TDS/TCR (Thanksgiving Hiatus)

Gobble, Gobble.  Is it that time of year again?  Well, I could probably use the rest anyway though I’m happiest when I’m in my routine.  Comedy Central will have repeats.  Me?  I hate to repeat myself though I might, or I could do something else, or maybe nap (though vampire-like at this time of year I have a tendency to sleep in the daytime, work in the night time, I might not ever get home, which is incredibly dysfunctional if you have to work with people but does wonders for my solitary creativity).

For the sites we will be continuing as best we can in the usual fashion because of my firm belief that nobody needs you quite as much as they do during those periods when everything else is closed.  This weekend will see the conclusion of the 2014 Formula One season in Abu Dhabi and we will start putting up our Thanksgiving specials culminating in the Big Balloon Parade a week from today, and then whatever we can scrounge to see us through the Black Friday weekend when our dozens of readers are presumably greasing the gears of Amurrican ‘Free’ Market capitalism with their life blood and money.  Let’s not forget the money.

And that’s one thing I am thankful for.  Because of our low financial overhead I’m not perpetually in the position of coming to you as a mendicant, especially when you are sentimental and vulnerable and need that money your own damn self thank you very much.

Yeah, we’ll run ads if you want them and accept donations if that’s the kind of thing you feel you need to do to register your satisfaction with the product, but that’s not why I write.

I do it for art.

The one thing that never fails to gratify me is when you use our platform to express yourselves.  What I do is mostly structure, a wall you can hang your own canvas on.  The gift I would most like during this holiday period, the contribution that would have the greatest impact, is for you to decide that your voice is important; or at least important enough to be included here where the natives are mostly friendly (mostly) and I have set the bar so low you can hardly help but trip on it (have a nice fall).  Exceeding expectations is not optional, it’s hard to avoid.

Over the river and through the guilt a la casa de ek vamos.

Oh, you came here for the waters?  You were sadly misinformed.

Back in Black Friday

Live Free or DIE!

The Lake House is close enough to Keene that I know they’re not only famous for Pumpkin throwing riots.

The real news below.

Late Success for Latecomer to Late Night

By BILL CARTER, The New York Times

NOV. 19, 2014

“It’s too late for success to do anything to me. I’m too old. Success had its chance. It’s too late for you, success. You had your shot. You’re not going to change me at this point.”

That was a bit of a comedy riff, of course. But Mr. Wilmore was sincere about appreciating the opportunity when his new late-night show starts on Comedy Central. The start date, being announced officially on Thursday, is Jan. 19.

…

He said he was also not thrown by the pressure of limited time to get the show up and running, nor a last-minute wrinkle in its official identity. When the series was announced last May by Jon Stewart, the “Daily Show” host and Mr. Wilmore’s mentor (as well as an executive producer on the new show), the title was to be “The Minority Report With Larry Wilmore.”

…

“It was never intended to be a show only about minorities,” Mr. Wilmore said. “It’s a show about underdogs, and that happens in a lot of different forms, whether it’s race, gender, or whatever.”

Not that he didn’t muse about other possible titles. “I thought we could make it ‘The Wilmore-T Report,’ with an invisible T,” he said. ” ‘Colbert’ has had the silent T; we could have had an invisible one.”

Even without the T, connections to the departing “Colbert Report” will be extensive for the new effort. He is not only inheriting Mr. Colbert’s position on the Comedy Central schedule, he is also moving into the studio and offices that production is vacating when Mr. Colbert ends his run Dec 18.

“I’m also moving into Stephen’s house and driving his old car,” Mr. Wilmore said.

He did seriously consider the title “Meet the Rest,” because his new show is intended to be, as he put it, “a cousin of ‘Meet the Press.’ ” Though the show is still very much a work in progress, Mr. Wilmore said “The Nightly Show” would regularly feature a panel discussion: a scripted comedy version of what is seen on Sunday-morning talk. He said he would probably start each show with a comedy take on something in the news, delivered in all likelihood from a seat at a desk, the way Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert have long opened their shows.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie extoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me.

…

(L)ike almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being ‘for’ society and then ‘against’ it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase – still it’s a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn’t accept any other; that much I’ve learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.

When last we saw him Eddie Redmayne was playing Marius Pontmercy (who married Cosette and poisoned her mind against Jean Valjean who raised her like a daughter, introduced her to Marius, and oh, by the way, saved his fucking life in the 1832 June Rebellion).

He’ll be on to talk about his role in The Theory of Everything.

Hey, what do you know?  Jon Stewart is visiting Stephen tonight.  Do you think they’ll talk more about Rosewater or Stephen’s imminent departure?

“My greatest joy on the show was making Stephen Colbert laugh”: Highlights from Jon Stewart’s Reddit AMA

Anna Silman, Salon

Friday, Nov 14, 2014 03:30 PM EST

Stephen smells like – it’s a cross between –

Squints into distance

Persimmons and a tattered copy of THE HOBBIT.