26MAR2019 – Photo of the Day
Month: March 2019
The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 6 – The Mirror
Peter Falk is Ramos Clemente, who is a stand in for Fidel Castro. Clemente and his four lieutenants are celebrating their victory over and capture of the former dictator De Cruz (a stand-in for Battista). The five friends toast each other with the wine they’ve captured in the Presidential Palace. De Cruz is brought in and Clemente taunts him with the prospect of a slow torturous death. De Cruz dismisses his taunts and rails at Clemente with the reality that now he was the new dictator and he would be living in fear of the next avenging angel to follow. De Cruz follows up by telling them that the ornate mirror on the wall of the Presidential Office is magic and will show Clemente the face of his would-be assassins. Clemente sends off De Cruz to his fate but we can see that de Cruz’s words have hit home in Clemente’s mind.
At this point one of Clemente’s lieutenants upbraids him for treating De Cruz in an extralegal fashion. He insists that Clemente cannot murder De Cruz but must have him tried in court. Clemente explodes at him and calls him a fool and dismisses his criticism as stupid. But when Clemente turns away from his critical comrade, he sees in the mirror that this man is now holding a gun as if he means to shoot Clemente. But when he turns back to the man, he has no gun and isn’t even looking toward him. But now Clemente remembers De Cruz’s words of the magic mirror. He accuses the man of plotting his murder. And immediately Clemente pushes his comrade through the balcony doors and throws him down to his death.
Now two of his other three lieutenants are shocked and agitated and upbraid him for what they see as insanity. By the way one of these two is dressed and made up to look like Che Guevara. Clemente argues with them and when he turns to the mirror again the two men are shown with a gun and knife. He tells the two men to go down to the prison and make sure De Cruz hasn’t escaped. They go reluctantly and as soon as they are gone, he calls the gate of the prison and tells the guards to kill his two lieutenants when the appear. Then he tells the guards to let him know when it is done.
Facing his last comrade, he asks him whether his turn will be next to turn on Clemente. The man says that there are two kinds of men, followers and leaders and he himself will follow Clemente until that day when he no longer thinks Clemente is the strongest. But he also tells Clemente that he can never again think of other men as his friends. A dictator has no friends, only followers or rivals. This seems to satisfy Clemente. Next the lieutenant answers the phone and informs Clemente that his two men have been executed by the prison guards. This seems to depress Clemente and he turns away. But when he looks in the mirror again, he sees his last comrade leering at him and holding a glass of wine. When he turns around the man is not holding any wine. When shortly after the man offers Clemente a glass of wine, he assumes the man is trying to poison him. He slaps the glass out of his hand and accuses him. The man mocks him for believing in magic mirrors but despite this Clemente shoots him dead. Now he is alone.
In the next scene the Catholic priest in charge of the area comes to Clemente and demands that the firing squads that have been working around the clock killing De Cruz’s men end. Clemente refuses saying he will kill off all his would-be assassins. The priest leaves but he tells Clemente that all dictators always miss the one real assassin.
As he leaves and closes the door Clemente in desperation throws his gun through the mirror and a few seconds later the priest and the guards outside the door hear a shot ring out and enter to find Clemente has committed suicide.
At the time Castro was in the news having just overthrown Battista and taken control of Cuba. Of course, no magic mirror overthrew Castro and he only finally died a few years ago but Peter Falk is so much fun to watch in this thing as a crazy Latin American dictator. A-
25MAR2019 – Photo of the Day
25MAR2019 – Quote of the Day
When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental – men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre.
H. L. Mencken
24MAR2019 – OCF Update – Twilight Zone Schedule
I’m going too fast to enjoy the Twilight Zone review process so starting today I’ll post them only on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That should give me time to recharge my critical batteries.
It’s Official, Leftist Journalistic Hatchet-Man Admits Russiagate Has Destroyed the Credibility of the “Press”
Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone hatchet-man, has the bare honesty to admit that the outright lies that were the stock in trade of the Russiagate frenzy have convinced an outright majority of Americans that the press was in the bag for the Dems and they shouldn’t believe anything the press tells them about President Trump.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-million?
It’s a long, boring, rambling indictment but to give him credit it’s pretty substantive and paints his allies on the Left as at best partisan fools and at worst perjured criminals.
One cheer for Matt Taibbi?
24MAR2019 – Quote of the Day
People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?
H. L. Mencken
24MAR2019 – Photo of the Day
The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 5 – A Game of Pool
Jack Klugman plays a small-time pool player named Jesse Cardiff. He is bitter that even fifteen years after the death of pool master Fats Brown everyone still considered Fats the greatest pool player. And he rails at a photo of Fats on the wall of his local pool hall and says, “I’d give anything, anything to play him one game!”
In the next scene we see Fats Brown (played by Jonathan Winters), apparently up in Heaven, and he’s being summoned by some kind of celestial appointment intercom. He heads down to Earth and appears in Jesse Cardiff’s pool room and tells him his wish has been heard and Fats is there to grant it. The catch is that the stakes for winning and losing are life and death. Now Jesse is taken aback. Sure, he’s anxious to prove his skill but betting his life seems nuts. But Fats goads him and mocks him until he agrees to the bet.
They now engage in a long, skillful and fiercely fought game of pool. At last it comes down to one ball and it is obvious that Fats has thrown the point and he tries to give Jesse one last chance not to take the crown of being the greatest pool player in the world. But Jesse sinks the ball and wins. Fats congratulates Jesse and leaves with a mysterious smile. Jesse revels in his victory but then seems almost deflated by the anticlimax of having won.
In the next scene we’re back in heaven and Jesse is dejectedly sitting next to the celestial pool table waiting for the next challenge to take. Being the champ is a grueling existence and Jesse must be envying Fats who Serling announces has gone fishing.
This is one of those goofy fantasy episodes. Heaven arranges pool rivalries and allows life or death stakes on the outcome? But who cares! Jack Klugman and Jonathan Winters ham it up to the hilt.
In my family, pool was a bizarre fetish. My paternal grandfather had a pool table in his basement. But we, his poor grandsons were anathema and weren’t even allowed to hold a cue near “the felt.” There was a shrine where an autographed photo of Willie Mosconi presided over the pretty terrible players that my grandfather surrounded himself with. So, pool had the reputation of being a boring waste of time. We preferred street football or stickball. Watching these two pool players agonize over fractions of a millimeter and an invisible degree of angle is strangely familiar in its futility. Funny thing is there was a full sized pool table in my basement when I bought this house so I make a point of letting the grandsons play on it any way they please. “The felt” is starting to look less than pristine but I don’t mind and neither do they.
Obviously, I have no objectivity about this subject but I find myself always enjoying this episode immensely. I’ll call it an A.
Guest Contributor – War Pig – Let Them Hate Us as Long as They Fear Us
. I do believe that by being such a “humane” military, we have lost some of the intimidation factor. An army is better feared (and that is the purpose of an army, to instill fear into the minds of the enemy), when they regularly drink from the skulls of their enemies. That is why so many Iraqis surrendered. They feared fighting the US military.
The Japanese had a lively fear of US Marines in WWII. They were told it was better to die fighting than to allow themselves to be captured and eaten by American Marines. That Marines were primarily recruited in mental hospitals from the ranks of homicidal maniacs. That we would lay down those we did not eat on the soon-to-be runways and grind them, alive, into the dirt with bulldozers and tanks. You would think that it led to fanatical resistance, and it did, but it also led to banzai charges where we did great execution upon the Japanese army. In most cases they went out, not to conquer, but to die – strictly from fear. Sort of a suicide-by-cop mentality. They charged straight into the teeth of interlocking machine gun fire. Much like in WWI, this tactic only led to massive casualties on the part of the attacker. Line ’em up and mow ’em down. In some cases, Marine machine gunners had to push piles of bodies away from the front of their guns to get an open field of fire. Corpses literally stacked up like cord wood.
So we want to be feared in battle, but also known for treating prisoners (the average Joe in the ranks) honorably. Much as we did in Desert Storm. Surrendering Iraqis were treated well, but those who fought died hard and cruel deaths. Many of them ere buried, alive, in their trenches by M-1 tanks with dozer blades on the front. Or they were cluster-bombed by B-52s from an altitude that meant they could not fight back, or were blown up and incinerated by M-1 tanks who they could not even see in their sights. The A-10 was called “silent death” as its quiet engines and supersonic 30mm shells meant the Iraqi tank crews were dead before they heard the jet roll in on them.
That is how the old pirates got their way. If a ship surrendered, they were not abused much. But if they resisted, they crew were slaughtered to the last man. Roman legions worked the same way. If a city surrendered, they survived. If the Romans had to fight for the city, they put everyone – men, women, babies, cattle, sheep – to the sword.