Showing posts with label Today Show. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Today Show. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

A Bradypus is a girl's best friend


Show-business people: They ain't like you and me.

No, they're not.

Take Kristen Bell, for example. That is, if you're properly certified to deal with people who are properly certifiable.

"The day of my birthday, we're sitting in the living room and I hear a knock at the door. He says, 'Your present is here. Why don't you grab the dogs and go in the back room?'" Bell tells Ellen DeGeneres on her eponymous talk show (airing Tuesday). "I was immediately overcome and I thought, 'There is a sloth near! There is a sloth here! It's close! It's gonna happen!'"
I MEAN, I'm minding my own business, checking out the latest news on MSNBC's website, and I see the headline "Kristen Bell cries hysterically over sloth gift." What was I supposed to do?

I did what you would do -- I clicked it.

My God, Hollywood people really, really,
really ain't like you and me.
Bell explains: "I didn't know how to process that because my entire life had been waiting for this moment where I would get to interact -- I'm serious! -- with a sloth."
OHMYGAWD! Ohmygawdohmygawdohmygawdohmygawdohmygawd!

Now you know.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

'Does a fat puppy poot?'


Dogs bark, cows moo, Weebles wobble and Paula Deen has Type 2 diabetes.


Who knew?


Ah . . . the Today show knows what darkness lies in the pancreata of celebrity cooks:
Queen of comfort cuisine Paula Deen confirmed to Al Roker Tuesday that she has type-2 diabetes.

In her first broadcast interview discussing the disease, Deen said she intentionally kept the diagnosis secret after discovering she had it during a routine physical three years ago. “I came home, I told my children, I told my husband, I said, ‘I’m gonna keep this close to my chest for the time being’ because I had to figure out things in my own head,” she told Roker on TODAY.
I GUESS Paula "figured" it out:
“I’m here today to let the world know that it is not a death sentence,” said the Food Network star, who is now being paid as a spokesperson for Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company that supplies her diabetes medication. Coinciding with her announcement, Deen and her family are appearing in a new ad campaign for the company this month.

The news puts a spotlight on Deen, who has been criticized for promoting the type of high-fat, high-sugar diet that leads to weight gain – a major factor believed to cause type-2 diabetes. Deen said her reputation wasn't the reason she kept the diagnosis under wraps. "I wanted to bring something to the table when I came forward," she explained.
EXCUSE ME while I go cogitate about how to make enough money whoring off of my arthritic ankle and lower-leg edema to buy myself a really badass Mac Pro computer.


OR . . . as Dr. Zachary Smith once said,
"The pain! The pain!"

Monday, September 26, 2011

With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps


The above video contains not-so-adult language. NSFW.


Apparently, this video was the big thing on the Internets last week.

Today, the big thing on the Internets is a debate on whether last week's big thing on the Internets was all a big set-up for the benefit of Bristol Palin's reality-TV show. That's TMZ's and the Today show website's story, and Bristol's co-star is sticking to it.

Today's blog, The Clicker, posts the above video and warns "The following video contains adult language." Trust me, there's nothing adult about any of it.

There's nothing adult about Bristol Palin cashing in on being an unwed-mother daughter of a flaky Alaska politician with national pretensions. There's nothing adult about doing the above clad in an "Empowered" sweatshirt (Phil. 4:13) with a "lightning" cross.

There's nothing adult about a half-drunk guy yelling whether Bristol rode baby-daddy Levi Johnson like the mechanical bull she was on. Or adding that "Your mother's a f***ing whore! She's the devil!"

THERE'S NOT a thing adult about Bristol -- wrapped in the cross Jesus Christ hung and died on -- getting in the guy's face and asking "Is it because you're a homosexual?" (Oddly enough, she apparently jumped to the correct conclusion.)

And there's nothing adult about this confrontation going on and on, with a camera crew to record the whole thing and put it on the Internet . . . and later, television.

video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player

NOPE. Nothing adult to be found in TMZ tracking down the profane heckler to get the "scoop" on whether it was all a put-up deal, and nothing adult in Stephen Hanks justifying his bad behavior with his passion for politics. There, however, was plenty ironic about his saying he was originally from Louisiana and, therefore, knew white trash when he saw it.

Probably in the mirror every day. Just a wild guess on my part.

Finally, I wonder whether there's anything adult about my giving all these people an extension on their 15 minutes of fame. I wonder whether there's anything adult about adding to our nation's cultural and media dysfunction by highlighting all this bad behavior going on in the name of ratings and revenue.

I tell myself it's because it's all so metaphorical. That it somehow sums up who and what we've become as Americans today.

I fancy myself as being the "adult" here. The adult pointing and yelling
"Look at the freaks! Look at the freaks!"

Lord have mercy, I think we all may be "the freaks" here. May someday we be "Empowered"
(ZAP!) to just stop.

After all, "I can do all things through Him who strengthens me."

Sunday, February 06, 2011

Simply '70s: The fascist regime strikes back


This must have been from 1978, this Today show report by Jack Perkins on NBC. The Sex Pistols were embarking on their first American tour, amid copious Establishment wailing and cultural gnashing of teeth.

My God, what if they cursed on stage? Spat on the audience? Trashed a hotel room?

Next thing you know, they'd be shooting the telly. What? Elvis did that years before?

Oh.


STILL, THE ADULT self, some 33 years removed from his teenage hormones, suspects that Establishment Jack was pretty much on target. The Pistols were boorish, dissipated louts of limited technical ability who probably did coarsen the culture, for what that's worth anymore.

I know this; you know this. Jack Perkins certainly knew this, and wasn't shy about telling his horrified TV audience -- the one sitting at the breakfast table putting a little nip of something in the morning coffee, smoking cigarettes and plotting out how to screw that little s*** at the office.

And then that young little thing after work, being that the missus was visiting the mother-in-law.

In your heart, you know I'm right. Somewhere in my cynical, cynical heart, I know Perkins was right.

THAT SAID, how about we throw the old fascist out of a moving limo on the way to the show?

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Shake your booty till your brains fall out


If you're a little boy growing up in Ashland, Neb., you can grow up to be an astronaut.

Look at Clayton Anderson. Remember, the sky's the limit.

If you're a little girl in Ashland, and if you want to try your hand at junior cheerleading, you can grow up to shake your butt for the astronauts. And if you don't want to shake it for the youth-football crowd, the cheerleader coach will kick your unshaking butt right off the squad.

Because the "shake your booty" cheer is a real "crowd-pleaser." Make of that what you will when 5- to 11-year-old girls are involved.
And note that the NBC version of the video package originally shot by Omaha's WOWT television artfully cuts away before the little girls shake their butts at the camera.

The local Channel 6 story is here.

HERE'S SOME of the story from the Today show on NBC:
“It just felt wrong. I don’t know why,” Faylene Frampton said Wednesday during an interview on TODAY with Tamron Hall. “It just didn’t feel it was a cheer that was appropriate for kids of my age or younger.”

The sixth-grader from Ashland, Neb., says she complained to cheerleading coach Tina Harris in the past that she did not feel comfortable with the cheer, which is number 33 in the squad’s 44-cheer routine.

The cheer calls upon Faylene and younger members of the squad — including some in the second grade — to turn their backs to the bleachers, bend over, and move their pelvises from side to side.

The cheer had been used in the past, but Faylene says never liked doing it and told the coach so. So when Harris gave the signal for “shake your booty” on Oct. 10, the third-to-last game of the season, she decided it was time to put her foot down — both of them, actually — and take a stand.

Faylene, the oldest and most senior of the junior cheerleaders, refused to do the cheer and was sent home. Later, her father was informed by the coach during a phone call that Faylene was being benched for the last two games for disrespecting the coach.

(snip)

Coach Harris told the local NBC affiliate that she didn’t find the cheer sexually suggestive or objectionable, but nonetheless dropped it from the last two games. She added that no one had complained about the cheer before, and that explaining the controversy, and her decision to bench Faylene for the remainder of the season, was difficult.
BUT NOT as "difficult" as just not having little girls shake their butts at adults in the stands of an elementary-school football game.

"Shaking it" is one thing. People dance; little kids dance. It's cute when they do.

But little girls, some as young as 5, turning their posteriors to the stands -- bleachers filled with adults -- and "shaking it" at the crowd is entirely another.

As a Catholic who has worked with kids at church -- and as someone who has completed the now-mandatory "safe-environment" training -- that is not something I'd be comfortable letting high-schoolers do for an audience, much less
forcing preadolescents to do under penalty of banishment. Maybe if everybody were doing the "Hokey Pokey" or the "Chicken Dance," but certainly not chanting "Jump! Shake your booty! Jump! Jump! Shake your booty!"

In other words, what the hell is wrong with this overgrown teenager they have "coaching" little girls in Ashland how to be cheerleaders?

It doesn't take a rocket scientist -- or an astronaut -- to refrain from teaching junior cheerleaders how to "shake it" like junior streetwalkers.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

No, I got nothin' today. Whatever.


Here I sit, thinking that surely there must be something I care to write about today.

Ummmmmmm . . . I got nothin'.

I've sworn off railing about my home state's long march toward self-murder because I got tired of repeating myself. And the economy is going to do what the economy's going to do, mainly because we no longer have a culture capable of growing statesmen -- honorable legislators of thick hide and long view.

Will Mrs. Favog and I ultimately go homeless and hungry before all this is done? Possibly. Most of you could say the same thing about yourselves -- and working in "old media" isn't pretty much the only thing you're qualified to do.

SO, we'll be selling stolen apples at 16th and Dodge . . . or we won't.

We'll turn out a feckless government skewed for the benefit of those who need no benefit . . . or we won't. If we do, we'll come to realize those whom we thrust into office as replacements are no better . . . or we won't.

Alternatively, the president and Congress will get a clue . . . or they won't.

We'll continue hornily and violently down the road toward complete societal breakdown . . . or, by the grace of God, we won't. And whatever little thing I have to say about any of it would make nary a difference.

WHAT YOU CHOOSE to do about any of it might make all the difference in the world.

Do what you will. I'm going to put some music into the computer for 3 Chords & the Truth.

While I'm doing that, y'all watch this: