I admit that I find very funny jokes that other people only groan at. I have been making them all my life and the strip below is exactly the kind of joke that appeals to me. It is amazing that I have not suffered the same fate as Pig and been ostracized by my family and friends.
Some interviewers of authors have not read the books prior to broadcast and depend on the authors to drive the interview. In this clip from the comedy show Newhart, Bob Newhart plays Dick Loudon who runs a B&B with his wife in rural Vermont but also hosts a local TV show about books. We see an interview that goes wildly wrong because he and his staff have not read the book. But his guest would not be considered that unusual today.
He continues his mission of talking to Trump supporters who believe in the wackiest things. I think the relentless insanity he has had to deal with is getting to him because he seems to be more impatient with his interviewees.
On the latest episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver continues his series of exposes on the awful incarceration system in the US where prisoners are subjected to cruel conditions, as if the fact that they have been convicted of a crime means that they cease to be deserving of the minimal requirements of decency.
In the clip, he shows one prison superintendent who seems to be an outright sociopath in the way he responds to conditions in his prison.
(Via Rob Beschizza)
Stephan Pastis, the creator of Pearls Before Swine, has come up with one of his most tortured puns.
I long ago stopped watching TV news and talk shows, either on local stations or on the national networks. They never said anything that I did not hear about elsewhere and instead spent a lot of time on mindless blather that was truly irritating. And of course there were the numerous commercial breaks.
But sometimes you cannot avoid them, such as when the TV is on in a doctor’s waiting room or in the boarding areas for flights and then you would often see segments where the host would interview people who were talking about some new product that supposedly has beneficial effects on health.
On his show Last Week Tonight on Sunday, John Oliver dissected such segments, showing how often they were what are called ‘sponsored content’, i.e. essentially advertisements paid for by the manufacturer of the product that the ‘news’ shows presented without clearly disclosing this key fact.
Towards the end of the segment, Oliver’s team pulls off one of the pranks they are famous for and that is worth watching. They clearly plan these shows well in advance of airing.
I enjoyed the pun in this cartoon but noticed one math item it got right and three things that it got wrong. Maybe others will find more. That’s the problem with math nerds. We tend to look for flaws.
One of the things I realized early on in my working life is that what follows after the first few lines of an email or other communication rarely registers in the consciousness of people, although they may have ‘read’ it in the sense that their eyes scanned over it. So you need to make the most important point right at the start.
This cartoon captures it exactly.
(Baldo)