"Through one Canadian ancestor, Louis Boucher de Grandpre, who was born in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, the pope is related to... Angelina Jolie, Hillary Clinton, Justin Bieber, Jack Kerouac and Madonna."

The NYT informs in an article that seems mostly concerned with whether the Pope is — in some sense — black.

We're told the article is written "by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in collaboration with American Ancestors and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami."

The article contains an amazing — and amazingly wrong — assertion: "Every one of us descends from an astounding number of recent ancestors: two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16 great great grandparents, 32 third great grandparents and 64 fourth great grandparents — that’s 126 unique ancestors through two parents. Go back to our 12th great grandparents, and everyone has a whopping 32,766 forebears."

As if the 32,766 positions on the family tree are always — and for everyone — going to be 32,766 different individuals! I think it's unlikely that anyone has 32,766 different individuals on a family tree going back to the 12th great grandparents.

The terms for this very well known issue is "pedigree collapse."

"Super Dave was puffed up with misplaced confidence as he plunged himself into one death-defying stunt after another."

"Although modeled on the real-life daredevil Evel Knievel, Super Dave was more like the ill-fated Wile E. Coyote, who would snap back from being crushed by a boulder or falling off a cliff in the Road Runner cartoons. 'People loved the character getting mauled,' Mr. Blye told the Television Academy."

From "Allan Blye, 87, Dies; ‘Smothers Brothers’ Writer and ‘Super Dave’ Creator/In his wide-ranging career, he also helped write Elvis Presley’s comeback special and appeared on an early version of 'Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood'" (NYT).

And, re the Smothers Brothers show:  "Mr. Blye and his writing partner, Mason Williams — best known for writing and performing the hit guitar instrumental 'Classical Gas'— worked on the deadpan editorials delivered regularly by Pat Paulsen, a mournful-looking cast member who used the show as a platform to run for president in 1968 as the candidate of the S.T.A.G. (Straight Talking American Government) Party."

"In a few days, the voters will go to the polls and elect a man to ruin the country. I mean run the country. All the other candidates are making 11th hour appeals seeking a convincing mandate from the people and the people are making 11th hour appeals for a convincing candidate. Polls show Nixon leading both Humphrey and Wallace with 14 undecided and 36 percent disgusted."

How "Ode to Billy Joe" could become the U.S. national anthem.

BONUS:

Goodbye to Tommy Smothers.

“Tom Smothers, Comic Half of the Smothers Brothers, Dies at 86/Though he played a naïve buffoon onstage, he was the driving force behind the folk-singing duo’s groundbreaking TV show” (NYT).

This is a very sad one for me. Not only did I love the old TV show, I am the world’s biggest fan of “Get to Know Your Rabbit.”

I’m blogging this from the air. A first time experience for me.

"[O]ur mother shattered the protocols of stuffy Washington decorum. 'People were uptight and too concerned about how they appeared'..."

"... my mother remembers. To cure this contagion, she coaxed notables of different backgrounds into unfamiliar situations. A wizard at peer pressure, she compelled her guests to play charades, freeze tag, and capture the flag, and join in rope climbing and push-up competitions. She had Cabinet members fence with bamboo sticks on gangplanks spanning the pool....When Robert Frost visited Hickory Hill after Uncle Jack’s inauguration, she made him judge a poetry-writing contest among government officials and celebrity guests. At a party for Averell Harriman’s birthday the guests came dressed as the Harrimans during some episode of their eventful lives. My mother borrowed life-size wax figures from Madame Tussauds of Harriman, FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta, and placed them unobtrusively around the living room to mingle with the crowd...."

Writes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in "American Values/Lessons I Learned From My Family."

"It’s curious that booing is absent from modern theatre, because it’s as old as European drama."

"The earliest reports of audience booing were recorded at the annual festival of Dionysus in Athens where playwrights competed to win prizes for their efforts. The verdict was delivered by the crowds who howled (that is, booed) at the worst dramas and cheered for the best.... [These days a]udiences have developed alternative ways to express their dissatisfaction. Coughing is the commonest method.... Noisily turning the pages of the programme tells your neighbours that you’re unimpressed by the antics on stage. Fiddling with sweets or rattling your ice cubes has the same effect. Snoring is sometimes heard in the stalls – surely the most lethal form of theatre review.... We are confused about booing. We enjoy the sound because it represents a revolt against authority, against celebrities who misbehave, and against poor taste. Yet we also consider it discourteous and even vulgar...."

Writes Lloyd Evans, in "Three cheers for booing in the theatre" (Spectator).

The oldest meaning of the verb "boo" — going back to the 1500s — is "To low or bellow as a cow does" (OED): "The ungodlye colleges of priestes..that dayly boo and rore the holye scriptures" (a1555).

There is a mountain.

 

Donovan's "There Is a Mountain" came up in my shuffled songs as I was running the other day, and I'd been thinking about it for a while. At the Genius annotation of the lyrics: 

“There Is A Mountain” by Donovan was released as a single in 1967. The lyrics reference a saying by Qingyuan Weixin. Here translated by D. T. Suzuki: "Before I had studied Chan (Zen) for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers."

Searching for the song this morning, Google gave me that Donovan clip — I love his shirt — and Bob Ross — just threw in Bob Ross like that. He's got a mountain too. A steep mountain. Okay. 

Writing about Gov. Northam this morning, I went looking for the old Ted Danson blackface routine (the one Whoopi Goldberg dared him to do)...

... and I found this parody by Howard Stern. How can Stern survive when that's on YouTube?

Man, he commits to the mocking racism with over-the-top racism. Interesting to see Sherman Hemsley (AKA George Jefferson) in the role of Whoopi Goldberg.

And what about Joni Mitchell? And Tom Hanks? And Sarah Silverman?

I couldn't find video of the old Ted Danson effort, but here's an article with a still photo.

ADDED: Further research suggests that there was never any videotape of Danson's performance — a Friar's Club roast of Whoopi Goldberg.  Roger Ebert was there and he wrote:

A blocklong dais featured more than 100 celebrities who sat stoneface through the monologue, including such prominent African Americans as New York Mayor David Dinkins, performers Halle Berry, Vanessa Williams, Anita Baker, RuPaul and Mr. T, and boxers Michael Spinks and Sugar Ray Leonard. A closed-circuit camera showed them looking embarrassed and uncomfortable....

Friar's roasts, which are never taped for telecast, are traditionally raucous and obscene. But the specter of a white man in blackface repeatedly using the [n-word] and other strongly coded words seemed to cross a line that was sensed by most of the people in the room. The event demonstrated that the painful history of black-white relations in America is still too sensitive to be joked about crudely. Goldberg, whose real name is Caren Johnson, has used her entire career to try to break down racial stereotyping, and in encouraging Danson's approach she may have thought it would play as satire. But, as stand-up comics say when their material isn't working, he was dying up there....

Goldberg, seated next to Danson, laughed and smiled at the material. Speaking last, she defended her friend: "Let's get these words all out in the open. It took a whole lot of courage to come out in blackface in front of 3,000 people. I don't care if you didn't like it. I did."...

Black model Beverly Johnson also defended Danson's performance: "If you can't see the humor at a place where there's supposed to be over-the-line jokes, then there's something really wrong."

AND: Here's the Wikipedia list of celebrities who've done blackface. Would those who want to exile Gov. Northam agree that all of these people should be shunned retrospectively (even the dead ones)? Fred Armisen, Fred Astaire, Dan Aykroyd, Jack Benny, Fanny Brice, George Burns, Johnny Carson, Joan Crawford, Billy Crystal, Robert Downey Jr., Judy Garland, Alec Guinness, Rex Harrison, Jimmy Kimmel, Dean Martin, The Marx Brothers, The Lone Ranger, Carroll O'Connor, Frank Sinatra, Red Skelton, Grace Slick, The Three Stooges, Elizabeth Taylor, Shirley Temple, John Wayne, Gene Wilder.



Soon, you'll attain the stability you strive for/In the only way that it's granted/In a place among the fossils of our time...



Life is change/How it differs from the rocks....

Goodbye to Officer Judy, Super Dave Osborne, Marty Funkhouser — Bob Einstein.

The comic actor who entertained us for half a century has died at the age of 76.

After spending some time in the advertising industry, he began his television career as a writer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and in 1969 won his first prime time Emmy. He went on to write for the Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour and the Canadian sketch comedy show, Bizarre. But his second Emmy came in 1977, as a producer for Van Dyke and Company....

Einstein played a slew of oddball characters on many of the variety shows he wrote for and produced, but it was Super Dave Osborne, an accident-prone stuntman who was a send-up of Evil [sic] Knievel, that made the writer-turned-actor a star. And it eventually led to his own TV show from 1987 to 1991 on Showtime called simply Super Dave. He revived the character for Spike TV (now called Paramount Network) in 2009 for Super Dave's SpikeTacular.

In more recent years, he developed a new fan base appearing as Marty Funkhouser, Larry David's self-proclaimed best friend on Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Larry Middleman, a surrogate for the family patriarch on Arrested Development.

There are so many great clips of Einstein. I'll just highlight the role that first made me love him — Officer Judy on The Smothers Brothers:

"'Nobody ever came from nowhere more completely,' Welles says, drawing a big studio-audience laugh..."

"... with this description of not just Latka but Kaufman as well. Asked how he came up with such a distinctive character voice, Kaufman says only that he 'grew up in New York, and you hear a lot of different voices in New York' ('You don't hear that one,' replies Welles). He also cites the accents of a high-school friend from South America and a college roommate from Iran."

Open Culture (via Metafilter) about this 1982 interview (in which Andy Kaufman seems almost to hypnotize Orson Welles into doing all the talking):



Welles was obviously not a natural interviewer, and he did not — despite how this looks — have his own talk show. Orson Welles was a very common talk show guest in his later years, and on this occasion he was subbing for the regular host, a man who was a natural interviewer, Merv Griffin.

I wish I could show you a wonderful example of Merv interviewing Orson in which you'd see comfort and pleasure replace awkwardness and confusion, but — like the way Andy Kaufman wanted to do wrestling — Orson Welles wanted to do magic tricks:



But wouldn't we all be better off quitting our career — whatever it is — and becoming a magician? 

And if you were reading this blog in its 5th week, maybe you'll realize why I'm nudging you like that. Here, from February 23, 2004:

I saw Get to Know Your Rabbit when it was shown, pre-release, in 1971, to a test audience in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I and it seemed like everyone else in that theater experienced it as the funniest movie we had ever seen. Somehow, even though it was directed by Brian De Palma and has Orson Welles in its cast, it fell into oblivion. I still have never come close to laughing as much at a movie as I did that night....

Here's Orson Welles schooling Tommy Smothers in showbiz magic:

"Man, you guys cannot stop talking about him. He is a dangerous presence and, you know, it’s just like candy by the bushel."

Said Hillary into a hot mike. She was talking to Chris Matthew, chatting between segments of an MSNBC town hall.

“We dip into him, dip out of him,” said Matthews. “We have a progressive audience, obviously. But, uh, nobody can tell what people want to watch.”

“Yeah,” she said, adding that people do “want to watch him.”

“— to laugh at him,” Matthews replied.

Then they talked about  Chris Christie: “Why did he support [Trump]?” Clinton wondered. And then Ben Carson, whom Matthews said he'd known "forever" and found "very soft spoken, never said a thing." Then Matthews said Carson reminded him of Tommy Smothers, and Clinton expressed appreciation to get to talk to someone who — unlike her young staffpeople — remembers the old TV shows. That caused Matthews to say "Sid Caesar" 3 times, and Clinton said "Ed Sullivan!"

About that scientist's sexy-lady shirt.

You know this story. The Rosetta project scientist, Matt Taylor, on the day of the landing on the comet, wears a ridiculous shirt, gets criticized, and makes a tearful apology. I wasn't going to talk about it because I didn't know what to say. Then I read this from WaPo's Rachel Feltman:

Of course, I personally hope that one day (when he's a little less busy) Taylor will say a bit more on the subject, and show that he understands why the shirt wasn't okay. Science is not a welcoming place for women, even today, and the only people who can truly make it more welcoming are the men who run the show. If a stellar scientist walks into work -- and then says hello to the whole world -- wearing a sexist shirt, what kind of message are we sending to future scientists?

She wants him to say why the shirt wasn't okay. That's just dragging out the apology, making it into more of an abject ritual. She already knows the reason why it's not okay, but just wants to hear him recite the reason that he's already had his face rubbed in to the point where he's sniveling. What I want him to talk about is what we don't know: Why did he think it was okay... not just okay, but a good idea? I don't know what else Mr. Taylor has in his closet, but what was that like — knowing it was the day of the landing, when eyes would be on you — to look at your array of clothing and to have it dawn on your big brain that this is the best costume for the day. I'd like a verbal depiction of that mental process, perhaps in the style of Little Edie:



That's from one of my favorite movies, "Grey Gardens." Another favorite movie of mine is "The Fly," the 1986 one with Jeff Goldblum as Seth Brundle. Brundle's a brilliant scientist — a tad odd, but brilliant. And in one of the lesser scenes — lesser, but memorable — he has to explain his clothes to his girlfriend Ronnie (Geena Davis):

Ronnie: Do you ever change your clothes?
Seth Brundle: What?
Ronnie: Your clothes. You're always wearing the same clothes.
Seth Brundle: No, these are clean. I change my clothes every day.
Ronnie: [looking in his closet] Five sets of exactly the same clothes?
Seth Brundle: Learned it from Einstein. This way I don't have to expend my thought on what I have to wear next, I just grab the next set on the rack.

So, now, I'm picturing Matt Taylor's closet — his Einstein-informed closet — packed end to end with shirts garishly patterned with cartoonishly bosom-y women. Come on, Matt, stop your sobbing and say something interesting.

The best song for the day:



"Do you have a shirt that you really love, one that you feel so groovy in?"

"Some of y'all don't understand that this kind of clapping is killing black folk."

"Do you understand what I'm saying? Killing us."



"It's killing some white folks, too."

At a Carnegie Hall concert recently, Neil Young stopped in the middle of a song because some people in the audience were clapping off-beat. Mike Love of The Beach Boys says that sometimes, it's a cultural thing.

"For instance, the preponderance of American pop music is based on the beat of two and four," he says. "You'll have a lot of cultural influences that cause people to do one and three. I remember being in the Vienna Stadthalle — the town hall in Vienna, with about 12,000 people in it — and it was, like, Teutonic."

ADDED: Remember how the crowd clapping screwed up the beat in "Give Peace a Chance"?

And there was like Tommy Smothers and Tim Leary and Dick [Gregory], and all people sort of clapping along and singing on the chorus. And if you hear the record, it's funny actually, because my rhythm sense has always been a bit wild, and halfway through it, I got on the on-beat instead of the back-beat and it was hard because all the...there were non-musicians playing along with us. And so I had to put a lot of tape echo to double up the beat to keep a steady beat right through the whole record, so it goes Bo-boom, bo-boom, instead of Ba, Ba.

The World's Foremost Authority!

Commenting in the thread to "Ta-Nehisi Coates reacts to the reaction to his calling Melissa Harris-Perry 'America's foremost public intellectual," EDH says:

For over 50 years, has there been any debate in America whatsoever?

"The World's Foremost Authority..."

Professor Irwin Corey.

He's still alive and he will be 100 this year! God bless him.

I love this guy. He looked old back in 1966 when The Smothers Brothers introduced him as "The World's Foremost Authority," and he is still alive. His 100th birthday is this year, July 29th.

Did you know that Jack Paar came up with the idea of the sofa and desk furniture arrangement for a TV talk show? Here are a few more things about Jack, who seems to have had a talk show that was much more about great talk than today’s talk shows, from the NYT obituary:

• [U]nknowns who [got] national exposure on his show[:] ... Bill Cosby, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Carol Burnett, Woody Allen, the Smothers Brothers and Godfrey Cambridge.

• "Everyone thinks Ed Sullivan discovered the Beatles," [Paar] once complained. "That's not true. I had them on before he did. I did it because I thought they were funny, not because I liked the music. I'm a Muzak kind of guy — my home's like living in an elevator."

• There always seemed to be a neurotic edge to Mr. Paar and his pals. [NYT critic John J.] O'Connor once said people watched to see if anyone would have a nervous breakdown on camera. Mr. Downs once explained affectionately, "Jack's not mentally ill; he's a carrier of mental illness." [Regular guest Oscar] Levant, asked what he did for exercise, mumbled, "I stumble and then I fall into a coma."

• "I hate my emotion," Mr. Paar said of all his tearful controversies. "Knock it off, I tell myself, but I just can't help it."

He had a catchphrase, “I kid you not.” I can remember my parents saying that and understanding that it was amusing in a way I couldn’t understand because I was too young to stay up and watch late night TV.