television

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George Carlin, an extraordinary standup comedian whose dark social satire won him multigenerational popularity and a starring role in the most famous broadcast obscenity case of modern times, died Sunday of heart failure in Los Angeles. He was 71.

Late last week the Kennedy Center announced he would receive its annual Mark Twain prize for American humor this November. The TV network Comedy Central in 2004 named him the second best standup comedian of all time, behind Richard Pryor.

Carlin became one of the most popular standup comedians in America in the 1960s and early 1970s through programs like "The Ed Sullivan Show." Carlin was one of the first comedians to dress "naturally" for a standup routine, in jeans and a beard, and his most famous routine became "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television."

"He was a genius, and I will miss him dearly," Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press. "He had an amazing mind, and his humor was brave and always challenging us to look at ourselves and question our belief systems, while being incredibly entertaining. He was one of the greats," Ben Stiller said.

The comedian, who toured college campuses for years and made a name for himself delivering biting social commentaries, had released 22 solo albums and three best-selling books, including "Brain Droppings," a collection of essays and routines, and "Napalm and Silly Putty," a collection of his stand-up material. Both won Grammy awards. His third book, "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?" was nominated for a Grammy. He earned several gold comedy albums and five Emmy nominations.

Carlin first appeared on radio in 1956 at age 19, while serving in the Air Force. He took a number of TV and movie roles over the years, introducing himself to a new generation of fans with the "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" series and an even newer generation with children's shows like "Thomas the Tank Engine." He did voiceovers in films that included "Cars" and in 1993 he got his own sitcom on Fox, "The George Carlin Show." He played George O'Grady, a New York cab driver, and the show ran 27 episodes. In the 1990s he appeared in the Barbra Streisand- Nick Nolte movie "Prince of Tides." Other film roles came in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" and "Dogma," with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. He was the first host of "Saturday Night Live" and appeared some 130 times on "The Tonight Show."

The death of his wife of more than 30 years, Brenda Hosbrook Carlin, on Mother's Day 1997 was particularly hard for Carlin. "See ya Dink," he wrote on his Web site. "Miss you a lot."

Last year, Carlin released "George Carlin: All My Stuff," a 14-DVD collection of his HBO specials from 1977 to 2005. He had shown no signs of slowing down. Just last week, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced Carlin would be awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. The center is scheduled to honor Carlin at a tribute performance by former colleagues on Nov. 10, which will be broadcast later on PBS.

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Photos courtesy of LA Times, The Money Times, Reuters/Mario Anzuoni, Lisa Falzon, Galella/WireImage

Original Source: NY Daily News and LA Times

Image Gallery: George Carlin 1937-2008

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On the June 6 edition of Fox News' America's Pulse, host E.D. Hill teased a discussion of a gesture Sen. Barack Obama shared with his wife, Michelle, saying, "A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab?" On June 10, Fox broadcaster E.D. Hill has apologized for her offensive suggestion that the “fist bump” Mr. Obama and his wife Michelle did recently could be a “terrorist fist jab.”

These slanderous attacks are not acceptable for any news organization to advance. This is appalling and unacceptable, and Media Matters, a liberal watchdog, demand a real apology for Fox News’ offensive comments and irresponsible reporting.

Karl Frisch, a spokesman for Media Matters, said: "This is part of a broader problem with Fox: out of bound comments are followed by a half-baked apology. At some point Fox has got to decide if it is a responsible news source."

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Photo Courtesy of Getty

Original Source: Media Matters and Telegraph, UK

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"They're all gone."
More than 35 years later, simply typing those words evokes memories of hooded terrorists and an unspeakable massacre. They were uttered by the great Jim McKay on worldwide television during the 1972 Summer Olympics, after 11 Israeli athletes and coaches were kidnapped in the Olympic Village and slaughtered during a failed rescue attempt at the Munich Airport.

McKay, who died Saturday at his home in Monkton, Md., at the age of 86, always described the dark hours of Sept. 5, 1972, as the worst day of his life, even though his work that day in the ABC studio has always been characterized as the finest performance of a man who was arguably the greatest television sports broadcaster of his generation. A day later, McKay received a telegram from CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite that read, "Dear Jim, today you honored yourself, your network and your industry." Peter Jennings, the late ABC news anchor who was working as a reporter during the '72 Games, once told the Baltimore Sun, "I've often said to folks on that day in Munich, I don't think anybody better could have been in the chair. I've never been able to imagine anybody else doing it with as much grace and intelligence and precision."

From the day the 26-year-old police reporter was plucked out of the Baltimore Evening Sun newsroom in 1947 and assigned to utter the first words ever heard on a Baltimore station in a fledging new medium called television, McKay was a professional's professional. His storied career, most of it with ABC, included coverage of 12 Olympic competitions -- from his first, for CBS, at the 1960 Rome Games, to his last, working for NBC at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.

He also spent more than 37 years as the original and continuing host of the ABC anthology series, "Wide World of Sports." McKay took the assignment in 1961 from pioneering sports producer Roone Arledge with a promise of just 20 episodes as a summer replacement series. The anthology eventually took him "spanning the globe" to every state in the union and 40 countries to cover more than a hundred different sports. ABC once estimated McKay had logged close to five million miles in the air for "Wide World."

But far more significant was the way McKay covered sports that ranged from the ridiculous -- barrel racing, demolition derby and Acapulco cliff divers -- to the sublime at during so many Olympiads, British Opens and Triple Crown horse races. There was dignity, humanity, often unbridled enthusiasm and, perhaps best of all, a story-telling approach he employed virtually every time he sat or stood in front of a camera.

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Photos courtesy of ABC and Baltimore Sun

Original Source: The Washington Post

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The Discovery Channel marks the 50th anniversary of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with “When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions”, a six-part, three-night series crafted from what a network news release describes as "NASA's own secret film vaults."

As fliers who weren't involved in, you know, bombing anything, yet were continually putting their own lives at risk, astronauts were especially attractive: Indeed, they were potentially leading the country into a post-national, interstellar future, when we would all be simply citizens of Earth and aliens would come only from other planets. Wasn't John Glenn's spacecraft called the Friendship 7?

That is the spirit here. Although "When We Left Earth" covers the entirety of NASA missions from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo, from Skylab to Hubble, this is not an in-depth history of a large, complicated and often politically charged subject but a moving-picture book of a great, sometimes hair-raising, even deadly adventure. Most of the surviving main players are here, the oldest and boldest now white-haired (if haired at all), but inspired to youthfulness by reminiscence; clearly, they were in it for the fun. And it isn't so much that the pictures illustrate the story as that the story gives the pictures context. But even forgetting the context, it's quite a show. The NASA cameramen, including the astronauts themselves, didn't just point and shoot; they worked with style and sensitivity, and there is a poetry in the images that matches the essence of its huge and elevated subject.

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Photos courtesy of NASA

Original Source: LA Times

An excerpt of "When We Left Earth", Discovery’s series on NASA’s 50 years