What do breasts have to do with "The Twilight Zone"?

It is my firm belief that at least half of all the women in the world between the ages of 18 and 40 would look just as good as the average Playboy centerfold if they had access to the same costumers, makeup artists, hairstylists, lighting people, and, most importantly, photo retouchers. (And a fair number outside that age range, too.)

Of course, real women are better because they actually exist in 3-D space, and one can have actual conversations with them and things like that. They might not have a page of jokes conveniently printed on their backsides, but nobody's perfect.

The ideal situation would be to have all the women in the world looking like Playboy centerfolds in real life, but that would probably be impossible without some sort of heretofore unknown scientific breakthrough, or sex-obsessed aliens with superior technology invading Earth, or something like that. There was a "Twilight Zone" episode along these lines in which it was postulated that the drawbacks of such a society would include stifling government-controlled uniformity and lack of freedom of thought, but I believe that the main drawback would involve there not being as much room on crowded subway trains because of all the breasts.

Besides, there was a "Twilight Zone" episode that attempted to show the drawbacks of just about every possible society, from the "hey, we're the first two people on Earth" type of society to the "hey, I'm the last man on Earth, but at least I have time enough at last to read all these books" type of society. That Rod Serling was a real killjoy.

Rod Serling wasn't even involved in what I consider to be the scariest "Twilight Zone" ever, because it was an episode of "The New Twilight Zone" from the '80s. A man's been having to deal with a lot of semi-indecipherable jargon in his work recently, and then one of his co-workers asks him, "Where's a good dinosaur to take a girl for lunch?" The entire English language keeps getting more and more jumbled up like that for him until everything he hears or reads is complete gibberish, and the episode ends with him sitting on the floor with a child's picture book on his lap open to a picture of a puppy; the text says "Wednesday." A while back, this episode ran on TNT in the wee hours and my TiVo recorded it as a suggestion for me. I didn't watch it...make that couldn't watch it.

That's one of only two "New Twilight Zone" episodes I can distinctly remember the plot of. The other one involved a man going back in time and successfully preventing JFK's assassination by running alongside his limo yelling, "Duck, Mr. President, duck!" For reasons involving the balance of the universe, though, Khruschev was assassinated on November 22, 1963, and the time traveler's computer device claimed that nuclear war would be the inevitable result of all this, so he had to convince JFK to now go a couple days back in time with him and go ahead and get assassinated. I think even at the age of 13, that episode caused me to roll my eyes repeatedly.

There's going to be a new "New Twilight Zone" this fall on UPN, hosted by "Waiting to Exhale" director Forest Whitaker. I can only hope it lives up to the high standards set by its immediate predecessor, or perhaps even the high standards of (dare I say it?) "Amazing Stories." And that it has as much breast-related content as "Charmed" does, over there on the WB.