Tom McMahon

Volkwagen Thing On The Price Is Right, Circa 1973

Volkwagen Thing On The Price Is Right, Circa 1973

R.I.P. Billy Mays

R.I.P. Billy Mays

When Someone Famous Dies

When Someone Famous Dies

So What If That Pervert David Letterman Had Told That Joke About One Of The Obama Kids? Do You Really Think He'd Still Be On The Air?

So What If That Pervert David Letterman Had Told That Joke About One Of The Obama Kids? Do You Really Think He'd Still Be On The Air?

David Letterman, Beta Male

An excerpt from Maggie's Farm:

Letterman's congenital problem manifested itself in spades. He is a Beta male in an industry filled with Beta males. Even the industry's a Beta. He's not even an entertainer -- his job is to talk to and about entertainers. They say politics is show-business for ugly people, and the similarities are manifest. Politics is often home to Beta males that try to cut in front of the big men on life's campus by the side door. Same deal. That's why they get along famously.

That's why men like Letterman always end up groping the help. All the Beta males do this. Look at John Edwards, Bill Clinton, Bob Packwood, Newt Gingrich... this will grow monotonous. They're lame, and know it, and so they try to get themselves in a position of power over the men they used to resent, and the women they never had a shot at. But the men are all dorks of one sort or another, and the women they never had a shot at are still out of their range. They can lord it over whatever women are handy, but eventually find that they are in the thrall of someone as defective as they are.

So Letterman sees Sarah Palin, and he sees red. He sees every real woman he sat next to in English class that wouldn't give him a second look. He sees her with a decidely Alpha male, everything he's not. It's Groundhog Day, and even though he's on the high side of sixty he's still the pimply adolescent. But it's always been Bizarro Groundhog Day for David Letterman. He thought he could take Johnny Carson's place by being the anti-Carson --moody, snarky, pretending to be ambivalent about everything and keying the cool kids' Camaros in the intellectual high school parking lot before taking the bus.

(via Joe Sherlock)

Why David Letterman Needs To Go

From David St. Lawrence:

David Letterman has lost all value as an entertainer.

He has made the long descent from his early wise-cracking humor to making lewd remarks about 14-year Willow Palin.

This was not an off-the-cuff remark. It was a carefully scripted and rehearsed part of the Letterman show on CBS.

His degraded attempts to throw up a smokescreen afterward show his lack of human decency.

Firms like Olive Garden, Mars Candy, and Kelloggs have no place supporting the leering comments from this long past sell-date TV figure. Great positioning guys! Corporate America has enough on its hands without supporting sexual assault on minors.

CBS must be looking at new ways to boost ratings. What will they think of next?

Yeah, I heard his second "apology". Insincere and smarmy, just like the man himself.

An Actor's Life

• Noel Neill on her role as Lois Lane and Jack Larson's as Jimmy Olsen on "Adventures of Superman" (1952)]: "We spent most of our time bound, gagged, and waiting for the bomb to go off."  

V Returns

V Returns

Hope Summers: Mayberry's Baby

Hope Summers: Mayberry's Baby

Jessamine Milner: The Foul-Talking, Pie-Baking Old Lady from Blazing Saddles Who Was Really Born in the Wild Wild West

Jessamine Milner: The Foul-Talking, Pie-Baking Old Lady from Blazing Saddles Who Was Really Born in the Wild Wild West

Jessamine Milner was born in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1894 and didn't start acting until 1972. There's not much about her on Ye Olde Internet, but I did find this heartfelt praise for her role in Sybil:

This was a deeply harrowing movie to watch, and unbelievably so when it came out in 1976. A small child in the grip of her homicidally insane mother, who inflicted sadistic torture on her, while her ineffective husband looked the other way when the signs of abuse were obvious.

There's a small performance in this movie that haunted me more than almost anything else in the film; the part of the grandmother, played by Jessamine Milner, who was as much a victim and prisoner in the home of her psychotic daughter as Sybil was. The difference was she was aware of the extent of her daughter's insanity.

What must it be like to be a prisoner in your own adult child's home, knowing she is inflicting abuse on your grandchild and will do the same to you if you speak? That kind of helplessness must be sheer hell to live with. She could have told her son-in-law or the police at any time (if she was able to get out of the house), but would they have done anything? Or turned a blind eye, considering the time?

Jessamine Milner's performance was so honest and affecting, it stands out as one of the most painful parts of the film, and she is in only two minutes of it! She was born in 1894, and was almost 80 when she made the film. She apparently was in her mid-seventies when she went into film! She's a mystery, and other than her few TV appearances in the late 70s, nothing apparently is known about her. However, she deserves a mention somewhere because of her performance in this difficult to watch film.