Month: May 2022

There is nothing wrong with your television set... Do not attempt to adjust the picture, we are controlling transmission... If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume... If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper... We will control the horizontal, we will control the vertical... We can roll the image, make it flutter... We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity... For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear... We repeat, there is nothing wrong with your television set... You are about to participate in a great adventure... You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to ...

I remember very clearly when the first episode of the television series The Outer Limits came out. It was called The Galaxy Being and I was six years old (1963).

This episode was my very first contact with the genre of science fiction, and boy did it scare the holy moly out of me! That strange alien was something way beyond my youthful imagination, and it gave me nightmares for a very long time. Perhaps even subconsciously to this very day.

Downstairs in the cellar, we had an entertainment area which had white walls and a smooth linoleum floor. In front of the old-fashioned black and white television (back then we only had 3 stations), there was this fifties-design chair with thick cushions you could sink into.

However, when the alien first appeared with it's eerie metallic screeching voice, I jumped from the false comforts of that chair and hid behind it, peaking from the side, I stayed in that position for the rest of the show, and even thirty minutes after that before I had mustered up enough courage to go back upstairs. Mommy ... I'm so scared, the alien is coming!

Because it was evening, it was dark outside and for some reason the windows downstairs didn't have any curtains. This meant that should the alien come my way, it would be able to look inside and upon spotting my reclined body behind the chair, would dispose of me with it's heat x-rays, as he did to the other victims on the television.

At the end of the episode, the poor alien was forced to disintegrate itself in order to save humanity, although on his planet in another faraway solar system there was no such thing as death. As a child, I hadn't yet heard about this foreign concept called death, so I had to ponder about it for a few moments. Pure darkness and silence. Before disposing of himself, the alien gave some powerful words of advice to humanity, pleading everyone to avoid violence and love each other.

I felt very sorry for the poor alien when he disposed of himself in an explosion of sparks and smoke. Part of death I guessed.

The episode ends with everyone breathing a sigh of relief and going back to their daily lives as if nothing had happened.

Then the narrator fades back in and ends the show with the following reaction:

"The planet Earth is a speck of dust remote and alone in the void. There are powers in the universe inscrutable and profound. Fear cannot save us. Rage cannot help us. We must see the strange in a new light, the light of understanding. And to achieve this, we must begin to understand ourselves, and each other."

We now return control of your television set to you, until next week at this same time when the control voice will take you to ...

"Adventurous radio station operator contacts a fellow experimenter in another galaxy. The operator locks in 3D communication, but a DJ who wants to impress his girlfriend with the station's range, boosts the signal all the way up, unknowingly sucking the alien, who's composed of electricity, into the remote desert town."

Watch The Galaxy Being.

Today I practiced my omnipotence by saving the life of a humble spider. The poor insect had been stuck in the corner of the ceiling behind the door, waiting patiently for days now in its little web for an unknowing fly to get snagged there.

The odds of ever catching food in that bare corner were pretty close to zero, so I decided to do him a favor. Or it might have been a her, I don't know.

I grabbed a chair and slid it underneath that corner of the room. Then I stood up on it and placed a glass carefully over the spider, shaking the glass slightly back and forth until the spider fell into it.

I put the palm of my other hand to cover the opening so that the panicky spider would not escape.

Then I walked to the balcony, turned the glass upside down, and then let gravity take care that the little spider fell and gently floated in the wind down into a the vegetation below.

The odds of survival have been increased drastically, and I feel very confident that the spider will find better prey amongst the branches and leaves.

You're very welcome little spider, let's keep in touch.

My expensive Iiyama ProLite XB3270QS monitor got stuck and no matter which button I pressed, the stupid error message "OSD Locked" kept appearing and I could not adjust the settings any more.

This has been going on for days now, and I had finally accepted the fact that I would have to switch my two computers manually to the monitor by using separate HDMI cables, what a pain.

Turns out that the solution is pretty simple. According to the online manual, "The power switch lock will be deactivated by pressing the front buttons MENU and › about 10 seconds."

Lo and behold, it works!