Defense
for some Capitol rioters: election misinformation. Falsehoods about
the election helped bring insurrectionists to the Capitol on Jan. 6, and
now some who are facing criminal charges for their actions during the
riot hope their gullibility might save them or at least engender some
sympathy.
Trump
blog page shuts down for good. "...asked online later Wednesday
whether the move was a "precursor" to the former president joining
another "social media platform,"" Miller replied: "Yes, actually, it is.
Stay tuned!" Someone should say something to them about the status of
MySpace...
Florida Man: 'Stand
your ground' defense rejected in iguana killing. A judge has
rejected the “stand your ground” defense of a Florida man who said he
beat an iguana to death only after it attacked him, biting him on the
arm.
Candidate
interrupted by sex toy on drone, punched at event. A New Mexico
sheriff who is running for mayor of Albuquerque was interrupted while on
stage at a campaign event by a flying drone with a sex toy attached to
it and a man who punched him.
-----
KGB's daily agglomeration of stuff I find interesting:
Published Thursday, February 13, 2014 @ 12:00 AM EST
Feb132014
Isaac Sidney "Sid" Caesar (September 8, 1922 – February
12, 2014) (Richard Drew/Associated Press)
Sid Caesar, a comedic force of nature who became one of television's
first stars in the early 1950s and influenced generations of comedians
and comedy writers, died on Wednesday. He was 91.
Mr. Caesar largely faded from the public eye in his middle years as he
struggled with crippling self-doubt and addiction to alcohol and pills.
But from 1950 to 1954, he and his co-stars on the live 90-minute
comedy-variety extravaganza 'Your Show of Shows' dominated the Saturday
night viewing habits of millions of Americans. In New York, a group of
Broadway theater owners tried to persuade NBC to switch the show to the
middle of the week because, they said, it was ruining their Saturday
business.
Albert Einstein was a Caesar fan. Alfred Hitchcock called Mr. Caesar the
funniest performer since Charlie Chaplin.
Television comedy in its early days was dominated by boisterous veterans
of vaudeville and radio who specialized in broad slapstick and snappy
one-liners. Mr. Caesar introduced a different kind of humor to the small
screen, at once more intimate and more absurd, based less on jokes or
pratfalls than on characters and situations. It left an indelible mark
on American comedy.
'If you want to find the urtexts of 'The Producers' and 'Blazing
Saddles,' of 'Sleeper' and 'Annie Hall,' of 'All in the Family' and
'M*A*S*H' and 'Saturday Night Live,' ” Frank Rich wrote in The New York
Times when he was its chief theater critic, 'check out the old
kinescopes of Sid Caesar.'
A list of Mr. Caesar's writers over the years reads like a comedy
all-star team. Woody Allen and Mel Brooks did some of their earliest
writing for him. So did the most successful playwright in the history of
the American stage, Neil Simon. Carl Reiner created one landmark sitcom,
'The Dick Van Dyke Show;' Larry Gelbart was the principal creative force
behind another, 'M*A*S*H.' Mel Tolkin wrote numerous scripts for 'All in
the Family.' The authors of the two longest-running Broadway musicals of
the 1960s, Joseph Stein ('Fiddler on the Roof') and Michael Stewart
('Hello, Dolly!'), were Caesar alumni as well. (Click
here for the full New York Times obituary.)
-----
Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little
curlicue at the end.
If I don't believe it, I don't care.
In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and
enjoyed.
New Year's Eve we got five dollars for the evening- but that was from
eight to unconscious.
The best thing about humor is that it shows people they're not alone.
The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented
the other three, he was a genius.
The remote control changed our lives... The remote control took over the
timing of the world. That's why you have road rage. You have people who
have no patience, because you got immediate gratification. You got
click, click, click, click. If it doesn't explode within three seconds,
click click, click.
The trouble with telling a good story is that it invariably reminds the
other fellow of a dull one.
When I did comedy I made fun of myself.If there was a buffoon, I played
the buffoon. And people looked at me and said, 'Gee, that's like Uncle
David', or 'That's like a friend of mine'. And they related through
that. I didn't make fun of them. I made fun of me.
You gotta come down to go up.
You have to be prepared for luck. You have to work with luck.
-----
YouTube video: Mel Brooks on working for Sid Caesar
-----
YouTube video: Sid Caesar reminisces with Barry Mitchell. ABC
World News Now
-----
YouTube video: Sid Caesar Interview Part 1 of 6 emmytvlegends.org
YouTube video: Sid Caesar Interview Part 2 of 6 emmytvlegends.org
YouTube video: Sid Caesar Interview Part 3 of 6 emmytvlegends.org
YouTube video: Sid Caesar Interview Part 4 of 6 emmytvlegends.org
YouTube video: Sid Caesar Interview Part 5 of 6 emmytvlegends.org
> YouTube video: Sid Caesar Interview Part 6 of 6 emmytvlegends.org
Published Wednesday, August 15, 2012 @ 6:46 AM EDT
Aug152012
(For all you World News Now fans):
Linda Ellerbee (born August 15, 1944) is an American journalist who is
most known for several jobs at NBC News, including Washington, DC
correspondent, host of the Nickelodeon network's Nick News, and
reporter and co-anchor of NBC News Overnight, which was
recognized by the jurors of the duPont Columbia Awards as "possibly the
best written and most intelligent news program ever."
Ellerbee was born Linda Jane Smith in Bryan, Texas. She attended River
Oaks Elementary School, Lanier Middle School, and Lamar High School in
Houston.
She also attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee,
although she quit in 1964 without graduating.
Ellerbee traveled around the country for some time afterward, working
itinerant jobs in radio. In her own words:
"I moved around some, married some, had two babies, worked for three
radio stations, one of which hired me to read the news because I sounded
black- my Texas heritage- and the black woman it had hired did not... In
radio, I learned about keeping logs, editing audiotape, writing copy,
selling air time, announcing, and "running a board," which sounds one
hell of a lot more sporting than it is. After a stint working for Terry
Miller, majority leader of the Alaska Senate, she was hired by the
Dallas bureau of the Associated Press to write copy. She claims to have
been fired after writing a catty personal letter on the AP's word
processors and accidentally sending the letter out on the wire. The
letter brought her to the attention of CBS television affiliate KHOU-TV,
which hired her to replace Jessica Savitch in January 1973. Within
several months she was hired by New York's WCBS-TV.
At NBC, Ellerbee worked as a reporter on The Today Show. Her
first anchor job was on the prime-time version of Weekend.
Ellerbee joined Lloyd Dobyns as co-host of Weekend when the show
moved from its late-night time slot (where it rotated with SNL on
Saturday nights) into direct prime time competition with CBS's 60
Minutes. As with the late-night incarnation, they would sign-off
with the phrase, "And so it goes." A couple of years later, Ellerbee was
again teamed with Dobyns (and later Bill Schechner) as hosts of NBC
News Overnight, where their ineffable writing stylea made the show
somewhat reminiscent of their stint on Weekend. They ended each
broadcast with a short, usually wry, commentary, again signing off with
the catchphrase, "And so it goes," which later became the title of her
first memoir.
In 1986, after the cancellation of Overnight, Ellerbee moved to
rival network ABC. There she served as a reporter for the morning
program Good Morning America. At ABC, Ellerbee was able to
co-write and co-anchor (with Ray Gandolf) Our World, a weekly
primetime historical series. She won an Emmy Award for her work on that
program.
In 1987, Ellerbee and her life and business partner Rolfe Tessem left
network news to start their own production company, Lucky Duck
Productions. The company has produced programs for every major cable
network, and has as its flagship program Nick News, a news
program for children on Nickelodeon. That show has received three
Peabody Awards (including one personal Peabody given to Ellerbee for her
coverage of the Clinton investigation), a duPont Columbia Award and
three Emmys. In 2004, Ellerbee was honored with an Emmy for her WE:
Women’s Entertainment network series When I Was a Girl.
In 1989, she guest-starred as herself in an episode of the sitcom Murphy
Brown. The episode, "Summer of '77," referenced that Ellerbee had
auditioned for the anchor job which eventually went to the title
character, played by Candice Bergen. Murphy Brown also accuses Ellerbee
of stealing her catchphrase "And so it goes..." from her during a long
haul flight. The two reminisce with Ellerbee saying she might like to go
back to an old network job, and Brown wanting to take some time off to
write a book. Both reply with "Nahh...".
Her autobiography, And So It Goes, was published in 1986. A
second book of memoirs, Move on: Adventures in the Real World was
published in 1992 and third, Take Big Bites: Adventures Around the
World and Across the Table in 2005. In addition, she has authored an
eight-part series of Girl Reporter books for young people, as
well as a syndicated newspaper column.
In 1992, Ellerbee was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a double
mastectomy. Since then, Ellerbee spends much of her time speaking to
groups about how she fought the cancer and how women need to fight not
only the disease and for better medical treatments of it, but to laugh
in the face of cancer as well. (from Wikipedia)
-----
Linda Ellerbee quotations:
Change is one form of hope; to risk change is to believe in tomorrow.
I have always felt that laughter in the face of reality is probably the
finest sound there is and will last until the day when the game is
called on account of darkness. In this world, a good time to laugh is
any time you can.
If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How
intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your
neck?
If you believe in your heart that you are right, then you must fight
with all your might to do it your way. Only dead fish swim with the
stream all the time.
Nothing you think at twenty-five is so.
People are pretty much alike. It's only that our differences are more
susceptible to definition than our similarities.
Putting people in a room and strapping wires to their wrist to find out
if I make them tingle when I'm telling them about Beirut is a long way
from Edward R. Murrow
Styles, like everything else, change. Style doesn't.
The two strongest messages we're sending through television are that
popularity is everything, and that if it doesn't make money it's not
worth anything.
Time doesn't go. Time stays. We go.
We call them Twinkies. You've seen them on television acting the news,
modeling and fracturing the news while you wonder whether they've read
the news- or if they've blow-dried their brains, too.
When the anchorman is wearing a colonel's uniform, it tells you
something.
-----
(YouTube video: Linda Ellerbee discusses "NBC News Overnight")
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