Roger Answers Your Questions, Gordon

Gordon, who knows I've met Rod Serling, asks these questions:

1) What's your favorite Twilight Zone episode?

Certainly, Time Enough At Last with Burgess Meredith:

The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street with Claude Akins and Jack Weston, and A Game of Pool with Jack Klugman and Jonathan Winters are up there. It's a Good Life with Billy Mumy and The Dummy with Cliff Robertson and Frank Sutton scared me as a kid.
But perhaps, as a librarian, I relate most to The Obsolete Man with Burgess Meredith and Fritz Weaver, about librarians and religion and politics, which can be seen, in three parts, below:








Yes, it's heavy-handed and preachy, but that's OK by me.

2) What have you been asked to do professionally that has you going, "I can't believe they pay me to do this?"

When I worked at the Schenectady Arts Council on a CETA grant in 1978 into January 1979, I was hired as a bookkeeper and to run a biweekly craft show, but there really wasn't that much to do to fill 35 or 40 hours a week, though I was on the telephone selling ads for a benefit to revitalize Proctor's Theatre for a couple weeks. So I found other things to take on. The dancer, Darlene, was teaching elementary school kids dance in the elementary schools, including disco, and she needed a partner, so I was drafted. The secretary, Susan, decided that she and I would go sing to the developmentally disabled from time to time. I loved that job, loved dealing with artists and musicians, and we stopped only because the money ran out.

3) What's the deal with "Chocolate Rain"? I don't get it.

You mean this thing that got 16 million hits and won some YouTube award?


Damned if I know. I have little idea WHY something becomes a hit on the Internet: LOLcats or lonelygirl15 - don't really get it.
That said, let me spitball here. It may be the juxtaposition of the unexpected. This nerdy-looking black guy with a deep voice that one might not be anticipating, with lyrics that seem to be saying SOMETHING, but we're not sure what; better play it again. Or maybe it's that he's put his listeners in a trance with the keyboards.
***
The footer to an e-mail I received yesterday (no, I don't know the parties involved)-
Mr. Diefenbaker:...I mentioned the cost of living a moment ago, and while I speak the cost of living has gone up.
Mr. St. Laurent: You should stop speaking.

ROG