Would you be prepared to survive in the event of a complete breakdown of modern civilization?"

"A man-made or natural global disaster could strand you for months, years or forever with no electricity, no water from the taps, no grocery stores, no city services and no government. Further, you'll be surrounded by countless others who didn't prepare — the very same people who mock survivalists by calling them paranoid pessimists and worse. But survivalists are the ultimate optimists. They believe that they will succeed - no matter what happens to the rest of the world — if only they can assemble the right supplies and learn the right survival techniques."

The book (recommended by Instapundit) is: "Long-Term Survival In The Coming Dark Age: Preparing to Live after Society Crumbles." I like that it's available in Kindle format. Gives me an idea for an update of that old "Twilight Zone" episode "Time Enough at Last." I'll blend in some elements from "The Shelter."

("Time Enough at Last" is the one where — after the nuclear holocaust — a man who wants to read breaks his glasses. "The Shelter" is the one where — as people think nuclear war is about to begin — one family has a bomb shelter and their neighbors don't and want in.)

Goodbye to Sherman Hemsley.

Here's an obituary. I was looking for a great "All in the Family" or "Jeffersons" clip, but I found this "Twilight Zone" performance — "I of Newton" — where he plays a math professor who gets involved with selling his soul to the Devil:



(Notice how the saying on the Devil's T-shirt keeps changing.)

"He meets a deaf woman who loves music. Her hearing aid has broken. But she has good eyes and can read to him, but she slurs the words."

"It turns out that he plays the guitar, and she can hear it, a bit. Then in a final shocking twist, we learn that his middle name is 'Adam,' and her name is 'Eve.' Sadly, however, she is a robot."

That's Original George's entry in the "Time Enough At Last" challenge. The idea was to write a sequel to the famous "Twilight Zone" episode in which a man, Henry Bemis, who only wants to be left alone to read, is the sole survivor of a nuclear attack and then, with time enough at last to do all his reading, he breaks his glasses, without which he cannot read. So, what next?

Christy's entry is more "The Remake" than "The Sequel":

He is on the steps to the paperless Library circa 2020, picks up a Kindle and discovers the electromagnetic pulse has wiped all digital media clean.

Actually, the comments thread veered away from the challenge and into the philosophical inquiry: If there were no longer any possibility of interaction with human beings in real life, what books would be worth reading?

Anyway, I wrote the original post saying I'd reveal my sequel idea later, so here goes:

We see Henry agonizing over his broken glasses and suffering. He has to grope about in his near blindness, etc. etc. Eventually, he gropes his way into an eyeglass store. But all the glasses are melted from the nuclear blast. And the frames in an eyeglass store don't have prescription lenses anyway, Henry, you idiot. But there, under the counter there's a safe, blasted half open. Inside, there is a pair of glasses — thick glasses, like his old ones. We see through his eyes as he tries them on: The vision is clear. Henry is jubilant. He runs through the town back to his old stack of books on the library steps. He sits down, and, no sooner does he open up a book to read than the glasses fall off, hit the step, and break.

"Time Enough at Last" — the sequel.

Remember that great episode of "Twilight Zone" with Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis, the guy who only wanted to be left alone to read and gets his wish? Embedded below are the last 8 minutes to refresh your recollection (and you can watch the beginning and middle here and here if you want.)(And here's the Wikipedia entry to get up to speed more quickly.)



What I've been contemplating is "Time Enough at Last: The Sequel." I have my idea, but you go first.

ADDED: Here's better video, all in one piece, with a commercial.

"The Demon With a Glass Hand."

Yesterday, we were talking about the Bradbury Building in downtown L.A.



Someone emailed to say that "The Demon With a Glass Hand" — an episode of "Outer Limits," written by Harlan Ellison — was filmed in the Bradbury Building. I love the Bradbury Building, and I love "Outer Limits," which I watched when it originally aired, back in the 1960s, on Friday nights, just before "The Twilight Zone."

And, look, aren't we lucky? You can watch "The Demon With a Glass Hand" on YouTube: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Where are the children?

Of all the things that make me feel as though my time was in the past and I don't understand this world today, first on my list is the absence of children playing outdoors in suburban neighborhoods.



Here in Madison, I go for walks past 20 or 30 blocks of houses — good-sized houses with lovely yards and neat sidewalks. Big shade trees line streets that are too narrow to attract any through traffic. And I don't see any children playing. I see an occasional toy vehicle like the one in the photograph, but not one child. No one rides by on a bike or a tricycle or scooter. Swing sets are empty. No one is playing hopscotch or jumping rope. There are no ball games or frisbees. No kids are running around and yelling. Nothing! Where are they?

It's like Episode 1 of "The Twilight Zone": "Where Is Everybody?" That aired in 1959. A man arrives in a town and finds it devoid of people. The story wouldn't even work today. You wouldn't understand what was so weird about a town without people in it and why the man found it so upsetting. You'd just be yeah, yeah, it's a town. So what? What is that guy's problem?



IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O. said"

No children outside? Excellent. It's quiet! I can now get to all those great books I've been meaning to read. I can sit outside on my hammock and read and read and read. I have stacks of books I can now focus on. Hooray!

Oh no! I just sat on my reading glasses. Alas...

ADDED: National Review's Lisa Schiffren responds here. Like many of the commenters on this post, she speculates that the children are involved in scheduled activities or indoor pursuits (like TV and video games). But she also thinks the birth rate is low, especially in Madison, which she says (correctly) "is very blue."

Shiffren then says a few things about abortion. I tend to think that the people who can afford to live in these nice suburban houses are competently using birth control and making their own free decisions about how many children to have. That may be why they send their kids to various planned activities. (Many commenters mentioned camp and pools.) It makes me wistful to see all the unused beautiful yards, and it's less sad if the kids are doing good things like camping. It's more sad if they are staring at TV and computer screens all the time.

And although it's really sad if the birth rate drops too low, but it's still good that people plan their family size, and I would not assume that that they achieve their goals by using abortion.

More importantly, it is incorrect to think that the incidence of abortion correlates with support for abortion rights. It doesn't! Look at the statistics. I haven't clicked on all 50 states, but I clicked on a lot of them and haven't found one with a lower incidence of abortion than Wisconsin's. It may be that people who support abortion rights are well-educated and realistic, that is, better at running their own lives and not getting pregnant by accident.

The UW 9/11 denialist appears on "Hannity and Colmes."

The day the university announced its decision to permit Kevin Barrett to teach the one course he was hired to teach, he appeared on "Hannity and Colmes," introduced by Alan Colmes as "University of Wisconsin professor Kevin Barrett." If those words had come out of Sean Hannity's mouth, it would have provided a good occasion to accuse Hannity of being slanted and out to paint UW as a bunch of radical crazies. But it came from Colmes, the show's liberal, so it's just a nice demonstration of how lots of folks don't notice the distinction between professors and lecturers, even part time lecturers like Barrett. He's teaching here. He's one of the professors as far as the general public is concerned.

Let's go to the videotape:



Colmes begins and tries to present Barrett in a fairly positive light by bringing out the facts that the course is not required, that the 9/11 conspiracy theory will take up "only about one week" of the course, that the students will not be required to "regurgitate" his theory, and that he means to inspire "critical thinking." (Smarter students, I note, may want to regurgitate.)

From the moment he begins speaking, Barrett twitches and jerks around quite oddly and speaks in a breathless, excited way. He tries to unload a torrent of words about the theory and won't stop to give Colmes a chance to get through his series of questions, which are quite clearly designed to put Barrett in a positive light. Barrett, however, is so keen on his theory, he'd rather spout conspiracy. He looks nutty even before Hannity starts the questions that are meant to trash him. That is, Barrett's a witness who mucks up the direct examination. It doesn't take cross-examination to bring out the problems.

When Hannity takes over, Barrett interrupts him in the middle of his first question. When Hannity insists on finishing the question, Barrett smugly goes "Yeah, yeah, finish up." On Hannity's show! As if he thinks the only people who are watching are folks who think Hannity's a jackass. Hannity asks him if he really believes 9/11 and other terrorists attacks were "an inside job." Barrett, inspiring no confidence that he will allow students to debate with him, says sharply, "I don't believe, I do know that 9/11 was an inside job." Barrett then tries to lay out the details of the theory. The word "thermate" comes out of his mouth. (It's supposed to be "thermite," but why be precise?) [ADDED: Apparently, there is something called "thermate," which, like thermite, has a role in the conspiracy theory.]

Hannity breaks in to say, "All right, so you believe that the buildings came down in a controlled demolition." Again, Barrett excludes the possibility of alternate theories: "Well, I don't believe it. I've looked at the evidence, and the evidence is overwhelming." Hannity's response is perfect: "All right, the evidence is overwhelming to you because you're a conspiracy nut." Hannity tries to set up his next question: "But putting that all aside..." That's perhaps the funniest line of the night, but it's stepped all over by Barrett, who motormouths conspiracy theory. Hannity goes ahead and asks his question with Barrett yammering over him. Hannity finally just lets the man babble. Then, he mutters, "Okay, I wish I had the 'Twilight Zone' music."

Hannity says, "Okay, here's my next question," and Barrett breaks in with a laugh and says "Okay, friend," and shrugs, looking quite pleased with himself, as if he believes he's getting the better of the exchange. As Hannity tries to ask the question, Barrett keeps interrupting, offering survey statistics that he seems to think show that people agree with him -- 60%! "You're in the minority," he tells Hannity. That is, we see Barrett garbling facts in real time, on camera.

Finally, Hannity gets Barrett to hear the question: Should extremists like you be allowed to teach? Barrett says: "No, you're the extremist. Fox News is the biggest bunch of extremists on the planet." He's got a huge laughing grin now. Hannity doesn't think Barrett should be teaching, and Barrett responds that he doesn't think Hannity should be on the air. "I think you guys should be taken off the airwaves, because you are the guys who are..." A desperate Colmes breaks in: "All right, we don't want to silence anybody...."

Colmes's attempt at the beginning to present Barrett in a good light by emphasizing that Barrett will bring debate and critical thinking to the classroom is all shot to hell. We've seen Barrett in action. Barrett retained his position here because we care about free speech values, but he slammed us in the face with his disrespect for free speech.

Alito answers.

Let's take a look at the NYT coverage of Day 2 of the Alito hearings.

The two Adams -- Liptak and Nagourney -- have this to say:

If Senate Democrats had set out to portray Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. as extreme on issues ranging from abortion to government surveillance of citizens, they ran up against an elusive target on Tuesday: Samuel A. Alito Jr. For nearly eight hours, Judge Alito was placid, monochromatic and, it seemed, mostly untouchable.

Unlike the testimony of John G. Roberts Jr., who had often declined to answer questions on various grounds, among them that certain issues might come before him as chief justice or that his older writings did not necessarily reflect his current views, Judge Alito's default impulse frequently seemed to be to try to give a direct response to the senators' often rambling questions.

How disarming! I imagine they didn't expect that. Roberts's performance has become a myth of perfection, so it made sense to assume Alito would ape it, and the Democrats may very well have thought that the Roberts technique would seem less elegant in a New Jersey accent, and they'd get the advantage in a way they failed to do last September when they encountered the ultra-polished Roberts. But Alito found a different path, daring to behave in the Bork mode and actually debate about law. Were the Democratic Senators a bit surprised?

For the most part, his handling of questions from Democrats had the effect of leaving his questioner shuffling through papers in search of the next question.

Ha ha. So they were planning to run out their time insisting that he answer and lecturing him about why he must answer, and then -- damn! -- he answered. What's Plan B?

Asked by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts about an endorsement of "the supremacy of the elected branches of government" in the 1985 job application, Judge Alito simply disavowed it.

"It's an inapt phrase," he said, "and I certainly didn't mean that literally at the time, and I wouldn't say that today. The branches of government are equal."

Mr. Kennedy followed up. "So you've changed your mind?" he asked.

"No, I haven't changed my mind, senator," Judge Alito responded. "But the phrasing there is very misleading and incorrect."

I wonder where Kennedy meant to go with that -- into a demand that the courts defer to Congress even more than they already do? I wonder if those who are working on the Senators' questions are spending the time between Day 2 and Day 3 of the hearings furiously rewriting the script so there are paths to take when Alito answers.

To a large extent, Judge Alito's success at skating though a good deal of the day reflected the quality of the questioning. The senators frequently did not follow up on their own queries, and Mr. Biden in particular devoted most of his 30 minutes to talking, leaving little time for the nominee to speak.

Well, since he didn't go first, maybe Biden saw the potential for embarrassment if he got to an interchange with the nominee and decided to run out the clock with the prefatory blather. I guess that's what's going on in the photograph described in the previous post.

Mr. Schumer, whose questioning left Judge Alito looking wobbly and pale, was an exception, as was Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who pressed him on his views about the Supreme Court's authority to overrule precedent.

I'll focus on those two when I get to my TiVo later this morning.

Judge Alito's command of the law was impressive, but it did not have Judge Roberts's effortless, Olympian quality.

As I said, Roberts has become a myth. The Adams note that Alito used the term "twilight zone" to refer to the wrong one of Justice Jackson's three categories for analyzing presidential power. They're right. That's a gaffe. The middle category is the "twilight zone," not the third category.

Enough of the Adams. Let's look at Elisabeth Bumiller's take:

The lure of 50 cameras and the captive audience in the Senate Hart Office Building appeared too much of a temptation for some of Capitol Hill's windiest lions, who began by promising not to run a marathon session of questions, then did so anyway.

Oh, the Senators preened?

At one point Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, was even granted two extra minutes from the committee's chairman, Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania - drawing groans from colleagues, among them Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

"Be quiet over there," Mr. Kennedy admonished his fellow committee members, to laughter. "Scurrilous dogs."

Ha ha. They're sick of each other!

The highest ratio of words per panelist to words per nominee was that of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, who managed to ask five questions in his 30-minute time allotment.

Ha ha. I'm glad somebody's counting these things.

"I understand, Judge, I am the only one standing between you and lunch, so I'll try to make this painless," he began, with some promise.

Mr. Biden then dived into a soliloquy on Judge Alito's failure to recuse himself from cases involving the Vanguard mutual fund company, which managed the judge's investments. After 2 minutes 50 seconds - short for the senator - Mr. Biden did appear to veer toward a question, but abandoned it to cite Judge Alito's membership in a conservative Princeton alumni group. Mr. Biden discoursed on that for a moment, then interrupted himself with an aside about his son who "ended up going to that other university, the University of Pennsylvania."

Judge Alito, who had been sitting without expression through Mr. Biden's musings, interrupted the senator midword, got out three sentences, then settled in for nearly 26 minutes more of Mr. Biden, with the senator doing most of the talking. With less than a minute to spare, Mr. Biden concluded, thanked Judge Alito for "being responsive," then said to Mr. Specter that "I want to note that for maybe the first time in history, Biden is 40 seconds under his time."

How appalling! And complimenting himself, in the third person, in the end, as if he's being charmingly self-deprecating? If you think you can bore and exasperate everyone for half an hour and then pull that off, you're not self-deprecating, you're self-deluded.

While most of the senators were at least as verbose as they were at the September confirmation hearings of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the crispest was the chairman, Mr. Specter, who dispensed with an introduction on Tuesday and was immediately out of the gate with a question about abortion.

"Judge Alito, do you accept the legal principles articulated in Griswold vs. Connecticut that the liberty clause in the Constitution carries with it the right to privacy?" Mr. Specter asked.

Judge Alito, as Chief Justice Roberts had before him, said that he did, indicating that he at least did not rule out the pivotal legal underpinning of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that legalized abortion.

Mr. Specter then moved into the same line of questioning he had used for the chief justice, even displaying the same chart that listed the 38 Supreme Court cases since Roe that affirmed the right to abortion.

Like almost everything else, the chart created an opportunity for more words from members of the committee. As an aide held the chart up behind Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, who opposes abortion rights, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, who supports them, was moved to crack, "Just balance that on Orrin's head."

Mr. Specter, who also supports abortion rights, chimed in, "It's a good photo-op for Senator Hatch."

Mr. Hatch, grinning, would have none of it. "He wants that over by Leahy," he said.

Funny. I've read this part of the transcript, and I think Specter did an excellent job of managing the presentation of the abortion material. Clearly, this was designed very well to build a foundation for Alito's testimony and give him security on the most difficult issue.

The most indignant questioner was Mr. Leahy, who went on a ramble through his own Irish and Italian roots and compared the discrimination that his parents and grandparents faced with the hard-luck story of Judge Alito's father, who came to the United States from Italy as an infant, grew up in poverty and had a difficult time getting a teaching job.

Leahy's Italian? Interesting.

Given that history, Mr. Leahy said, he was particularly troubled that Judge Alito would have joined the conservative college group, Concerned Alumni of Princeton University, which resisted the admission of women and members of minorities.

"Why in heaven's name, Judge, with your background and what your father faced, why in heaven's name were you proud of being part of C.A.P.?" Mr. Leahy asked.

Judge Alito, who acknowledged having listed the group on a 1985 job application, responded, "I have racked my memory about this issue, and I really have no specific recollection of that organization."

I would have followed up with a question about what he means by "specific recollection." Why add the modifier "specific" unless there is some recollection?

The judge's toughest questioner was Mr. Schumer, who late in the day bored in with follow-up after follow-up about whether Judge Alito thought that the Constitution protected the right to abortion. In 1985, Judge Alito - then applying for a position in the Justice Department - contended that the Constitution did not guarantee such a right.

But on Tuesday, Judge Alito repeatedly refused to say what he now thought of the issue, exasperating Mr. Schumer.

"I do have to tell you, Judge, your refusal I find troubling," he said, likening the side-stepping to the response that might have been given by a friend who had told him 20 years earlier, "You know, I really can't stand my mother-in-law.'

Mr. Schumer spun out the rest of the hypothetical: "And a few weeks ago, I saw him and I said, 'You still hate your mother-in-law?' He said, 'Well, I'm now married to her daughter for 21 years, not one year.' I said, 'No, no, no, do you still hate your mother-in-law?' And he said, 'Mmm, can't really comment.' "

Mr. Schumer paused. "What do you think I'd think?" he asked the nominee.

The barest of smiles crossed Judge Alito's face. "Senator, I think --"

Mr. Schumer, in the theme of the day, cut him off. "Let me just move on," he said. Mr. Schumer seemed to notice that Judge Alito's mother-in-law was in the hearing room.

"I have not changed my mother-in-law," Judge Alito offered.

As always, the senator had the last word. "I'm glad you haven't, because she seems nice," Mr. Schumer said.

That's what passes for tough questioning these days? Cornball humor? And by the way, Senator Schumer, hating one's mother-in-law was stock comic material back in the 1950s and 60s. Then, there was a little something called the Women's Movement, and after that, it became kind of uncool to just tap into that. I just love the irony that the Senator who is offering to be the champion of women's rights sounds like the old comics who used to piss me off 35 years ago.

"28 Days Later."

I watched about half of the movie "28 Days Later," partly just to check out how my new widescreen HDTV looked with HDHBO. I thought the film had a great chimpanzee-filled beginning, which was followed by the title, cleverly setting up the next scene, the mystery of a naked man waking up in a hospital bed. The man yanks out various medical tubes, puts on some clothes, and begins to try to figure out what has happened to him. The hospital and the city around it (London) are deserted. This part, which I quite enjoyed, was very much like a "Twilight Zone" episode (especially the first episode, "Where is Everybody?"). After a while, the man finds some people and figures out some of what has happened and the movie becomes more of a survivalist/road trip story. It was getting late, so I turned it off. But I checked out the DVD on Amazon just now, and saw that the extra features include:

Alternative theatrical ending with optional commentary
Alternative ending with optional commentary
Radical alternative ending with optional commentary

Of course, I didn't see the original ending, so that's four endings left for me to see. And one ending is radical.

Hmmmm .... so you didn't care enough to keep watching to see one ending, and now you're thinking of spending $25 to see four endings. What's the logic in that?

It makes a lot of sense! If there is one ending, then you watch thinking the ending better be worth slogging through all the padding in the middle. But if there are four possible endings, the investment of watching the middle section pays off fourfold, and at least one ending is likely to satisfy. Plus, there's the fun of deciding which ending you prefer, arguing with others about which ending is best, and checking out the "optional commentary" to see what the director and the writer thought were the comparative pros and cons of the four endings. Ending x 8. For people who really like to experience endings. But maybe I'm only into beginnings ... as evidenced by my loss of interest when the middle section got under way.

UPDATE: Thanks to About Last Night for linking to this post. ALN liked "28 Days Later" and calls it a "flesh-eating-zombie flick." Were those zombies? As noted, I didn't stick around for the ending, but I thought they were pre-dead "infecteds." They did have the way of the zombie about them though--except that they could move quite fast.

Old TV gets the high art treatment.

In amongst the fancy fare playing at UW's Cinemateque this summer (like "The Five Obstructions") are some old TV shows. (Via The Capital Times.)(All shows are free.)

On July 30, they are showing two episodes of "Twilight Zone" along with two episodes of "Way Out." It looks like each "Twilight Zone" will be preceded by a "Way Out," the way the shows used to run on Friday nights in 1961. How well I remember completely loving "Twilight Zone" and watching the lesser "Way Out" to get a larger dose of Twilight-Zonishness on Fridays, often in the context of sleepovers and slumber parties. I never realized until just now, from the Cinemateque website, that Roald Dahl hosted "Way Out"!

On July 23, you can watch an "archival print" of the "Toody's Paradise" episode "Car 54, Where Are You?" with original ads for Tide detergent, Camay soap, and Gleem toothpaste. If I remember correctly, Camay "creams your skin while you wash," and Gleem has "Gardol" which is represented by an "invisible shield" of clear glass/plastic that protects the announcer when a golfer hits a golf ball into into it. I can't remember a thing about old Tide commercials, which I think is because I was in a state of hypnosis, caused by the whirly orange and yellow packaging. I remain incapable of buying any other laundry detergent.