John Oliver Archives - Page 11 of 18

November rambling #2: The Road to Unfreedom

‘Make the Gospel great again’

Dunn lumber sign NATIONAL CLIMATE ASSESSMENT (it ain’t good)

Lies, damn lies and post-truth

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver – Authoritarianism and the Weekly Sift – From Russia to Ukraine to Brexit to Trump: The Road to Unfreedom

Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination

How the Generals Are Routing the Policy Wonks at the Pentagon

With Statement Equal Parts ‘Dangerous’ and ‘Imbecilic,’ He Smears Khashoggi and Vows to Back Murderous Saudis

Billboard featuring DJT, ‘Make the Gospel great again,’ Bible verse is taken down in Missouri

The Difference Between ‘Patriotism’ and ‘Nationalism’

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner Won’t Invite a Comedian Next Year

The Nancy Pelosi Problem – the most effective congressional leader of modern times—and, not coincidentally, the most vilified

Hazing, humiliation, terror: Women who work in federal prisons are harassed by both inmates and guards; those who complain are ‘blackballed’

Ken Screven: Breaking Stereotypes | Out in Albany

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Already Breaking the Rules

West Virginia Democrat announces 2020 presidential bid

Walter Ayres: The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) approved a pastoral letter against racism – Open Wide Your Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love

Stephen Colbert On How He Returned To Catholicism After Being An Atheist

Coffin Clubs New Zealand

For Young Adults, Cohabitation Is Up, Marriage Is Down

Forgotten your keys again? It’s not as bad as you think; it could be good for your brain

Color Meaning, Symbolism, And Psychology: What Do Different Colors Mean

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Is Incomplete — There’s a Final, Forgotten Stage

The intraocular option

HAIRMERGENCY!

Noun. alexiteric (plural alexiterics) (medicine) A preservative against infectious diseases. A preservative against the effects of poison. (HT, Dan)

Bill Gates is obsessed with redesigning the world’s toilets

Dustbury turns 65 and thinks he’s Sinatra

SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg has died at age 57 of ALS

Tributes to the late magician Ricky Jay

RIP William Goldman the Oscar-winning screenwriter who penned classics such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, and The Princess Bride

Greg Burgas: Some more olde-tymey movies I’ve had the chance to watch or re-watch recently

Kelly Sedinger: Prologue to his forthcoming supernatural thriller, The Chilling Killing Wind

CGC 9.2 Overstreet #1 Hits $9K at Heritage

Cookie Monster Week: The proper way to eat a cookie and Gets therapy and How to make an apple pie

Subway Break Dancers, Clad in Armor, Go Medieval at the Met Museum

Internet Wading: Numbers, words, food, and art

Oven Rack Placement for the Best Baking Results

Now I Know: Why Do Leaves Fall from Trees? and Why Did the Chickens Cross Under the Highway? and How to Become Half a Prince and 1-916-CALL-TURK

Arthur does a meme I tagged him on

MUSIC

Coverville 1239: The Joni Mitchell Cover Story III

Roy Clark: I Never Picked Cotton and 12th Street Rag and Yesterday When I Was Young and Malagueña from The Odd Couple

Roman Carnival overture – Berlioz

YOU MAKE MY DREAMS Aubrey Logan feat. LaVance Colley – Hall & Oates

How Eric Idle wrote Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

November rambling – We are not the enemy

Tips on how to endure the 18+ hour flight

Cease fire Sooner or later, tyrants are always abandoned by their followers

The American civil war didn’t end, and we have a Confederate president

The First Family of Fraud

Fox and Friends: If the Media Doesn’t Want to Be Called ‘The Enemy’They Should Report the Story How He Wants

Amy Biancolli: We are not the enemy

John Oliver: Migrant Family Separation and Drain the Swamp

Why Is It So Hard to Vote in America? Voter turnout lags in the world’s most powerful democracy? and Cost of Voting in the American States

A Legislative Agenda for House Democrats

What Republicans fear most of all

A man who survived a mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017 was among those killed in the 2018 mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, CA

There’s very little known about the thousands of victims who survive deadly shootings

Tammy Marshall – My Breast Implants Almost Killed Me – The Truth About BII

The US just elected 9 new scientists to Congress

The Ancestor Hunt: Historical Jewish American Newspapers Online

Why are the Spanish living so long?

Ken Levine interviews media consultant, Valerie Geller – Tell the truth, make it matter, never be boring: Learn the keys to successful communication

Ntozake Shange, Who Wrote ‘For Colored Girls,’ Is Dead at 70

Former San Francisco Giants first baseman Willie McCovey’s presence was one of a kind

In Conversation: Alex Trebek The Jeopardy! icon on retirement, his legacy, and why knowledge matters

Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), a former Navy SEAL, representative-elect: SNL mocked my appearance; here’s why I didn’t demand an apology

Jimmy Kimmel: Trumpy bear

John Boehner: Washington Needs to Legalize Cannabis – NOW, he says it

The Crazy Contentious History Of Taco Tuesday

Scott McCartney, travel writer for WSJ, taking world’s longest flight — Newark to Singapore; tips on how to endure the 18+ hour flight

The cheapest ways to get to the center of Manhattan from the three airports that serve the Big Apple

Esquire Fiction: Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah – Annual holiday super sale? Or zombie apocalypse?

Video tour from the forties Los Angeles side-by-side with the same route in 2016

It slices, it dices, and it’s older than me

This image has exactly 12 dots, but it’s impossible to see them all at once

Now I Know: The Problem With Anonymous Lottery Winners and The Cat’s Meow, Instrumentalized

Fabulous German words with no English equivalent

MUSIC

Take the A Train – Roy Clark And Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown; Roy Clark, country guitar virtuoso, ‘Hee Haw’ star, dies at 85

Above The Law – The O’Jays

BE A DJ: Kathy Buckley – 10/30/18 (WDST, Woodstock, NY)

Snippets of Hey Red! B/W We’re Not Going Steady – Herb London on Buzz Records; London, Conservative Thought Leader and occasional political candidate in New York State, died at 79. (HT to Dustbury)

Solid Rock is now a cultural part of Australian music history

Alexander Borodin’s String Quartet No 1, performed by the Moscow String Quartet

Recording of a warning chime recorded by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra – In all, Lincoln commissioned six different non-critical warning chimes from the orchestra, covering 25 vehicle functions

Careless Whisper – Train, ft. Kenny G

Happiness is just around the bend – Brian Auger

Anything You Can Do – Voctave

9,999,999 Tears – Dickie Lee

Alice Cooper in a Dodge commercial

October rambling #2: Threat of Tribalism

Climate change: The Media is Failing Us and Billionaires Are the Leading Cause

Triumph of the strongman has worrying echoes of the Thirties

Why America Didn’t See Fascism Coming

More Americans Supported Hitler Than You May Think

John Oliver Takes Down Saudi Dictatorship, In Detail

The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Tyranny or Revolution

This Is What Living on Minimum Wage Looks Like

This is why the Founders banned emoluments

Here’s why he threatened to pull out of a 144-year-old postal treaty

‘It Doesn’t Matter What He Says We’ll Support It’: His Fans Profess Cult-Like Love

Vlogbrothers: The Rigged Election

Republican Voter Suppression Efforts Are Targeting Minorities, Journalist Says (nothing new)

Weekly Sift: 12 Things to Remember Before You Vote and Souls in Darkness

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: State Attorneys General (at 10:00)

Kavanaugh proves one of the nine justices is not like the others

Pregnancy discrimination’s toll: Women in strenuous jobs miscarried after employers denied requests for light duty

The Threat of Tribalism – The Constitution once united a diverse country under a banner of ideas, but partisanship has turned Americans against one another—and against the principles enshrined in our founding document

Melania, we have a Be Best emergency

Guy’s $650 World Series Ticket Stolen by Scammer Through Instagram Photo

How a Ragtag Group of Oregon Locals Took on the Biggest Chemical Companies in the World — and Won

The Most Googled Medical Symptoms by State

James Karen, R.I.P.

Eugene Peterson, author of ‘The Message’ and pastor to other pastors, dies at age 85

A nice remembrance of Neil Simon that was assembled upon his recent passing

Robert S Hoffman The big chill has broken our circle

The heart-busting story of Igor Vovkovinskiy, one of the tallest men in the world

Spectrum customer service

Julia Louis-Dreyfus receives Mark Twain Prize

Speeding up sitcoms

Jimmie Walker on the “Good Times” cast – TelevisionAcademy.com/Interviews

Back Machine stops in 1969

Nik Durga’s new blog, My Impression Now. “I’m coming back to blogging because it trains me to write more than a few pithy sentences”

A sin, Arthur! Blogging about blogging

More meta: Internet Wading: A bit of it

PostSecret Ted Talk

SEEN: Albany Public Library Foundation’s Literary Legends Gala 2018

Now I Know: The “Faithful Employee” Award Which Had the Opposite Effect and Until Death Does the Hangman Part and The Battle over The Collect Call and Why We Park on Driveways and Drive on Parkways and The Cell Phone Contract Killer

Dancing robot dog is too creepy

MUSIC

A Scary Time

‘Swamp Rock’ Master Tony Joe White Has Died At 75; Polk Salad Annie

Can’t Run But – Paul Simon, Saturday Night Live, 13 Oct 2018

Steel Here- Tisha Campbell-Martin (powerful backstory)

While My Guitar Gently Weeps – the Beatles (Acoustic Version, Take 2)

English singer Kathy Kirby (1938-2011)

Hard Times Come Again No More – Mavis Staples

I Need To Be Loved – Keiko Togi, Carpenters

POP Chamber String Orchestra

Poke at The Pope – Donovan

I’ll Follow the Sun – The MonaLisa Twins

Coverville 1237: The Radiohead Cover Story IV and Coverville 1238: The Duran Duran Cover Story IV

The Wheels on the Bus – Mad Donna, and Leo Moracchiol

The oddly controversial cover: T Ko Ko Korina -Ahad Raza Mir & Momina Mustehsan

K-Chuck Radio: Seamless segues

Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys – Sabrina Lentini

WatchMojo.com’s 10 Worst #1 Songs on the Billboard Hot 100; I own four of them

Music as Medicine

The Copyright of Spring

September rambling #2: Land of Confusion

Ex-Beatle Lands No. 1 Album for First Time in 36 Years

Your shadow The republic for which it stands

The NRA’s Catch-22 for Black Men Shot by Police

US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos Demands Taxpayer Money For Religious Schools

The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck

10 Years After: The Post-Recovery Economy

Stephen Colbert Made DJT’s Hurricane Response Into A Children’s Book

Sexual assault survivors tell ‘why I didn’t report’

Stop Making Victims of Sexual Assault into Martyrs for Virginity

We Need to Rethink Our Ideas About Aging

The Plot to Subvert an Election – Unraveling the Russia Story So Far

China is building a digital dictatorship to exert control over its 1.4 billion citizens. For some, ‘social credit’ will bring privileges — for others, punishment

John Oliver: Facebook’s global expansion has been linked to political turmoil overseas, so maybe their ads should focus less on how they “connect the world” and more on why connecting people isn’t always the best idea.

Doug Ford Cancelled Ontario’s Basic Income Pilot Experiment Because It Was Working

How Golf Digest helped free a golf-course artist imprisoned 27 years for a murder he didn’t commit

Arizona’s Gosar family asks voters NOT to re-elect their brother to Congress

Noor Inayat Khan, one of the bravest women of World War II

RIP Thad Mumford, MASH writer and former Yankees batboy

R.I.P. Norm Breyfogle, 1960-2018, Batman artist

Chevy Chase can’t change

The 2018 Winners of the Ig(R) Nobel Prize

You Can’t See ‘Round Corners: The Vietnam War as a rare TV miniseries

Two People with Paralysis Walk Again Using an Implanted Device

In Saratoga Springs, NY! This Enormous Warehouse Of Used Books In New York Will Be Your New Favorite Destination

Interview with Dick Van Dyke at 2017 Salt Lake City Comic-Con (30 min)

What’s coming to Broadway in the coming months

Premiere night of The Minor League Mecca, the Albany Patroons documentary

The million-dollar brownstone that no one owned

Bruef slide show on the history of the Horn & Hardart Automats

Now I Know: Why the Big Bad Wolf Wouldn’t be a Good Baseball Player and Why You Shouldn’t Pass Gas Near a West Virginia Police Office and When Flying First Class Isn’t Good Enough and How Long It Takes to Find a Needle in a Haystack

The history of cookies as explained by the world’s foremost authority on the subject

Would-be robber loses trousers

MUSIC

Fugue on “Donald Trump is a wanker” based on Seven-Man Army – White Stripes. Plus So You Want to Write a Fugue? – Glenn Gould

René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War – Paul Simon (Live from Copenhagen); Feeling Lost with Paul Simon One Last Time

Land of Confusion – Hidden Citizens

Africa -Weezer (starring Weird Al Yankovic)

Estancia, by a composer named Alberto Ginastera

Good Times – Pheobe Snow

Ravel Left Hand Piano Concerto played by Yuja Wang

Overture to The Jolly Robbers -von Suppé

Bonehemian Rhapsody – 28-Trombone Collaboration! (from ITF 2018!)

Gangsta’s Paradise – Jain

Marry An Ugly Woman – Rafael de Leon (Roaring Lion)

Weekend Diversion: Coldplay

How big was Helen Shapiro? The Beatles opened for her in 1963

Paul McCartney: Lands No. 1 Album for First Time in 36 Years and Answers the Web’s Most Searched Questions and Talks to Howard Stern and at the Kennedy Center Honors (2012)

Jefferson Airplane Co-Founder Marty Balin Dead at 76

August rambling #2: Fibonacci sequence music

Robert Mueller’s Indictment Song

A friend wrote: “Suddenly, it all makes perfect sense to me. Tubby all grown up=?”

Boston Globe, 22 August 2018: “It’s hard to come up with a satisfactory explanation that doesn’t end up with ‘because he got his hand caught in the cookie jar.'”

The drift towards autocracy continues

“That’s Obstruction of Justice”

How the National Enquirer helped DJT’s fixer keep scandals off the front page

‘Like a State Dinner’: Huge White House Event Honoring Evangelical Christians and he lied to them that he got rid of a law

The 47-page indictment against California Congressman Duncan Hunter and his wife Margaret details a shocking list of improper uses of campaign funds and financial mismanagement. The Hunters are accused of spending $250,000 of campaign funds on expenses that no reasonable person would believe were legitimate campaign expenditures

Why peace doesn’t last without women

Trade: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver – Jared is to blame

Commission on State Fragility, Growth and Development

Another deadly pandemic is coming — and the United States is not ready

Cancer: It’s Not Always What You Eat, But When You Eat It

Climate change will be deadlier, more destructive and costlier for California than previously believed, state warns

Life After Quitting; Five people on addiction, in their own words

America Soured on My Multiracial Family

Elizabeth Warren stakes out her message

Court Backs Activists Who Feed Homeless

The interwoven systems that shape our destiny even though we rarely pause to think about them

TV debate between William F. Buckley and Groucho Marx

When a Stranger Decides to Destroy Your Life

While We Sleep, Our Mind Goes on an Amazing Journey

Meet The People Who Spend Their Free Time Removing Fake Accounts From Facebook

Ken Levine interviews Peri Gilpin of Frasier, Part 1 and Part 2

A mouse walks into a bar

Jaquandor geeks out

Pulp Empire – “A Tarantino inspired Star Wars mashup and remix”

The insidious lure of nostalgia

Fonts of knowledge

Who needs the Kwik-E-Mart?

Snapping dry spaghetti into just two pieces

Mean Hetty Green

Scrambled eggs in a microwave

Now I Know: Why Bird Poop is White

MUSIC

Music from the Fibonacci sequence

Robert Mueller’s Indictment Song -James Corden

René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War – Paul Simon (2018)

The Cedar and the Palm,”symphonic picture” Vasily Kalinnikov

Bobaflex – Hey You (Pink Floyd cover)

SEUNGRI – ‘WHERE R U FROM (Feat. MINO)’

A Pentatonix kind of day

Kaze no Torimichi (The Path of Wind) from From My Neighbor Totoro – Joe Hisaishi, adapted for chamber performance

Coverville 1229: The Madonna Cover Story III

The Mamas and the Papas “If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears”

overture to Les Horaces – Antonio Salieri

Inspecta – Jain

The evolution of Dragon’s “Young Years”

Do songs of the summer sound the same?

Inductee insights: Moody Blues

Dirty Prank Calls, Done For $250,000

Newly Released FBI Files Expose Red-Baiting of Woody Guthrie