Call Tv Series Quotes

Their devotion showed me there were no versions of love there was only... Love. That it had no equal and that it was worth searching for, even if that search took a lifetime.

The shell must be broken before the bird can fly.

Doubt is a disease that infects the mind creating a mistrust of peoples motives and ones own perceptions. Doubt has the ability to call into questions everything you ever believed about someone and reinforce the darkest suspicions of our inner circle.

Some think intuition is a gift, but it can be a curse as well--a voice calling to us from places that are better left unexplored...an echo of memories that will never die, no matter how hard we try to kill them.

A human being weighing 70 kilograms contains among other things: -45 litres of water -Enough chalk to whiten a chicken pen -Enough phosphorus for 2,200 matches -Enough fat to make approximately 70 bars of soap -Enough iron to make a two inch nail -Enough carbon for 9,000 pencil points -A spoonful of magnesium I weigh more than 70 kilograms. And I remember a TV series called Cosmos. Carl Sagan would walk around on a set that was meant to look like space, speaking in large numbers. On one of the shows he sat in front of a tank full of all the substances human beings are made of. He stirred the tank with a stick wondering if he would be able to create life. He didn’t succeed.

A person's true identity can often be difficult to discern, even to themselves, causing one to question their character, their calling, their very existence. For most, time gives clarity, but for others, these questions remained unanswered for an identity can not be fully defined when it is a guarded secret.

The most successful people in history were made fun of, called "crazy", hated on, and ridiculed...because people didn't want to think a normal person like them could be successful. Thank God they didn't listen to the haters, because how else would the Founding Fathers of America establish America? - Kailin Gow, The American Adventure TV Series

It all made sense: my shyness, all the times I was dismissed for not being “black enough,” my desire to reframe the images of black film and television, which I started to do when I created a series in college called Dorm Diaries, my inability to dance—these were all symptoms of my Awkward Blackness.

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.

Ove has a heart problem..." he begins in an anodyne voice, following this up with a series of terms that no human being with less than ten years of medical training or an entirely unhealthy addiction to certain television series could ever be expected to understand.

Darius: Us humans are always close to destruction, Life itself is but a series of close calls. I mean, how would you know you were alive unless you knew you could die?

We might think we know how we are being affected by the media—a book, a movie, a TV series. Ironically, this so-called awareness, the “third person effect,” is most common with, according to Gierzynski, “those with higher education.” He notes that “we think we know how the media affects us,” but in truth, it controls us more than we know.

following this up with a series of terms that no human being with less than ten years of medical training or an entirely unhealthy addiction to certain television series could ever be expected to understand.

New Rule: Americans must realize what makes NFL football so great: socialism. That's right, the NFL takes money from the rich teams and gives it to the poorer one...just like President Obama wants to do with his secret army of ACORN volunteers. Green Bay, Wisconsin, has a population of one hundred thousand. Yet this sleepy little town on the banks of the Fuck-if-I-know River has just as much of a chance of making it to the Super Bowl as the New York Jets--who next year need to just shut the hell up and play. Now, me personally, I haven't watched a Super Bowl since 2004, when Janet Jackson's nipple popped out during halftime. and that split-second glimpse of an unrestrained black titty burned by eyes and offended me as a Christian. But I get it--who doesn't love the spectacle of juiced-up millionaires giving one another brain damage on a giant flatscreen TV with a picture so real it feels like Ben Roethlisberger is in your living room, grabbing your sister? It's no surprise that some one hundred million Americans will watch the Super Bowl--that's forty million more than go to church on Christmas--suck on that, Jesus! It's also eighty-five million more than watched the last game of the World Series, and in that is an economic lesson for America. Because football is built on an economic model of fairness and opportunity, and baseball is built on a model where the rich almost always win and the poor usually have no chance. The World Series is like The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. You have to be a rich bitch just to play. The Super Bowl is like Tila Tequila. Anyone can get in. Or to put it another way, football is more like the Democratic philosophy. Democrats don't want to eliminate capitalism or competition, but they'd like it if some kids didn't have to go to a crummy school in a rotten neighborhood while others get to go to a great school and their dad gets them into Harvard. Because when that happens, "achieving the American dream" is easy for some and just a fantasy for others. That's why the NFL literally shares the wealth--TV is their biggest source of revenue, and they put all of it in a big commie pot and split it thirty-two ways. Because they don't want anyone to fall too far behind. That's why the team that wins the Super Bowl picks last in the next draft. Or what the Republicans would call "punishing success." Baseball, on the other hand, is exactly like the Republicans, and I don't just mean it's incredibly boring. I mean their economic theory is every man for himself. The small-market Pittsburgh Steelers go to the Super Bowl more than anybody--but the Pittsburgh Pirates? Levi Johnston has sperm that will not grow and live long enough to see the Pirates in a World Series. Their payroll is $40 million; the Yankees' is $206 million. The Pirates have about as much chance as getting in the playoffs as a poor black teenager from Newark has of becoming the CEO of Halliburton. So you kind of have to laugh--the same angry white males who hate Obama because he's "redistributing wealth" just love football, a sport that succeeds economically because it does just that. To them, the NFL is as American as hot dogs, Chevrolet, apple pie, and a second, giant helping of apple pie.

The last year had been a series of wrong turns, bad choices, abandoned projects. There was the all-girl band in which she had played bass, variously called Throat, Slaughterhouse Six and Bad Biscuit, which had been unable to decide on a name, let alone a musical direction. There was the alternative club night that no-one had gone to, the abandoned first novel, the abandoned second novel, several miserable summer jobs selling cashmere and tartan to tourists. At her very, very lowest ebb she had taken a course in Circus Skills until it transpired that she had none. Trapeze was not the solution. The much-advertised Second Summer of Love had been one of melancholy and lost momentum. Even her beloved Edinburgh had started to bore and depress her. Living in a her University town felt like staying on at a party that everyone else had left, and so in October she had given up the flat in Rankellior Street and moved back to her parents for a long, fraught, wet winter of recriminations and slammed doors and afternoon TV in a house that now seemed impossibly small.

I understand, intellectually, that the death of a parent is a natural, acceptable part of life. Nobody would call the death of a very sick eighty-year-old woman a tragedy. There was soft weeping at her funeral and red watery eyes. No wrenching sobs. Now I think that I should have let myself sob. I should have wailed and beaten my chest and thrown myself over her coffin. I read a poem. A pretty, touching poem I thought she would have liked. I should have used my own words. I should have said: No one will ever love me as fiercely as my mother did. I should have said: You all think you’re at the funeral of a sweet little old lady, but you’re at the funeral of a girl called Clara, who had long blond hair in a heavy thick plait down to her waist, who fell in love with a shy man who worked on the railways, and they spent years and years trying to have a baby, and when Clara finally got pregnant, they danced around the living room but very slowly, so as not to hurt the baby, and the first two years of her little girl’s life were the happiest of Clara’s life, except then her husband died, and she had to bring up the little girl on her own, before there was a single mother’s pension, before the words “single mother” even existed. I should have told them about how when I was at school, if the day became unexpectedly cold, Mum would turn up in the school yard with a jacket for me. I should have told them that she hated broccoli with such a passion she couldn’t even look at it, and that she was in love with the main character on the English television series Judge John Deed. I should have told them that she loved to read and she was a terrible cook, because she’d try to cook and read her latest library book at the same time, and the dinner always got burned and the library book always got food spatters on it, and then she’d spend ages trying to dab them away with the wet corner of a tea towel. I should have told them that my mum thought of Jack as her own grandchild, and how she made him a special racing car quilt he adored. I should have talked and talked and grabbed both sides of the lectern and said: She was not just a little old lady. She was Clara. She was my mother. She was wonderful.

Where is the freedom in all this? Nowhere! There is no choice here, no final decision. All decisions concerning networks, screens, information or communication are serial in character, partial, fragmentary, fractal. A mere succession of partial decisions, a microscopic series of partial sequences and objectives, constitute as much the photographer's way of proceeding as that of Telecomputer Man in general, or even that called for by our own most trivial television viewing. All such behaviour is structured in quantum fashion, composed of haphazard sequences of discrete decisions. The fascination derives from the pull of the black box, the appeal of an uncertainty which puts paid to our freedom. Am I a man or a machine? This anthropological question no longer has an answer. We are thus in some sense witness to the end of anthropology, now being conjured away by the most recent machines and technologies. The uncertainty here is born of the perfecting of machine networks, just as sexual uncertainty (Am I a man or a woman? What has the difference between the sexes become?) is born of increasingly sophisticated manipulation of the unconscious and of the body, and just as science's uncertainty about the status of its object is born of the sophistication of analysis in the microsciences.

Watching television in our cells, we became glued to news of the Great March of Return in Gaza, a series of demonstrations that had begun while we were attending our classes. Beginning on March 30, 2018, which Palestinians commemorate as Land Day, the besieged people of Gaza had protested weekly along the fence separating them from Israel. They were demanding an end to Israel’s crippling air, land, and sea blockade, which had effectively trapped them for over a decade inside the world’s largest open-air prison. And they were demanding the right to return to their homes, which Zionist militias had forcibly removed them from to clear the way for Israel’s creation in 1948. Seventy percent of Gaza’s population are, in fact, refugees.

Jane doesn't watch very much television. She used to watch it more. She used to watch comedy series, in the evenings, and when she was a student at university she would watch afternoon soaps about hospitals and rich people, as a way of procrastinating. For a while, not so long ago, she would watch the evening news, taking in the disasters with her feet tucked up on the Chesterfield, a throw rug over her legs, drinking a hot milk and rum to relax before bed. It was all a form of escape. But what you can see on the television, at whatever time of day, is edging too close to her own life; though in her life, nothing stays put in those tidy compartments, comedy here, seedy romance and sentimental tears there, accidents and violent deaths in thirty-second clips they call bites, as if they were chocolate bars. In her life, everything is mixed together.

The idea on which Lick’s worldview pivoted was that technological progress would save humanity. The political process was a favorite example of his. In a McLuhanesque view of the power of electronic media, Lick saw a future in which, thanks in large part to the reach of computers, most citizens would be “informed about, and interested in, and involved in, the process of government.” He imagined what he called “home computer consoles” and television sets linked together in a massive network. “The political process,” he wrote, “would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a months-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups, and voters. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information through a good console and a good network to a good computer.” Lick’s

Several dozen of the non-English Wikipedias have, each, one article on Pokémon, the trading-card game, manga series, and media franchise. The English Wikipedia began with one article and then a jungle grew. There is a page for “Pokémon (disambiguation),” needed, among other reasons, in case anyone is looking for the Zbtb7 oncogene, which was called Pokemon (for POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic factor), until Nintendo’s trademark lawyers threatened to sue. There are at least five major articles about the popular-culture Pokémons, and these spawn secondary and side articles, about the Pokémon regions, items, television episodes, game tactics, and all 493 creatures, heroes, protagonists, rivals, companions, and clones, from Bulbasaur to Arceus. All are carefully researched and edited for accuracy, to ensure that they are reliable and true to the Pokémon universe, which does not actually, in some senses of the word, exist.

This is a short public service announcement: you don't have to fail with abandon. Say you're playing Civilization, and your target is to get to sleep before midnight, and you check the clock, and it's already 12:15. If that happens, you don't have to say "too late now, I already missed my target" and then keep playing until 4 in the morning. Say you're trying to eat no more than 2000 calories per day, and then you eat 2300 by the end of dinner, you don't have to say "well I already missed my target, so I might as well indulge." If your goal was to watch only one episode of that one TV show, and you've already watched three, you don't have to binge-watch the whole thing. Over and over, I see people set themselves a target, miss it by a little, and then throw all restraint to the wind. "Well," they seem to think, "willpower has failed me; I might as well over-indulge." I call this pattern "failing with abandon." But you don't have to fail with abandon. When you miss your targets, you're allowed to say "dang!" and then continue trying to get as close to your target as you can. You don't have to say dang, either. You're allowed to over-indulge, if that's what you want to do. But for lots and lots of people, the idea of missing by as little as possible never seems to cross their mind. They miss their targets, and then suddenly they treat their targets as if they were external mandates set by some unjust authority; the jump on the opportunity to defy whatever autarch set an impossible target in the first place; and then (having already missed their target) they reliably fail with abandon. So this is a public service announcement: you don't have to do that. When you miss your target, you can take a moment to remember who put the target there, and you can ask yourself whether you want to get as close to the target as possible. If you decide you only want to miss your target by a little bit, you still can. You don't have to fail with abandon.

I’ve recently suggested that Betty and I should do a TV series about two seniors living together in an unlikely pairing of a widow and a naughty gay best buddy. We could call it Friends with Government Benefits.

A whole new smart glass industry has been incubating for a decade. As the global construction industry comes back to life, the thousands of smart glass installations in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia are evidence of the technology’s rapidly escalating adoption rate. Corning, the world leader in specialized glass and ceramic products, has produced a series of YouTube clips called A Day Made of Glass. In them, every piece of glass in the home contains intelligence and sensors that serve as a ubiquitous contextual computing system. In Corning’s vision, the home is one big connected computer and every piece of glass is a screen that you touch to move an image from one glass surface to the next. For example, you can look up a recipe on your phone and drag the result to a space on your stovetop next to your burner as you prepare the dish. If you are video chatting on a smart glass tabletop, you can slide the image onto your TV screen without missing a beat.

By 1981, the seventy-four-year-old Brezhnev, hobbled by a series of strokes and barely able to function, could be seen drooling on himself on his rare appearances on Soviet television. Rather than removing him, however, the Politburo merely nominated him for still more medals. Lenin—the “incandescent” Lenin, as Churchill called him—would have been appalled.

The show was shot on an enormous sound stage, the largest one in Hollywood, and the same one used for Gone with the Wind. A complete house for the McCoys was built on the set. In those days, the all-consuming grind of doing a television series meant that actors spent their downtime in little huts called “knockdown greens.” They were like tents, said Kathleen Nolan. “Now you have a trailer outside, but then it was an efficient way of keeping the talent close at hand. They did four shows a week, and then took a week off, so that Brennan could rest.

With my wonder child as a guide, I can now see that my whole life is perfect. My dysfunctional family, my alcoholic dad and co-dependent mom, my poverty—all were perfect. They were exactly what I needed to experience in order to do the work I am now doing. Without my childhood I would never have done a TV series on dysfunctional families or written books on shame and shame-based families. And certainly I wouldn’t be writing this book on homecoming, which calls you and me to reclaim and champion our wounded inner kids.

REALITY… Sometimes people in my dreams say crazy dumb stuff because they forget I’m in a wheelchair. Hey, I don’t blame ’em. I’d like to forget it, too. But I can’t. Of course, I keep hoping that one day I’ll see a commercial for a new wonder drug called something like Spinulax that will magically make me walk again. Unfortunately, it would probably come with a list of gross side effects like all those other pills they advertise on TV: “Spinulax may cause constipation and diarrhea. Not to mention projectile vomiting. And sudden death syndrome—as in, oops, sorry, you’re dead.

In the world of the OWO, people are locked in isolated little boxes called houses, watching junk on TV, eating junk, reading junk, vegetating. They are passive, submissive, weak, lazy, tired, unambitious. They haunt shopping malls like fading wraiths. Gods can never come into being in shopping malls. Gods need ambrosia and nectar, the food and drink of the deities. They need to breathe aether – the most rarefied, divine air. They need spiritual sustenance, not full shopping baskets.

The soul, being stronger than we think, can survive all mutilations. And the marks upon it make it perfect and complete.

was surprised by how quickly I was forgotten, how calm the waters were, as soon as I paddled out of the center of the evangelical right-wing whitewater. From one day to the next, I went from daily calls to be on some TV show, or be on the radio, or to be a participant in this or that symposium, march, seminar, or publishing venture, to blessed silence. It was a relief. It also confirmed what I already knew: that evangelicalism is not so much a religion as a series of fast-moving personality cults. As soon as a leader steps aside, or is shoved aside, or stumbles, the crowd looks for the next man or woman to briefly follow. There is always a bigger show down the street, another even better Bible-study leader or congregation to try, another hot author/guru to read, another trend, from speaking in tongues to giving homeschooling a try. And most evangelicals spend a good portion of their time wandering from church to church, from leader to leader, even from one radio and TV personality to another, in the same way that when I was a teen I’d switch my loyalty from one rock band to another. It’s all about who is “hot.” In

Nigel Havers One of Britain’s leading stage and television actors, Nigel Havers has also appeared in many outstanding film productions, including Chariots of Fire, A Passage to India, Empire of the Sun, The Whistle Blower, Farewell to the King, Quiet Days in Clichy, and The Private War of Lucinda Smith. He has recently completed his autobiography, Playing with Fire, published by Headline. One afternoon, when I was filming a series called The Good Guys and Polly was away in Spain, all the crew were all a bit beady-eyed with me. “What on earth is going on, guys?” I asked. But they kept looking at me in a strange way. It transpired that on the front of the Evening Standard was the first transcript of the Diana tapes--the Squidgy tapes--and no one knew who the man calling Diana Squidgy was and the headline on the front page said it was me! As everyone was hiding the paper from me, I went and grabbed it. “My God, it’s not me. It’s not me, I know,” I said. It wasn’t me, of course. But when you read something and your name is in banner headlines, there is a split second where you almost believe it. I called Diana at once (she had given me her private mobile number), and she laughed like a drain when I told her how panicked I was. She literally couldn’t stop laughing. I was a bit jumpy around her because I fancied her so much, but I really just felt sad for her. When she came to tea with me, she would be wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She just walked out of Kensington Palace and up Kensington High Street to my flat. She told me that no one would turn around, and as they weren’t expecting to see her strolling down the street, she was never recognized.

Charles called out to him as he walked down the hall, “Oh, and one more thing! Remember that your partner will never let you down if your partner is Jesus! He’s the only one you can trust in a world where folks want to have their devil’s cake and eat it, too.” As

The Director’s Chair is with Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, etc.), and Robert refers later to this quote from Francis: “Failure is not necessarily durable. Remember that the things that they fire you for when you are young are the same things that they give lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.” ROBERT: “Even if I didn’t sell Mariachi, I would have learned so much by doing that project. That was the idea—I’m there to learn. I’m not there to win; I’m there to learn, because then I’ll win, eventually. . . . “You’ve got to be able to look at your failures and know that there’s a key to success in every failure. If you look through the ashes long enough, you’ll find something. I’ll give you one. Quentin [Tarantino] asked me, ‘Do you want to do one of these short films called Four Rooms [where each director can create the film of their choosing, but it has to be limited to a single hotel room, and include New Year’s Eve and a bellhop]?’ and my hand went up right away, instinctively. . . . “The movie bombed. In the ashes of that failure, I can find at least two keys of success. On the set when I was doing it, I had cast Antonio Banderas as the dad and had this cool little Mexican as his son. They looked really close together. Then I found the best actress I could find, this little half-Asian girl. She was amazing. I needed an Asian mom. I really wanted them to look like a family. It’s New Year’s Eve, because [it] was dictated by the script, so they’re all dressed in tuxedos. I was looking at Antonio and his Asian wife and thinking, ‘Wow, they look like this really cool, international spy couple. What if they were spies, and these two little kids, who can barely tie their shoes, didn’t know they were spies?’ I thought of that on the set of Four Rooms. There are four of those [Spy Kids movies] now and a TV series coming. “So that’s one. The other one was, after [Four Rooms] failed, I thought, ‘I still love short films.’ Anthologies never work. We shouldn’t have had four stories; it should have been three stories because that’s probably three acts, and it should just be the same director instead of different directors because we didn’t know what each person was doing. I’m going to try it again. Why on earth would I try it again, if I knew they didn’t work? Because you figured something out when you’re doing it the first time, and [the second attempt] was Sin City.” TIM: “Amazing.

dlaurent The Ballad of Johnny Jihad (Down Desert Storm Way). © c. 2001 During the Gulf War (1990-1991), American Pro-Taliban Jihadist John Philip Walker Lindh was captured while serving with the enemy forces. Here is his tale in song and legend. My nowex at the time did not want me to run to the radio station with this, thought I’d look singularly ridiculii. The following, 'The Ballad of Johnny Jihad' is sung to the tune of 'The Ballad of Jed Clampett' (1962), commonly known as 'The Beverly Hillbillies' song, the theme tune for the TV show series starring Buddy Ebsen. (Lyrics, Paul Henning, vocals Jerry Scoggins, Lester Flatt; master musicians of the art of the ballad and bluegrass ways, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs). The Ballad of Johnny Jihad (Sung) Come and listen to the story of Johnny Jihad, Who left home and country to study his Islam, And then one day he was shooting at our troops, So down through the camp did the government swoop. (Voice Over): ‘Al Que-da that is, Af-ghani Tali-ban, Terror-ist . . .’ (Sung) Well, the first thing you know ol’ John from ’Frisco roamed, The lawman said ‘he’s a lad misunderstood very far from home.’ Said, ‘Californee is the place he oughta be,’ So they request his trial be moved to Berkeley . . . (Voice Over): ‘Liberals that is, group-ies, peace-activists . . .’ Announcer: The Johnny Jihad Show! (Intense bluegrass banjo pickin’ music) . . . (Sung) Now its time to say goodbye to John and all his kin, Hope ya don’t think of him as a fightin’ Taliban, You’re all invited back again to this insanity, To get yourself a heapin’ helpin’ of this travesty . . . Johnny Jihad, that’s what they call ’im now Nice guy; don’t get fooled now, y’hear? (Voice Over): ‘Lawyerin’ that is, O.J.ism, media-circus . . .’ (Music) . . . end

Thou questions are for the blind, the circling's, those who would call themselves witness, yet can not see, thy title is a lie, thy crown undeserved, byproduct thou art, waste, an abomination, rotten flesh, slithering through the bowels of causality.

A couple of weeks before, while going over a Variety list of the most popular songs of 1935 and earlier, to use for the picture’s sound track – which was going to consist only of vintage recording played not as score but as source music – my eye stopped on a .933 standard, words by E.Y. (“Yip”) Harburg (with producer Billy Rose), music by Harold Arlen, the team responsible for “Over the Rainbow”, among many notable others, together and separately. Legend had it that the fabulous Ms. Dorothy Parker contributed a couple of lines. There were just two words that popped out at me from the title of the Arlen-Harburg song, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”. Not only did the sentiment of the song encapsulate metaphorically the main relationship in our story – Say, it’s only a paper moon Sailing over a cardboard sea But it wouldn’t be make-believe If you believed in me – the last two words of the title also seemed to me a damn good movie title. Alvin and Polly agreed, but when I tried to take it to Frank Yablans, he wasn’t at all impressed and asked me what it meant. I tried to explain. He said that he didn’t “want us to have our first argument,” so why didn’t we table this conversation until the movie was finished? Peter Bart called after a while to remind me that, after all, the title Addie Pray was associated with a bestselling novel. I asked how many copies it had sold in hardcover. Peter said over a hundred thousand. That was a lot of books but not a lot of moviegoers. I made that point a bit sarcastically and Peter laughed dryly. The next day I called Orson Welles in Rome, where he was editing a film. It was a bad connection so we had to speak slowly and yell: “Orson! What do you think of this title?!” I paused a beat or two, then said very clearly, slowly and with no particular emphasis or inflection: “Paper …Moon!” There was a silence for several moments, and then Orson said, loudly, “That title is so good, you don’t even need to make the picture! Just release the title! Armed with that reaction, I called Alvin and said, “You remember those cardboard crescent moons they have at amusement parks – you sit in the moon and have a picture taken?” (Polly had an antique photo of her parents in one of them.) We already had an amusement park sequence in the script so, I continued to Alvin, “Let’s add a scene with one of those moons, then we can call the damn picture Paper Moon!” And this led eventually to a part of the ending, in which we used the photo Addie had taken of herself as a parting gift to Moze – alone in the moon because he was too busy with Trixie to sit with his daughter – that she leaves on the truck seat when he drops her off at her aunt’s house. … After the huge popular success of the picture – four Oscar nominations (for Tatum, Madeline Kahn, the script, the sound) and Tatum won Best Supporting Actress (though she was the lead) – the studio proposed that we do a sequel, using the second half of the novel, keeping Tatum and casting Mae West as the old lady; they suggested we call the new film Harvest Moon. I declined. Later, a television series was proposed, and although I didn’t want to be involved (Alvin Sargent became story editor), I agreed to approve the final casting, which ended up being Jodie Foster and Chris Connolly, both also blondes. When Frank Yablans double-checked about my involvement, I passed again, saying I didn’t think the show would work in color – too cute – and suggested they title the series The Adventures of Addie Pray. But Frank said, “Are you kidding!? We’re calling it Paper Moon - that’s a million-dollar title!” The series ran thirteen episodes.

The major TV networks at the time all aired some version of melodramatic afternoon programming for teens. ABC called its afternoon movie series After School Specials, and CBS called their version Schoolbreak. NBC went with Special Treat, which, given the content of these shows, strikes me now as darkly comic. I rarely managed to watch one of these programs in its entirety because I wasn’t allowed to turn on the television during homework time, but occasionally I’d sneak a half hour. They ranged from mild domestic drama, like “Divorced Kids’ Blues,” to more sensational stories, such as “Are You My Mother?,” in which a girl finds out the mom she thought was dead is actually alive and in some kind of institution. Then there were episodes like these: “One Too Many”—one of several specials about drunk-driving accidents. “Don’t Touch”—a variation on the theme that abuse can come at you from any direction: a sitter, a parent, an uncle, a family friend… (See also, and I swear I’m not making this up: “Please Don’t Hit Me, Mom.”) “Andrea’s Story: A Hitchhiking Tragedy”—What happened to Andrea when she accepted a ride from a stranger? Well, it wasn’t good at all, I can tell you that. “A Very Delicate Matter”—Guess what? The matter is gonorrhea. “Tattle: When to Tell on a Friend”—Answer: as soon as you notice their interest in cocaine.

Anything is possible now!

And I pray, if there are ever two children who come visit my home here, that you will give them the courage to say shalom, so that they will know they do not have to remain in hiding. Amen

Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.

We will watch Him and watch and watch and watch... forever, I think.

Let’s call this the Netflix Test. Could your World be turned into a TV series? If not, why not? That can be a significant difference between Series 1.0 and Series 2.0 (see Chapter Twenty-one for my thoughts on Series 2.0).

Sitting on the couch in the trailer watching TV one late night, I saw an infomercial for a series of audiocassettes called Attacking Anxiety and Depression from the Midwest Center for Stress and Anxiety. Without a moment’s hesitation I reached for the phone, called the 800 number on the TV screen and purchased the tapes. When the tapes arrived a few days later, I popped in the first cassette in the sixteen-cassette self-help series—which was comprised of testimonials from people afflicted with panic attacks—and realized that I wasn’t going crazy, that this was indeed a legitimate psychiatric disorder. As I listened to the remainder of the series in our trailer, I began to grasp that my brain could tell me something so convincingly that I had almost no choice but to believe it. During anxiety attacks I actually believed that I was dying. The attacks were so severe that I would have rather known that I was going to have open heart surgery at 9:00 a.m. the next day than a panic attack. That was the power of the nervous system: we can think things that aren’t true and feel and see things that aren’t real. With the Attacking Anxiety and Depression tapes suddenly the subjective no longer held the power for me that it had once held. Indeed, what I was learning about the power of the mind just might explain some of the experiences I’d had in the past—like speaking with God or hearing his voice. It was neurologically possible to hear an audible voice when there was no voice there. I began to entertain the possibility that there was an objective way of looking at my experiences, and that this objective perspective might prove those experiences to be false. Up until that moment seeing truly was believing, but what did it say about my beliefs if I had not seen or heard anything at all?

It’s hard to explain how important Star Trek is to me. I think I went to my first Star Trek convention when I was fifteen. So to hear that Leonard Nimoy—Mr. Spock—was on the phone, I was not processing what he was saying. I could only focus on his amazing voice. I thought this was a phone call to see if he’d agree to do the part, but in his mind, he had already agreed to do it! He had one specific note on the script, which is that Mr. Spock doesn’t use contractions when he speaks. He says “cannot;” he doesn’t say “can’t.” And I remember just being chagrined that I hadn’t intervened and had allowed this to go on. I loved Spock so much, I used to sneak lines of Mr. Spock dialogue from the movies and TV shows into Big Bang Theory and give them to Sheldon. There’s an episode early on where Sheldon and Leonard are having a fight, and Penny asks, “Well, how do you feel?” And Sheldon replies, “I don’t understand the question.” That’s from the beginning of Star Trek IV where Spock has reunited with his mind and his body, and is being quizzed by a computer about his status. So Leonard Nimoy was just one of many fanboy moments. I once said to LeVar Burton, “If I could go back in time and tell my teenage self there would be a day where I would eventually talk to three crew members of the USS Enterprise, I’d fall over and die.

They kept to themselves on their farm in Ohio, until an unexpected call from the producers of reality TV series Wife Swap upended their world. Was it the scrutiny of a skeptical public that led to the tragic circumstances some years later?

Stories can be incredibly powerful and beautiful devices that form and assist our perception and understanding of the world. However, according to twentieth-century American author Kurt Vonnegut, stories rarely tell the truth. After studying stories from an anthropological standpoint, examining the relationships with various cultures, Vonnegut found that stories and myths across many cultures share consistent similar shapes that can typically be broken down into just a few main categories. These shapes can be found graphing the course of a protagonist’s journey through a story along an axis of good and ill fortune. In all stories, someone or something starts somewhere, either in a good place, bad place, or neutral place. Then things happen related to that person which is conveyed as good or bad, bringing the character up and down the axis of fortune as they traverse forward through the story. Then, the story ends and its shape reveals itself. Vonnegut discovered that many popular stories follow common, consistent curves and spikes up and down the good/ill axis and that most end with the protagonist higher on the axis than where they started. However, what’s perhaps most interesting about Vonnegut’s analysis is this argument that these shapes, and consequently most stories, lie. Vonnegut proposed that a more honest, realistic story shape is simply a straight line. In a story of this shape, things still happen and characters still change, but the story maintains ambiguity around whether or not the events that occur are conclusively good or bad. According to Vonnegut, Hamlet is the closest literary representation of real life. “We are so seldom told the truth. In Hamlet-Shakespeare tells us that we don’t know enough about life to know what the good news is and the bad news is and we respond to that.” One story medium that seems to inadvertently coincide with this idea, is the medium of the television series. The goal of TV series is to keep viewers watching as long as possible. Each episode must be an engaging enough story to keep the viewer watching until the end, but each episode must also be left unresolved enough so the larger season-long and series-long stories continue and the viewer is interested in watching all the following episodes. In order to keep the whole thing going, none of the stories can reach a conclusion, and thus, the main characters can’t find ultimate peace or freedom from the uncertainty between good and ill-fortune. Of course, most shows don’t qualify as the straight-line shape in Vonnegut’s analysis, because most shows attempt to convey conclusively good and bad fortunes within them. However merely by the requirements of the medium TV series are forced to self-impose the same sort of universal truth that Vonnegut suggests. That neither the viewer nor the characters in a series can ever know what anything that’s so-called “good” or “bad” in one episode might cause in the next. And that on a fundamental level, the changes in each episode are futile because they are a part of a never-ending cycle of change through conflict and resolution, for the mere sake of its continuation, with no aim of a final resolution or reveal of what’s ultimately good or bad. Of course, eventually, a show reaches its series end when it stops working or runs its natural course. But the show fights its whole life to stay away from this moment. A good TV series, a series that we don’t want to end, is only a series that we don’t want to end because it can’t seem to resolve itself. In this, the format of Tv series also shows us that there is meaning, engagement, and entertainment within the endless cycle of change, regardless of its potential universal futility. And that perhaps change in life can exist not for the sake of some conclusion or ultimate state of peace, but a continuation of itself for the sake of itself. And perhaps the ability to be in this cycle of continued change for the sake of change is the actual good fortune.

I keep mentioning television. Remember: There was no internet in the 1980s. What a child knew of the world was what immediately surrounded her in real life—her own family, friends, school, and home—and what glimpses she could get of the larger world through available windows. Television filled in the blanks, I thought, in my understanding of life. I had no way of knowing how many blanks remained unfilled or how correct or incorrect was the mental map I drew of the world based on that understanding. The major TV networks at the time all aired some version of melodramatic afternoon programming for teens. ABC called its afternoon movie series After

Two strangers alone, we had entered the clumsy, uncomfortable time of prospective lovers—uncomfortable because we have all seen it rehearsed again and again on a million television screens. You find yourself sliding into the practiced routines of the buxomed starlets and the square-jawed heros, so that even the honest gesture of affection begins to ring untrue. So I was content to steer Sniper toward a pretty little harbor I knew—a deepwater retreat within the confines of a pine-swept island called Punta Blanco. I did not put my arm around her, nor did she lay her head on my shoulder, but there was still the physical awareness, the deep wanting—yet we were both content to simply ride and enjoy the night.

Thanks to a documentary series on Netflix, I knew that nachos were called nachos because of their inventor's name (Ignacio, nicknamed Nacho). Croissants originated in Australia, not France, a tricky question that knocked all the other teams down... except for Bennett. Thanks to a paper I'd written in college on the history of the celebrity chef, I knew that the first TV celebrity chef was Fanny Cradock in England, not Julia Child, which three of the other teams thought. Not Bennett, of course. I wondered how he knew about Fanny. She wasn't exactly a household name. At least, not here. If I asked him, he'd probably expound upon a teenage trip to England, where he'd visited the former set. The first food eaten in space? Applesauce. The first sushi restaurant in New York City? Nippon.

No one was allowed to make noise when television was on. Children were supposed to watch the news in silence while the adults discussed the atrocities in South Africa every time a picture of Nelson Mandela came up, wondering when those bad white people were going to set that good man free. Children were supposed to watch documentaries in silence; watch fast-talking cartoons, which they called “porkou-porkou,” in silence. They had to be quiet during whatever British or French or American series CRTV was broadcasting, soap operas and sitcoms which they barely understood but nonetheless giggled at whenever kissing scenes came on and groaned whenever someone was punched. The only time children were allowed to talk was when a music video came on. Then, they were encouraged by the adults to stand up and dance to Ndedi Eyango, or Charlotte Mbango, or Tom Yoms. And every time they would stand up and bust out their best makossa moves, twirling tiny buttocks and moving clenched fists from right to left with all their might, smiling to no end. To be able to see their favorite musicians singing in a black box, what a privilege.

It may have been derivative, lighthearted fluff but Once Upon a Dead Man also seemed like the ideal vehicle to help facilitate Rock Hudson’s transition from movie to television star (even if he dismissively referred to the tube as “illustrated radio”). The much-publicized two-hour movie would serve as the pilot for a new NBC series called McMillan & Wife.

(A Russian television series called Sleepers, in which the United States is plotting to overthrow the Russian government, began airing in the fall of 2017. In the show, the U.S. ambassador is blond; his name is Michael. They haven’t forgotten about me yet!)

I remember a woman called Máirín na Yanks Ni Mhurchú, who owned a shop near Mrs Hurley's.... I used to buy chocolate from her when I first came here, and sometimes we'd meet on the roads, picking blackberries. A few years ago, shortly before she died, she was interviewed for an Irish language television series. It was called Bibeanna, which is the Irish word for the wraparound aprons women here used to wear in the house and the farmyard. They were made of dark fabric, patterned with little flowers. I remember watching the series on television and thinking that Máirín's quiet voice hadn't changed since I'd first heard it. Sitting by her fire, wrapped in her flowery apron, she described her life, looking back on her childhood and the years she'd spent in her shop. She talked about the pleasure she took in the company of neighbours who'd drop in for a chat. Then she summed it all up in a sentence. 'I'm calm and easy in myself; I take each day as it comes and I keep my door open.

Suppose that humanity flourishes thanks to the enslaved-god AI. Would this be ethical? If the AI has subjective conscious experiences, then would it feel that “life is suffering,” as Buddha put it, and it was doomed to a frustrating eternity of obeying the whims of inferior intellects? After all, the AI “boxing” we explored in the previous chapter could also be called “imprisonment in solitary confinement.” Nick Bostrom terms it mind crime to make a conscious AI suffer.4 The “White Christmas” episode of the Black Mirror TV series gives a great example. Indeed, the TV series Westworld features humans torturing and murdering AIs without moral qualms even when they inhabit human-like bodies.

Where do you make your homes?” he asked. “Rumson,” Matt called back. “Rumson, Nebraska.” “Nebraska? Where is this place, Nebraska?” The general and his men looked perplexed, but the state of their confusion was nowhere near that of Matt and his friends. “I never met anyone who didn’t know where Nebraska was,” Hooter mumbled through chattering teeth. “Where…where do you think they’re from?” Tony stammered. “I don’t know,” matt whispered, staring at the soldiers and their muskets. “But I have this strange feeling, like…like…” “Like we’ve seen them someplace before,” Q concluded. “Where?” Hooter wanted to know. “Where have we seen them?” “In our history book,” Q whispered. “We’ve gone back in time!” “You mean before TV and stuff?” Hooter asked, looking at the old-fashioned muskets that were pointed at them. “Before TV?” Q squeaked. His voice always turned into a series of squeaks when he was excited. “Try before electricity and flashlights. Try 1776--the Revolutionary War!

Us humans are always close to destruction, Life itself is but a series of close calls. I mean, how would you know you were alive unless you knew you could die? - Darius

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The most direct critique [in the TV series The Prisoner] of what might be called the politics-industry of late capitalism, however, is undoubtedly [the episode] “Free for All”, both the funeral dirge for the national mass party and the unofficial founding charter of the New Left. In many ways, “Free for All” is the logical complement to the visual innovations and luminous mediatic strategies of “A., B. & C.”; whereas the latter identifies the space of the editing room as a new kind of cultural zone, and thus transforms a certain visual recursion into a protomorphic video library of images, the former concentrates not on the image per se but on the messages and texts transmitted by such—or what Derrida would identify as the thematic of a dissemination which is never quite identical with what is being disseminated. But where deconstruction and post-structuralism promptly sealed off this potentially explosive insight behind the specialized ghettos of linguistics or ontological philosophy, and thus unwittingly perpetuated precisely the authoritarian monopoly over theory authorized by the ontologies in the first place, the most insightful intellectuals of the New Left (most notably, Adorno and Sartre) would insist on the necessarily mediated nature of this dissemination, i.e. the fact that the narrative-industries of late capitalism are hardly innocent bystanders in the business of accumulation, but play an indispensable role in creating new markets, restructuring old ones, and ceaselessly legitimating, transacting and regulating the sway of the commodity form over society as a whole.

Rook even investigated a site devoted to the mutt languages of some TV series called Firefly.

God did not send His Son into the world to condemn it, Nicodemus. He sent him to save it through him. It’s

You know what lasers are?” “No,” I said stuffily. “Not lasers, or masers, or atoms, or molecules, or flashlights—” He raised an eyebrow, then the other one. “You may think you know what a laser is, but you do not, you simply do not, my ignorant friend. You may know that laser is an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, which describes a concentrated source of coherent light all of the same wavelength, and you may realize that with lasers men can drill holes through little jewels and also bounce signals off the moon and make holograms, and you may be vaguely aware that men even now perform delicate retinoneural surgery—weld eyeballs, to you—and even more delicate microsurgery on single cells, and do other exciting things such as etching halftone plates and fixing decayed teeth. But you do not know what a laser is.” “I’ll bet I’m going to find out.” “It is your great good fortune. Soon lasers will be all over the place, coming out of your ears. They’ll be used for swift bloodless surgery, for invisible death rays that slice open the enemy, knock down satellites, carve legs of lamb. They’ll carry thousands of phone calls on one beam of light, zillions of television sets on one laser beam—” “Sets?” “—stations. Channels, signals. What do you care?” “I don’t.” “But I haven’t told you the greatest thing,” he said. “Can I stop you?” “During the demonstration earlier tonight, Dr. Fretsindler—that’s Fretsindler of M.I.T.—had a big hunk of granite on the stage. He banged it with a hammer, smacked it with a chisel, and naturally nothing happened.” “Then why are you telling me all this?” “Nothing was supposed to happen, Sheldon,” he said cheerfully. “That was the point. But then Fretsindler aimed some new kind of infrared laser—already had it on stage—at the damned boulder.