IS THERE SUCH A THING AS ... SUPERNATURAL?

Do you believe in the supernatural?

There are two answers to that question, of course.

One that you believe in bright sunlight.

And the one that you fear is true in the shadows on a strange, moonlit street.

I know. I've had too many occasions to walk the dark streets of the French Quarter at night.

I wasn't suicidal. I was broke.

I saw street crime naturally. I also saw glimpses of things my rational mind refused to consider.

To focus my mind off those glimpses,

I tried to make a list of movies with scenes involving lone walkers at night in the growing fog.

Word to the wise. Don't do that. It really doesn't help. At all.

New Orleans has been called a Twilight City, for it rises from civilized slumber to bustling life at night.

Performers often line the streets, pushers sell their brands of death,

prostitutes promise sex as if it were love,

dancers weave through the partiers on the street,

and music throbs through the veins of the French Quarter.

If the undead do exist, they walk lazily down streets in front of buildings dating back hundreds of years.

In that sense, they would be at home. It is we the living who could be thought of as intruders there.
New Orleans is famous for its "Cities of the Dead."
Since the city is below sea level, it is filled with above the ground tombs instead of graves in the moist earth.

One of the most famous of these "cities" is St. Louis Cemetery #1, established in 1789

and considered by many as being the final resting place of the infamous voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau.

But Samuel McCord would tell you differently.

He still visits her occasionally if the situation is dire enough to warrant risking suicide.

Then, there is Samuel's favorite airport: the Denver Airport -

Located 25 miles from Denver on a plot of land encompassing 53 square miles,

sits the second largest- and the most bizarre airport in the world, the Denver Airport.

It has a 34 foot statue of an apocalyptic war-horse called El Mesteno,

and its demonic glowing eyes are the very first thing greeting you when you step out of the airport building.


Oh…did I mention the demonic horse statue killed its creator, Luis Jiménez?

It also has a statue of Anubis:

Somehow the powers that be figured a hellhorse from the underworld wasn’t frightening enough.

That’s why it got a companion in the form of this gigantous Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead.

If you ever visit the airport then it’s probably best not to stare at this statue directly

as it will no doubt whisper secrets that will wither your soul …

Then, there are the Bizarre Murals:

Now, this is where it gets freaky, and I mean like Michael Jackson’s painting collection freaky…

A long, long trail of mothers holding dead babies in their arms, many more lying dead on the ground,

as a gas-mask wearing, evil warlord holds a huge sword and a machine gun, thrusting the sword into the belly of the white dove of peace.

Notice that the evil warlord doing the killing is a military soldier, where the gas-mask refers to the use of some kind of biological weapon.

Not exactly the thing you would want to look at when you’re returning from vacation.g h

Children buried in coffins underneath, while on top above ground a solar fire storm rages.

Do the flames make a reference to the sun burning up the earth as in the Mayan 2012 calendar predictions,

or a reference to the devastation caused by nuclear bombs exploding?

The roof of DIA is made of 15 acres of Teflon-coated, woven fiber glass, which makes it impossible to see inside the place with radar.

V Is How You Scare A Little Kid Spitless

I remember watching V in reruns as a little kid ...

and when that scene came with the good-looking alien woman

stretching her open mouth wide enough to swallow that squirming hamster ...

Gulp!

Sure the special effects seem comical now. 

But it whalloped me as a small boy!!

When the survivor of the death camps explained to the kids spray-painting a V on the Visitors Poster, it impacted me ...

much more than any scene in the reboot of V a few years ago.

 

Sometimes Story trumps Special Effects, right?

U Stands For The Mascot of All Struggling Indie Writers

Underdog,

Shoeshine Boy's heroic alter ego,

appears whenever love interest Sweet Polly Purebred is being victimized

by such villains as Simon Bar Sinister or Riff Raff.

Underdog nearly always speaks in rhyme, as in "There's no need to fear, Underdog is here!"

His voice was supplied by Wally Cox.

Have you ever watched an episode?

T Stands For A Class Act

Johnny Carson added a dash of class with his humor. His intelligence sparkled through his show.



In 2005, after Carson's death,

it was revealed that he had made a habit of sending jokes to Dave Letterman

which Letterman would then sometimes incorporate into his monologues.

The January 31, 2005, episode of the Late Show with David Letterman, which featured a tribute to Carson,

began with a monologue by Letterman composed entirely of jokes written by Carson himself after his retirement

S Is For You Can Only Use The Same Tea Bag Just So Many Times

The original will always stir my imagination

Next Generation took until Season 3 to fully entertain me.

I tired of the Palestinian allusions to DS9. I hear it got better toward the end. 

It was too late. I had stopped watching.

And BABYLON 5 handled the lone space station scenario much, much better.

Voyager was a bit too PC for me: a woman captain, a Native American second in command,

a Latino/Klingon female engineer, and the only white male was the black sheep of the bunch!

But like with Next Gen, by the 3rd Season, I started enjoying it.

Though BATTLESTAR GALACTICA handled the consequences of a lone ship

having to deal with battle-damage from one episode to the next.

By the time of ENTERPRISE,

Rick Berman was copying storylines from the other series so much that some episodes were diluted like an over-used tea bag!

Like with DS9, I heard it got better towards the end, but again, it was too late.  I had stopped watching.

HOW DID YOU LIKE THE VARIOUS TV STAR TREK SERIES?

R is for Behind the Scenes Isn't So Much Fun

In 2002, The Rockford Files was ranked #39 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time.

Universal began syndicating the show in 1979 and aggressively marketed it to local stations well into the early and middle 1980s.

This accounts for its ever-presence on afternoon and late-night schedules in those days.

 From those showings, Rockford developed a following with younger viewers,

with the momentum continuing throughout the 1990s and 2000s (decade) on cable.

NBC and Universal claimed the show was generating a deficit of several million dollars,

a staggering amount for a nighttime show then,

although Garner and his production team Cherokee Productions claimed the show turned a profit.

Garner told a story to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show

that the studio once paid a carpenter $700 to build a shipping crate for a shoot-out on a boat dock, though there were shipping crates on the dock.

The script often called for Garner to damage his car, so the car could be sold, repaired, and repurchased for each episode.

The dispute was settled out of court in Garner's favor,

but the conflict meant that the Rockford character would not re-emerge until 1994.

Rockford had a close relationship with his attorney, the idealistic, tenacious Elizabeth "Beth" Davenport (Gretchen Corbett).

 It is implied that the two become romantically involved for a time.

After Corbett was dropped from the show following the fourth season

(allegedly due to contract disputes between Universal, which owned her contract, and Cherokee Productions, Garner's company),

the show was never quite the same for me.

Q stands for a fun song

I never watched the show, but isn't it a fun tune by Jose Feliciano?

Have any of you ever watched an episode

of QUEEN OF SWORDS?