SIA, WOULDN’T WANNA BIA, or SEPARATED AT BIRTH?

Having recently remarked upon the astonishing resemblance between Ted Cruz and Hungry Chuck Biscuits, I couldn’t help but notice that there was another Face in the News that reminded me of a similar one from back in the day.

Sia, the pop star who famously likes to avoid showing her face while performing (perhaps she should redub herself “Nope, Can’t Sia”), has appeared on shows as diverse as SNL, the Tonight Show, and the Ellen Degeneres Show in the past few weeks. Up until her performance on SNL, I couldn’t have told you who Sia was even if she had bitten me on the ass, but now she seems to be everywhere. She is prodigiously talented, but I cannot bear to watch her perform, given that she is usually accompanied by some sort of performance artist cum dancer who writhes around on the stage while Sia sings. Even our own Elder Daughter, herself a performance artist, considers Sia’s stage act gagworthy. Just listen and don’t look, and she’s actually quite good.

The enormous black-and-white wig she has been sporting lately reminded me of an old Star Trek episode that featured Frank Gorshin, well known at the time for playing the Riddler on the Batman TV series. Lookee:


Sia (image ©2016 World Entertainment News Network) and Frank Gorshin (image ©1969 CBS Pictures/Photofest).

The ridiculous black-and-white makeup was for an episode entitled “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield,” which featured two aliens at each other’s throats in what could be considered a mash-up between the Javert-Valjean conflict from Les Miserables and a good old-fashioned race riot. Each alien, you see, was half black and half white... but one was black on the left, the other on the right.

If you think the writers of the episode were trying to convey a message of racial tolerance and opposition to bigotry in the most stupidly obvious and heavy-handed way possible, you’d be right. Not even Rod Serling at his most preachy was this bad. (Of course, it was the third and final season of the original Star Trek series, by which time any of the reasonable good SF ideas that made it to the screen in the first season were a distant memory.)

The difference between this “Separated at Birth” exercise and the one involving Ted Cruz and Hungry Chuck Biscuits? Here, it’s obvious that Sia and Frank Gorshin are not twins separated at birth. They just have the B&W theme going on. But I’m beginning to be convinced that Senator Cruz and Hungry Chuck Biscuits are not merely twins separated at birth - I think there’s a good chance they’re the same person.