Kitty cat meow

I just watched a great Colbert Report segment on Shepard Smith, who is Brian Williams’ only legitimate competition for world’s most entertaining “legitimate” newsman. In the course of it they had a clip of him saying the following – and I don’t know the context of this, I don’t want to know, I just want to sit back and enjoy it as the pure freaky word jazz it is:

Kitty cat meow
Thousand dollars
Snooki’s pregnant

The Dividing Line

Patricia Neal and Walter Matthau in 'A Face in the Crowd.'

Maybe my favorite sequence in A Face in the Crowd is one I couldn’t find on The YouTube, and since I am not yet a smart enough monkey to capture my own video off a DVD, I’ll have to just tell you about it.

It begins about 26 minutes in, just as Lonesome Rhodes is making the leap from small-town radio in Arkansas to a TV show in Memphis. There’s a great shot of Lonesome (Andy Griffith) as his train pulls away from the station in Pickett, AK where hundreds of fans are seeing him off. He waves goodbye with his hat, looking back at the admiring throng, but then turns to face forward, into the camera. In that moment he gives a look that has something really profound in it. It’s hard to say what exactly. It’s more than just hope, or expectation, or confidence; it’s a look that says this guy is going to fucking eat the world. He is America circa 1957: a hungry predator, an unstoppable force. That was a long time ago.
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Festivus Is Here Again

The old calendar on the wall tells us that Dec. 23 has rolled around, and that means only one thing: time for Festivus once again. What’s your favorite part of the holiday? The Airing of Grievances? The Feats of Strength? I myself have a great admiration for the clean, modern simplicity of the Festivus Pole, but honestly there’s no part of the tradition that I don’t love. Happy Festivus, everybody!

Tour de France 2010, Postscript

Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen: a very close relationship.

Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen: a very close relationship.

Re the Tour de France, Merle Baggard writes:

OK, glad it’s over. Please get back to more important subjects.

Merle likes to push my buttons, but I take his point. I do want to make just one more note before moving on, though.

The one thing that seemed to get people really emotionally involved this year was only tangentially related to the race itself. This was what has become known as the “falling out” incident involving longtime Tour commentators Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen.
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