Category: Stephen Colbert

I was, for some years, a big fan of Randy Newman.  My interest started with hearing his then-new album Sail Away in high school.  My favorite song from the record was Political Science.  I loved it so much I used the closing lyric as my high school yearbook quote.  If you click here you can listen to the song, as taken from the original piece of plastic that I listened to a thousand times, so many years ago.  Spring of my senior year in high school I was ecstatic when it was announced that Newman would be appearing at Symphony Hall in Boston.  I took a train into the city and bought tickets at the box office for myself and my girlfriend, and it was a very memorable show.

This week, Newman will be appearing at Carnegie Hall.  Last night, Newman appeared on The Colbert Report to promote the concert.  Washington politics being what they presently are, I think Political Science is more timely than it was 34 years ago.  Here’s the video of Newman performing the song.

Player problem?  Click here.

Here’s a cropped screen shot taken from the video clip of last night’s Colbert Report.  This is how the image quality should look on your computer, too, when played with the embedded controls; i.e., scaled up smoothly by the media player from 320×240 pixels, without jaggies.  Just checking!  If you launch it from the “player problem” link it’ll be in its original, smaller size.

Here’s a segment Stephen Colbert had last night on terrorism and racial profiling, which is now being labeled ‘behavioral’ profiling.  The first part highlights Colbert’s superb comic acting skills.

I remember how immediately after the Oklahoma City bombing the Boston radio talk show wing-nut Howie Carr declared it to have been the work of Islamic terrorists.  By chance, a few months later I came across Carr making an appearance at a New Hampshire mall.  I was going to say something to him about Timothy McVeigh not looking especially like a typical Islamic terrorist, but I had my son with me, and he was only 3 then, so I thought better of it.

Click here

Oh, dear.  Two Colbert clips in a row.  Well, it’s too late now…

Here is Colbert interviewing NY Times columnist Frank Rich two nights ago.

Click here

You don’t have to know what Stephen Colbert’s “Green Screen Challenge” is to enjoy this great video clip from last night’s show.  I did a quick search of YouTube and don’t see it posted yet, but plenty of past entries are available there.  Search for something like ‘colbert green jedi’.

Click here

Somehow, I totally missed the introduction of Stephen Colbert’s Alpha Squad 7, the New Tek Jansen Adventure back in August. Colbert is obviously a comics and cartoon fan, and he was a writer for Robert Smigel’s TV Funhouse, so I’m not surprised he’s doing this. Here is part 2. Part 1 is undoubtedly available on YouTube.

EDIT: Let’s have a little fun with this. Somebody has posted this video on YouTube, although without the teaser that I included. I’m going to scale my embedded video up to 425 pixels across to match YouTube’s, and embed that one here. You can compare and judge who did the better job of capturing the video. Don’t use an old Windows Media Player, like version 7, because it’ll look awfully jaggy, compared to YouTube’s Flash player.

EDIT P.S. The YouTube video has been replaced with my own upload. This is as good as it gets after YouTube has processed something. The preview still frame is nice, and if there’s a way to do that with Media Player I’ll find it.