Alan Colmes, the guy who used to get paid to lose debates to Sean Hannity, has been circulating the following joke which Jay Leno told on The Tonight Show, way back on September 2, 2008, right in the midst of the campaign...
Gov. Palin announced over the weekend that her 17-year-old unmarried daughter is five months pregnant. And you thought John Edwards was in trouble before! Now he has really done it.
The premise in citing this line is to suggest that since no one scolded Leno for it, David Letterman is being held to a different, perhaps hypocritical standard when he's excoriated for his joke about how "...at the Yankee game, during the seventh inning, her [Sarah Palin's] daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez." Bloggers are asking, "What's the difference between the two jokes?"
There are two differences. One is that Leno's joke was unambiguously about Bristol Palin, who was seventeen and unmarried and pregnant. Letterman meant his joke to be about Bristol, and most people I'm sure took it as being about Bristol. But Palin was at the Yankee game with her 14-year-old daughter, Willow.
You can decide for yourself if Palin is just seizing upon the difference here to try and claim that Letterman was suggesting the statutory rape of Willow Palin...or if she actually believes that's what the joke meant. You could even imagine that it's what Letterman intended but I think you'd be really off-base if you did. Anyway, that's one of the differences.
The other difference is that Leno made his joke during the campaign. For Palin or her supporters to have raised a fuss then would have been to prompt more discussion of Bristol's unwed mother status at a time when they didn't want it to be more of an issue than it already was. They'd spun it, somewhat successfully, as a matter of, "Yes, well, she had this child but the young man's going to marry her so it was just a matter of this young married couple having their honeymoon a little early." A little more spotlight though and you might have had people saying...well, the kind of thing that Conservatives would have said had it been a Democratic nominee with an unwed mother in the family: "Lousy, permissive parent...can't run his/her own family so how can he/she run the country?, etc."
But now the election's over and given the polls lately, Palin doesn't have much to lose by attacking. She's already lost everyone who's going to decide she's been an irresponsible mother. So why shouldn't she lash out, especially at a guy who's told hundreds of Sarah Palin jokes in which she couldn't find a factual error? She couldn't say anything in retaliation to all of them. Why shouldn't she go after the one time Letterman left her an opening? I'm not saying she's right or anything; just that it isn't surprising she's acting outraged now.
I was posting these for a while and then I forgot but now I'm doing it again. These are photos from a newly-rediscovered stash of photographs I've taken over the years, mostly at comic conventions. Here we see Marvel inker supreme Joe Sinnott at a New York con in '75 or '76 posing with a guy (I assume it was a guy) in a homemade Thing costume. As Joe was the main inker on Fantastic Four for about three thousand years, we had to get a snapshot of him with this fellow. I love the fact that even though the Thing's face was sculpted, it seems to have the perfect expression as if to say, "Who is this odd-looking person?"
If you're following me on Facebook — not that I can fathom why anyone would do such a mad, impetuous thing — there's an easy way to do it now. Just click on over to www.facebook.com/evanier. There you will read all sorts of stuff I've posted or replied to that doesn't always show up via any other means.
I have one medication that I take every day. A week or so ago, a lady from my friendly CVS Pharmacy calls and says, "I see that you're almost out of this prescription. Would you like us to renew it?" I think that's damned nice of them...keeping an eye out to make sure I have my pills. I say yes, thank you. I mean, I'm not really out of it and would have renewed it myself in plenty of time, but they've saved me going to their website and clicking on something. So why not? On Thursday, I get one of those automated robocalls from my friendly CVS Pharmacy telling me my prescription is ready for pick-up. Fine. So far, quite convenient.
Last night, I go over to my friendly CVS Pharmacy to pick up said medication and find they have two prescriptions waiting for me — the one I need and one I stopped taking months ago. They renewed it, too. I tell them of their error and they return those pills to stock and charge me for the one I need but don't really need yet. Home I go with it.
At home, I look at the bottle and the instructions say, as they always do, "Take one a day by mouth for 30 days." But it also says on the outside, "10 pills." And sure enough, inside the little vial are ten pills.
I figure I'd better get this straightened out now. I drive back to my friendly (but apparently confused) CVS Pharmacy and point this out to the friendly CVS Pharmacist. No matter how clever one is, one cannot take one pill per day by mouth for 30 days if one has but ten pills. One needs...oh, I'm so bad at math but I would guess somewhere around thirty pills. The friendly CVS Pharmacist also does the math, agrees that I'm probably right and says, "You must have only requested ten."
I assure her that, appearances to the contrary, I am not that chowderheaded. She checks the computer and determines that — aha! — they only gave me ten of the pills because that's all they had in stock. "Why then," I ask, "did I get a call saying my prescription was ready when my prescription was not ready?"
She says, "It was ready. It just didn't have the right number of pills in it." As I absorb this strange new definition of the word "ready," she checks their inventory and discovers that they now have 14 more of the pills. "Will that help you?" she asks.
Again, I do some exhaustive calculations and determine that, well, 24 pills do seem to be closer to 30 than ten. But I will still need...hmm, six more pills, perhaps? "We'll have them on Tuesday," she says. "You'll have to come back for them." This means I will have made three trips to my friendly CVS Pharmacy to pick up one prescription...a prescription which, by the way, I didn't need refilled until the week after next anyway. This does not seem all that friendly to me.
I tell you, it's enough to make a person take drugs. Or it would be if they'd give you the right amount of them.
A new TV series debuts tomorrow on TruTV, the cable channel formerly known as Court TV. The show is called Man Vs. Cartoon and rather than explain it, I thought this video would explain it properly...
I haven't previewed the show but if you've ever wondered about the physics involved in the inventions of Wile E. Coyote — or if you've longed to see the products of the Acme Company properly tested — here's your chance.
U.S. News and World Report spotlights some restaurant chains that are in financial trouble. Obviously, a lot of that is because the economy is swan-diving all over the place...but I'd like to suggest that several of the named companies are probably in trouble because of what you get when you go into them and/or what it costs you.
You been to a Marie Callender's lately? I haven't...because the last few times, I got tasteless food that probably had been sitting in the kitchen under a heat lamp since my previous visit.
You been to a Mastro's Steakhouse lately? I haven't...because the two times I was in one, you could have bailed out General Motors with what the check came to. I wasn't paying either visit but I did see the total and felt that the steaks, though wonderful, weren't that kind of money wonderful. I don't mind paying for a great meal but I know a couple of superb steakhouses (one is a block from the Beverly Hills Mastro's) where you can get just as fine a piece o' meat for about 60% of the same tariff.
You been to a Sbarro's lately? Actually, I have. Recently in an airport, it was the only option to grab a necessary bite of something before my flight and I was reminded why they have Sbarro's in airports and malls. It's to make the Pizza Hut Express look good. Does anyone anywhere like that food? I've heard a lot of odd things in my life but I've never heard anyone say, "I'm in the mood for Italian. Let's go to Sbarro's!"
And as for Krispy Kreme: Well, I gave up sugary delicacies of that sort some time ago...but even when I did eat things like doughnuts, Krispy Kreme always seemed too sweet to me. It was like eating birthday cake that was all frosting, no cake. Obviously, there's a market for food that is fried and loaded with sugar but just as I think there are better places to spend your beef-eating money than Mastro's, I think there are more enjoyable ways to ingest 300 calories in about four bites.
I haven't been to the other places cited in the article...but I wonder how much of their current financial downturn is the economy (people aren't dining out or aren't going shopping in the areas where the restaurants are situated) and how many of them are mainly suffering from lack of quality. It could also be — and probably is — both: With money as tight as it is, consumers are getting fussier about where they consume. I just hope the lesson some chains learn is that while you can go out of business because the economy stinks, you can also go away because your food does.
It is amazing that this clip exists. As you may know, NBC destroyed all the tapes of the first decade and a half ofThe Tonight Show. What little exists of Johnny Carson's early years of that program is mostly grainy, eighth-generation black-and-white snippets. But here, miraculously, we have almost eight minutes from September 1, 1964...and in full color.
It's a segment with Stan Zabka, a musician who had worked as the Associate Director of The Tonight Show. Apparently, because of that job, Mr. Zabka was able to get his mitts on a copy of either the whole show or just his segment on 2" videotape and that's how this survived when all else was lost. So here's your chance to see what the program looked like in 1964, just shy of Carson's second anniversary as host. Thanks to Kevin Segura for letting me know about this little treasure.
We really, really liked the special musical material that Neil Patrick Harris did under the credits on last Sunday's Tony Awards broadcast. We embedded a video here and wondered about how many alternate lyrics its writers had prepared. In this article, the New York Times reveals how the medley came to be included and offers up a few lines that didn't make it. Thanks, Bob Elisberg, for telling me about this.
June 14, 2009
