Month: March 2019

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 16 – A Penny for Your Thoughts

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Hector Poole is a bank clerk who while walking one day to work bought a newspaper and when he threw the quarter into the newsie’s cash box it landed on its edge and stayed there.  The newsie tells him he’s never seen that happen before and when Hector sees what he happened he realizes he now can read the minds of the people near him.

Unfortunately, almost everyone whose mind he reads are thinking of doing something bad.  One of the bank’s customers is planning to use a loan to bet on the horses in an attempt to pay back money he embezzled previously.  His boss is planning to cheat on his wife.  And one of the other clerks is planning to steal a briefcase full of money and run off to Bermuda.

The only positive is that the secretary Helen is secretly in love with him.  As the day progresses Hector gets deeper and deeper in trouble.  When he tells his boss about the embezzler his boss assumed he was cracking up.  When he tells him about the clerk who planned to rob the bank he convinces the boss to confront the clerk and when no money is found in the clerk’s bag Hector is fired.  As he’s packing up he gets up the courage to tell Helen he likes her too and that he can read minds.  But when Bagby finds out that the embezzler has been exposed he rehires Hector.  Helen telepathically tells Hector to confront Bagby and demand a promotion and new office.  Bagby refuses but Hector lets him know he knows about the affair he is having.  Bagby relents and gives in to Hector.

Hector asks Helen to walk home with him and on the way he buys another newspaper and this time his quarter knocks over the one that was still standing on edge.  And at once he could no longer hear the thoughts of those around him.

This episode is a fantasy take on the Jack Lemon movie “The Apartment.”  Hector Poole was played by Dick York who was Darrin Stephens on Bewitched.  He has the face of a beleaguered honest shnook.  Here’s a Twilight Zone with a goofy plot and a happy ending.  A.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 15 – The Invaders

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The story takes place in a rustic farmhouse, with only candles and lamps for light, out in the middle of nowhere.  An older woman (played by Agnes Moorehead) is cooking her dinner in the kitchen.  Suddenly a high-pitched whine hurts her ears and then there is a crash on the roof of her house and she falls to the floor.  When she climbs up a ladder and opens a door onto the roof, she sees a miniature flying saucer about five feet in diameter has landed on the building.  As she watches a little man in a space suit about eight inches tall walks out of the ship.  She knocks him into the opening and he falls down the hole.  Another comes out of the ship and fires a tiny ray gun at her so she bowls him over with a lamp she throws at him and he falls off the roof.

The woman climbs back down the ladder and starts searching the house for the little invaders.  She meets up with them a number of times and they manage to hurt her enough with their ray guns to raise a series of blisters on her skin.  One of them even steals a kitchen knife and cuts her on the hand and calf at various points in the story.  Finally, at a certain point she traps one of them in her bed blanket and after tugging the knife out of his grasp she beats the blanket with the space man in it against a table until we assume, he is dead.  Then she puts the space man into a box and throws it into the fire place to burn.

The woman then up the ladder to the roof and taking a small hatchet she chops the space ship into wreckage.  While she is doing this, we hear a voice apparently calling over a radio to his base reporting that they have landed on a planet of giants and that his crew mate has been killed and that he himself is dying.  He warns that no retaliation or further landings should be attempted because the giants are just too powerful.

As the woman walks away, we get a closeup of the ruined ship and written on the side is US Air Force, Space Probe No. 1.  The tiny men were us!  Dun dun dunnnnnn!

When I was a little kid, I thought this was great.  Then when I grew up, I thought it was really cheap.  Now, I’m somewhere in the middle.  Agnes Moorehead is an annoying mute and pretty homely to boot.  She only screeches, whines, cries and moans a little.  Are the giants mute?  Who the hell knows?  The fact that the space men were running around like high speed mice whenever they were off camera but stood like statues whenever you could see them was very cheesy.  How they wielded a knife that was bigger than they were and almost weighed as much is beyond comprehension.  And how the two of them weren’t killed when they were dropped from what to them would have been a hundred feet on Earth is laughable.  And finally, once again they managed to recycle a prop from Forbidden Planet (the miniature flying saucer).

Alright, I’ll split the difference B-.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 14 – The Whole Truth

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Jack Carson plays Harvey Hunnicut a New York City used car salesman who tries to sell decrepit automotive wrecks to unsuspecting car buyers.  His sales pitches have absolutely zero resemblance to reality and never get anywhere within a mile of the truth.

Along comes an old man selling a Model A Ford and Harvey tells him that the car isn’t worth a dime but he’ll give him twenty-five dollars.  The man sells him the car and then tells him that the car is haunted.  Any man who owns the car has to tell the absolute truth about everything.

Now Harvey starts going into his sales pitch to a young couple and tells the awful truth about the awful cars he sells.  Of course, they run away and Harvey is starting to despair.  Next his wife calls up and he tells her that the inventory story he tells her every week is actually a ruse to hide his weekly poker game with the boys.  Finally, his sales assistant asks him again about his long-delayed raise and Harvey tells the sad truth that there isn’t a chance in the world of his ever getting a raise working for Harvey.  His assistant punches him in the face and knocks him down before exiting the establishment.

Next day a politician named Honest Luther Grimbley comes in looking to buy an old car that will make his constituents think he is poor.  Harvey is willing to sell it for a song but when Grimbley asks if there are any strings attached, he tells him the honesty catch.  Grimbley recoils and said no politician could possibly buy it because it would destroy his career.

Before Grimbley leaves he tells Harvey that it would be fun to sell it to the politician who was on the front page of the newspaper.

In the last scene we find out that Harvey has sold the car to Nikita Khrushchev who is getting ready to speak at the UN and now will have to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  He calls the operator and asks if there is a way for him to speak to Jack Kennedy.

Jack Carson is great.  He can even make this clunker fun.  And I always give Serling a break if he can make it funny.  This should be a B but for the above considerations I’m going to promote it to an A-.

Reflections on the Political Landscape

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A while back I put Colin Woodward’s book, “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America,” in my wish list based on the Z-Man’s description of its importance.  I’m about twenty percent into it and I’ve got an idea of where it is going.  I also can tell that Woodward is a thorough going lefty but that there is a lot of useful information in the book.  The beginning of the book describes the origins of the various “nations” that he contends still underly the current political and cultural reality of the United States and its surroundings in North America.

As I said, there is a lot of slant to his description of the character of the various populations and you can tell where his sympathies lie and who he is virtue signaling to but there is also valuable information that actually helps to explain some general behaviors that can be observed at work today.

For example, Woodward waxes poetic about the New England characteristic of local autonomy and small-town democracy.  This is presented as a contrast to the feudal rule of aristocratic Virginia where great landowners lorded it over the common men and monopolized the government and the courts.  Supposedly this is still the reality today.  But anyone living in New England knows that any community that imposed any policies out of synch with the smothering regulation existing at the state level would be assaulted with the full force of the state’s judicial and administrative might and quickly the offenders would find themselves in prison and their families dispossessed and harassed out of the state.

One of the features of New England was its early adoption of universal education and the establishment of higher education as the basis of elite status.  This is also touted as a democratic virtue as opposed to the wealth-based basis of education in Virginia.  Looking at the present day it’s instructive to see that the educational situation is much changed.  The educational state of the poor even in New England has degraded to the point where claiming universal education is very debatable.  And the status of higher education has likewise changed to the point where elite status is more of a legacy condition than any kind of meritocratic status.  In other words, the state and poorer colleges have been degraded to where their degrees are approaching a worthless status whereas the high-status Ivy League schools are the domain of elite families and the affirmative action minorities that they include for the sake of appearances.

What seem to be happening is that the supposed egalitarian impulses of the New England nation and their descendants in the other Left dominated areas of the country have abandoned the pretense of equality and now embrace the model of an elect elite directing the lives of the rest of society as some sort of latter-day serfdom.  This conforms more closely to the Marxist model than any puritan world view.  And this of course makes sense.  As the New Englanders shed their Christianity, they reached out for what replaced it in their environment, the fashionable socialism of nineteenth century intellectuals.

I’ll have a full review at some point and other discussions of the ideas and the applications of these ideas to the present condition we find ourselves in.  Z-Man was right. There is useful information in this book overlaid with leftist smugness.

Howie Carr breaks Down the AP Stylebook for Both Parties

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We all know how the Media describes things about the Left and Right, namely positively and negatively respectively.  Howie is not breaking any new ground here but he adds the right wing “smirk” as the newest crime of the deplorables and apparently it justifies violence.

https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/03/03/howie-carr-smirking-media-bias-against-gop-couldnt-be-clearer/