What NON-POLITICAL, NON-RELIGIOUS Headlines Are You Following?

Someone loaded their Isuzu Rodeo in the back of a U-Haul van
truck.jpg

https://www.yahoo.com/autos/someone-loaded-isuzu-rodeo-back-174400613.html​
 
Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine said:
A real Wisconsin idjit: https://www.yahoo.com/news/fire-ignites-resident-tries-siphon-154101583.html

A Janesville male attempted to syphon gas/petrol with a bloody vacuum cleaner. I don't believe that I need to go any further in my explanation.

Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine
Click to expand...
Guess he missed the memo about electric vacuum motors and sparks. o_O

Although, there is a way to accomplish what he was trying to do that doesn't involve gasoline entering the vacuum. Still risky, but maybe a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10, as apposed to 12!
 
An answer to a question that I asked on LiveJournal (concerning "hauntology"):
"Yes — deeply. In many ways the original Twilight Zone (1959-1964) is one of the foundational hauntological texts on American television, long before the word existed.

Hauntology, in Derrida's sense and then Mark Fisher's, is about being haunted by futures that never arrived and pasts that won't let go. It's the ache of a lost modernity — abandoned technology, faded promises, nostalgia as a trap, the present feeling thin and ghostly.

Rod Serling built almost the entire show on that feeling.

1. The Past That Won't Stay Dead

This is the most obvious hauntological move in the show, and Serling returns to it obsessively.

Nostalgia as a literal place. In Fisher's terms, hauntology is mourning for a time you can't return to. Twilight Zone makes that physical:

"Walking Distance" (S1E5) — A 36-year-old executive finds his childhood hometown exactly as it was in his boyhood, and tries to stay. Serling's closing narration: "the long, long memories of a summer long ago..."
"A Stop at Willoughby" (S1E30) — A stressed ad exec keeps waking up in an idyllic 1888 Ohio town from a train that shouldn't exist.
"The Incredible World of Horace Ford" (S4E15) — A toy manufacturer is haunted by his own childhood.

In all of them, the past is not remembered, it's inhabiting the present. The longing itself becomes the ghost.

2. The Future That Failed to Arrive

The other side of hauntology is the cancelled future. Classic TZ was made at the peak of American futurism — space age, atomic age, suburban utopia — and it is already mourning it.

Technology that is uncannily out of time: jukeboxes that predict fate, cameras that show the future, a slot machine that calls your name. The analogue object becomes eerie.
"The Lonely" (S1E7) and "I Sing the Body Electric" (S3E35) — robots built to cure loneliness, but they only make the absence more visible.
"Time Enough at Last" — the ultimate hauntological image: a man who finally has the future he was promised (all the time in the world to read) after the world that promised it has vanished.

Serling's post-war America is full of what Fisher called "the slow cancellation of the future" — bomb shelters, empty main streets, small towns where progress has stopped.

3. The Architecture of Hauntology

The show looks hauntological:

Liminal spaces: Empty diners at 3am ("Where Is Everybody?"), abandoned department stores after hours ("The After Hours"), deserted highways, bus stops that go nowhere. These are now classic hauntological settings.
Old media haunting new media: A recurring device is a film, a record, a photograph, or a TV set that bleeds through. "A World of Difference" — a man discovers his life is a movie set. "The 16mm Shrine" — an aging film star lives inside her old movies.
The voice from nowhere: Serling's own narration is a disembodied, archival voice — a man from the present narrating a future that is already past.

Where modern hauntological artists like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop or Boards of Canada use crackle, tape hiss and public-information films to create unease, Serling used 1950s Americana itself — the barbershop quartet, the carousel music, the small-town parade — and made it strange.

If you want a pure hauntology watchlist, start with these:

Core hauntological TZ: "Walking Distance", "A Stop at Willoughby", "The After Hours", "Where Is Everybody?", "The 16mm Shrine", "Static", "A Game of Pool"

They all ask Fisher's central question: What if the time you belong to is not the time you are in?" - davesmusictank (the original poster)

Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine
 
Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine said:
They all ask Fisher's central question: What if the time you belong to is not the time you are in?" - davesmusictank (the original poster)
Click to expand...

An intriguing question indeed.

Which makes the time travel speculations all the more poignant and unsettling.

I loved The Twilight Zone.

The original and the 80s revival.
 
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