Month: August 2017

Can’t read. Can’t watch. Can’t bear it.

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8:30 p.m. Wednesday evening. I’m in Texas on assignment, Dallas thankfully. The planned evening workout at the gym has been canceled without much fuss.  I’ll need to carry the fuel of three consecutive days of nutritious Chick-fil-A, home fries and Kit Kat bars into a fourth day. You’d say, not possible to eat Chick-fil-A, home fries and Kit Kat bars three days in a row, and I would tell you not to bet against me.

I’m fully reclined on the bed leaning against the headboard.

A long day.

The MacBook warms my lap.  The TV remote control rests on my right.

I start with the day’s RSS feeds, rifling through the posts.  And stop.

The Headline shouted: Fishermen jailed, fined millions for massive shark massacre off Galapagos Islands. The Ecuadorean navy made a shocking discovery earlier this month when, at the request of Galapagos National Park officials, it investigated a Chinese-flagged vessel cruising through the marine reserve off the Galapagos Islands. They found more than 6,600 illegally caught sharks lying in piles onboard the vessel known as the Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999.”

The Galapagos Islands. A protected area.  6,600 illegally caught sharks. Wow.

I set the laptop down and grab the remote.

CNN: Houston. Hurricane Harvey. Levees topped out. Mothers’ clutching babies. The aged being hauled out of Nursing homes. Flood waters rising.

Click.

FOX: North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and missles over Japan.

Click.

MSNBC: Trump and Russia.

Click.

BRAVO: The World Wildlife Fund commercial. 60 seconds, and I can’t avert my eyes.

I turn the TV off.

I twist in my ear buds, grab my iPhone and turn to Apple’s Coffeehouse playlist.  The first tune on the list is Glen Campbell’s (RIP 8/7/17) Gentle on My Mind:

I still might run in silence
Tears of joy might stain my face
And the summer sun might burn me till I’m blind
But not to where I cannot see
You walkin’ on the back roads
By the rivers flowin’ gentle on my mind

Lights out…

~ DK

 

“No, Buddy, I have to do this.”

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When I was young, I never envisioned stand-up as a way to make a living. I was always the guy on the edge of the crowd saying things to people next to me and they’d laugh. I couldn’t help myself. Stand-up was something I had to do. […]

I probably got my first laugh at home. When someone laughed at something I said, I liked how laughter sounded. I also wanted to hear that sound more. I still like hearing that sound. […]

I stammered as a kid. You can hear it in my routines. But it was never a problem. I found that people finish your sentences when you start to stammer. They try to help you out, so you wind up off the hook.

I attended Loyola University and majored in business management and minored in accounting. I always had a head for numbers. Then I went into the Army during the Korean War. When I was discharged, I went to law school under the GI Bill. Then I left to work as an accountant.But accounting was painfully dull… That’s when I convinced myself to try to make a living at comedy as a solo act. But it was a slow process, and I took part-time jobs to make ends meet. In the late 1950s, I worked behind the counter at the Illinois unemployment office. I was paid $65 a week, but the claimants got checks for $55 and they only had to come in one day a week. So I left. […]

As my stand-up career evolved, I became known for keeping a straight face and for a slight, endearing stammer. The stammer is real. As for the straight face, that’s just my delivery.

Ginnie and I met in 1963 through comedian Buddy Hackett. When Buddy and I were first introduced, we started talking and I told him I had an accounting degree.

He said, “You mean you don’t have to do this?” I laughed and said, “No, Buddy, I have to do this.”

~ Bob Newhart, excerpts from Bob Newhart’s Ridiculous Road to Comedy (WSJ · by Aug. 29, 2017)

Bob Newhart, 87, is a stand-up comedian and actor who won three Grammy Awards in 1961 for his first comedy albums. He starred in two successful TV sitcoms, “The Bob Newhart Show” in the 1970s and “Newhart” in the ’80s, as well as in films such as “Catch-22.” He spoke with Marc Myers in this interview.

More famous lines from Bob Newhart:

  • “The first time I got up in front of an audience was terror, abject terror, which continued for another four or five years. There still is, a little bit.”
  • “I’ve been told to speed up my delivery when I perform. But if I lose the stammer, I’m just another slightly amusing accountant.”

Guess.What.Day.It.Is?

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Men lead a recently purchased camel ahead of the Eid al-Adha festival, a Muslim holiday, in Peshawar, Pakistan. (By Fayaz Aziz/Reuters in wsj.com Photos of the Day August 28, 2017)

Notes: Background on Caleb/Wednesday/Hump Day Posts and Geico’s original commercial: Let’s Hit it Again

It’s been a long day

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To whom does my brain belong?
With what can I or you resist?
Within me disorder
While my brain seeks its order, at almost any price …

~ Göran Sonnevi, from Mozart’s Third Brain

Notes:

And what was so beautifully . . . what is the word? . . “comforting” about what happened every day

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Now she is 63. What I want to know is: What does 63 know that 44 didn’t? She pauses for a long time. “In your 40s, you’re coming into it, you’re intellectualizing things, and you kind of know it and you feel it,” she says. “But there is a deepening and a broadening and quickening of the knowing that happens in your 50s. Maya Angelou used to say to me, ‘The 50s are everything you’ve been meaning to be.’ She looks at me over the top of the nerd-chic glasses she favors these days. “You’d been meaning to be that person.” She laughs. “By the time you hit 60, there are just no . . . damn . . . apologies. And certainly not at 63. And the weight thing that was always such a physical, spiritual, emotional burden for me—no apologies for that either.”

Interviewing people who interview people for a living presents a special challenge: They know what you’re up to. You feel as if you’re being quietly judged. Not with Oprah. Once she’s committed, once she’s present, there is a kind of flow and trust that develops on the spot. Oprah, by her count, has interviewed more than 37,000 people during her 25 years of doing the The Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago. When I ask her if there is one big takeaway, she says, “Absolutely. There’s not a human being alive who doesn’t want—in any conversation, encounter, experience with another human being—to feel like they matter. And you can resolve any issue if you could just get to what it is that they want—they want to be heard. And they want to know that what they said to you meant something. Most people go their entire lives and nobody ever really wants the answer to ‘How are you? Tell me about yourself.’ And what was so beautifully . . . what is the word? . . comforting about what happened every day on the Oprah show is that people would dress up like they were going to church. Sometimes I would notice somebody and I would say, ‘Oh, wow, that’s a really pretty green dress.’ And she would go: ‘I wore it for you! I knew you would notice me!’ People just want to be seen; they want to be validated.”

~ Jonathan Van Meter, from Oprah Winfrey Is On a Roll (Again) in Vogue, August 15, 2017

Portrait of Oprah by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, September 2017 titled: “Like a Prayer.” “I have no angst, no regret, no fear,” Oprah says.