Good morning, Whitewater.
Friday in town will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-one. Sunrise is 6:53 and sunset 6:34, for 11h 40m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 74.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1959, the Twilight Zone debuts on CBS:
The series was produced by Cayuga Productions, Inc., a production company owned and named by Serling. It reflects his background in Central New York State and is named after Cayuga Lake, on which Ithaca College is located.
Aside from Serling, who wrote or adapted nearly two-thirds of the series’ total episodes, writers for The Twilight Zone included leading authors such as Charles Beaumont, Ray Bradbury, Earl Hamner, Jr., George Clayton Johnson, Richard Matheson, Reginald Rose, and Jerry Sohl. Many episodes also featured new adaptations of classic stories by such writers as Ambrose Bierce, Jerome Bixby, Damon Knight, John Collier, and Lewis Padgett.
Twilight Zone???’??s writers frequently used science fiction as a vehicle for social comment, as networks and sponsors who censored controversial material from live dramas were less concerned with seemingly innocuous fantasy and sci-fi stories. Frequent themes on The Twilight Zone included nuclear war, McCarthyism, and mass hysteria, subjects that were avoided on more serious primetime television. Episodes such as “He’s Alive” or “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” offered specific commentary on current events and social issues. Other stories, such as “The Masks“, “I Dream of Genie“, or “Mr. Denton on Doomsday” were allegories, parables, or fablesthat reflected the moral and philosophical choices of the characters.
Despite his esteem in the writing community, Serling found the series difficult to sell. Few critics felt that science fiction could transcend empty escapism and enter the realm of adult drama. In a September 22, 1959, interview with Serling, Mike Wallace asked a question illustrative of the times: “…[Y]ou’re going to be, obviously, working so hard on The Twilight Zone that, in essence, for the time being and for the foreseeable future, you’ve given up on writing anything important for television, right?” While Serling’s appearances on the show became one of its most distinctive features, with his clipped delivery still widely imitated today, he was reportedly nervous about it and had to be persuaded to appear on camera. Serling often steps into the middle of the action while the characters remain oblivious to him, but on one notable occasion, they are aware of his presence: In the episode “A World of His Own“, a writer (Keenan Wynn) with the power to alter his reality objects to Serling’s narration, and promptly erases Serling from the show.
In season two, due to budgetary constraints, the network decided – against Serling’s wishes – to cut costs by shooting some episodes on videotape rather than film. The requisite multicamera setup of the videotape format precluded location shooting, severely limiting the potential scope of the storylines, and the experiment was abandoned after just six episodes (“Twenty Two“, “Static“, “The Whole Truth“, “The Lateness of the Hour“, “The Night of the Meek“, and “Long Distance Call“).
The original series contains 156 episodes. Unlike seasons one through three, season four (1962–63) consists of one-hour episodes. Season five returned to the half-hour format.
On this day in 1861, the first train of the Wisconsin Central Railroad runs:
On this date the first train of the Wisconsin Central Railroad ran between Menasha and Waupaca. The railroad was important in the development of railroads in Wisconsin. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers edited by Sarah Davis McBride, p.69]
Here’s the final puzzle in this week’s Puzzability series, Blended Wines:
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This Week’s Game — September 28-October 2
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Blended Wines
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We have some lovely pairings this week. For each day, we’ve taken the name of a wine, added a letter, and scrambled all the letters to get a new word. The answer phrase, described by each day’s clue, is the wine followed by the longer word. The clue includes the lengths of the answer words in parentheses.
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Example:
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Person attending a party in honor of a dry red wine (8,9)
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Answer:
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Cabernet celebrant
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What to Submit:
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Submit the phrase, with the wine first (as “Cabernet celebrant” in the example), for your answer.
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Friday, October 2
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