The knives are out among the leftist Twitter Mob for Tucker. They have some old clips of Carlson talking with one of the weird shock jocks and saying some edgy things. It will be interesting to see what Fox News will do. They aren’t exactly the bravest of men. Personally I think Carlson is a valuable asset for our side. I’d hate see him run out of town. Michael Anton agrees.
Month: March 2019
Sheryl Attkisson Put Together a Video on “Curating Out the Fake News”
Sheryl did a nice job hitting the high points on the current mania to suppress the opposition by curating it out of the mainstream. Short and to the point.
11MAR2019 – Quote of the Day
“The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism – nay, it is identical with nihilism.”
Leo Strauss
11MAR2019 – Photo of the Day
The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 21 – The Prime Mover
This is a morality play disguised as science fiction. Jimbo Cobb (played by Buddy Ebsen of Beverly Hillbillies fame) is a partner in in a small diner in the southwest. His partner Ace Larsen is a very unlucky gambler with a bad temper. He begs and threatens the slot machine installed in the diner whenever he loses a try. Their waitress is a young woman named Kitty Cavanaugh who is also Ace’s long-suffering girlfriend. She is growing tired of Ace’s gambling problem and his stalled marriage proposal. It is implied by his facial expressions that Jimbo is very sympathetic to Kitty’s plight and wishes that his friend Ace would get his act together and move all their lives forward by concentrating on constructive actions instead of wasting his resources on gambling.
Outside on the highway that day a car skids off the road and tumbles into an electric substation. Ace and Jimbo run over to the crash site and Ace is prevented from reaching the passengers of the car by the high voltage current arcing around the car. He somewhat incoherently tells Jimbo to do something to help the passengers trapped inside and amazingly Jimbo does something.
A looked of pained concentration goes across Jimbo’s face and the automobile reverse flips away from the substation and clear of the electrical hazard. He clutches the sides of his head as if he is in great pain and Ace goes to the aid of the motorists.
Afterwards, Jimbo is lying on a bed in the apartment behind the diner rubbing his temples while Ace talks to him. He tells Jimbo that the car passengers weren’t critically injured and were expected to recover. The Ace asks Jimbo to explain how he had saved them.
Jimbo explains to Ace that he has always had the ability to move things by thinking it. At first, he had thought everyone had this ability but later he figured that it was something that was best left unsaid because he had gotten in trouble back in grammar school when people didn’t understand how he was able to do these impossible things. He also explains that using this ability too much gives him blinding headaches.
Ace asks him to prove it by moving something. Jimbo lifts the bed off the ground and lets it float for a few seconds before landing again. Then Ace asks him if he can move smaller things and Jimbo tells him that smaller things are of course easier to move. Ace flips a coin onto the bed and it lands tails. He asks Jimbo to make it heads and as Jimbo twitches his head to the side the coin flips over to heads. Then Ace gets a pair of dice and asks Jimbo to make the dice land seven. Ace tosses them and as they are tumbling Jimbo twitches his head and the dice land seven.
Now Ace is ecstatic and his gambling dreams have all come true. He gathers Jimbo and Kitty (and Kitty’s hundred dollars) and they head to Las Vegas to make some money. With Jimbo as his guarantee Ace goes on an unbroken winning streak at the roulette wheels and craps tables of all the casinos on the Vegas Strip. Perhaps they practiced on a site like casino-bonus.me.uk beforehand or it may have even been beginner’s luck but they accumulate two hundred thousand dollars in winnings before Jimbo’s headaches become too extreme to continue.
When they collect their cash, Ace has let the money go completely to his head. He starts flirting with the cigarette girl in front of Kitty and Jimbo and tells them that he intends to make enough money to buy the state of Nevada tomorrow with the money he will win. Jimbo tells Ace that he doesn’t want to keep going with this gambling setup because it’s cheating and goes against Jimbo’s ethics. Ace convinces Jimbo to allow just one more bout of gambling the next day before quitting. But Kitty has had it and declares she’s heading home. She walks out the door of their suite. Jimbo convinces Ace that Kitty is more important than the money and that he should run after her and win her back. Ace catches up to her in the lobby and tells her it’s just one more day and then he’ll be filthy rich. But she’s so disgusted by the way he’s acting that she runs out of the casino without looking back. Now Ace is angry and just at that moment Sheila the cigarette girl shows up again and after she flirts with Ace again, he decides to celebrate his good fortune with her instead of Kitty. The casino manager wants to know why she is walking away from her job so Ace gives him some cash and tells him she’s keeping him company which works for the manager. Then Ace tells the manager to get in touch with whoever is the highest roller in town and tell him to get in touch with Ace. The manager tells Ace that would be the Chicago gangster Big Phil Nolan.
Next morning Jimbo wakes up to the phone ringing. It’s Nolan and he tells Ace he wants to have a high stakes craps game with Ace. When Nolan shows up with his bodyguards, they set up the game and with Jimbo’s help Ace turns his two hundred thousand dollars into a million. Ace tells Nolan that he wants to bet his whole million on one throw of the dice, his last play. But just then Sheila shows up and Jimbo sees that Ace has replaced Kitty. As Ace gets ready to roll, Jimbo tries several times to stop Ace and warn him that there were no more guaranteed wins. But Ace ignores him and rolls a loser. He has lost the whole million. The happy mobster leaves with the money and seeing the gravy train departing Sheila leaves too. Now Ace asks Jimbo what happened. Jimbo lies saying he blew a fuse. But instead of becoming enraged, he starts laughing uncontrollably and seems to have learned a lesson.
The next scene is back at the diner. Ace is having the slot machine removed and then he asks Kitty to marry him. She agrees and Ace grabs Jimbo’s arm in excitement and Jimbo dropped the broom he was holding. He watches approvingly as Ace and Kitty kiss and while they are distracted, he uses his ability to lift the broom handle off the floor without touching it.
The lesson is love trumps greed. A simple story with enjoyable characters. A solid B.
10MAR2019 – OCF Update
I’m finishing up the book “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America,” and without exaggeration it has been an eye opening book. Dividing the country by the origin of the founding stock in each geographical area explains many things that weren’t previously understandable. Now granted, the writer is firmly in the lefty camp but information is still information. I should start writing something early next week.
I’m starting to post a bunch of butterfly shots I took a week ago at a conservatory. That should break up the winter monotony of white snow.
I haven’t been very inspired by the political news lately. Everything seems to be about the 2020 election. Seems a little early for everything to grind to a halt. I’m sure something will break soon. Mueller for instance. But I did find myself thinking about who the actual Dem candidate would be. For all the talk about women of color, I think the candidate will be either Creepy Uncle Joe or Bernie Sanders. But without a doubt the VP will be Kamala Harris. She’s the female Obama and needs the grooming for her own run in the future.
Either way it should be an hilarious campaign. The debates should be the stuff of legend, a veritable blooper reel of comic goodness.
It’s been insanely busy at work so things have had to slow down on the site.
post script: First tests using the Orion 10010 Atlas Pro AZ/EQ-G Computerized GoTo Telescope Mount with my Sony A7 III and the 90mm f\2.8 macro lens were very promising. With only the minimum of calibrating the polar axis 30 second shots were completely usable. But I can tell the post processing stuff will be an enormous learning curve. This will be a very long story. I’ll revisit this in late spring.
The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 2 Episode 20 – Static
Ed Lindsay is an old man living in a rooming house that features a communal living space where the residents gather to watch tv at night. When we meet them, Ed is playing checkers with the “Professor” who is also paying more attention to the tv western than to his game. This enrages Ed who goes off on a tirade on the stupidity and unhealthiness of the tv content. His fellow boarders barely respond to his invective and remain glued to the tube. Finally, in disgust, Ed heads down to the basement to reclaim his antique console-sized radio and with the help of a neighborhood boy carries it upstairs to his apartment.
Once powered up Ed attempts to tune in some kind of acceptable programming. After rejecting the local rock and roll stations he finds that the rest of the dial is just static. But just as it seems he will be defeated he bangs the top of the radio with his hand and he hears the sound of his favorite Tommy Dorsey song coming over the radio. Ed is delighted to hear his old music and afterwards the radio plays others of his favorite radio shows from more than twenty years ago. Ed calls to the neighbors to share his discovery. But when the Professor and a female resident named Vinnie come to his room to hear what he’s excited about there is nothing but static.
The pattern repeats itself where Ed hears some old time show but when anyone else enters the room the broadcast is gone. When the Professor recommends that Ed call the radio station to find out how to improve reception the operator informs Ed that the radio station, he named went out of business ten years ago. Ed isn’t disturbed by this revelation but the other tenants assume that Ed is imagining hearing things that aren’t there.
The next day Ed returns to his room to find that his radio is gone. He confronts his neighbors and Vinnie admits that she gave the radio away to the junk dealer. Ed goes off in a rage down to the junk dealer’s store and pays the man to take back his radio. When he returns Vinnie shows up at his apartment and gives the back story to what is going on.
When She and Ed were twenty years younger, they were engaged to be married but Ed’s mother was ill so they postponed it and events conspired so that they never married and became bitter ex-lovers who lived next to each other in disappointment and regret. And she further notes that every year on the anniversary of their engagement Ed waxes nostalgic for his earlier life. For instance, the Tommy Dorsey song he keeps hearing was actually the song that Ed and Vinnie had considered their own. Ed rejects this explanation and forcefully sticks to his story that he was hearing the programs he said he heard on the radio. And he tells Vinnie to leave his room.
Once alone, Ed tunes in the radio and he hears Tommy Dorsey again and is so excited he calls out to Vinnie to come back and hear it. She walks through the door and this time she’s a young woman again and she’s still in love with Ed. And Ed is much younger too. And now they will relive their lives the way they should have, together and in love.
Dean Jagger plays Ed and he puts all the right amount of cranky old man and someone mourning for the good old days when things were great. The rest of the cast do well enough and the story moves along without slowing down enough to annoy me. The plot is simple wish fulfillment around a magic talisman, in this case the radio that has a direct link back to the old world that Ed longs for. This type of story is done quite often on the Twilight Zone. I won’t claim that this version is particularly special but it seems to work and I like it enough to give it a B.
10MAR2019 – Quote of the Day
“The silence of a wise man is always meaningful.”
Leo Strauss
10MAR2019 – Photo of the Day
09MAR2019 – Photo of the Day
Ice Fisherman at work
