Saturday, April 29, 2006

Watching Stephen Colbert

Well, it looks like Don Imus no longer has the trophy for the most uncomfortable speech at one of these events.

• Posted at 8:04 PM · LINK

Briefly Noted...

If you just want to catch whatever Stephen Colbert does at the Correspondents' Dinner tonight, C-Span is currently saying that the post-meal program will commence around 9:30 PM (all times Eastern), George W. Bush will speak at 10:05 and the Prince of Truthiness will go on around 10:25. Right after the dinner is concluded, C-Span will re-air the entire thing and they're saying that will start "around Midnight," plus they'll run it all again on Sunday at 12:30, which I assume means 12:30 PM.

That's what they're currently saying on-air. The schedule on the CNN website says something else. This is not unusual for C-Span.

Also, I believe Mr. Colbert is the subject of a story tomorrow night on 60 Minutes.

• Posted at 5:29 PM · LINK

Happy Lennie Weinrib Day!

Here's a birthday shout-out to Lennie Weinrib, one of my favorite friends and one of the most talented. I first worked with Lennie on a show for Sid and Marty Krofft for which he was re-creating the role of H.R. Pufnstuf. Lennie was not only the voice of Pufnstuf but wrote most of that character's first TV series. There was a time there when you couldn't turn on your TV or radio without hearing Lennie: He had hundreds of commercials running and he was on a dozen cartoon shows (including The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, written about here a few days ago).

This period followed the one where you couldn't turn on your TV without seeing Lennie doing a guest role on some TV series. One time a few years ago, I was flipping channels on my satellite dish and I caught him simultaneously on reruns of The Munsters and Emergency, plus some channel was running The Thrill of It All, a Doris Day movie in which he had a small role. The still above is from one of his several appearances on The Dick Van Dyke Show. And at some point in there, he also had a period as a film director. Anyone here ever see Beach Ball? Or Wild, Wild Winter?

He's pretty much retired now and living outside the U.S. but we still talk and e-mail, and in honor of his birthday, I'm actually packing up a box of stuff I've been promising to send him for several months now. In fact, I like him so much, I'm even going to go mail it.

• Posted at 3:57 PM · LINK

Throat Alert

Tonight, CNN is rerunning a Larry King Live from last Tuesday on which King interviewed Mark Felt, the gent who was recently revealed to have been Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's infamous source, "Deep Throat." The interview was pre-taped (i.e., not aired live) at Felt's home and it comprised part of the show. The rest of the hour was a live panel discussion with Woodward, Bernstein, Ben Bradlee and members of Felt's family.

The panel discussion is of little interest due mainly to King's lazy interviewing style. At one point, he asked, referring to Felt, "What manner of man is this?" Which might have been an interesting question if he'd directed to Woodward, who had the friendship with Felt and who met him in that parking garage many times and who visited him recently. But King put it to Bernstein, who never met Felt and who speculates with as much authority as you or I might have had. Then King asked Ben Bradlee if he ever had any doubts about Felt's validity and he lets Bradlee get away with talking about how perfectly accurate Felt was as a source. The moment cried out for an interviewer who would cite some of the questionable "facts" Deep Throat is quoted as providing in All the President's Men...but King obviously didn't know about them.

By contrast, in the interview with Felt, King asked most of the right questions, perhaps because he was reading them (in some cases, as if he'd never seen them before) from notes prepared by someone else. The discussion, which looks like it was heavily edited, is actually a pretty decent chat with Felt, who's a lot more lucid than one might expect from some recent accounts. It also may be the only one we're ever going to get so if the story of Deep Throat and Watergate interests you, you might want to catch the replay tonight. Felt praises J. Edgar Hoover and even Richard Nixon...and while I got the feeling that some of his answers were learned for the interview (the whole show is about promoting a new book), what emerges is a somewhat different set of motives than we might have expected. Felt has bad words for no one, which you have to suspect was not his attitude back when he was helping Woodward. He seems to have had a powerful devotion to the law, which more than any goals involving politics or personal benefit may have been his dominant reason for doing what he did.

In the panel discussion, Carl Bernstein couldn't resist making a couple of comments about how he wished more public servants today were like Mark Felt, placing duty to the truth above duty to the boss. A lot of us feel that way.

• Posted at 1:16 PM · LINK

Team Work

I don't know quite why this struck me as funny but when I went to tell my TiVo to record the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner tonight, I laughed to see the listing: "President George W. Bush and Stephen Colbert speak." And I had a mental flash of Colbert looking at this and saying, "Hmm...have to do something about the billing order."

• Posted at 3:51 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

I'm a big fan of Penn and Teller...not of everything they do, of course. I think, for example, they're responsible for what I see as an unfortunate belief among some newer magicians. That's the notion that a trick is hip if you can only work some self-mutilation and stage blood into it. But that's okay. One of the things I like about them is that they try different things and aren't afraid to alienate one segment of the audience to entertain another.

For a time, they had a bad name among magicians for allegedly exposing tricks. I thought that was an unfair rap. The few tricks they did expose were the kind that anyone with an I.Q. higher than their shoe size could figure out in ten seconds. The one exposed in today's video link is just such a trick. I figured out how it was done when I was six. I mean, how else could you put a box containing a live human head on the floor unless the rest of the human was under the floor? There would be little entertainment value in doing the trick and pretending it was fooling anyone. There's plenty in doing it in a way that shows you how hard it is to do.

The clip is from a pretty good TV special they did in 1990 called Don't Try This At Home and it runs a little more than three minutes. So let's blast off...

• Posted at 2:29 AM · LINK