I know perfectly well that the trouble caused by the local weather pales beside the impact of the horrific walls of water that overwhelmed southeast Asia.
But I still wish it’d just stop it.
End of rant. Now I want my tea.
Via Mark Evanier’s blog: on January 7th, Soupy Sales was formally awarded his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
I was right in the middle of the generation that grew up with the great kids’ TV that appeared on WNEW in New York during the late 50’s and early-to-mid 60’s. (“Wonderama”, anybody? I would have been in the Sonny Fox and Sandy Becker generation.) Soupy’s slightly weird brand of humor sank deeply into my brain: I can still hear the affable ravings of the only-partially-visible White Fang and Black Tooth, not to mention Pookie the Lion and the rest of that deranged crew.
Soupy’s comic timing was faultless. No one knew how to pie somebody like Soupy. And Noel Godin, aka “M. le Tarteur” — the guy who hit Bill Gates with one, and installed the verb entarter, “to be hit in the face with a pie,” in modern French usage — may possibly owe Soupy a very sideways debt. For the Great Art might have fallen wholly into decline after the death of vaudeville had not its faint spark been kept alive by a slightly crazed guy from North Carolina. Anybody who had the staying power to either hit over 19,000 people with pies during his career, or to be hit by them (in a rather Zen way, the stats are confused as to the direction in which the pies were traveling) deserves a star for that alone…but there was so much more.
Congrats, Soupy!
Unquestionably this.
(reels away clutching her head)
Something very cool in the Washington Post today:
Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence for something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained for centuries: Mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness.
Those transformed states have traditionally been understood in transcendent terms, as something outside the world of physical measurement and objective evaluation. But over the past few years, researchers at the University of Wisconsin working with Tibetan monks have been able to translate those mental experiences into the scientific language of high-frequency gamma waves and brain synchrony, or coordination. And they have pinpointed the left prefrontal cortex, an area just behind the left forehead, as the place where brain activity associated with meditation is especially intense.
“What we found is that the longtime practitioners showed brain activation on a scale we have never seen before,” said Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the university’s new $10 million W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior. “Their mental practice is having an effect on the brain in the same way golf or tennis practice will enhance performance.” It demonstrates, he said, that the brain is capable of being trained and physically modified in ways few people can imagine.
…After having been careless about it for too long, I’ve started making sure I get half an hour’s meditation time every morning. Nice to see solid validation like this for its effects. (Now I’ll just have to concentrate on not getting all impatient for my new mutant brain powers to manifest themselves.)
Something unusual happens in a number of European countries, mostly (but not all) German-speaking, on or around New Year’s Eve. The TV stations begin showing the same 20-minute comedy sketch again and again. What’s truly unusual about this is that the sketch is in English — recorded 40 years ago in front of a German audience — and has since become a cult classic. For a surprising number of German-speaking people, the words “Same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?” are not only the English-language phrase they know best, but are held in the same kind of hilarious context as the phrases “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” or “It is an ex-parrot!”
The sketch “Dinner for One” — the German name of the sketch translates as “The 90th Birthday” — has nothing in particular to do with New Year’s (though one “virtually present” character does say “Happy New Year” at one point). It tells the story of a birthday party. Miss Sophie (played by actress May Warden) is 90, and the table is set for herself and her four friends: Sir Toby, Admiral von Schneider, Mr. Pommeroy, and Mr. Winterbottom. Unfortunately, the ravages of time have taken their toll, and of the five of them, only Miss Sophie is still alive.
Assisting at the dinner is James, Miss Sophie’s butler (played by veteran British comedian Freddie Frinton). It falls to him not only to serve dinner, but to impersonate the four missing persons for a lady who may or may not be entirely clear that they’re no longer among the living. As part of the act, James has to drink their traditional toasts to Miss Sophie — all of them — and gets progressively more sloshed as dinner progresses. But he just keeps soldiering on, despite that pesky tiger skin….The sketch is a tremendous showcase of Freddie Frinton’s mastery of comic timing. We finally managed to score a good quality tape of it last year, to our great pleasure.
Now, though, I see from the “Dinner for One” section of the NDR website that a documentary called “40 Years of ‘Dinner for One'” aired yesterday. German-speaking blog-readers — did anyone get a recording of that thing? If you did, please get in touch: we’d dearly love to see it.
(PS: Turns out the Guardian did a small piece on “Dinner for One” a couple of years ago; and this year another one, with a slightly different focus (i.e., why don’t the British find this funny?).)
With that: you can view “Dinner for One” in its entirety here at the NDR website. (They also have the colorized version.)
…at least, it’s been doing so over the last month. Sorry for the absence: I’ll do better in January.
Meanwhile, just a wish: may 2005 bring everyone who reads this all the good things he, she or it desires.
29%.
Every two-night miniseries experiences a drop-off on the second night. We had a 1.2% drop-off — not negligible, but not at all bad.
Die Nibelungen therefore becomes:
- The highest-rated movie-for-TV on German television for 2004 (and will be picking up Blickpunkt-Film’s “DIVA Award” on this account in January):
- The single highest-rated dramatic presentation of the German network Sat.1 in the network’s history.
Woo.
[Sounds of somewhat restrained partying in the background, as we had to take the cat to the vet because of an abscess in her toe…]
There are about four different SF novels implied by the first third of this article. To my mind, anyway. More perceptive readers will probably find even more….
“Moon gas may bail out energy-sapped earth” (AFP, Udaipur, November 26)
A potential gas source found on the moon’s surface could hold the key to meeting future energy demands as the earth’s fossil fuels dry up in the coming decades, scientists said on Friday.
Mineral samples from the moon contained abundant quantities of Helium 3, a variant of the gas used in lasers and refrigerators as well as to blow up balloons.
“When compared to the earth, the moon has a tremendous amount of Helium 3,” said Lawrence Taylor, a director of the US Planetary Geosciences Institute, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. “When Helium 3 combines with deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen), the fusion proceeds at a very high temperature and it can produce awesome amounts of energy,” Taylor said.
“Just 25 tonnes of helium, which can be transported on a space shuttle, is enough to provide electricity for the US for one year,” said Taylor, who is in Udaipur to attend a global conference on moon exploration.
Medical first: Rabies case treated without vaccination
Jeanna Giese, 15, contracted the deadly virus when she was bitten by an infected bat at a church on September 12 and was admitted to hospital a month later, according to hospital officials.
The disease had progressed to a point where immunisation was not an option, so a team of eight specialists decided to try something new: coma-inducing drugs to protect the teenager’s brain and a cocktail of drugs to protect her nervous system and boost her immune system.
Wow! Can’t wait to see the writeups on this in the medical journals.
…And so the famous “Black Turkey” recipe appears on the main page at Edibilia.
(For those of you wondering where the “French Toast on Five Railroads” recipes went, they’re now over here.)
Before anyone asks “have you actually made the Black Turkey recipe?”, the answer is “yes”, though with a much smaller turkey. Next question usually being “Is it worth it?”, the answer is “If you feel like all that work, sure.” Probably it’s good for keeping you away from the TV if you don’t feel like watching some parade or football game. Unless of course you have a TV in your kitchen…which would be your problem, not mine. 🙂