Although he made more than 200 film and television appearances, actor Kevin McCarthy, born February 15, 1914, is forever linked to one film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The 1956 sci-fi horror classic features McCarthy as a small town doctor who discovers an alien invasion in which plant spores from outer space have fallen to Earth where they grow into large pods.
Placed next to sleeping townspeople, the pods replicate their victims assuming their exact physical characteristics, memories and personalities but lacking any human emotion. One by one these pod people take over, leaving only Kevin McCarthy to warn the outside world: “They’re here already! You’re next! You’re next!”
In a 1978 remake of the film, McCarthy makes a cameo appearance playing his original character as an old man still frantically warning passing motorists of the invasion.
McCarthy should not be confused with another Kevin McCarthy the former Republican Minority House Leader and most likely a pod person.
In yet another remake, The Creeping Menace from Mar-a-Lago, the pods attack the US Senate, sidling up to sleeping Republican Senators, sucking away not only their human emotions but their integrity as well. (They skip the House because there’s nothing to suck away.) And there’s no Kevin McCarthy (the actor) to warn them this time, his having died in 2010. But wait, there’s Mitt Romney who has traded in his Etch-a-Sketch for a conscience. For a moment, we think there’s a glimmer of hope for mankind, but then we spot Ted Cruz.
You Too, Fu
Novelist Sax Rohmer, born on February 15, 1883, is probably not as well-known as his famous villain, the evil genius Fu Manchu (not to be confused with the “stable genius”), “tall, lean, and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green.” The 13 fast-paced adventures make lively reading if you can get past the frequent overt racial slurs. And here we are back at Mar-a-Lago.
Wretched Richard's Almanac 