This might be the scariest Twilight Zone episode yet. Dennis Hopper plays Peter Vollmer a street-corner neo-nazi whose rantings earn him contempt and beatings, and whose sole source of emotional comfort is...an elderly Jewish holocaust survivor named Ernst, who shows leniency towards Peter because he remembers him as a scared, abused child. This changes when the supernatural (?) element of the story is introduced: the ghost of Adolf Hitler shows up, cloaked in shadows, to instruct him on how to whip a mob into a frenzy better. As Hitler guides Vollmer towards success, what little humanity he has left in him is lost. His elderly mentor tries to pull him back, but it seems that it is too little, and too late.

This is one of the scariest episodes of The Twilight Zone, because it is one of the most relevant. Vollmer's lessons towards fascism are too realistic, and the sad story of a broken boy becoming an aggrieved, angry man are too familiar, and too realistic. It is…

Today is Pungenday, the 10th day of Discord in the Year of our Lady of Discord 3186

People occasionally ask me about my religious beliefs, and in the list that I trot out is Discordianism. I've often said that if someone put a gun to my head and said "pick a religion", it'd be Judaism, because everything's laid out right there in writing for all to see. But in the background, in my hidden heart, I'd be Discordian. It's partly my anarchistic tendencies,…

Thank you for inviting me.

The late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., said he first learned he was a science fiction writer in the 1950s when he read reviews of his his first novel, and discovered that critics had placed him in a file drawer labelled, "Science Fiction." He said that he spent the next part of his career trying to get out of that particular drawer, because so many critics mistook it for a urinal.

Fast-forwa