Tinky Winky started a still hinted-at controversy in 1999 because of his carrying a bag that looks much like a woman's handbag (although he was first "outed" by the academic and cultural critic Andy Medhurst in a letter of July 1997 to The Face). He aroused the interest of Jerry Falwell in 1999 when Falwell alleged that the character was a "gay role model". Falwell issued an attack in his National Liberty Journal, citing a Washington Post "In/Out" column which stated that lesbian comedian Ellen DeGeneres was "out" as the chief national gay representative, while trendy Tinky Winky was "in." He warned parents that Tinky Winky could be a covert homosexual symbol, because "he is purple, the gay pride colour, and his antenna is shaped like a triangle: the gay pride symbol."
The BBC, who co-produced the programme, made an official response, "Tinky Winky is simply a sweet, technological baby with a magic bag." Ken Viselman of Itsy-Bitsy Entertainment, who distributed the show in the USA, commented, "He's not gay. He's not straight. He's just a character in a children's series.
Rooney was also mistakenly connected to racism when a politically charged essay highly insensitive to minorities was written in his style and passed off as his on the internet in 2003....How loathsome is CBS?
Many assumed he wrote the screed because Rooney's longtime habit of writing or speaking plainly on sensitive topics had left him open to attacks in the past by activist groups. The racist essay was one of the many false Rooney quotes and essays bouncing around the Internet. The racism charge angered and hurt Rooney deeply, especially because as a young soldier in the early 1940s, he got himself arrested in Florida for refusing to leave the seat he had chosen among blacks in the back of an Army bus.
At the height of the AIDS crisis, Rooney had his biggest run-in with a group and it had dire consequences. In February 1990, the gay magazine The Advocate interviewed him after he associated the human choices of drugs, tobacco and gay sex with death in a CBS News special, "A Year With Andy Rooney: 1989." The magazine printed racist remarks attributed to him from the interview, which he vehemently denied making. A torrent of negative publicity followed, after which then-CBS News President David Burke suspended him for three months. The outcry for his return was deafening. Burke reinstated him after only three weeks, saying Rooney was not a man "who holds prejudice in his heart and mind." The ratings for "60 Minutes," CBS' only top-10 hit that season, dropped while Rooney was off the air.
The actor is well known as the funnyman who graced "SNL" to spoof celebrities like Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Sean Connery. He said there was a darker side that played out in his life, before he became known for those roles, and then later on, backstage before he went out to perform....
Hammond says he was medicated almost all of the time he performed on "SNL" each week, but that wasn't all that was happening behind the stage doors.Here's an older clip of Hammond explaining how he worked out his impersonations of Bill Clinton and Al Gore and how he thought in terms of color, for example, picturing both Ted Koppel and Dick Cheney as — for some inexplicable reason — "plush blue." (Like this?)
"There was cutting backstage," he said, adding that one time, he was taken from the studio to a psychiatric ward because of his actions. "In fact, the week that I did the Gore debates, I believe I was taken away in a straitjacket."
Residents ... want to know how the project will be funded.Yeah, me too, but I have a way to cut the cost. Cut the public art. It's always, always, always bad. The money that is wasted on bad art in this city is so painful. I'd pay extra to get back to nothing. I'm not talking about the old statues. I'm talking about everything from the past 50 years. It's all bad. Really, really bad.
A warning about the poem’s language preceded the airing, as a series of offensive words including “nigger” and “spastic” were employed.Here in America — where we have Elvis energy, apparently — those 2 words are on completely different levels of offensiveness, but I guess that's the way they talk in Britain, where, presumably, "spastic" is not a word to be used casually.
[T]he clumsy or inept meaning of spaz remained mostly on the playground until the late 1970s, when it began seeping into American popular culture. In 1978, Saturday Night Live started running occasional sketches starring "The Nerds," with Bill Murray as Todd DiLamuca and Gilda Radner as Lisa Loopner. On two shows that year (Apr. 22 and Nov. 4), host Steve Martin joined in, playing the character Charles Knerlman, or "Chaz the Spaz" as he was known to Todd and Lisa.... A year after the SNL sketches in 1979, Bill Murray starred in the summer-camp comedy Meatballs, which featured a stereotypically nerdy character played by Jack Blum called "Spaz."
For someone like Tiger Woods who came of age in the '80s (and who, incidentally, is on record as saying that another Bill Murray movie, Caddyshack, is his all-time favorite), the American usage of spaz had long lost any resonance it might have had with the epithet spastic. This is not the case in Great Britain, however, where both spastic and spaz evidently remain in active usage as derogatory terms for people with cerebral palsy or other disabilities affecting motor coordination. A BBC survey ranked spastic as the second-most offensive term for disabled people, just below retard....
It would be funny if, after he bonked his big noggin, he said "Wait a minute... we're about to sign some bill spending a trillion dollars of unnecessary pork during a recession? What?! Not on my watch, we're not!" and promptly ran back to the White House and fired everyone.
... Cavett's piece on Sarah Palin was insufferably supercilious. With dripping disdain, he sniffed at her "frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences." He called her "the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High," "one who seems to have no first language."...Ha ha. Really. (I say in blogspeak, proving Cavett's a dick.)
How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude?
In sonorous real life, Cavett's slow, measured, self-interrupting and clause-ridden syntax is 50 years out of date. Guess what: There has been a revolution in English -- registered in the 1950s in the street slang, colloquial locutions and assertive rhythms of both Beat poetry and rock 'n' roll and now spread far and wide on the Web in the standard jazziness of blogspeak. Does Cavett really mean to offer himself as a linguistic gatekeeper for political achievers in this country?
I am very sorry that he, and so many other members of the educational elite, cannot take pleasure as I do in the quick, sometimes jagged, but always exuberant way that Palin speaks -- which is closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class.Dick says:
Some of what Ms. P. says is so dumb that I assumed, at first, that it was meant to be funny. But I think I’m wrong. It would be strange of her — considering the number of arrows already in her daunting intellectual quiver — to suddenly attempt humor.That's very old-fashioned humor, you know, Dick. The street rappers of today would never put it like that.
When I say Obama, you say Ayers...
"We have 70 percent unemployment - and it's not because we can't work. Obviously, the governor of New York is blind, and he's doing the job. Whenever you have a portrayal that calls the basic capacity of [blind people] into question, that's a potential problem."Now, wait, there really were news stories, plenty of them, that reported that hybrid cars were dangerous to blind people. Like this one. Notice anything? It quotes Christopher S. Danielsen, a spokesman for the National Federation of the Blind. It looks as though "SNL" may have read his organization's press release... and it got a laugh.
Danielsen claims "SNL" has a long history of mocking the blind - going back to Eddie Murphy's Stevie Wonder impression and, more recently, a "Weekend Update" one-liner that hybrid cars are dangerous to blind people because they can't hear the engine.
The complex fractal circular time-shifted way in which my media habits now play out – hear about Tina Fey doing a Saturday Night Live impression of Sara Palin on an RSS feed, watch the clip at work on YouTube, then go home to watch the same clip being shown on The Daily Show, and then read online about what happened on the daily show via an RSS feed – means that my experience of the election had a multithreaded, always-on quality I’ve simply never experienced before. ... [M]y home network went on the fritz at 2am on election night, leaving me with only my handheld Twitter and the TV. I felt positively unplugged....Yeah, well, that was England. We had holograms. And Parsons knows that -- perhaps because the flashy high-tech junk on American TV was mocked on the first segment of "The Daily Show" the day after the election. (Watch it here, starting at 2:48.)
The advantages of web technology here are clearly to do with intimacy, connection, and immediacy. Twitter is a great way to consume huge amounts of information when you’re trying to understand a complex real-time process.... However, I was also struck by a much bigger, tonal difference. The BBC ‘s snooze-making election coverage was shamefully poor, and seemed to consist of a sleeping Dimbleby and a bobbing Vine, along with a few other B-grade pundits who gave the evening all the drama and insight of a minor English by-election. Broadcast TV, with its narrow tone, its low-brow certainties, just felt hopelessly out of date....
You can tell TV has a sort of blurry panicked fear that the web is eating its lunch. Something Must Be Done. This is why TV presenters used daft gizmos – swingometers, touch-screen displays, even in CNN’s case, holograms, to try and stay down with the tech kids. This is like trying to be an opera singer by putting on weight, mistaking an unrelated symptom for a fundamental cause.
"This is like trying to be an opera singer by putting on weight..."AND: XWL says the holograms were a lie:
TV: Wait! It's not over until the fat lady sings.
Us: But she can't sing, she's just fat...
It's over.
[T]he so-called holograms were simply 2D images superimposed onto the TV broadcast.Tomograms!
The images were in fact tomograms, or images captured from all sides - in this case by 35 high-definition cameras set in a ring inside a special tent - reconstructed by computers and displayed on the screen.
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