Once again I doff the Dog Rat tupe to Denro for finding something that’s blog worthy. It also has a personal connection for both of us. We took courses at Westfield State that were taught by Phil Shepardson.
I knew Phil well. It was thanks to him that I started working in radio. Phil hosted a TV quiz show, called As Schools Match Wits. I have to laugh, hearing and seeing Shepardson in these video clips. Yep, there he is, just as I remember him.
I wasn’t kidding about taking some days off. I just didn’t say whether or not they’d all be consecutive. 😉
The first time I posted something about Stephen Colbert was two weeks after starting this weblog,* during the second term of George W. Bush’s presidency. What an aggravating, time consuming struggle it was back then, capturing video and getting it to play online!
How long ago was that? For a reference, three weeks later, Google announced its intention to buy YouTube. Steve Jobs was four months away from introducing the iPhone.
Here we are today, twenty years later, and Colbert is in the crosshairs of the petty, childish, vindictive, and incompetent yet dangerous, President of the United States. Bush was only one of those pejoratives. Stephen is righteously pissed off, and he has every reason to be.
Here is the interview Colbert wasn’t allowed to air on broadcast television.
Everyone, myself included, underestimated Trump’s ability to succeed as a con man. Obama most of all, as Peter Baker writes about in one of his typically compelling and readable reports.
* dograt.com had been live since 2002, with a set of static web pages. They were written with Microsoft Front Page, along with some HTML manual editing.
A recent picture of artist Colleen Doran. Colleen is a nominee for this year’s Eisner Awards:
https://www.comic-con.org/awards/eisner-awards/
I have a 2004 photo Denro took of me meeting Colleen for the first time. I’ll try to find it. Here she is in a Zoom call with Jamar Nicholas of the National Cartoonists Society.
With Friday the 13th behind us, here’s to Valentine’s Day.
Have some red velvet cupcakes.
I’m freeing my mind from blogging for a couple of days.
Tonight’s PBS News Hour ended with this segment about Boston’s singular significance in the Revolutionary War. Then it “goes woke” with a discussion of another revolt; the desegregation busing crisis of fifty years ago.
