Tag: Stephen Colbert

Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette

Adapted from Rant of the Week from The Stars hollow Gazette

Adapted from Rant of the Week from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Stephen Colbert hosted his last “The Colbert Report” on December 18. His first “The Word” was “Truthiness” which in 2006 became Merriam Webster’s “Word of the Year.”

As expected, there were a few surprises in store for us as we pored through your submissions for our first Word of the Year online survey. Either the vast majority of you out there in the Merriam-Webster online community are big fans of The Colbert Report, or Time Magazine was right on target when it honored the show’s host Stephen Colbert earlier this year as one of the most influential people of 2006. By an overwhelming 5 to 1 majority vote, our visitors have awarded top honors to a word Colbert first introduced on “The Word” segment of his debut broadcast on Comedy Central back in October 2005. Soon after, this word was chosen as the 16th annual Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society, and defined by them as “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.”

Beauty Is Truthiness, Truthiness Beauty …

… that is all ye know on earth, and if ye need to know anything else, Stephen Colbert, 42, will tell ye what to think. On Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report (silent t, both words), he plays a vain, blustery political pundit, and neither politics nor punditry emerges unscathed. In the first episode, he coined the term truthiness to embody his belief that facts are far less important than what you want to be true. “You don’t look up truthiness in a book,” he declared. “You look it up in your gut.”

Truthiness resonated beyond Colbert’s satire in an era of phony memoirs and reality TV. And to people who feel the Administration chooses gut (and spin) over facts, his acerbic speech “praising” the President at the White House correspondents’ dinner became pop legend. Citing Bush’s cratering job-approval rating, the in-character Colbert argued, “Does that not also logically mean that 68% of Americans approve of the job he’s not doing?” Whatever you’re doing, or not doing, Mr. Colbert, keep it up.

So to honor Stephen’s departure from Comedy Central and the end of “The Colbert Report”, our “Rant of the Week” presents his first and last words.

Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette

Adapted from Rant of the Week at Stars hollow Gazette

Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette

Bill O’Reilly’s Plan To Defeat Islamic State: A 25,000-Person Mercenary Force

U.S. Naval War College Professor Tells O’Reilly: “This Is A Terrible Idea, Not Just As A Practical Matter But As A Moral Matter”

Adapted from Rant of the Week st The Stars Hollow Gazette

Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette

Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette

Sometimes satire fails.  Even if you are Stephen Colbert, satire can fail.  

Satire is a genre of literature, and sometimes graphic and performing arts, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, corporations, government or society itself, into improvement.

When Colbert decided to use his inimitable charm to take on the subject of transgender seniors gaining the possibility of Medicare coverage of gender confirmation surgery, he neglected the fact that the majority of his audience are opposed to that coverage.

The assumption that all liberals would support transgender-inclusive healthcare ignores reality.  Prachi Gupta at Salon addresses the issue.

Even more disturbing than the idea of Nana and Pee-Pop playing Mr. Potatohead downtown is that it violates the tacit agreement we have reached with the transgender community,  I agree to be totally cool with it – which I clearly am [footage of his interview with trans activist Janet Mock], which Time Magazine clearly is, and which all the people lobbying for this transgendered woman [Carmen Carrera] to be a Victoria’s Secret model clearly are – as long as you are hot.  But now you want me to accept unattractive transgender people?  Where does it end?  Will I have to accept unattractive non-transgender people?  What am I made of?  Humanity?

–Stephen Colbert

Way back when I read Jane Goodall’s books, I came across a picture of a chimp leaning back on a tree, like a migrant worker at lunch, staring into the distant trees.  It was captioned something like, “Evered in the forest.”  At the time, I mistakenly read “evered” as an adverb, e.g., as “perpetually,” a chimp contemplating the forest until the end of time.   I loved that caption, and still do.  It wasn’t until  later that I discovered that Evered is an actual name, like Burt or Ernie, that she applied.

Anywho, I just noticed Goodall on the Colbert Report (the greatest television presence ever?), and she killed on the topics of forests and chimps.  It’s rare to see someone wittier than Colbert (even though he often boxes with kid gloves to midwife his points via his character.  In that respect, his talents are wildly exceptional.  She was more than up to the task, and his kid gloves got smoked, to his appreciative surprise.).  

http://thecolbertreport.cc.com…

Both the chimps (our nearest relatives) and forests are going away, which doesn’t  sound good for us.  What? Are we gonna write an app that makes it all okay?  No, Sir.  No, Ma’am.  At that point we’re cooked.

I’ve got a buddy at Tufts who teaches AI (and co-teaches with Daniel Dennett, prolly the world’s most famous living philosopher).  They are dreaming of post-organic evolution, but entire sabbaticals get wasted on  starting page-one of their books.   True story.

They are about the smartest people available, and I’ve been in flagship institutions.