How I found this video is a long story. 26.2 miles long to be exact.

As a disclaimer: I’m not “sporty”. But, because I am a great indoorswoman, if I weren’t a runner, I would be completely sedentary.

I am a runner because I run. But before I ran a marathon, I was a marathoner because I said I was. Most of finishing a marathon is mental. And your mental training starts with learning to lie with a causal aplomb matched only by televangelists and the tabloid press.

“I am a marathoner,” you say, even if you can only run for 30 seconds before gagging into some shrubbery.

“I am a marathoner,” you say while pretending that $35 is a reasonable price for socks.

You say this casually to strangers, working it, non sequitur, into the amount of conversation required to buy the paper and hoping that no one you actually know is standing behind you. You say this, even though at first it sounds indistinguishable from saying “I am Napoleon”.

You say this because behavior motivates attitude. Faking it starts the momentum. But that alone won’t get you over the line. Once the momentum gets going, you are required to have the unquestioning faith of a North Korean General.

An article of your faith can be, say, that the first time your Supreme Leader picked up a golf club, he shot a 38-under par round that included 11 holes in one. Or – more handy for a marathon – an article of your faith can be that when the time comes where everything is telling you to stop running and drop by the side of the road, you will simply refuse.

I’m not one for motivational aids usually involving posters of zebra migrations or “secrets” involving minimal effort and deep thoughts. I’m also not one for teams or sports (see disclaimer above). So I can’t really explain why I love this video so much, except to say that this is what self belief sounds like and it works. As Mr Christopher Wallace said, ‘Stay far from timid. Only make moves when your heart’s in it. And live the phrase Sky’s The Limit’.

While I don’t endorse anyone to “arrive violently” or “rip the heart from [their] enemy”, I did cross the finish line powered by my knowledge that ‘my heart and my mind would carry my body when my limbs were too weak’. Not everyone’s a runner. I get it. Some people like a full complement of toenails. That’s cool. But faking it and mad determination to keep putting one put one foot in front of the other are going to come in handy, eventually, in everyone’s life. Anyone can do it and everyone will need it. So start now. Watch this video and be mighty. Because you are a champion.

The post I Am A Champion – The Greatest Speech Ever appeared first on The Good Blog.

-Rod Serling to Mike Wallace, September 22, 1959.

Rod Serling had question marks in his eyes and he added one over everything he saw and was told. The 1950s was an excellent decade for questioning for those who had witnessed the implosion of Europe, the explosion of Hiroshima and the rise of American’s Greatest Generation. Nothing and everything seemed possible of humans, the world they lived in and the earth they lived on.

In 1951, “when television was just a baby” as Mike Wallace (himself just a baby) reminsced eons later in 1959, a newly-married, 27 year old Serling made the balls-of-steel decision to leave the security of his staff writer job for a Cincinatti television station (“a particularly dreamless occupation” in his words) to become a freelance television writer. He had thrown down in “the battle of the writer to be his own man”, as Wallace put it. On October 2, 1959, after gaining some critical and commercial success with previous scripts and progressing from 40 rejection slips to three Emmy Awarrds, Serling’s series – The Twilight Zone – debuted on CBS where it aired for five seasons.

Of 156 episodes, Serling wrote 92. The eloquence of his metaphysical mission – to challenge the fundamental assumptions about time, space, morality and human nature that govern our world view – was unfurled like a battle standard in the opening to the first series:

“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.”

Serling maintained creative control over the series and he was uncompromising. He managed to rise above “the pit of man’s fears” while avoiding angering the censor and sponsors by using the show’s science fiction format as a cover to call bullshit on racism, moral panic, McCarthyism and nuclear war.

Other writers for the series included Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont and Jerry Sohl. Some episodes were adaptations of classic stories by such writers like Ambrose Bierce, John Collier and Damon Knight.

Somewhere between Sagan and Hitchcock, Serling’s Twilight Zone was consistently intelligent, socially conscious and interesting TV. He understood the notion of consequences inherent in the theory of relativity – the idea that when we are looking out at the future, we are looking back at the past. He understood the vital role of questioning all received wisdom. And in each of the episodes he managed to remind us how, in a place “as vast as space and as timeless as infinity” we are simultaneously the most significant and the most insignificant things in the universe.

It’s not often that I find myself wishing I lived in 1959. But every time I watch the Twilight Zone I do. I wish I could have sat in the dark watching the TV (itself a recent marvel) and been held in pure wonder at this new fifth dimension, tangible proof of the Drake Equation: anything is possible, but only if you first believe that anything is possible.

Where is everybody?

Third from the Sun

The Monsters are due on Maple Street

Bonus

• The Mike Wallace interview with Rod Serling (1959) in which they discuss censorship, commercialism versus artistic quality, the values inherent in the dominant notion of “success” and how awesome it is to smoke your brains out on national television. With his ethics, eloquence and confidence, Serling is at the height of his powers and it is impossible not to fall a little in love with him

The post The Twilight Zone Original Series 1959 – 1964 appeared first on The Good Blog.

For a short taste, here are Neil’s thoughts on allowing children to perform experiments:

For the full experience:

And you really should set aside the time to watch the whole thing.

It’s pretty easy for Neil Degrasse Tyson to come across as the smartest guy in the room. Largely because he is. Pretty much every time. Regardless of the room. Even if it’s the after party for the Nobel Prize All-Star Game, you know that everyone would be standing around saying ‘tell us another story, Neil’.

And that’s essentially why Neil is the smartest guy in the room. He doesn’t just have an encyclopaedic knowledge of some of the biggest and most challenging ideas that humans have ever wrapped their heads around, he is also a master of the complicated art of human communication. I once heard Chris Rock say that “saying something so clever that only five per cent of people can understand it, isn’t actually that smart. But saying exactly the same thing in a way that everybody can understand is just about the smartest thing in the world.” (that fool Einstein was probably plagiarizing Chris Rock when he said that “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.) This is exactly what Neil Degrasse Tyson does.

Stephen Colbert, on the other hand, has mastered the art of playing the dumbest guy in the room for satirical purposes. Here, he is doing something different. He is playing the innocent, trying to understand science on the audience’s behalf. He is somehow playing dumb while still managing to guide a conversation with one of the smartest, best-informed people in the world.

The result is Idea Jazz. The structures are known, the knowledge is there. Now it’s just time to riff and see where it goes. And it goes to some magical places. Not least of which is the Newtonian law that Stephen’s intellectual crush on Neil has an equal and opposite intellectual crush by Neil on Stephen.

But the most incredible thing they create is contagious intelligence. Watching them in conversation, it is impossibly to not feel that your intelligence is utterly dwarfed by what they offer. Yet somehow you feel smarter just by watching it. In fact, you feel smarter just for finding it on Youtube. Then you watch it, you learn something, and you feel more curious about the world, not to mention more confident about it and your place in it.

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