Let Us Be Clear Here -
If anyone - ANYONE! - mentions those execrable books or films Whose Name Shall Not Be Spoken, then my kommando kangaroo kick-boxing killers will be paying a visit*.
Nor is this a patriotic paean to the nation of South Canada, which may confuse some of you, as today's title is taken from their national anthem, "The Star Spangled Banner", to wit: "What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming".
Here an aside. There wouldn't have been any such song if Perfidious Albion hadn't bombarded Fort M'Henry in the first place, so a little modest recognition wouldn't go astray, ta very much.
The South Canadians have never really forgiven us for burning down the White House, you know, despite it being an accident with a box of matches and some tinder.
Poetic inspiration
Nor is today's title a reference to the filmed thriller, starring Burt Lancaster and Richard Widmark, which of course Conrad has seen, and has also read the book it was based upon ("Viper Three" I believe). Art? Less coal more picture!
Okay, so we have begun in typical BOOJUM! style, going on at length about what it's not; I like to establish our parameters from the start. What is this Intro about? Why "Rolling Stone"'s Top 50 Television Sci-Fi Shows, of course, and we are now down to Number 2 (or should that be "up to"?). Art!
Those were 1977 dollars
O sorry I turned over two pages at once; that should read "A mind-bending melange of terror, horror and evil, neatly done up with bows and ribbons".
A warm, fuzzy, family-friendly laff-riot romp!
Well yes. All the best anthology series are, or is that just me? It gets confused a lot with "The Outer Limits" which is fair enough, apart from Rod Serling always cropping up to introduce an episode, and then again at the end to gloat at how the protagonist was turned into a spiny cactus and eaten by mules, or how it wasn't a real spaceship just a set for lab testing and there was no need to have killed and eaten the other crew members - that sort of thing.
It seems that Rod, the driving force behind the television series, found conventional scripts too confining and liable to studio intervention, so he came up with TTZ. His logic was that this series, featuring science fiction quite as much as the supernatural, would be far less likely to come in for censorship and meddling. And do you know, he was right. People are extra-specially fond of the episode "To Serve Man", with it's hilariously ambiguous title. Art?
"Let the Uglification Projector be activated!**"
TSM is a rare (tee-hee! "rare") outing for Lloyd Bochner as a heroic protagonist, as his stock-in-trade was usually the oleaginous, weaselly, dishonest sleazebig***.
O and because I care, and because you're all skeptics, that mystery photograph is from "Eye Of The Beholder".
Right, Motley, I've got the scalpel and bandages, let's see how easy plastic surgery really is.
The Map Of Mystery
Conrad noticed some folded papers beneath his work desk, wondered if it was a map and retrieved it.
Yes, it was a map. Art?
Okay, it's not one of my replica trench maps, they have both sides lines inked in blue and green and in excruciating detail. It's not from an Official History mapset, as they don't have an Ordnance underlay, and there's no legend on it. Conrad examined the towns and villages on the map (e.g. "Fricourt", "Mametz") and realised these were objectives for the British at the beginning of the Somme campaign. The dates at various phase lines are in late August, so I suspect the map was from one of the Official History reprints, probably the second volume for 1916. All well and good, except my OH collection is in no particular order. A bit of a search beckons.
The Drugs DO Work -
- in fact they work all too well. For Lo! we are back at "Bleak House" again, and a minor character has just managed to top themselves with an overdose of opium. There are various characters in attendance in the squalid hovel where the deceased 'lived', including a local doctor, who calmly pronounces that he had been selling the dead addict grains of opium. Art!
"What?" I asked myself aloud, for there were no others present to worry, "Was it that easy and simple to get hold of powerful narcotics?"
Yes! is the simple answer. For Ol' Chas was writing in 1852, at which time you could indeed purchase opium, or laudanum (opium in a tincture of alcohol), perfectly legally from the butcher (!), the ironmonger (!!) or even the confectioner (!!!). The drug was prescribed for a wide range of ailments and even used by parents to put children to sleep - O what could possibly go wrong there!
Looking at those prices, you could render yourself stupified for days on an outlay of (current prices) £0.20, at which one cries "Egad!".
It wasn't until 1868 that laws were passed that tightened the rules about buying opium alongside a bag of sweets or a hand trowel, restricting sales to registered and licenced pharmacists. It was still perfectly legal up to a century ago. Suffer the children less; the death rate amongst infants abruptly fell and continued to fall. Which is a good thing, Vulnavia, lest you be unaware.
Finally -
Politics! Religion! Subjects we don't normally touch at BOOJUM! with a barge pole attached to the end of another barge pole. However, in this case we are talking of historical events, ones eighty years past and also in France, which makes all the difference. Art!
Monsieur Blum, as you may have guessed from his surname, was Jewish. He was also a Socialist, and a Prime Minister in 1936. This made him, at the very least, equal to Satan in the eyes of French right-wingers. He protested at later French government's appeasement of the Teutons, and refused to vote for Marshal Petain becoming dictator in 1940, which got him arrested. Vichy pretty unwisely put him on trial in 1942, where he proceeded indict them in the very harshest of terms; in fact he proved to be so persuasively eloquent that the Teutons ordered the trial to end and have him imprisoned again. None of that dangerous free speech here!M. Leon Blum
Well the joke was on Vichy. Leon got transferred around prison camps and was released in May 1945, so he outlasted the Quisling government and went straight back into French politics.
Yah-boo
And with that we are done!
* They blend in well. Camouflage skills.
** I've no idea what's going on here, it was a random image culled from Google.
*** Like a sleazebag, except more so
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