Tag: sausage grinder of snark

What do we know now?

Mike Yard is a regular.  Tonight’s show is about the State Of the Union.  We were invited to submit our questions about President Obama.  Now I could have gone a different way with this and asked about the fact that African-Americans, who are wildly over represented in the less affluent demographics because of historic and persistent racial prejudice, have actually seen their economic position decline under the policies of this President, Obama, and that Police Violence against the African-American community has increased under his Administration and militarized Law Enforcement; but as I’ve indicated I think it does a disservice to The Nightly Show and Larry Wilmore to use a merely racial and tribal lens when watching.  African-Americans are Americans.  Their struggle is our struggle and class knows no race.

Besides, it’s too much research for midnight and I have other things to do with my life which include careful examination of the inside of my eyelids.

So instead I went with some things where the facts are undisputed-

How do you feel about Obama’s protection of torture, bank fraud, & indiscriminate surveilance, and his dozen+ new wars?

Would Larry have Bill Cosby on as a panelist?  Hell yeah!  And Mike Yard is actually funny-

Tonight’s panel is John Lovett, David Remnick, Amy Holmes, and Godfrey.  Sorry about last night, now that I know where to look I’ll try to include it.  Did I mention the Kinks?

Continuity

Admiral Zhao

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Wednesday 1/21: Anne Hathaway
• Thursday 1/22: Jennifer Aniston

When last we saw Anne Hathaway she was a phantom in Hugh Jackman’s dying mind-

Tomight she’ll be on to talk about her debut as a producer (though she also stars) Song One.

The real news below.

What do we know now?

Shenaz Treasury is a regular.  We’re going to get a monologue followed by an extended panel discussion (in addition to Treasury, last night we had Talib Kweli, Bill Burr, and Corey Booker).

The Boston Globe says, “Comedy Central appears to have come up with a worthy partner to “The Daily Show,” with Stewart and Wilmore as the salt and pepper shakers of late-night TV.”

I have mixed feelings about that kind of praise.  The Nightly Show should not be judged on ‘diversity’ criteria as if it were a Short Bus special needs collection of tribal integration but on whether it is funny and enlightening.  My verdict is more enlightening than funny.  It moves very quickly indeed and the panel is intelligent and respectful.  This is not Three Stooges slapstick (not that there is anything wrong with that).

Brian Moylan at The Guardian loves that.

I wish The Nightly Show would get rid of the monologue altogether (or shorten it considerably) so that Wilmore could do what no one else is doing in late night and talk to other people well and intelligently. It’s hard enough for adults to squeeze a meaningful conversation about complex topics into 30 minutes and it’s even harder when the show is only devoted to the panel about half the time.

His favorite part is the ending segment, ‘Keeping It 100’, as in 100% Real.  In the premier Wilmore and his staff picked the questions for the panel members and his question was picked only by the staff- ‘What’s the last racist thought you had?’

Viewers are invited to submit our own questions in the future via Twitter.  Tonight’s topic is Bill Cosby.  Since we are nothing but slaves to media culture, of course we had to submit our own-

Is it true Cosby and Culp had a sexual affair while filming I Spy?

We expect we’ll be doing this every night so if you have a strong suggestion, post it and we’ll pass it along.

Continuity

What does your cat do all day?

This week’s guests-

The Daily Show

• Tuesday 1/20: Jennifer Lopez
• Wednesday 1/21: Anne Hathaway
• Thursday 1/22: Jennifer Aniston

Jennifer Lopez will be on to whore The Boy Next Door which will be released Friday.  The film was shot in 23 days and probably looks like every minute of it.

The real news and Elmer Gantry’s web exclusive extended interview below.

As I’m sure is true with the shows themselves there are still some kinks to get worked out.

What do we know?

Larry Wilmore on Colbert Takeover: ‘Replacing Stephen Is Impossible’

By Andy Greene, Rolling Stone

January 16, 2015

Wilmore was chosen for the job almost a year ago, soon after David Letterman announced his retirement and CBS signed up Colbert. “Jon Stewart and I got together to talk about what we might do with the slot,” says Kent Alterman, the president of content development and original programming at Comedy Central. “He had this idea for this show with Larry as the host, since his whole career has really built him toward that moment. Considering Jon’s track record when it comes to discovering talent, you’d have to be a real idiot to argue with him.”

Stewart’s pitch was rather simple. “His basic idea was there were lots of underrepresented voices out there that deserve to be heard,” says Wilmore. “He envisioned it as a Daily Show/panel show, with me hosting it. I was surprised he had me in the middle of the bull’s-eye. My jaw just kinda dropped. I went, ‘OK . . . sure. That sounds great.'”

There is still no guest list, this is what Jon Looks like for the week-

The Daily Show

• Monday 1/19: Mike Huckabee
• Tuesday 1/20: Jennifer Lopez
• Wednesday 1/21: Anne Hathaway
• Thursday 1/22: Jennifer Aniston

Some continuity-

Alabama Justice

Mike Huckabee == Elmer Gantry (that’s an equation test not an assignment operator for the uninitiate).

I have here in my pocket – and thank heaven you can’t see them – lewd, dirty, obscene, and I’m ashamed to say this: French postcards. They were sold to me in front of your own innocent high school by a man with a black beard… a foreigner.

You want to read the whole thing?  It was written by Sinclair Lewis and dedicated to my meta namesake, H.L. Mencken.  I assure you that it will do more to feed your soul than any amount of time spent listening to this charlatan mountebank grifter.  Hot Dog?

But I do hope you’ll stick around for the Second Act.

Pencil Necked Geek

Below the real news and next week’s guests.

Well, some of them.

What’s the trouble with Florida?

I’m torn.  Rubio got a 3 part web exclusive extended interview and I guess I’ll include it below for completeness, but that doesn’t mean you have to watch it.

Also the real news and this week’s guests.

Les Crayons de France

The real news, Jimmy Carter’s web exclusive extended interview, and this week’s guests below.

I ♥ NY

The real news and this week’s guests below.

Heck Cattle

Homeless in Salt Lake City

The real news and next week’s guests below.

Nothing to be done.

I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle.

So there you are again.

Am I?

I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone forever.

Me too.

Together again at last! We’ll have to celebrate this. But how? Get up till I embrace you.

Not now, not now.

May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?

In a ditch.

A ditch! Where?

Over there.

And they didn’t beat you?

Beat me? Certainly they beat me.

The same lot as usual?

The same? I don’t know.

When I think of it all these years but for me… where would you be? You’d be nothing more than a little heap of bones at the present minute, no doubt about it.

And what of it?

It’s too much for one man.

The problem with transitions like this is that one is never sure when they’ll pick up the pen again, or even if they should.  The blank page looms intimidating in it’s nakedness and covers call and naps don’t take themselves you know, you have to sieze them like Roman Herman’s Berries.

I don’t expect your praise.

And not that I’ve really napping, I’ve been erecting pyramids in honor of my escaping.  This is the land where the Pharoh died.

I tell you this- No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.

When all else fails we can whip the horse’s eyes and make them sleep.

And cry.

If you’ve been watching Comedy Central at all today it’s been pretty hard to ignore that tonight is Stephen’s last Colbert Report and like many of you I suppose I’m a little sad to see him go.

The Colbert Report has been airing since about the time I started writing on the Internet (well, as ek hornbeck at least, my character is as much an artificial construct as Stephen’s and like him I never break it) and I won’t pretend that I noticed either The Daily Show or The Colbert Report before that time.  Instead I watched Cable News (lots of it) and considered myself reasonably well informed (I also read 3 or 4 daily newspapers so I didn’t get all my news from TV).

Being on the ‘Tubes was an eye opening and radicalizing experience for me.  I have always wanted to be a writer, and have always written.  I was an editor at my High School Alternative Newspaper and won a couple of Awards from the Columbia School of Journalism, one for the paper and an individual Columnist Award.  I took a term or so at the Boston University School of Journalism and worked a couple of years for my local Weekly.

Journalism is a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures.

And did I mention that it pays poorly?  So I did some other things with my life, some of which had nothing at all to do with writing (working with the severely learning disabled, Supervisor of Shipping and Receiving) and then cheap micro-computers came out.

I had sworn that computers were the work of the Devil (and they are) and that I would never, ever use one.  You can see how the latter turned out.

So for I while I wrote poetry for machines, stacks and stacks of it, and there’s something satisfying about composing originals following a very strict syntax and grammar in a foreign language for an absolutely literal minded and unforgivimg audience.

For amusement my friend and I formed a small multimedia enterprise to advance our political position in our Club.  In addition to countless newsletters, pamphlets, training manuals, flyers, posters, and reports and meeting materials, we did some DJing and wrote, produced, and directed videos, ran training seminars, and did the public speaking thing.  He was the candidate, but after he was defeated he lost interest.  I never gave up and became Capo di Tutti.

And I ran things with an iron fist (velvet gloves are for sissies) for about 5 years before I got bored and quit for good.

I golfed for a while, but it’s a tedious game.  I wouldn’t garden, I’ve seen The Godfather.

In April of ’05 I was tired of Cable and ventured out on the ‘Net (another thing I swore I’d never do because of totally reasonable caution) as ek.  I thought I had found a home, a place where I didn’t need to be afraid to let it slip I was a Democrat and I suppose it was a home for a while.  While there I discovered this little corner of it called The Daily Show/The Colbert Report Spoiler Thread which we affectionately know today as TDS/TCR, the Sausage Grinder of Snark (my idea, at least the tag is).  At the time it was under the stewardship of a lovely lady that it’s my great pleasure to know, TiaRachel.

Occasionally she needed a replacement for a break and, having by that time built my own reputation to the point that I no longer cared about writing blockbusters, I was happy to fill in.  In a moment of weakness during a particularly long hiatus for the programs, I succumbed to the entreaties of PerfectStormer to cover the off periods.

And thus things were until my first banishment (over the very same pictures of U.S. prisoner abuse that Barack Obama refuses to release today ironically) and after my reinstatement, which I never sought nor have I ever apologized for my words and actions, I returned to the same routine.  TDS/TCR was the only damn thing I missed about that place anyway.

After a while TiaRachel retired and I took over the franchise which I ran for about a year and a half before my second banishment (for defending a friend against bullying which I don’t regret either).  Because of the presentation limitations of that place I had already established the series here and while others have continued the tradition elsewhere (and good for them) I contend that we also maintain Apostolic Succession.

Now I don’t know what they are planning on doing, this is my plan.  During the holiday break I’ll be running some specials related to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.  When Jon resumes live broadcasts we will live blog those.  When The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore starts we will cover that too.

When Stephen Colbert takes over The Late Show (sometime after May) we will promote the guests, but will not live blog (hey, I gotta sleep sometime).

Will I miss The Colbert Report?  Of course.  And however dead he kills the character, in the incestuous zombie culture of reunion re-boot happy media I expect it to re-emerge at some point or another.

In a way it marks the end of an era for me, but I’m not going anywhere and you can count on my continuing to plumb new depths of obnoxiousness for some time to come.

Lucky you.

Pobrecitos

90 Scratchers

The real news below.