Good evening, welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of Late Nite Radio. Tonight we present a song from The Producers, the Mel Brooks musical in which a Broadway producer named Max Bialystock and his accountant Leo Bloom come to the excited, if nervous, realization that they could – theoretically – reap a one-time financial windfall by staging a lavish, guaranteed flop, and then, after the enterprise has collapsed on opening night, pocketing all the money raised for its production.
The two men find what they believe to be the most unimaginably bad play extant — “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden” — but their carefully chosen worst-ever director, Roger Elizabeth De Bris, considers the play’s ending to be not quite cheerful enough for his tastes, and initially refuses to direct the production even when promised complete artistic freedom to do whatever he wishes with the script and the staging. Eventually his susceptibility to flattery and his desire for a Tony Award gets the better of him and he relents, breaking into song at the very prospect of a Broadway juggernaut in bright lights having his name on the side. When he decides to rewrite the ending so that the Germans win in the end, no moral judgement whatsoever is involved: in De Bris’ happy mind, snappy production values — form, line, and gaiety — will trump the unappetizing facticity of war, destruction and dysentery. And it will work.
In tonight’s selection we see the very moment where the eager yet uncontrollably self-equivocating De Bris is finally convinced to direct the play. Here it is then, without further ado, the cast members of the Broadway production of The Producers — including Gary Beach as Roger De Bris, and Nathan Lane and Mathew Broderick as Bialystock and Bloom respectively — performing the nimble and humorous Keep It Gay.
Your Reader Tips — keep it light, keep it bright — are welcome, as always, in the comments.
SWEEP: Revisiting The Rent Seekers
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation plays “follow the money”;
In 2003, the Electronics Product Stewardship Canada was formed to help influence governments on what environmental legislation was coming. David Betts, formerly of ITAC became its CEO and president. Incredibly, he also became Chair of the Board of SWEEP itself while still holding the EPSC post.
Shortly after the SWEEP program was implemented, David Betts resigned from both SWEEP (see page 3 of the annual report) and the EPSC. On June 1, as soon as his resignations had taken effect, Betts joined the management team at eCycle Solutions where he is currently a vice-president.
Ever since the SWEEP program was first implemented in 2007, Alberta-based eCycle Solutions has been exclusively tasked with recycling the televisions and monitors collected at SARCAN and in B.C.’s similar program. For eCycle Solutions and EPSC companies, industry-led, government-mandated programs have proven lucrative. However, a system that de-emphasizes re-use and restricts private sector participation is second-rate for the environment, consumers slapped with eco-fees, and recyclers shut out of the system.
Lots more at the CTF link, including an eCycle website that’s developed a streak of shyness.
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Is There Nothing That Obama Can’t Do?
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Carol Platt Liebau (Harvard Law Review), February 20th – “[Tom Pirelli] did most of the day to day work. Barack Obama was nowhere to be seen. Occasionally he would drop in he would talk to people, and then he’d leave again as though his very arrival had been a benediction in and of itself, but not very much got done.”
CNN Political Ticker, July 21st – One Democratic senator tells CNN congressional Democrats are “baffled,” and another senior Democratic source tells CNN members of the president’s own party are still “frustrated” that they’re not getting more specific direction from him on health care. “We appreciate the rhetoric and his willingness to ratchet up the pressure but what most Democrats on the Hill are looking for is for the president to weigh in and make decisions on outstanding issues…”
Prosperous Times Ahead
This is my brother Mohammed, and this is my other brother Mohammed
It’s as though they all have something in common.
UN report examines Arab world obstacles – A new report by more than 100 independent intellectuals and scholars from Arab countries blames political, economic, social and environmental problems for undermining the lives and freedom of Arabs — coupled with the region’s vulnerability to outside intervention.
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here is Mr. Jose Carreras singing Some Enchanted Evening ¤ ¶, from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1949 musical South Pacific, pursuant to the London production in 1986, Jonathan Tunick conducting (3:31).
| Some enchanted evening, Someone may be laughin’. You may hear her laughin’, Across a crowded room. And night after night, |
Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons… Wise men never try. Once you have found her, |
For some value of her.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
Y2Kyoto: The Key To Comfort This Summer
Is “layers” (pdf)…
We warned the ladies of Chicago they had three weeks of summer left and that was in late June and we had previously suggested a cooler and wetter bias to summer in our February 2009 outlook for the growing season. Now that the coolness is here we can breathe again. It is not easy living on the edge of a cliff or far out on a limb by oneself in the weather business.
Now that we all know that luck has come our way, let us explain why the cold will not go away for any great length of time in the next few weeks.
Drew Lerner is one of the most respected weather forecasters in agricultural circles;
For a year like this those, frost and freeze events may show themselves earlier than usual. Already in the past ten days there have been bouts of soft frost in Canada’s prairie. No crop damage has come from it, but they occurred in the heart of summer during one of the usually warmest weeks of the year. What will happen later in August when hemispheric cooling begins and the same bias for cooler than usual conditions exists? It just might get cold enough to cause some problems for crops.
This In Vitro Thing Is Spinning Out Of Control
“People over 80 are multiplying faster than any other age group…”
h/t Cal2 and Dutch Canuck, who notes – “Only in a tossed-off aside at the bottom of paragraph 5 do they mention dropping birthrates. Talk about burying the lede!”
Y2Kyoto: The World Is Being Run By Crazy People
Seattle Department of Transport spokesman Rick Sheridan;
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Reader Lee M. writes;
Thus
no parking lots near most of the train terminals. After packing the trains (free fare) over the weekend the new system commenced paid operation this morning and …. around 8 a.m., trains were arriving at Tukwila from downtown Seattle with fewer than 10 passengers aboard.
$165,467,625. That’s the cost of building the system. Per mile.
Mercifully the rail, created to carry passengers from downtown Seattle to the airport, is only 13.9 miles. It’s 15.6 miles from downtown Seattle to the airport. But that’s being fixed.
This boondoggle was created by King County, WA Executive Ron “tax-to-the-max” Sims. Ron is now Obama’s deputy secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
“Livin’ the dream, Sir!”
The latest from Afghanistan, from Michael Yon.
Reader Tips
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite
Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here is Mr. Roy Clark
performing some version of Malaguena (5:06).
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
“I do know for a fact that all jews in the area were notified to stay off of the moon”.
On The View: Barbara Walters comes face to face with her worst recurring nightmare and America comes within a heartbeat of witnessing a television celebrity strangled with her own dreadlocks…
Flashback: Meltdown on the View
They Closed Down All The Freak Shows, Put ‘Em On Discovery Channel
Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
NBC, July 19th – “5-Legged Pup Rescued From Coney Island Freak Show”
TLC TV Special , July 15th – “Conjoined Twins: Sister Bond”
Hope, Change, Porkulus…
And a Monday morning chain yank by Drudge provokes a response from the USDA …
Oops.
Agriculture Sec. Vilsack: ‘Purchased 760,000 Lbs of ham at cost of approximately $1.50 per pound’…
FOOD LION: $.79 Lb…
My Editor Hates Me
“Libya’s Moammar Khadaffy led me by the hand through the ruins of his private quarters…”
I Blame Dick Cheney
Is there nothing that Obama can’t do?
The administration’s annual midsummer budget update is sure to show higher deficits and unemployment and slower growth than projected in President Barack Obama’s budget in February and update in May, and that could complicate his efforts to get his signature health care and global-warming proposals through Congress.
The release of the update – usually scheduled for mid-July – has been put off until the middle of next month , giving rise to speculation the White House is delaying the bad news at least until Congress leaves town on its August 7 summer recess.
The administration is pressing for votes before then on its $1 trillion health care initiative, which lawmakers are arguing over how to finance.
The White House budget director, Peter Orszag, said on Sunday that the administration believes the “chances are high” of getting a health care bill by then. But new analyses showing runaway costs are jeopardizing Senate passage.
“Instead of a dream, this routine report could be a nightmare,” Tony Fratto, a former Treasury Department official and White House spokesman under President George W. Bush, said of the delayed budget update. “There are some things that can’t be escaped.”
(Speaking of dreamworlds – has L. Ian MacDonald been living in a cave ? Or just Canada?)
More, from The Anchoress;
I am waiting to hear the outrage in the press, over the heavy-handed, brazen and rather arrogant moves of a president who sounded downright thuggish last week when he went before the microphone and said this monstrosity was going to pass, and it was going to pass quickly and “I mean it.”
President Obama’s daily finger-wags and bully-pulpits are not in the mode ala President Bush, who said, “I have all this political capital, and I’m going to spend it,” which the press found unpardonably arrogant. It’s not even Obama saying, “I won,” which made the media giggle. This withholding of public information/ramming through of legislation is a whole ‘nother kind of arrogance.
Footprints On The Moon
A documentary by David Sington that includes previously unseen mission footage, you can watch it here.
| Also – “Lunar Probe Delivers First Photographs of Old Apollo Landing Sites” at Popular Science. |
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“You don’t have a problem with God, do ya?”
Patience, My Ass
Reader Tips
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Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our second of three special
Apollo 11
editions of SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to that singular time in history forty years ago, here is some
documentary coverage, The Eagle Has Landed, and here is the original Man On The Moon, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, & VIII broadcast coverage, as you would have seen it, live, on television, landing on the moon at 20:17 GMT on July 20, 1969, with twenty-five seconds of fuel left, and then setting foot on the surface of the moon, at 02:56 GMT on July 21 1969. And lastly, here is some documentary coverage from the Lunar Ascent at 17:54 GMT later that day.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.