Rod Serling Archives - Page 3 of 4

August Rambling: Deep dark secrets

I wrote this blog post about my ambivalence about blogging on the Times Union website.

The Hook-Up Culture Is Getting 20-Somethings Nowhere. On the other hand, Casual Love.

Nixon’s still the one. And What We Lost 40 Years Ago When Nixon Resigned. See Harry Shearer recreate Richard Nixon as he preps and delivers his resignation speech. Plus George Will Confirms Nixon’s Vietnam Treason.

New Zealand’s non-partisan Get Out the Vote campaign. I don’t see such things often in the US. Sure, there’s get our SUPPORTERS to vote, but that’s a different animal.

Deep Dark Fears is “a series of comics exploring those intimate, personal fears that mostly stem from your imagination getting darkly carried away.” Read more about it.

Rod Serling’s closing remarks from The Obsolete Man episode of The Twilight Zone. “It remains profoundly prescient and relevant.”

All these in a 48-hour period: How games’ lazy storytelling uses rape and violence against women as wallpaper and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has come forward with several stories of being called “chubby,” “fat,” and “porky” by her male colleagues in Congress and Fark prohibits misogyny in new addition to moderator guidelines and Snappy response to sexist harasser in the tech field.

Modern Office with Christina Hendricks.

FLOWCHART: Should You Catcall Her?

Guns and The Rule of Intended Consequences.

What our nightly views might look like if planets, instead of our moon, orbited Earth.

Cartoon: Pinocchio, Inc.

Remember when I wrote about flooding in Albany this month? Dan explains the systemic reason WHY it happened.

Arthur makes the case against “the case against time zones.” I’m not feeling the abolition of time zones either, at this point.

Nōtan: Dark and Light principles of Design.

The jungle gym as math tool.

The disaster drafts for professional sports.

The Procrastination Doom Loop—and How to Break It.

One of my favorite movie quotes, maybe because it’s so meta: “That’s part of your problem: you haven’t seen enough movies. All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.” (Grand Canyon, 1991)

Seriously, Rebecca Jade, the first niece, is in about four different groups, in a variety of genres. Here’s The Soultones cover band – Promo video. Plus a link to her latest release, Galaxy, with Jaz Williams.

Tosy’s U2, ranked 40-31 and 30-21.

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, 2004.

August 22, 1969: The Beatles’ Final Photo Shoot

Coverville 1043: The Elvis Costello Cover Story III, in honor of him turning 60.

4 chairs, 4 women; 4 women, no chairs.

12 billion light-years from the edge. A funny bit!

Don Pardo, R.I.P..

Lauren Bacall: always the life of the party. And cinema icon of Hollywood’s golden age, 1924-2014. A Dustbury recollection.

More Robin Williams: on ‘cowardice’ and compassion. Also, a Dan Meth drawing and Aladdin’s Broadway cast gave a him beautiful tribute. Plus, a meeting of Yarmy’s Army and Ulysses.

Jaquandor remembers little Quinn. Damn middle recording made me cry.

The Wellington Hotel Annex in Albany, N.Y. was… murdered in plain sight in front of hundreds of onlookers. “If I were a building, this is how I’d like to go.” Here’s another view.

SamuraiFrog’s Muppet jamboree: C is for Clodhoppers and D Is for Delbert (who evolved) and E is for Eric the Parrot and F is for a Fraggle and G Is for the Gogolala Jubilee Jugband.

New SCRABBLE words. Word Up has identified some of the new three-letter words.

I SO don’t care: one space or two after the period. Here’s a third choice.

The ultimate word on that “digital natives” crap.

Whatever Happened to the Metric System?

Freedom from fear.

Ever wondered what those books behind the glass doors of the cupboard might be thinking or feeling?

The New Yorker thinks Yankovic is weirdly popular.

Here’s a nice Billy Joel story.

Pop songs as sonnets.

House of Clerks, a parody of House of Cards.

Saturday Night Live Political Secrets Revealed.

This Sergio Aragonés masterpiece is included as a fold-out poster within Inside Mad. His priceless gift to all Mad fans shows over six decades of Mad contributors and ephemera within a mish-mash of Mad office walls. The only thing missing in this beautiful mess is a key. Doug Gilford will be attempting to label everything you see with brief (pop-up) descriptions and links to pertinent pages…

Hello Kitty is not a cat. You may have known that; somehow, I missed it.

You May Have Something Extremely Valuable Hiding In Your Change.

Improved names for everyday things

GOOGLE ALERTS (me)

I wrote this blog post about my ambivalence about blogging on the Times Union website. J. Eric Smith, who used to be a TU blogger, responds at length.

SamuraiFrog responds to my response to 16 Habits of Sensitive People. Also, per moi, he does his #1 songs on his birthday: 1987-1996 and 1997-2006, and 2007-2013. I’ll go back to this myself, eventually.

Dustbury on the theme song to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which a passage in Schutte’s Mass resembles more than slightly. He discovers a Singapore McDonalds product.

Jaquandor answers my questions about vices such as swearing and politics/American exceptionalism.

He also writes of buckets and the dumping of the water therein, which Gordon thinks hurts nonprofits. Snopes, BTW, debunks the claim that 73 percent of donations to the ALS Association fund executive salaries and overhead.

Do you know that ABC Wednesday meme I mention with a great amount of regularity? I think this recent introduction I wrote explains it fairly well.

March Rambling: mostly about me

I’ve been Superman, Abraham Lincoln, and a Georgia O’Keefe painting.

My old buddy Augustus (who you FantaCo customers might have known as Matt), put this together for my birthday. Pic on the left is from the cover of the FantaCon 1988 convention program, drawn by the late Chas Balun. The image is on the right was John Hebert’s rendition from Sold Out #1, c. 1986.
This is about me because: It was so cool. And he wrote: “Thank you for turning me on to a world of literature far beyond science fiction and fantasy. You are still an influence on this boychik. Long may you arrange. (books in order).” And you thought I couldn’t blush.

Now Jaquandor KNOWS how to celebrate my birthday. He added me to his sentential links here. He answered my question about football.
This is about me, obviously. (Sidebar: some highly educated person wrote: “As is my want” recently in a mass e-mail I received. You have NO idea how difficult it was for me NOT to correct him. Jaquandor would NOT make this misteak, er, mistake.)

Tom Skulan of FantaCo is being interviewed for Theater of Guts.
This is about me because: I worked at FantaCo for over eight years I took the photo of Tom, and also the pic of the late Chas Balun looking towards the ceiling. I find it interesting that my photos of the store and the FantaCon have been so heavily used since I am really a lousy photographer.

Dustbury answers my question about women’s fashion. Not only does he know more about the topic than I do, but he also knows more about popular music.
This is about me because: as a librarian, I am always ready to defer to people with greater expertise.

Occasionally, I’ll do one of those BuzzFeed games. This month, I’ve been Superman, Abraham Lincoln, and a Georgia O’Keefe painting.
This is about me because: actually I found the first two descriptions relatively accurate; the third, maybe not so much.

Meet Jeopardy!’s new master–and his controversial strategy, [Podcast interview] by Glenn Fleishman, two-time JEOPARDY! winner. Plus Arthur Chu’s social media brand, from the New Yorker.
This is about me because: I like to watch JEOPARDY! And now that Chu’s 11-day run is over, these articles will stop, at least until the Tournament of Champions. See also, Ken Jennings’ interview with Julann Griffin, the mother of JEOPARDY!

Tosy continues to count down his U2 song rankings, from 144 to 135 and 134 to 125 and 125 to 115 and 114 to 101.
This is about me because: When I wrote that I was linking to his return post last month, he wrote, “Thanks, Roger! I need the pressure!” I THINK he meant that in a good way.

Eddie, the Renaissance Geek, links to Green Day songs.
This is about me because: I mean it’s GREEN Day. Yeesh. How is it that American Idiot is MORE relevant now than it was a decade ago?

In the years 1965-1966, Pete Seeger hosted a television series, Rainbow Quest, devoted to folk music. Here are 13 of the 39 episodes.
This is about me because: I loved Pete Seeger’s music, and I used to sing folk music, and this was posted by a sort of relative.

Incredibly dirty R&B: gloriously filthy music from the 30s-50s
This is about me because I really like music, as my posts this year should suggest. I’m particularly interested in the history of music in the United States. Yeah, that’s the story.

Why Sharp Little Pencil writes.
This is about me because: we lived in the same county (Broome, NY), at the same time, once upon a time. And because she speaks truth to power, which I find to be an admirable thing.

Here is, on a wall of Binghamton High School, a picture of Rod Serling.
This is about me because: Rod Serling went to what was then Binghamton Central High School, as did I. He was student government president, as was I. I got to introduce him to an assembly, sort of.

Mark Evanier linked to twelve songs, all but one sung by Mel Blanc, voicing a different cartoon character, each a “Happy Birthday” song for a different month. Here’s
January and February, and
March and April, and
May and June, and
July and August, and
September and October, and
November and December. PLUS Happy Birthday played on “the 5th largest organ in the world”
This is about me because: did I mention this is my birth month?

12 YEARS A SLAVE: portraits of Solomon Northup’s descendants
This is about me because: what it says about our preconceived notions. And because it’s about movies. And Northup lived around here.

My cousin Dr. Anne Beal is leaving one important job for another.
This is about me because: my family had Thanksgiving dinner with hers, and about a dozen other people, in 2013.

Stephen Bissette‘s open letter to DC on Facebook about NBC’s Constantine.
This is about me because my friend Steve’s dissection of DC is so deliciously understated, and addresses the issue of common courtesy.

Rory O’Neill, aka Panti Bliss, a leading drag performer in Ireland, speaks about homophobia.
This is about me because the narrative reminds me of certain people on a certain “news network” defining racism for black people.

Lisa retells the story of Esther, which led to the holiday of Purim.
This is about me because: about 20 years ago, I played Haman in a church play.

What’s the reality behind “senior moments”?
This is about me because: because…because…oh, yeah, because this TOTALLY explains mine.

Anthony sees an anxious face in this picture of a building.
This is about me because: so do I.

The Lost Art of the Unsent Angry Letter from Jaquandor, and the AmeriNZ response.
This is about me because: I seldom respond quickly to comments on the Internet so that I can avoid unnecessary noise.

SamuraiFrog is linking to Muppet stuff, such as Sequel Song and Lipton Tea commercials, and searching for sushi and St. Patrick’s Day.
This is about me because: The Daughter REALLY wants to see the new Muppet movie, so I GUESS I’ll just HAVE to take her.

Les Miserables is back on Broadway, and Sesame Street has put together an excellent cookie-themed parody of it.
This is about me because: I love theater and Muppets. And COOKIES!

Frog is also still writing his 50 Shades of Smartass. Here’s Chapter 17 and Chapter 18 and Chapter 19 and Chapter 20.
This is about me because: now I have an excuse to REALLY NEVER EVER have to read the books.

Dustbury notes that a strange story about the woman’s auto-payments hid her death for six years!
This is about me because my auto-posting on this blog, and directed to Facebook and Twitter, would probably hide my own demise for a month.

I love this church sign.
This is about me because: I TOTALLY mean it. Bring it on, Westboro! Here’s my Fred Phelps tribute post. Here’s Nathan Phelps’ statement on the death of his estranged father. And Dustbury points to the new Westboro poison meister.

Me as fictional characters, plus Obama, Serling, Cosby

I’ll vote for Obama, in large part because the other guy will be far worse.

Chris from NYADP asks:
Which book/ movie/ TV/ comic book character best represents how you actually are right now?
That would be Bruce Banner. He is the guy who has anger management issues. Fortunately, I was raised well enough that I don’t act on my pent-up rage so I don’t Hulk out. But sometimes, things just infuriate me.

One example is the story of Kenneth Chamberlain, a 68-year-old veteran of the U.S. Marines, was killed in his home by the police in White Plains, NY, on November 19, 2011, after his medical alert device was accidentally set off. According to his son, the audio device installed in his father’s home as part of his medical alert system captured racial slurs – Chamberlain was black – and after the door was knocked down, being Tased before being shot dead.

You’ve probably heard about shooting death of unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin at the hands of “neighborhood watch” vigilante George Zimmerman on February 26. There may be disagreement over just what happened that night, but there’s little doubt that incompetent police work after the fact was involved.

From here: “Zimmerman, who is white, called police from his SUV and told them he was following a ‘suspicious’ character. The dispatcher promised to send a prowl car and told Zimmerman to stay in his vehicle. He didn’t. When police arrived, they found him with a bloody nose and Martin face down on the grass not far from his father’s door, a gunshot wound in his chest.”

The more overriding issue, though, is Florida’s controversial law, which protects from prosecution someone who uses deadly force if that person “reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”

I was SO enraged for a couple of days that my stomach was in knots. And there have been others who have been victims of the “shoot first, ask questions later” laws in about two dozen US states. The Sunshine State’s version is clearly the worst. I thought President Obama addressed the issue quite well.

On the other hand, I’ve been disappointed in some of President Obama’s policies…which leads to-

Tom the Mayor, my old FantaCo buddy, asks:

Has Barack Obama disappointed you in any way, I feel that he has missed some great opportunities to enact more changes, especially after the election when he had majorities in both houses? I will still vote for him, but it is kind of sad.

I really think that the failure in the first two years of office was tied to his evidently false notion that he was dealing with rational people. In fact, given the vitriol he had to deal with by day 100, it became clear to me that the folks he was working with across the aisle were not playing the same game. He thought he’d have a honeymoon, which, in very many ways, did not occur. I believe he didn’t want to come off as the “angry black guy,” even though some painted him that way anyhow.

He was working harder in the interregnum than I’ve EVER seen a guy not yet President work. But he, like most, underestimated the depth of the recession. So, by saying that the unemployment rate wouldn’t get under 8%, he clearly miscalculated.

Still, there were things I liked (gay rights, e.g.), and a few I don’t like at all. A couple of recent examples of the latter:

H.R. 347 expands the power of the Secret Service and police to arrest protesters near a ‘protected person’ or at special public events like nominating conventions… [It] passed the House of Representatives by a 388 to 3 margin and was signed, shortly thereafter, by President Obama, on Friday, March 9, 2012.

The Obama DOJ’s decision to charge more national security whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all other administrations combined.

When I probably end up voting for him, it’s only because the guy who will run against him would likely have championed the same things, and far worse.

Chris also asked:
Which book/ movie/ TV/ comic book character represents the person you’d most like to be?

Kwai Chang Caine from the TV show Kung Fu: “The demands of his training as a priest in addition to the sense of social responsibility which was instilled within him during his childhood, forced Caine to repeatedly come into the open to fight for justice. He would then leave his new surroundings in a further search for anonymity and security.” He had a certain calm, as well as skills to turn the fight back on the attacker.

I was so impressed with Democratic Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, who, in response to those men wanting to legislate woman’s reproductive health, introduced legislation that would introduce new hurdles for men who want Viagra: proof that they have sought sex therapy, and a sexual partner’s notarized statement verifying their impotency. Very much turning the aggression back on itself. Brilliant; very Caine.

More from Amy at Sharp Little Pencil:

1. Do you think that when our hometown boy Rod Serling said, “Everybody has to have a hometown; mine is Binghamton,” he was being in any way sarcastic?

Absolutely NOT. I read his biography by Joel Engel last summer. Rod LOVED Binghamton, felt safe there. Here’s the fuller quote:
Everybody has to have a hometown. Binghamton’s mine. In the strangely brittle, terribly sensitive makeup of a human being, there is a need for a place to hang a hat or a kind of geographical womb to crawl back into, or maybe just a place that’s familiar because that’s where you grew up. When I dig back through memory cells I get one particularly distinctive feeling-and that’s one of warmth, comfort, and well-being. For whatever else I may have had, or lost or will find-I’ve still got a hometown. This nobody’s gonna take away from me.

BTW, did you see that story about Binghamton being the least hopeful city in America?

3. What is your favorite single cut of all time – 45 or album cut, and by whom?

Amy, you’re a cruel woman, you know that? I have so many tunes running in my head at any given time. Still, I’ll go with God Only Knows by the Beach Boys; incidentally, Brian Wilson turns 70 in June. Although there is a woman in my choir who’s having a baby in July; his code name is Rufus, and I’ve had Tell Me Something Good stuck in my head ever since.

4. Why is there air? (Haha, know you dig Cosby)

And I still have that Cosby LP, Why Is There Air? BTW, take this test to see how well you know that album. But going off from that, the air is there so politicians can make it hot; probably the REAL reason behind global warming.

Christmas 2011

The Bells of Christmas may be my favorite recording of a Christmas song ever.

Merry Christmas! It’s a Sunday morning and I’ll be going to church, but our choir is not singing; we sang on Christmas Eve, but not Christmas Day, which is fine by me. Besides, Santa is probably tired from putting presents under the tree.

Somebody I once met was born on Christmas Day 1924, and that’s the late Rod Serling. My blogger buddy Gordon has been trying to institute his and Humphrey Bogart’s birthdays (b. 1899) as alternative holidays for “those who may be atheists, agnostics, or just plain tired of the usual thing.” Don’t know how that’s working out.

Speaking of Serling, I reviewed his bio back in October, and I was thrilled to find that the book’s author, Joel Engel, commented on my post! Check it out.

And as for that OTHER holiday today, here’s The Bells of Christmas and Joy to the World, both sung by Julie Andrews. The former may be my favorite recording of a Christmas song ever; the latter recording pops as though it’s from that original Firestone tire LP that I owned as a kid, and in fact still own.

Rod Serling biography by Joel Engel

One of the things I was able to do in the Adirondacks a couple of months ago was to read the bulk of the book Rod Serling: The Dreams and Nightmares of Life in the Twilight Zone – a biography by Joel Engel. I wanted to finish it because I had borrowed the book from my father-in-law and I wanted to return it; that was my internal message, not his external one.

In the Methodology and Sources section of the book, author Joel Engel expressed surprise that in 1985, a full decade after the death of the celebrated television writer Rod Serling, there had not yet been a Serling biography. So Engel made inquiries and ended up writing a book about a man whose fans adored him, but who, despite his considerable success, was riddled with self-doubt. As Engel notes in the Prologue re Serling in 1967: “Submitted for your examination: a man who’s dying inside. Not so many years ago, he rode the crest of a golden wave he thought would never end…But that was before giving birth to the Creation…Each day, he hears fewer whispers of his greatness, and those still heard cannot be believed from inside the private hell to which the Creation has doomed him.”

The Creation, of course, was the seminal series The Twilight Zone, whose writing and hosting made him both successful as a writer but also a celebrity; yet he doubted his writing abilities, and scorned his own celebrity.

Chapter 1 was about Rod Serling’s dad Sam, who was too poor to go to college and become the engineer his skill set would suggest he could have become. He ended up enrolling in secretarial school and took his bride Esther to Panama, where she almost died of yellow fever. When the Serlings returned to Auburn, NY, they discovered Esther was pregnant. The pregnancy was difficult, and the doctors assured the family that Robert, born in 1918, would be their only child. Sam then felt that he was doomed to work for his father-in-law’s grocery business, in Cortland, then Syracuse.

But the doctors were wrong. Rodman Edward Serling was born on Christmas Day, 1924. Sam moved south to Binghamton to buy his own grocery store and when it proved successful, the family moved to Bennett Avenue on the city’s middle-class West Side. He was attracted to the place that became a relatively worker-friendly town for the vast immigrant population. More importantly, Binghamton became, for Rod “a kind of geographic womb to crawl back into – and that’s your hometown,” a feeling not shared by Bob, BTW.

“Rod attracted people to him by sheer force of personality. He received constant praise, even adoration, and soon found it difficult to live without them.” At some level, this would continue to be the case for most of his life.

Chapter 2 involved Rod Serling as a paratrooper in World War II, a function he had to plead for because of his diminutive stature. Engel tells about the campaign in the Philippines in 1945, and how the absurdity of war – one friend was killed by the food supply dropped from the air to save them – that colored Rod’s eventual writing career.

Subsequent chapters addressed his evolution as a writer from radio station intern to some encouraging radio drama submissions to some success with this new medium called television. Despite some great volume of work, when the focus of TV production moved from live stagelike NYC shows to the filmed Hollywood product, it was a bit like starting over.

Nevertheless, despite his eventual success with The Twilight Zone, Rod’s “need to please,” and his disdain for, yet attraction to, fame and success made him not quite satisfied.

Due in large part to his four-pack-a-day cigarette habit – he even smoked during a classroom appearance at his alma mater, Binghamton Central High School in 1970, I can testify personally – Rod Serling died on June 28, 1975.

The Engel book is quite interesting, especially the first two chapters. But it is all well researched. If the latter chapters are somehow less enjoyable, maybe it’s because the subject of the book was unable to be content with his life, believe his success, be happy with his first writing critic, his wife Carol. Like his father, he wanted more than he achieved and like Sam, he died young pursuing it.