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...