In a piece below, I mentioned an early movie made by the Sci-Fi Channel that has not seenthe light of day since. It had a blond hero madly in love with a black woman.

When I wrote how silly that was, back in those days when the computer world was tiny enough so I got answers, the spokesman for the scifi channel gave me two answers:

1) The black woman was the biggest star they could get and 2) I was the only person who said anything about race.

The bottom line is that 1) they lost a lot of money on that movie and 2) if you are going to launch a new network your first original movie makes a LOT of difference, and this was a BAD mistake.

Black and blond is UGLY. No one is going to tell you so.

Vincent Price made a chiling film in the 1950s called “The Last Man on Earth.” As with so many black-and-white cheap movies in the 1950s, they decided in the 1980s to remake it with a Big Star and in color.

So Charleton Heston starred in “The Omega Man.”

But Charleston Heston, like any other respectable conservative, wanted desperately to prove he was no racist. So the girl in the film was black. Even National Review, this was twenty years ago, referred to her as “his equal opportunity girlfriend.”

The movie disappeared without a trace. It could have been a hit.

But you see, as with the scifi channel, nobody would SAY that people really don’t want to watch a smooch session between a blond and a black.

Everybody says they would like nothing better.

The only problem is that they DON’T. The only problem is the truth.

If you keep threatening people with damnation if they tell you the truth, they won’t tell you the truth.

That’s a Whitakerism.

Allie McBealle was a runaway hit with the yuppies. Then Allie, the blond female lawyer, kept showing she would slurp up black males.

Well, she had to do that. So far, so good. Good, solid patronizing.

But THEN she got INVOLVED with a black lawyer. Her audience raised hell.

Everybody said, like John McCain, “I thought we were BEYOND that.”

Even with yuppies, ugly is still ugly.

So the gentleman black decided he couldn’t have sex with Allie.

I remember the comments on newsgroups: “Allie wouldn’t have a relationship with a black because of class…” and so forth.

Black and blond is UGLY. No one will say that.

Not saying what you see is a costly business.

Which is probably one reason I got paid for saying what no one else would.

In the time of computers, it is amazing how fast each “age” passes.

I just got through deleting six repetitions of hte article I just wrote to Peter.

Not only does every reader understand exactly what happened, it has happened to him repeatedly:

While the computer grinded away publishing what I had written, I kept hitting the “publish” button. I am willling to bet the same thing has happened to you on e-mail or something else.

Whatever I am doing here is familiar to everybody reading this.

When I look back over some fifteen years that I have been at a computer, age after age has passed.

I remember when I was in a news group and read an entry Bill Gates put in, “a loyal liberal,” he said. The computer world was a good deal smaller then.

At the time the Science Fiction Channel on cable television began, every e-mail I sent them was immediately answered, even one objecting to a program, which has not shown up since, with a white and black mixed couple.

Can you IMAGINE that now?

It was a TINY world.

We are not talking about the last generation. This was ten years ago.

So I am enjoying this time when my readers see some goofup I make and understanding exactly what happened. I am going to miss this cozy world in the Next Generation, up to five years from now.