The Consequence of Matters

Today is the birthday of comedian Buster Keaton, born Joseph Frank Keaton in Piqua, Kansas in 1895. His parents were vaudevillians, and according to Keaton, he earned his nickname as a toddler, when he fell down a staircase. Harry Houdini picked up the child, dusted him off, and said, "That was a real buster your kid took!" His parents added him to the act when he was three years old, and he quickly learned that the more serious he looked, the harder the audience laughed. In February 1917, Keaton met Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle at the Talmadge Studios in New York City, where Arbuckle was under contract to Joseph M. Schenck. Joe Keaton disapproved of films, and Buster also had reservations about the medium. During his first meeting with Arbuckle, he asked to borrow one of the cameras to get a feel for how it worked. He took the camera back to his hotel room and dismantled and reassembled it. With this rough understanding of the mechanics of the moving pictures, he ...

The Twilight Zone premiered on this date in 1959. The show's creator, Rod Serling, had been a successful TV writer for several years, penning hard-hitting dramas that often ran afoul of the censors. The show ran for five seasons, and it gave audiences an early glimpse at many future stars, including Robert Redford, Julie Newmar, William Shatner, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Peter Falk, Ron Howard, Leonard Nimoy, Burt Reynolds Jonathan Winters, and Carol Burnett. It also featured Hollywood legends like Buster Keaton, Art Carney, Ida Lupino, Dana Andrews, and Mickey Rooney. In 1997, the episodes "To Serve Man" (meaning #2 of serve in the Oxford dictionary) and "It's a Good Life" (a 6 year old with godlike powers and a cornfield) were respectively ranked at 11 and 31 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time. Serling himself stated that his favorite episodes of the series were "Time Enough at Last" (in which a bookish Burgess Meredith...

Today is the birthday of the greatest Texan who ever lived, Molly Ivins who once said, "The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion." Molly Ivins was born in Monterey, California in 1944 and raised in Houston, Texas. Molly Ivins once said: "I am not anti-gun. I'm pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up with someone in order to stab him. A general substi tution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We'd turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don't ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives." She went to Smith and to Columbia's School of Journalism and spent years covering the police beat for the Minneapolis Tribune (the first woman to do so) before moving back to Texas, the setting and subject of much of her life's writing. In a biographical blurb she wrote about ...

A mystery solved. I've wondered over the years what the rubbing means in rubbing alcohol. Does anyone actually rub with it? I mean regular rubs, not the old rub and tug. And then I forget again but today I remembered to look it up. People once rubbed with it, as a liniment for treating muscle pains, but it wasn't quite the same thing. The stuff was created in the 1920's, sometimes with ethanol and sometimes with isopropanol, but they were perfumed and had a number of other ad ditives, notably methyl salicylate. Methyl salicylate, when rubbed on the skin, causes a heating sensation similar to what happens with a product like Bengay (which, incidentally, is an Anglicized version of the French inventor's name, Bengue'). I have a hard time believing that a chemically induced sensation of heat is anywhere near the same thing as actual heat from a heating pad. It doesn't involve actual heating of the muscle tissues, just activation of heat sensitive neurons. I g...

I guess you've heard about Apollo 11. It took them an unusually long time to get ready to step out. It was a school night, but my dad let me stay up late to watch. Some time well after 11 PM, they actually made it out the hatch and I could barely keep my eyes open. As a kid, I was utterly consumed by the space program. I had a huge scrapbook of newspaper articles and I read every one of them. I was not utterly consumed by music. That didn't come until later. You can read elsewhere all the historical stuff. I'm fascinated by an oddball thing I learned recently. One of the least known works in the Pink Floyd catalog is called Moonhead. It seems that the BBC program Omnibus commissioned the Floyd to provide a soundtrack to the landing. For seven and a half minutes, with the occasional BBC announcer breaking in, they did just that. This was not the world famous Pink Floyd. That would come later. This was the psychedelic cult act Floyd, only recently divorced from ...