Blogtrek

Twilight Zone

Today I heard on NPR a description of how Rod Serling developed his Twilight Zone show, despite frequent objections from the Television Establishment. They mentioned several of my favorite episodes, including "Beauty and the Beholder", in which an injured woman had her face remade to be "ugly" but she looked perfectly normal to us, and the doctors and others were the ones with pig faces, as well as another episode in which a man wandered by himself all alone in a town. Some of my other favorites include those where: gremlins kept occurring outside the window of an airliner in a storm; aliens land with a book entitled "How to Serve Man" only at the last minute people discover it was a cookbook; a man describes people into his tape recorder and makes them suddenly materialize; astronauts are lost and land on a foreign looking planet only to discover it was Nevada; a man dies and winds up in a place of eternal happiness where he had all the pleasure and women he wanted so he asks for Hell instead and is told he already is in Hell; one in a war where a soldier sees halos on the heads of soldiers that subsequently die, and then sees it on his own mirror reflection, and one in which a man gives a recalcitrant woman a love potion and then she keeps going after him and he can't get rid of her. I saw these episodes when I was a teenager, and the memory of them sticks in my mind. I would like to see it again; I hear they are playing it again but wonder if it will measure up to the original.

Down and South

I have found objectionable the use of "south" to mean "down", as in "the Dow is headed south". I feel it is wrong; the Dow is going down instead, and furthermore, I feel it disparages southerners of all types - southern US, Third World, and Australians, for example. But I now see by a notable example that one should also not do the reverse; namely use "down" to mean "south". I had not thought of that one. But when the three Arab-Americans were detained in southern Florida because the authorities thought they were a terrorist threat, one of the things that they allegedly said at a Shoney's was "Do we have enough to bring it down?". According to news reports, a lady at the restaurant thought it meant a building, in these post-Planeattack days. But they said they meant a car instead. They used "down" to mean "south" to Miami. They should have said "Do we have enough to bring it south?" or "do we have enough to bring it to Miami?" Then there would have been no misunderstanding. But one thing this whole episode brings up is that one should use "down" to mean "down and "south" to mean "south" and not confuse the directions.