The following three GIFs capture one of Rod Serling’s recurrent themes in the Twilight Zone: anti-intellectualism. While “Time Enough at Last” is about many things, I can’t help but read Mrs. Bemis’s sadistic defiling of her husband’s books as anything other than society’s violent reaction to learning as a form of pleasure and beauty. What’s more, it seems all the more relevant that Burgess Meredith also stars in another classic Twilight Zone episode on this topic: “The Obsolete Man” (he was in four episodes all told). Control is a function of shackling the imagination, and reading remains the most liberatory of acts given how little it imposes a third party’s mediated rendering of the world upon our imagination.
Watch the bava blog trailer!
about
is an ongoing conversation about media of all kinds ...
Testimonials:
Generations from now, they won't call it the Internet anymore. They'll just say, "I logged on to the Jim Groom this morning.
-Joe McMahon
Everything Jim Groom touches is gold. He's like King Midas, but with the Internet.
-Serena Epstein
My understanding is that an essential requirement of the internet is to do whatever Jim Groom asks of you while you're online.
-James D. Calder
@jimgroom is the Billy Martin of edtech.
-Luke Waltzer
My 3yr old son is VERY intrigued by @jimgroom's avatar. "Is he a superhero?" "Well, yes, son, to many he is."
-Clint Lalonde
Jim Groom is a fiery man.
-Antonella Dalla Torre
“Reverend” Jim “The Bava” Groom, alias “Snake Pliskin” is a charlatan and a fraud, a self-confessed “used car salesman” clawing his way into the glamour of the education technology keynote circuit via the efforts of his oppressed minions at the University of Mary Washington’s DTLT and beyond. The monster behind educational time-sink ds106 and still recovering from his bid for hipster stardom with “Edupunk”, Jim spends his days using his dwindling credibility to sell cheap webhosting to gullible undergraduates and getting banned from YouTube for gross piracy.
I am Jim Groom
Find out more about me here.
Recent comments
- Anne-Marie Scott on Reclaim Karaoke at the Rockaway Club
- Reclaim Karaoke at the Rockaway Club | bavatuesdays on The Boy Who Streamed Too Much
- Reclaim Karaoke at the Rockaway Club | bavatuesdays on Reclaim Karaoke: Testing 1,2,3
- Reclaim Karaoke at the Rockaway Club | bavatuesdays on Friday Night Karaoke at OERcamp.global
- Reclaim Karaoke at the Rockaway Club | bavatuesdays on Summer Summit 2020 KaraOERke Setup Update
- Reclaim Karaoke at the Rockaway Club | bavatuesdays on YouTube, Copyright, and the ongoing Claims on our Culture
- Reclaim Karaoke at the Rockaway Club | bavatuesdays on Karaoke Fridays on #ds106radio
- The Joy of Web Improbability: The Buggles on/in front of #DS106 TV – CogDogBlog on ds106zone Week 4: Video Killed the Radio Star
- David Schlaefer on Day 29: Navarone Playset
- The Boy Who Streamed Too Much | bavatuesdays on OBS Ninja
- The Boy Who Streamed Too Much | bavatuesdays on Diabolik: a Cultural Revolution Comic on Film
- The Boy Who Streamed Too Much | bavatuesdays on The Evil Eye
- The Boy Who Streamed Too Much | bavatuesdays on Reclaim Karaoke: Testing 1,2,3
- Looking Back and Looking Forward: The Three E’s for Facing the Future | Rob Reynolds on Presenting Reclaim Cloud at OER23
- OLWeekly ~ by Stephen Downes – AI in Higher Education – Automated Curation Project on Presenting Reclaim Cloud at OER23
-
Recent Posts
- Reclaim Karaoke at the Rockaway Club
- Metaphor’s in the Water, You Go in the Water
- The Boy Who Streamed Too Much
- Reclaim Karaoke: Testing 1,2,3
- Reclaim Karaoke Test on ds106radio
- Presenting Reclaim Cloud at OER23
- The Allure of Mastodon
- Creating a Domain Alias for Mastodon Files Served through DigitalOcean Spaces
- Moving Mastodon Object Storage from AWS S3 to DigitalOcean Spaces
- Mastodon Version Updates, Object Storage Security, and More
browse the bavarchive
Contributors
some favorites
- Alan Levine
- Andy Rush
- Audrey Watters
- bava.social
- Bonnie Stewart
- Brian Lamb
- Bryan Alexander
- Chris Lott
- Clint LaLonde
- Cole Camplese
- Darcy Norman
- David Kernohan
- David Wiley
- Gardner Campbell
- GNA Garcia
- Grant Potter
- Jeffrey Keefer
- Jon Beasley-Murray
- Jon Udell
- Kate Bowles
- Kin Lane
- Laura Blankenship
- Leslie Madsen-Brooks
- Lisa M Lane
- Martha Burtis
- Martin Hawksey
- Martin Weller
- Mike Caulfield
- Mikhail Gershovich
- Mountebank
- Paul Bond
- Scott Leslie
- Serena Epstein
- Shannon Hauser
- Stephen Downes
- The OLDaily
- Tim Owens
- Tom Woodward
- Tony Hirst
I love these. All of them. I had the same ideas, actually; I was going to do one of these three scenes. I thought maybe the wife ripping the pages out, because I just though it was such a ridiculous thing to do. She is a complete caricature in this episode, utterly irrational in her hatred of Henry’s reading. I don’t get it. She seems to dislike him for not being “manly” because of his intellectualism. Or maybe I’m reading that into it. Anyway, the portrayal of the wife annoys the crap out of me, and I wanted to talk about that with a gif. But you beat me to it! That’ll teach me to put off my giffing. 🙂 Nice ones!
Christina,
I am sorry to steal your GIF, and no question the characterization of the henpecked husband by the overbearing wife was a bit too much. Obviously it is for effect and dated generationally. That said, if you can abstract out both the wife and his boss, the anti-intellectualism from all elements of society seems to sink in a bit more.
As for GIFing, what I love about it is there are so many scenes to do from so many episodes 🙂
Oh yeah, and thank you kindly for the compliments, I am verklempt 🙂
Jim,
This is mortifying. I can’t remember the details of this episode, but believe I’ve only heard it and not seen. The gif is pure and deadly. Perfection. G
@GNA,
I watched it on the plane last night and totally forgot the scene with the evil wide, the blacked out pages reminded me immediately of The Blackout Poetry assignment and I wanted to do it 🙂
http://assignments.ds106.us/assignments/newspaper-blackout-poetry/
Jim, the first thing I noticed with these gifs (‘specially the first two) is how seamless they are. The action is a never ending cycle, without visible clipping from the sequence of frames. I need to work on my skills to attain such a level!
Both the blackout pages and the tearing out of pages remind me of Keri Smith’s Wreck this Journal. It’s a project to build confidence in creativity, and in destruction as an act of creativity.