Category Archives: To Be Filed

• I'm not watching the fight but I am rooting for whichever guy sold less advertising space on his trunks.

• Mayweather and Pacquiao split a $200 million purse tonight…which is about 10% of what the pizza delivery places are making about now.

• Called Time-Warner 'cause my cable was out. Got no help but much urging from recordings to order Mayweather-Pacquiao fight on Pay-Per-View.

Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS raises money for its good causes in many ways, including benefit shows in which the Broadway community performs. Frequently in these productions, the cast of one current Broadway show will parody another…and frequently, the company of The Lion King wins. So at the 2015 Easter Bonnet Competition, the cast of the new off-Broadway revival of Avenue Q spoofed The Lion King…

In 2001 on this site — and rerun just a week or so ago here — I told you about something I had witnessed on TV in January of 1970 and remembered ever after. It was the night David Steinberg was guest-hosting Johnny Carson's Tonight Show and a few comedy legends (including Johnny!) suddenly walked out to the surprise and delight of the audience and Mr. Steinberg.

So I reran that story here and it was read by my buddy Paul Harris, who is heard across this land on many stations but mainly on KTRS in St. Louis. Yesterday, David Steinberg was on with Paul to promote Steinberg's program, Inside Comedy, which starts its new season this week, and Paul asked him about the incident. You can hear that entire interview here and the first question is about that 1970 Tonight Show incident. Given how long ago it was, I was afraid either Steinberg's or my memory might be faulty but…well, give a listen.

Steinberg also talks about his friendship with Groucho Marx and his days at Second City, as well as about his guests on Tuesday's episode of Inside Comedy, who are Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. The man has known a few funny people in his lifetime and is one himself.

My pal Bob Elisberg has posted this a few times on his fine blog and I'm not above stealing from him. It's "Over the Rainbow" sung by E.Y. "Yip" Harburg…and who better, since he wrote the lyrics for it? Among the other tunes you may know with Harburg lyrics are "April in Paris," "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?", "Cabin in the Sky," "It's Only a Paper Moon" and "Lydia the Tattooed Lady." This one, of course, is his masterpiece…

Jef Peckham, who has been quoted on this here blog before, sent me this…

Reading about your disappointing visit to Costco, and the bit about the expiration dates on the low-dose aspirin you found there, don't worry about it. Most pharmaceuticals do not go bad (note I did not say all). Many drugs including aspirin never go bad unless the various ingredients somehow precipitate out and separate themselves from the other ingredients.

The main reason for this is improper storage. You may have seen some drugs (normally ointments and creams or injectibles like insulin) that say on the packaging to "store between 50 and 85 degrees F" or something of that nature. Those drugs pose the highest risk for ingredients separating and becoming ineffective. Stable medications like aspirin are still effective for years after their "expiration dates." Aspirin (just to keep it on topic) didn't have an expiration date at all until it became a requirement.

Yes, requirement. The Food and Drug Administration back in the late '60s or early '70s issued a requirement that all medications have an expiration date, usually five years after a drug is manufactured or packaged, unless the medication itself warranted a shorter time span. In many cases the five year timeframe had nothing to do with the effectiveness of the medication. My late father, a pharmacist for 50 years, jokingly speculated that it was simply to force him to replace old pills and keep the drug companies in business.

You're probably right about the aspirin not really "expiring" and he was probably right about the motives for the dating. I do though feel there's something wrong with me buying aspirin this week which I won't be taking until May of 2017. I mean, I love Costco but I'm a single man and there are times when I look at the ketchup as they sell it and think, "Do I really need to buy ketchup I won't use up for three years? Maybe I should adopt a family of eight."

It just seems to me that the expiration date should have some connection to reality. They shouldn't be selling you a two-year supply of aspirin and telling you it expires in eighteen months even if it can be taken for years after that.

I have an odd thing about reading expiration dates on products. Often in markets, I alert the staff that they're selling certain items past the printed expiration dates and some of these are items where that really matters.

When I buy cereal, I occasionally note the expiration date on a box and think to myself, "Gee, I could buy this box of cereal now and leave it in my closet for months until I'm ready to open it…or I could come back here in eight months and maybe buy this exact same box of cereal."

Playboy Interview with Bill Maher. No great insights but a lot of good lines.

Dave Itzkoff of the New York Times tweeted that during the Q-and-A warmup of a recent taping of his Late Show, Dave Letterman said they'd invited two more guests to appear before their last show on May 20. One is Jay Leno and the other is Brian Williams.

If that's so, I can't imagine why Leno wouldn't say yes. Presumably, the two of them would spend the segment burying all hatchets and speaking well of each other. I can imagine why Brian Williams wouldn't. It looks like NBC is getting ready to dump him and settle his contract. I doubt that will happen in the next three weeks and until it does, he'd be wise to lay low. But maybe they'll work something out.

Okay, it turns out there is an extended (full) version online of the discussion on last night's Daily Show between Judith Miller and Jon Stewart. The portions that were trimmed for broadcast are mostly near the end of it and they show Stewart being somewhat harder on Ms. Miller and her being somewhat worse at defending her reporting. That's probably the opposite of the way most shows would have edited the interview and I wonder if it was deliberate.

In any case, here's a Comedy Central embed. These can get funky at times so if it doesn't play — or if it does weird things to this page and I have to delete it, here's the link to watch it at the Daily Show site. If you saw it on the broadcast, be aware that it's not that much longer but there are a few new exchanges of note. Boy, I wish all interviews on TV could be like this — an actual discussion of issues — instead of just trying to generate a slap fight to attract viewers…

Thor Benson has an explanation of why Bernie Sanders is not a Socialist. He isn't really but of course, these days, anyone who doesn't want to see the tax burden in this country lifted from rich people and placed more heavily on the poor and middle-class is a Socialist to some people.

Jon Stewart had Judith Miller on his show last night for the kind of one-on-one discussion that I rarely see on any so-called "news" show. He politely — without using any inflammatory language — accused her of being a bad journalist who was duped into reporting Bush Administration propaganda in the New York Times that helped lead the U.S. into the Iraq War on a lot of false premises. He gave her ample time to respond and state her case and did not turn it into a wrestling match with theatrics and outbursts. He was well-informed and it ended with one of those agreements to disagree with both sides stating their case rather well.

For what it's worth, I thought both scored some good points and I'm a wee bit more sympathetic to Miller's position, which is not to say I think she didn't do a bad job. But she has been singled out for a sin committed by quite a few others, the Times editors included. And a large part of what I think was wrong there was not that the Times reported a lot of bogus information but that once it became evident that so much of it was not true, they did a tepid job of correcting the record and holding the exaggerators (the most charitable thing I can call them) accountable.

I've seen some one-time lovers of Mr. Stewart's work say they think he's tired and the show is not what it once was. I disagree…and it was all real good last night, not just the interview but also the first segment which mocked some of the arguments made against Gay Marriage at the Supreme Court.

I'm not certain but I don't think there's an Extended Interview that will be available tomorrow on the Daily Show website. I think we got the whole thing. But if there is a longer version, I'm eager to see it.

I just looked at the posting dates of the previous two items and for about two seconds thought something was wrong. Then I realized that as counter-intuitive as it may seem, 12:46 PM comes before 10:39 PM. We really ought to start AM and PM at 1:00 but I suppose it would screw up way too many things to make that change now. Next time, we start a world, let's keep that in mind.

Two intelligent men on opposite sides of the political spectrum debate ("discuss" is more like it) the possible treaty with Iraq over its nuclear future. I don't know what to think.

Here we have a medley from Mary Poppins performed by Ruthie Henshall, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and an awful lot of people in the audience who know and love those songs…