George Carlin was the funniest guy when I was a kid. Doing his TV news anchor schtick 35 years ago I remember "there was a freak accident on the highway last night. Two freaks in a van hit another three freaks in another van." And there was the time he stood on live TV (The Sonny and Cher Show …

About 35 years ago when George Carlin used to appear on TV's Sonny and Cher Show and things like that, he used to pretend he was doing a TV news anchor man reporting on quirky items - the sort of thing SNL ripped off a few years later. Once he told this joke: "Scientists have discovered that …

What is the bird that wakes up by making a call that consists of one cheep followed over a few seconds by seven to ten evenly spaced double cheeps in which the second double cheep is slightly highest in pitch, the rest following slightly lower and quieter? That is the one that made me realize I …

Episode 1, Part 1  •  Episode 1, Part 2  •  Episode 1, Part 3  •  Captain Scarlet.

Having a week off is swell and all but I really have never taken one off without any plan to do some travel or big project. The only plan was to explore my idleness. Has this been wise? Let's review:  •  Until about 11:00 am yesterday, I was going to Syracuse to see the game between UMass and the …

An interesting stat in an article this morning about public radio and TV in the USA:  •  “Lately the audience for public TV has been shrinking even faster than the audience for the commercial networks. The average PBS show on prime time now scores about a 1.4 Nielsen rating, or roughly what the …

I suppose the 45 rpm manufacturers associations of American scrambled to find other ways to market the seven inch disk with a hole in the middle, too:  •  “But Texas Instruments, the chip maker that developed the digital light processor most commonly found in most rear-projection TVs, is holding …

There is a good story in The New York Times this morning about classic baseball announcers and it includes this photo of Red Barber broadcasting at Ebbets Field:  •  “"They’re tearing up the pea patch," Barber would inform his audience in Brooklyn, where there were precious few pea patches, but we …

Remember when blogging the debate meant you sat and typed out word for word (except you missed every second sentence) what people said like a bad dictaphonist? Here are my thoughts on the first Republican half of <a this evening's debates on ABC...without the crap transcript:  •  Format - very …