Stephen Colbert returned from his break and used two segments to make fun of the media fuss over the announcement that Hillary Clinton’s daughter is pregnant. Colbert mugs a lot for the camera but in these segments he outdid himself. I was really impressed at how flexible his face is. Watch especially at the 3:24 mark on the first clip and the 1:00 mark on the second.
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Today is reportedly the day when William Shakespeare was born 450 years ago in 1564. There is no actual record of his birth date but he was baptized on April 26th and this makes people think that today was the likely day, which also happens to be the day he died in 1616.
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The success of the ACA in enrolling people has pretty much unhinged the GOP who had clearly thought that the botched rollout meant that the numbers would be way below the original target. This cartoon pretty much captures their reaction.
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Bob Mankoff is the long-time cartoon editor of the New Yorker magazine, notorious for the quirky and sometime inscrutable nature of its humor. In this TED talk, he tries to explain what kind of cartoon he thinks fits within the framework of that magazine. Analyzing humor and what makes people laugh is a decidedly difficult proposition but it is a little easier to do with cartoons and Mankoff gives a highly entertaining effort.
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The issue of college athletes being recognized as employees and having the right to unionize has resulted in a lot of information coming out about them. I had not realized that athletes at those universities that have big sports programs have to practice and watch game films and the like for fifty or more hours per week. That is shocking because that would leave them hardly any time to attend classes, let alone study for them. No wonder that this breeds the practice of bogus classes that they sign up for in order to maintain their academic standing.
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Aaron Sorkin is the creator of popular shows such as The West Wing and The Newsroom that have his signature style such as the walk-talk in which characters in positions of importance are moving around and talking over each other at times of crisis, behaving with a great sense of urgency, mixing the personal with business, interspersed with somewhat preachy messages and moralizing.
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Religious people are upset that their views on creation are not being given sufficient deference in the TV series Cosmos and that the shows promote (oh, the horror!) evolution. The website Funny or Die has got hold of an alternative show that gives their side of the story. As you can see, the Biblical version of creation is pretty succinct.
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Al Madrigal of The Daily Show looked at how the Spanish language media promoted the Affordable Care Act to encourage people to sign up and how that was covered by Fox News.
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The Daily Show chronicles the continuing decline of Congress into a body that seems to be purely becoming a punching bag for comedians, such as producing over-the-top campaign ads
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Sex sells. That is something that the advertising agencies discovered a long time ago. So it should not be surprising that TV channels should want to use sex to gain audiences, especially during the periods when ratings are being calculated. But at the same time, news stations tend to have older viewers who, at least on the surface, like to think of themselves as upholders of old-fashioned morality. Thus has emerged one of the most obvious media tricks to have your cake and eat it, and that is to have an ‘in-depth’ news story closely examining some aspect of sex while deploring it.
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