I just found (and am currently watching) a special called Victor Borge: 100 Years of Music & Laughter on one of my local public broadcasting stations. It's narrated by Rita Rudner and I have no idea what she has to do with Victor Borge, either...nor can I explain where the 100 years come from since Mr. Borge only made it to age 91 and he wasn't even that funny for the first dozen or so of his years.
But it's a really good special which doesn't, like most Borge compilations around, merely recycle the same ten routines that he recycled endlessly the last few decades of his life. The PBS station is offering a deal for donations. They'll send you thirteen (13!) Victor Borge DVDs and one CD for $150, which ain't a bad deal at all...although I'd be very surprised if that package didn't contain at least a dozen versions of the Phonetic Punctuation piece and the Inflationary Language speech.
Anyway, I dunno if the deal's being offered on other stations — I'm watching KOCE at the moment — but if you love Borge, you might want to keep an eye out for it. And do watch for this special because even if it repeats some of those same bits — including, yes, Phonetic Punctuation and Inflationary Language — it's got a lot of material not available elsewhere. (For those in Southern California: KOCE is running it again this Saturday evening and the following Saturday...and KCET is running it this Saturday. And I notice KOCE is going to be running the Frost-Nixon interview on Watergate — the real one — on Wednesday evening, January 6 at 9 PM. It's not in the TiVo listings for that night but their website says it's on and websites are never wrong.)
My buddy Bob Elisberg has a new column up in which he argues that Republicans are a lot better at speaking and acting with a single mind than Democrats. I think he's right about that but I'd disagree that it really comes out of any permutation of Conservative philosophy. I think Republicans have just been better at convincing each other that their base will punish anyone who even puts a toe outside the reservation. I don't see that it has a lot to do with politics.
Yeah, Republicans are the ones who say "My country, right or wrong," but I've always felt that was just a slogan...like "fair and balanced." It comes from the same place as assertions by right-wingers that they're the true Americans because they have the right view and maybe the right religion. Conservatives are just as apt to trash America (or to blame it "first") as Liberals when it isn't doing what they want. Lately, some of them can't say enough bad things about the competence of the government, or its duly-elected officials, to do anything right.
My friend Roger, who describes himself as a guerilla Conservative, does that all the time. If I say that I think our military leaders are doing something wrong in Iraq, that's "blame America first" and hating this country and not supporting our troops. And five minutes later, he'll be telling me how the post office is incompetent, the immigration department is a pack of clowns, and Congress is mucking up everything it touches overseas.
A guy named Richard Reid tried to blow up a plane with an explosive in his shoes. It took then-prez George W. Bush six days to comment on the attempt, about which he said very little. Eventually, Reid was tried and convicted in a standard American courtroom.
A few years later, a man named Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab tries to blow up a plane with what is apparently the same explosive in his underwear. It takes current-prez three days to condemn the attack...but guys like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are out slamming Obama for not speaking out sooner and more forcefully. They also say it is wholly inappropriate to try the suspect in a standard American court. That Obama would even consider that instead of a military tribunal shows he doesn't understand the threat of terrorism, doesn't take it seriously, etc.
And of course, the mere fact that the new attack occurred is proof that Obama has dropped the ball on the War on Terrorism. But despite the shoe bomber, Bush kept us safe after 9/11.
Here's a five minute episode of The Funny Company — and I'll bet most of you don't make it all the way through. This was a 1963 syndicated cartoon, each episode of which was produced for around a buck-eighty. They had a long theme song and a long closing, which cut down on the amount of animation to be produced for each installment. And then most of each installment featured some science film or travelogue or promotional film that they got for little or no money. I didn't even like these when I was eleven years old and Engineer Bill was running them on Channel 9 locally.
That's Dick Beals doing the lead voice and the villain is performed by Hal Smith, who seems to have been in every cartoon show produced in Los Angeles during the sixties with a budget under a hundred dollars. Robie Lester and Nancy Wible are in there, too. See how long you last watching this...
December 31, 2009
