I know, I know. It's Hedley. Thursday the world lost a wonderful talent and by all accounts a great man.
Harvey Korman was famous for his characters on the Carol Burnett show and his roles in many films, notably many with Mel Brooks. I grew up watching Harvey, Tim Conway and Carol. As an adult I've watched nearly Mel's entire body of work and Harvey's roles couldn't have been better filled. His unique presence will be missed.
There still seems to be a lot of anger towards Ms. Silverman since her appearance the MTV Video Music Awards weeks ago when she referred to Britney Spears' children as "adorable mistakes". Frankly, I don't see what's so outrageous about a comedian (or comedienne, if you prefer) saying something offensive in an attempt to get laughs. Isn't that pretty much par for the course?
Some might argue that it fell flat and just wasn't funny, and there's nothing wrong with having that opinion but lots of comics make jokes that fall flat — why is Silverman deserving of additional scrutiny? It appears the primary reason is that people felt sorry for Britney after her lackluster performance which preceded Silverman's roasting (too soon?)
But really, we're talking about a girl (and I say "girl" rather than "woman" because Ms. Spears, while undeniably physically mature — perhaps even past her prime — has yet to display mental or emotional maturity) who drove her car with an infant on her lap. We're talking about a girl that waited until after she was a parent to get completely messed up on drugs and/or alcohol requiring rehab.
So do people feel sorry because she's a single mom (by choice)? Or because she looked a little chunky and lame on stage and obviously realized it? Far worse things have been said about far better people, and they were still funny. Spears on the other hand needs to get her life together and if a comic can't make a joke about someone who had it all and then turned into a complete idiot then what's this world coming to?
The Sarah Silverman Program, smartly anchored by Comedy Central immediately following South Park, is actually pretty funny too. In each show Sarah picks a theme — racism, abortion, bestiality, some bizarre stuff really — and then Sarah's character proceeds to blunder through a series of related events acting like a complete imbecile and yet somehow manages to explore the issue-at-hand rather artfully.
Ms. Silverman may not be everyone's cup of tea but between her and Ms. Spears the latter is far more worthy of public scorn. And the truth is that if you added a laugh track to Silverman's VMA performance and watched it again today (without re-watching Spears' sad lip-sync-n-dance-job), it was actually pretty funny! I say give the girl a chance, and if you're up after South Park give her show a look-see.
- one
P.S. if you don't watch South Park you really should — 10+ years of solid material (including some really good political & social commentary) and counting.
According to Robert Vamosi over at CNET,
Osama Bin Laden's latest video is fake. The telltale signs lay throughout the video, from the fact that current events are never mentioned by a "live-action" Bin Laden, but are voice-overed still photos to the interesting choice of outfit (the same one worn during a recording 3 years ago).
It certainly seems plausible, but the evidence also seems a bit circumstantial. Neal Krawetz, the gentleman who appears to have first noticed the discrepancies, points out that the video footage of Bin Laden is taken from an interlaced video source but the text and graphical portion of the screen is not. This, along with some of his evidence of video splicing, hardly seems interesting since it could very well occur during the normal course of editing a video — not necessarily denoting an attempt at trickery.
It would be interesting to hear what the State Department has to say about this, if any of their experts care to weigh in. Either way though, kudos to Krawetz for his detective work. I find the art of detecting video trickery fascinating, it's like a solving an extremely subtle (sometimes) puzzle. I am a big fan of
Ghost Hunters but more often than not I find myself dissecting their evidence like… well, like a Bin laden tape
- one
