Reader Tips

Reader Tips 48 Comments

Years ago it was common for comedians and comedic actors to portray stereotyped ethnic characters for laughs. Buddy Hackett’s surly Chinese waiter (“Your brother’s a liar!”) was a standout, as was Peter Sellers’ guileless Hrundi V. Bakshi in Blake Edwards’ comedy film The Party. Tonight’s featured amusement en route to the Tips is a comedy skit about a laconic, hapless Mexican-American who has been chosen – ordered – to be the first man in space. From a 1960 recording, here’s actor/comedian Bill Dana as Jose Jimenez the Astronaut.
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48 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. How very un-European of them:
    “Irish homeowners can now legally use guns to defend themselves if their homes are attacked under new legislation.
    “The new home defense bill has moved the balance of rights back to the house owner if his home is broken into ‘where it should always have been’, say top Irish police.
    “The police association of superintendents and inspectors, the AGSI, stated that ‘the current situation, which legally demands a house owner retreat from an intruder, was intolerable.'”

  3. Tucker Carlson, on the JournoList issue:
    “We’re not contesting the right of anyone, journalist or not, to have political opinions. (I, for one, have made a pretty good living expressing mine.) What we object to is partisanship, which is by its nature dishonest, a species of intellectual corruption. Again and again, we discovered members of Journolist working to coordinate talking points on behalf of Democratic politicians, principally Barack Obama. That is not journalism, and those who engage in it are not journalists. They should stop pretending to be. The news organizations they work for should stop pretending, too.”
    (…)
    “One final note: Editing this series has been something of a depressing experience for me. I’ve been in journalism my entire adult life, and have often defended it against fellow conservatives who claim the news business is fundamentally corrupt. It’s harder to make that defense now.”

  4. My God, EBD, you keep digging up these old flashbacks. Jose Jimenez. Oh, for the days when political correctness made it impossible to have a good laugh. People thought it was funny because it was….well, you know, funny. And Jose Jimenez was funny.

  5. The Tucker Carlson editorial referenced by EBD is well worth reading. Here’s another great snippet:
    “Gather 400 lefty reporters and academics on one listserv and it turns out you wind up with a strikingly high concentration of bitchiness. Shocking amounts, actually.”
    “Plus, a lot of the material on Journolist is actually pretty banal. In addition to being partisan hacks, a lot of these guys turn out to be pedestrian thinkers. Disappointing.”

  7. I wanna know!!! Were there Canadian journalists working in the US who subscribed to that listserv, and if so, what were they doing while this was going on.

  8. From today’s The Real Cuba. http://www.therealcuba.com/
    “According to the Colombian ambassador to the OAS, his government has confiscated several new computers from FARC terrorists, that have information “much more important” than what was found in the computers of slain guerrilla leader Raúl Reyes. According to Ambassador Hoyos, the information “shows that officials of the Venezuelan government are involved with the FARC terrorists.”
    Hugo has sent the Colombian Ambassador back to Bogota, and is sending troops to the border. (again).
    There is no mention of what the Colombian government has up their sleeve still, Alvaro Uribe has another month of presidency remaining, and he has always carefully metered out his secrets, always to use them as a means of negotiation. I wouldn’t want to play poker across from him.

  9. One for the Captain:
    http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/22/pf/college/highest_paying_college_majors/index.htm?hpt=T2
    While mid-career salaries fell 1.5% overall between 2009 and 2010, engineers, scientists and mathematicians continued to rake in the big bucks, as well as students who graduated from Ivy League schools.
    “Our society values something practical — that’s why poetry isn’t popping up on the top of the list,” said Al Lee, director of quantitative analysis at PayScale. “As in the past, engineering and [similar] fields with a strong math component plus a physical world component remain on the top, with lots of money to be made in these fields.”
    I guess we could enter this one into the journal of the blatantly obvious….

  10. Why shouldn’t homeowners protect themselves?
    Hack writers are deluding themselves if they think they are above using stereotypes or idealised characters? Do you mean to tell me “Little Mosque on the Prairie” is a realistic depiction of western Canadian society?
    My point is we have changed that much. We just think we have.

  12. Thanks CJ. It’s fixed now. I must have got skulled by a piece of hail or something…
    Ann Coulter:
    “As we now know from the Journolist list-serv, where hundreds of liberal journalists chat with one another, and which was leaked to Daily Caller this week, journalists cry ‘racism’ whenever they need to distract from bad news for Obama. (Ironically, this story did not make headlines.)
    “When the Rev. Jeremiah Wright scandal broke during the 2008 campaign, the first response of Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent was to demand that they start randomly picking conservatives — ‘Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.’
    “Ackerman, frequent guest on MSNBC’s ‘Rachel Maddow Show,’ continued on Journolist: ‘What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.'”

  17. A) chip posted this @3:06 on the thread about the bear with its head stuck in the pickle jar:
    Not enough reporters to do basic reporting. From a Reuters story:
    http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66K6JN20100721
    ” Images such as Obama with a bone through his nose and the White House with a lawn full of watermelons are often displayed at Tea Party rallies.”
    Kind of like saying Canadians often murder their neighbours because someone did it once.
    The real story’s in the comments. People are really, really p*ssed off.
    B) Sleep is for wimps, so stop judging me.

  18. (The italics went a bit weird on that one. It is my contention that the real story is in the comments. I don’t know how chip feels about it.)

  20. **Quite an article from Gerry Nicholls & the timing could not be more suited (Chretian/Ignatieff meeting)
    ‘Mean’ Harper surely not the biggest bully
    Gerry Nichols july23/2010
    I always find it amusing when Canadian left-wingers attack Prime Minister Stephen Harper for being a bully.
    It’s an attack you see all the time in the left wing blogospere, in newspapers & in just about every CBC news report..
    http://www.owensoundsuntimes.com/srticledisplay.aspx?e=2681792

  22. Hey, Gunny (@ 12:43 a.m.), when I opened your link and tried to vote, this is the pop up I got:
    Congratulations on your recent purchase of a Dell Computer preconfigured with Windows Live. If you use the Windows Live applications included on this computer, some information will be sent to Microsoft. The data sent will include information about service performance, your machine and your service use. See http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=81184 for more information. The applications are governed by the Microsoft Service Agreement, available at http://tou.live.com.
    The only option I was given to get rid of the pop up was to click on “OK,” so I just exited the site altogether. I have no idea if my “yes” vote was counted.
    I DON’T EVEN HAVE A DELL.
    So, folks, what’s up with this?

  25. Bryanr’s 8:38 link doesn’t work, but the the column by Gerry Nichols that he links to is well worth reading.
    Excerpt:
    “…it’s not just the lame politics of the ‘Harper is a bully’ attacks I find amusing.
    “Even funnier is that when left-wingers attack Harper for being a bully they expose themselves as supreme hypocrites.
    “After all, these are the same folks who applaud and throw rose petals at the biggest, most authoritarian, meanest, bully in the history of Canada — big government.
    “And yes, make no mistake, the government is a bully.
    “The government is always pushing us citizens around.
    “It bosses us with rules and regulations that tell us where we can smoke, what we can eat and what kind of light bulbs we can put in our homes.
    “It passes ridiculous laws to intimidate gun owners and marijuana smokers.
    “It forces us to give up nearly half our income in the form of taxes so it can finance things like artificial lakes in downtown Toronto and chauffeur-driven limousines for federal cabinet ministers.
    “It even tries to control what we can think and say through the so-called Human Rights Commissions.
    “In short, the government uses coercion to manage just about every aspect of our lives from cradle to grave.
    “Now that’s what I call bullying.”
    It is kind of amusing, if you think about it, that the very people whose raison d’etre entails the right to control other people habitually accuse those who specifically wish to remove such G-controls of being – some variant of – “control freaks.”

  26. sorry bat, my apologies
    i dont know how to do the Link thing to the article (Et told me how to do that, but I keep screwing it up) so i typed it in Sorry for the error.
    Quite an article though, Eh.

  27. Bryanr, you drew our attention to Nichols’ – great – column. Thanks for that. Errors in typed-out URLs are, in relative terms, inconsequential.
    Thanks again for the Tip.

  28. black mamba – I like your example of false reasoning. ..the ‘images of Obama’ and ‘Canadians murder’..
    Here’s another…
    The NAACP “calls on the Tea Party and all people of good will to repudiate the racist element and activities within the Tea Party,”. Got that?
    This is a fallacy called ‘petitio principii’ or ‘begging the question’ or simply ‘The Captain’s Fallacy’.
    This is where there is an axiom within the statement that is accepted as fact..when it should be questioned.
    For example, the question where you ask the Captain: ‘When are you going to stop beating your wife’?…assumes without evidence that the Captain IS beating his wife.
    So, the NAACP resolution assumes without evidence that there IS a racist element and activities within the Tea Party! Note that it assumes that these racist elements are part of the Tea Party ideology!
    Could one ask NAACP the same? ‘When is NAACP doing to confront and deal with the racist elements in its membership’? That assumes that some people in NAACP are racists. It also assumes that their racism is not just individual but part of NAACP!

  29. This a great article by Nichols. MSM’s attacking Harper by painting him as a bully is just one of the left’s ongoing tactics of trying to discredit anything and everything that PM Harper does, while at the same time suggesting that the Liberals and NDP have the Uncle Joe Stalin persona.

  31. Re: Gerry Nicholls & Harper Bully
    Like i said the timing could not be more suited with Ignatieff meeting with the Shawinigan Brawler.
    Which btw their is a article over @Borque that talks about that, The protestor that Chretian gave the strangle hold too back when has some fond memories.
    *Note in article how he points out that he had a visit from the RCMP offering to pay $500. & change for dental broken tooth, Only in Canada! We need some Judge Judy’s here.
    I appreciate your patience with my lack of everything IT, So could someone please explain to me in Non computor terms how to put the article/column there with out typing it all in at the end.
    Much appr’d all for your Understanding.
    *Finaly: They’re calling for more muggy & wet weather here in Grey/Bruce & I feel like a pile of crap, congested, dizzy, winded & it hurts in my back when i move wrong or cough. So finaly yesterday I gave in to the wife, went to the Doc. she prescribed these big honkin yellow horse pills & iam back in today at work, against her recom..
    So have a great weekend all if i crash & go home, get some rest & dont get back on.

  32. The local Canadian media have been truly sickening of late.
    Conrad Black – you could hear the venom in the news reporter’s voice talking about how Black may be freed. The person who bailed him out, was shown receiving an award from GWB, so there is the Bush-smear component. She was shocked and disgusted that this was happening, and obviously wished he’d been executed instead.
    Census change – something about which NOBODY is concerned. Yet all they did was talk to the opposition about how horrible, evil, and ideological this move must be, obviously. How Harper has irreparably harmed Stats Canada by now making the head appear to be a political appointment. Mocking the present law “do census police come to your door to take you away if you don’t fill out the form? Not in my reality” I think that was Goodale.
    Still no coverage of Pablo Rodriguez’s criminal conviction, nor of the daily slaughter of thousands of birds by power-generating windmills.

  33. Well, If anyone is looking for a mascot (or T-Shirt print) for small dead animals then I nominate the this.
    “It’s pricey, furry and a little bit freaky but the brewing firm behind a brand new ale thinks beer bottles cased in dead animals is just what your local needs.A brewer from Aberdeenshire has created a super-strength ale which costs £500 a bottle and will be sold inside dead stuffed animals.Twelve bottles of The End Of History ale have been made and placed inside seven dead stoats, four squirrels and one hare.”

  35. The real story’s in the comments. People are really, really p*ssed off.
    Black Mamba at July 23, 2010 4:48 AM
    After reading all the comments following the “article”, two reallys won’t cover it.
    The US is boiling, Obama was a poor choice for the the first black president of the United States, simply because of HIS racism……..
    He hasn’t done anything yet.” … Michelle Obama

  36. Lately, I have been hearing a quite a bit of chatter about Brad Wall’s latest attacks on unions. Apparently, Bill 80 opened up the construction industry unions to competition by a new union called CLAC, Christian Labour Association of Canada. I’m not sure if the mainstream unions are more outraged about competition or the obviously religious nature of CLAC. Anyway, I hear that both provincial and international union publications have set CLAC up as the newest bogeyman to scare union workers in Sask. The second tale of despair is that the SP is dragging its heels on new contracts to be able to use its new-ish essential services legislation.
    Once (if) this scenario starts, it could be a nasty year of strikes, lockouts and back-to-work legislation. Ugh.

  39. bryanr, batb to the rescue!
    When you open the article, place your cursor at either the end or the beginning of the http//www address at the top of the page; left click and drag your mouse over the whole address (it will turn blue).
    Then, right click, which will produce a drop-down menu; left click on the “paste” option.
    Then go back to your comment, and place your cursor where you want the http address to go; right click, which will produce another drop-down menu, and left click on the “copy” option.
    Voila! There’s your http address exactly as it appeared on the original article, cut and pasted; I can’t imagine typing every character in the address window! I’d probably make a mistake every time.
    Hope you find this easy to do — it is, once you’ve had some practice!

  40. Thanks Batb appr that help tremendously, Now just got to practice over & over in order to set it into the memory banks Which are pretty fuzzy lately.
    i still feel like a pile of crap gotta get outa here.
    Humidity is killin me along with these damm horse pills.

  41. batb, bryanr
    I humbly suggest: click “copy” first, then “paste”.
    And I usually shudder after reading some of Nichol’s stuff, but this was bang on. Actually read it this a.m in my small town local.
    May I suggest the next silly poll?
    Who should be allowed to return to Canada?:
    a. Black
    b. Khadre
    I predict varying results depending on the media doing the polling.

  42. Yes, bluetech! WHAT was I thinking? Even as I was doing it correctly, I was explaining it incorrectly: a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, or the left brain not knowing what the right brain is doing … OR just a senior moment!
    Listen to bluetech, bryanr!!

  43. something for the privatized jail proponents at SDA to chew on:
    guardian.co.uk/society/2010/jul/18/guide-punishing-jailed-youths

  44. beagle – what makes you think a state-run prison will be any better/worse?

  46. beagle. Those all look like defensive maneuvers to me. You don’t go knuckling in the heart to teach a lesson. You do that when your options are limited and the outcome is in doubt. Stops the heart you see. Now I assume the knuckler is inside the grip of the knucklee and he can’t just beat the snot out of him instead.

  47. I remember when bill dana decided mocking those of a foreign language was no longer funny and that was it for mexican astronauts.

  48. Sorry for posting this in the wrong place before,can I try again here?
    At the Daily Telegraph comments from we “deniers” are being censored and deleted and we fear that the blogs are being moderated by warmists. Visit if you have time the James Delingpole blog at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/author/jamesdelingpole/ to see for yourself what is happening.We have a petition going there [which they are deleting,but we keep posting it back 🙂 ]
    and this read as follows.Help us if you can,censorship is dirty.
    Petition requesting the lifting of the unfair DT ban on Mack and restoring all his great posts on all DT blogs.
    AlfredOfAlbion
    amanda
    Amerloque
    anzon
    aphilips
    aurelian2
    Basil Brush
    Beatrice
    Bradthimpala
    brooksc
    brownbess
    Bufo75
    catweazle
    colliemum
    colliemore
    criticalthinker
    Crownarmourer
    Daedalus X Parrot
    daveedinburgh
    dirlada
    DougS
    exsul
    Fenbeagle
    freewales
    greensand
    gypsey
    hagar
    humf
    I_was_ferret
    James Delingpole
    johnpkb
    leapingcat
    locustsandwildhoney
    meltemian
    mickeypee
    oldmanmow
    Old Goat
    Oriphus
    orkneylad
    ozboy
    NoIdea
    peanut892
    peteh
    phantomsby
    pogleswoodsman
    pointman
    rapscallion
    ravenscar
    RealityReturns
    rogercuul
    sajc
    ScouseBilly
    Skeptic
    Suffolkboy
    thebnpwantstostealmypassport
    theguvnor
    theunbrainwashed
    Will
    yaosxx
    60
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