THE TWILIGHT ZONE is 50 years old this weekend!

On October 2nd, 1959, CBS premiered a new television series. Its creator, Rod Serling, had already established himself as a force to be reckoned with in the new medium.

But for his new show Serling had something very different in mind. Eschewing traditional drama, Serling chose an anthology format that would not only entertain, but enthrall and tantalize and, at times, utterly haunt the viewer.

So it was that on that evening, millions of viewers crossed over into The Twilight Zone for the first time.

Could this possibly be the greatest television series ever? I mean, it's hard to think of any other show that has been more influential, or had as tremendous an impact on our modern culture.

Awright, so anyone who notes the anniversary of The Twilight Zone is doubtless going to tick off his/her favorite episodes, right? Well, in no particular order some of mine are "A Most Unusual Camera" (the first episode of The Twilight Zone that I ever saw), "The Obsolete Man" (maybe the best episode that Burgess Meredith did for the series), "A Game of Pool" (one of the most solid and powerful single episodes of television ever, in my opinion), "It's a Good Life" (wigs me out every time I watch it), "Once Upon a Time" (a comic entry for the series, starring Buster Keaton), "I Sing the Body Electric" (was there a moral, or did it even really need one?) and "Nick of Time" (a story that, it goes without saying, not only could conceivably happen but has happened in one form or another throughout human history).

So... do y'all have any favorite stories from The Twilight Zone? Comment away!

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The only existing film footage of Anne Frank

From the Anne Frank House channel on YouTube...

Here's the clip's description...

July 22 1941. The girl next door is getting married. Anne Frank is leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a good look at the bride and groom. It is the only time Anne Frank has ever been captured on film. At the time of her wedding, the bride lived on the second floor at Merwedeplein 39. The Frank family lived at number 37, also on the second floor.

This would have been about a year before Anne and her family went into hiding.

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Cad Bane: Best new Star Wars baddie in a LONG time!

Previously I'd noted that I've been late to the game so far as Cartoon Network's Star Wars: The Clone Wars animated series goes. I'm now regretting it even more, because today was the first time that I got to see Cad Bane in action.

What else can I say? Cad is easily the awesomest new villainous addition to the Star Wars pantheon in too great a long while. Everything about Cad Bane screams bad-a$$: his Clint Eastwood/"spaghetti western"-esque look, his voice (provided by Corey Burton), his proficiency with the blaster (or more than one), his cold-blooded personality... and the fact that he's a reputation for being the most feared bounty hunter in the waning years of the Old Republic. That alone carries lots of street cred in the galaxy far, far away.

And I just found out that there's a Cad Bane action figure floating around. Guess I'll have to be looking for it now... :-)

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I've newfound respect for the Olympics

International Olympic Committee, congratulations: y'all did the way right thing in picking Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Summer Games.

I've never been to Rio, but have heard a lot of good things about that town over the years. Maybe this'll be a good enough excuse to finally check out the place :-)

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Doctor Emmett Brown has been targeted for termination!

Skynet needs more gigawatts!

How It Should Have Ended is famous across the 'Net for their perversely funny take on well-known movies. This is one of their best yet!

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I can't label nothing no more...

Yours Truly has gone hogwild with the labels feature ever since I first started using it about two years ago: Blogger has told me that there's a 2000 labels limit and I'm all out.

C'mon Google, we expect better from you! Fix this, please :-)

EDIT 09:32 p.m. EST: Taking a looksee around the blogosphere, many users of Blogger are reporting problems with labels. I'm hearing that Google/Blogger implemented some "improvements" and that a restriction on labels is supposed to be one of them. Uhhhh...

If Google is in the business of locating data quickly, then limiting labels for its own blogging service seems an awfully big step in the wrong direction.

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U.S. unemployment hits 9.8%

Last month employers across the country slashed more than a quarter-million jobs, sending the unemployment rate in America precariously close to ten percent.

So one-tenth of the domestic workforce is... out of work. Doesn't sound like any recovering economy to me. Heck, that sounds an awful lot like depression.

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It's THE A-TEAM!

ComingSoon.net has the first pic of the complete The A-Team ensemble! From left to right we see Quinton "Rampage" Jackson as B.A. Baracus, Liam Neeson as "Hanibal" Smith, Sharlto Copley (most recently seen playing Wikus in District 9) as Murdock, and Bradley Cooper as "Faceman" Peck.

Okay, minus getting to see the mohawk and gold chains of B.A., that looks pretty darned persuasive as a modern-day take on the A-Team guys.

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LEGO versions of classic photographs

Mike Stimpson is a photographer... and a LEGO maniac. So he combined his love of both and came up with a series of pics replicating some of the most famous images in modern history with LEGO bricks and minfigs (like Stimpson's take on the classic VJ Day kiss in New York City, shown at right). The Daily Beast has more about Stimpson's work along with the photos that inspired them. And if you want to check out the rest of his stuff, click on through to Mike Stimpson's official website.

(Thanks to Lee Shelton for the great find!)

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Bay promises third Transformers movie for 2011

On his official site, Michael Bay has publicly vowed that a third Transformers flick for summer after next. It's set to roll out on July 1st, 2011.

From his blog...

Well its official: We have a great Transformers 3 story. The release date is now July 1st 2011. Not 2012.

Today is Day One. This morning started with an ILM meeting for five hours in San Francisco. Currently I'm flying with writer Ehren Kruger to Rhode Island to talk to Hasbro about new characters.

P.S. Megan Fox, welcome back. I promise no alien robots will harm you in any way during the production of this motion picture. Please consult your Physician when working under my direction because some side effects can occur, such as mild dizziness, intense nausea, suicidal tendencies, depression, minor chest hair growth, random internal hemorrhaging and inability to sleep. As some directors may be hazardous to your health, please consult your Doctor to determine if this is right for you.

Pain and Gain is right after shooting of Trans 3.

I'm still a bit conflicted over Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Looking forward to catching it again when the DVD streets in a few weeks. I think it was generally a good sequel, maybe better than its reputation, but it was loaded with problems (and Skids and Mudflap continue to honk me off to no end). But if Bay and crew can up the ante on the next movie though, all will be well.

That, and bring back Steve Jablonsky to compose the score (but on this blog, that goes without saying :-)

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Wireless networking hacked to see through walls! (BUT...)

Okay, first the bad news: researchers have found a way to modify wireless networking signal processing so that people outside your home or office can "see" what you are doing right through the building's walls.

But there is also good news: another group of researchers has developed a new kind of paint that blocks wireless networking radio waves! Just coat those same walls with this stuff, and if the paint lives up to its promise you'll be free to do... whatever (and I don't wanna know either).

I could also see a huge market for this paint among those worried about mind control rays...

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Interesting pics from the RED DAWN remake

Wasn't sure at first what to think about a remake of 1984's Red Dawn. But after seeing a number of behind-the-scenes images like this one...

...y'all can now color me "curious". It's been a long time since we've had an anti-communist movie. And making it China instead of the Soviet Union is going to be an intriguing update on the original's premise.

Red Dawn 2010 is the site you wanna go to for more about Red Dawn, due out next year.

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"Missing" content finally restored to STAR WARS: KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC II

While we're waiting for Star Wars: The Old Republic (and BioWare is now taking applications for closed beta testing if you're into that sort of thing) maybe this'll satiate your appetite in the meantime. About five years ago Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II came out but instead of BioWare doing the follow-up to their original game, work was contracted out to Obsidian. Now don't get me wrong: Knights of the Old Republic II was a superb game ("some" people, ahem, even claim it's better than its predecessor).

But even the most casual players found that there were obviously things... wrong... with KOTOR II. Some more tech-savvy folks went looking through the game's CD-ROM discs and found huge chunks of content that Obsidian had intended to put into the final version, but for one reason or another chose to instead yank it out. But the "missing" resources, like cutscenes and dialogue and even an entire planet (to say nothing of that elusive HK droid factory) were still there amid the files. And it wasn't long after the game was released that a community of fans coalesced together to modify the game and restore the deleted material.

It's taken nearly five years, but at long last the Knights of the Old Republic II Restored Content Project is darn nearly in its final form. The developers are calling the latest version of their mod an "open beta", but by all accounts this is the game as Obsidian first envisioned it. The modders are recommending a clean install of Knights of the Old Republic II and using no previously saved games. Here's the current complete list of download links and other info on the project's official website.

Maybe after I finish playing Batman: Arkham Asylum (not to mention Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 and Halo 3: ODST) I'll check this out :-)

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Skull thought to be Hitler's is actually of a woman

In April of 1945, during the final days of the European theater and with the approaching rumble of Soviet tanks heralding the collapse of his "Thousand Year Reich", Adolf Hitler is said to have committed suicide within his Berlin bunker. His longtime mistress Eva Braun also joined him in death, rather than be captured alive. They took cyanide and then shot themselves. And according to surviving accounts, Hitler's aides took the bodies outside the bunker, doused them with gasoline and set them ablaze: an attempt to ensure that the Soviets could not make a trophy of the Fuhrer's remains.

But a year later, bones and skull fragments with bullet holes were found at the site by Russian forces. They were assumed to be all that was left of Adolf Hitler. The fragments sat in Moscow throughout the Cold War, and only in recent years have they finally come under the scrutiny of modern science.

And now, according to DNA studies... "Hitler's skull" is found to be that of a woman, most likely between the age of 20 and 40.

There's no telling who this skull might be then. My guess is that it might be Braun's, but absent any confirming DNA from possible relatives, there's no way we'll ever know. Just one more mystery then, among the myriad of enigmas, of World War II. But it also adds fuel to the fire about persistent theories that Hitler survived long after the war.

Or, maybe it really is Hitler's skull... and he was actually a woman? I've heard that one in my time too.

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Johnny Robertson channels Oral Roberts! Cult leader exclaims "This may be our last night!"

This has to be one of the most ridiculous broadcasts I've ever seen coming out of Johnny Robertson and the "Church of Christ in Name Only". And that's sayin' something...

He started at 10 p.m. tonight on the program out of WGSR's Martinsville studio, ranting about Bob Lawson (several e-mails came in today saying that Lawson pitched my blog during Charles Roark's The Local Buzz earlier this afternoon and that neither Roark or Robertson like that at all).

After that, Robertson commenced to launching an on-air crusade against, for some reason or another, a steakhouse.

And now several times in the past few minutes Robertson has insinuated that this might be the end of him on WGSR. It was like watching Oral Roberts back in 1987, when Roberts told his viewers to send him millions of dollars or else "the Lord will call me home". Tonight Robertson announced several times that "This might be our last night!" It sounded as if he were begging the WGSR viewing area to keep him on the air, in spite of how he was denouncing WGSR general manager Charles Roark and staff member Debra Buchanan for doing business with said steakhouse.

(Does this mean that Hollywood Mountain is Martinsville, Virginia's very own "City of Faith"? :-P)

Hey Johnny Robertson, quit being a drama queen! EVERYONE knows that Charles Roark will never kick you off of his station. Roark has sold too much of his principles (some even are saying his soul) to you. The entire area knows that you, Johnny Robertson, are the biggest-paying client of WGSR and that without all that money coming to you from the cult in Texas that WGSR would take a crippling hit.

It's like watching the proverbial battered wife: Robertson can trash-talk Charles Roark and the entire staff of WGSR as much as he wants, and Roark will let him get away with it. Because Robertson will just tell Roark "Where else you gonna go bay-bee?"

(And in response to the reader of this blog hailing from Alaska: I am not making this stuff up about what goes on around here. It's really happening. The nonsense coming out of Robertson's cult is so bizarre that I wouldn't know how to begin to conjure it up out of my imagination.)

And for a broadcast called What Does the Bible Say?, Robertson spent approximately two minutes out of two hours' broadcast time covering any scripture at all. Parse that as you may...

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Now it's a North Carolina school making kids sing about Obama

Last week it was news of an elementary school in New Jersey that had forced its students to chant a song of praise about Barack Obama.

And now there's this video, made at Sand Hill Elementary School in Asheville, North Carolina (one of my most very favorite places that I've lived, incidentally)...

What the heck is going on here?

Actually, that's a very rhetorical question. Because I do know what's going on here. I've watched it build and grow for the past seventeen years, at least. It's not just a cult of one person. It's a cult of executive power: worshiping the President of the United States as if he were the living seat of divine government. I saw the warning signs during the Clinton era and was utterly appalled at how too many Christians were eager to imbue the same qualities onto George W. Bush. What's going on now with Barack Obama is only the dismal tide of the times.

That said: I still can't recall anything quite this disturbing before in American history. That a outright cult of personality is developing around the President.

This is very wrong in the worst way. I don't know of any other way to put it.

Thanks to Matt Mittan for the heads-up.

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I'm getting #@&% sick and tired of EVONY ads!!

Whoever is responsible for all of those #@&% banner ads for Evony needs to be dragged out into the street and shot hung from the nearest telephone pole by his circular reproductive units with piano wire.

Seriously.

No, I haven't played this game. But I have heard from numerous sources that it is terrible. And the thing about Evony being "free forever" is a fraud: to achive anything in the game will likely microtransaction you into bankruptcy.

But that hasn't stopped the developers of Evony from running a publicity campaign that could be called full-bore faulty advertising, if not increasingly desperate. There is no "queen" to save (nor is there "your lover", My Lord).

I have tried numerous times to keep the Evony ads from popping up on this blog. They keep creeping in, like so many filthy cockroaches...

Want to see how badly the idiots behind Evony want you to play their cruddy game? Hit here, My Lord, for a gallery of Evony ads and watch how the raciness has escalated throughout this past summer.

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