Month: May 2019
19MAY2019 – OCF Update – ShatnerCon or ShatnerKhan?
I was out of town all day Saturday (18MAY) and only got back this afternoon. It was a family event and gave me a chance to see all the people who are so important to me but don’t live int he area. Most of the discussions were family stuff that doesn’t belong on a blog like this but there was one piece of business that could be discussed here.
A small secret fanatical group of Shatner fans will gather in July to celebrate and mock all things Bill Shatner. The agenda will include the viewing of prodigious doses of Shatner on the screen and scholarly papers dedicated to dissecting the genius, nay the divinity, of the greatest bad actor of his generation.
But the naming committee is deadlocked between ShatnerCon and ShatnerKhan as the official designation of this seismic event. It seems only fitting that you, the audience of Orion’s Cold Fire step forward and cut this Gordian Knot. Or something.
Anyway, the road trip has thrown me behind schedule so I will be scrambling to put up contnet for the next few days.
photog
19MAY2019 – Photo of the Day
18MAY2019 – Photo of the Day
The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 29 – Four O’Clock
Oliver Crangle lives alone in a cramped cluttered dark apartment and has a parrot that periodically squawks out the word nut. He is near-sighted almost to the point of blindness from obsessively documenting all his enemies and spends his day “investigating” people that he reads about in the paper or sees on television or meets in the street. He categorizes everyone and any that he deems evil, he harasses and attacks. If he thinks that the clerk in the post office is a communist then he’ll call up his boss and report him. If he reads about an accident victim that died in a hospital, he’ll find out who the attending physician was and report him to the hospital as negligent.
The wife of the doctor who he has attempted to vilify comes to Crangle’s apartment to find out why he is doing it. When Crangle asks whether the hospital is ready to discharge her husband she tells him that the hospital doesn’t believe the charge. But she says her husband is a sensitive man and the abuse is wounding him. But Crangle has no sympathy.
Later an FBI agent shows up and interviews Crangle about a complaint he has sent to the bureau about communist infiltration. While talking to the agent Crangle reveals his new plan. Crangle says that by using only his will he will turn all the evil people in the world into two-foot-tall midgets at exactly four o’clock pm. The agent tells Crangle to seek psychiatric help. Crangle reviles the agent and tells him that he too will be one of the midgets.
At four o’clock Crangle is reduced to two feet in height.
The previous episode, The Little People, and this present one are about height. But I guess that’s a metaphor for moral stature. This is a character study about a 1960s version of a social justice warrior. I wonder what Rod would think of how his side in the culture war has mutated into the thing he hated. Interesting inversion. The episode is a little thin for my tastes. Your mileage may vary. C.
17MAY2019 – Photo of the Day
16MAY2019 – American Greatness Post of the Day – Our Modern Satyricon – VDH
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist by training so it is perhaps unsurprising that he finds the analogies between Petronius’s Satyricon and the cultural rot of our own age.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/15/our-modern-satyricon/
But I still praise him for the accuracy of his point by point comparison. Comparing the present age to post-republican Rome has become a common trope but Hanson points out just how accurate it is. Nothing new here, just the scholarly expertise of the author pointing out the exactness of the analogy.
The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 3 Episode 28 – The Little People
Captain William Fletcher (played by Claude Akins) lands his space ship on an asteroid (of course) to repair damage done by a meteor shower. His copilot Peter Craig bellyaches about the inconvenience of being stuck on a boring speck of dust and about having to obey Fletcher’s orders. When Fletcher asks him why he’s so allergic to taking orders Craig confesses that what he wants more than anything else is to be the big boss.
While Fletcher is busy repairing the ship, Craig goes out exploring the asteroid. He discovers water but what is astonishing is that he discovers a civilization of tiny people smaller than ants. They have towns and automobiles and boats. And what makes Craig really happy is that he has become their leader and in fact their god. Because he can destroy anything in their world just by stepping on it the little people fear him and will obey any order, he gives them.
The next day Fletcher discovers that the little people have built a life size statue of Peter Craig. Craig had ordered them to build it and complete it in one night. But when Craig starts stepping on some of the little people’s town, just to keep them afraid and show who’s boss, Fletcher knocks Craig down and berates him for behaving like a sadist.
Later on, Fletcher tells Craig that he’s repaired the ship and now it’s time to leave. Craig refuses to leave and when Fletcher attempts to force him to go Craig pulls out a blaster and threatens Fletcher with it. In fact, he blows the head off of his statue to show he means business. Craig intends to stay on the asteroid and spend his days as the deity of the little people and their curse. Craig gives Fletcher an ultimatum, leave or die. So, Fletcher blasts off in the rocket and Craig laughs as the ship ascends into the sky. But later a space ship lands and two giants as tall as mountains happen upon Petr Craig and one accidentally crushes him to death while trying to pick him up. The giants are saddened by the accidental death they’ve caused but they drop Peter back on the ground near the little people’s settlement as they leave.
Later we see that the little people use ropes to tip over the statue on top of the corpse of their former god.
What can I say? Claude Akins is an amusing character actor but there’s not much to work with here. It’s sort of a riff on Gulliver’s Travels and the bad guy gets his comeuppance, I guess. C+ is the best I can do.
16MAY2019 – Photo of the Day
Finding the Missing Link between Microbes and Men
Unless we include progressives there doesn’t seem to be any close relationship between bacteria (a prokaryote) and humans (a member of the eukaryote group). In fact, even something as humble as a fungus has more in common on the cellular level with humans than it does with bacteria. Assuming that bacteria were here first (which is an assumption that needs to be tested) it isn’t clear how the jump happened from the bare bones simplicity of the prokaryote to the remarkable complexity of even the most simplistic eukaryotic cell. Recent discoveries in the organisms that fall somewhere in between these two groups (archaea) is fueling additional controversy. According to one theory the archaea are the ancestor of the eukaryotes and therefore sort of our multi-great grand uncles. This rubs a lot of biologists the wrong way. There are even feuds based on this disagreement. I don’t have a dog in this fight but I am interested in advancements in the understanding of how life evolved on Earth. An interesting aspect of the story is that certain components of the eukaryotic cell (like the mitochondria and the chloroplasts) started out as independent bacterial cells that were ingested by some ancient organism but somehow survived inside the cell and formed a symbiotic and permanent arrangement. And many modern biologists see similar symbiosis between the bacteria living in our intestines and our human selves. Both species profit from the relationship and in our cases couldn’t survive without the other. What a strange and remarkable world we live in. Interesting read.
The Trickster Microbes that are Shaking Up the Tree of Life by Traci Watson