Isn’t this cliche just the “flying car” of career advice?

Sure, I’m already an entrepreneur, and know all the beautifully patina-ed koans:

“Nobody ever got rich working for somebody else” and so forth.

But I’m a contrarian, too.

In this glorious sole-proprietorship future, won’t somebody still have to wear the name tags?

Are we planning for an era that —  like 99% of those “flying car” “futures” of the past — won’t ever materialize?

(Weigh in in the comments.)

Yesterday I just had to post Drew Carey’s emotional reminiscence about being “called over to the couch” after his first stand up gig on The Tonight Show.

Honest comics will tell you that getting waved over to join Johnny and Ed at the desk was THE most important event in their lives: bigger than getting married, having kids, anything.

Someone like Freddie Prinze literally woke up the next morning with a development deal, like his for Chico and the Man.

Overnight, you went from feature act to headliner and could double or triple your asking price for comedy club gigs.

So who else got the nod?

RELATED:

For fellow Boston comics, Steven Wright’s first appearance on The Tonight Show was such a watershed moment for “the scene” that at one club (the Ding Ho?), they stuck a TV on stage that night so everyone could watch him.

Wright was such a hit that Johnny brought him back on the show a week later.

Tim Burton’s career success baffles me, so naturally I turn to the man who can explain almost anything — Steve Sailer – for answers.

I was eight years old in 1972, and I hated it. I was permanently creeped out.

The Watergate hearings interrupted my lunchtime Flintstones, and all those somber men mumbling about “bugs” had me convince that giant spiders were about to invade.

When I managed to make out that “bugs” were listening devices, I took a notion that everyone everywhere was being recorded; in particular, that there was a camera hidden in the macrame orange sunflower artwork over the TV.

Also, it seemed to me, thanks to Patty Hearst and Chowchilla, that everybody was being kidnapped.

My mother explained that we were too poor for anyone to want to kidnap me.

However, she also used to try to make me feel better about a rather embarrassing birthmark by chirping that, after all, it would make it so much easier for her to identify my body, should such a circumstance arrive.

And that she dearly hoped that if I ever was abducted, they’d at least find my body pretty quickly so she’d at least know I wasn’t being tortured with power tools in a basement someplace.

Fortunately, she’d bought a life insurance policy and a burial plot for me — for $50 — when I was born, so none of this would cost too much money.  

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PJMedia on the Norfolk incident (I wrote about at Taki’s):

The newspaper ignored the story under its nose for two weeks. When Pilot Editor Denis Finley allowed the paper to mention the serious incident, he assured the world that it did not involve racial hate.  This was also the public position taken by interim Norfolk Police Chief Sharon Chamberlin. The public has been assured that it was a simple case of an ordinary street crime.

However, Jesse Watters, a reporter for Bill O’Reilly’s Fox TV program, managed in one visit to find young blacks who said on camera that racial animus was involved and that there was some mention of taking revenge for the killing of Trayvon Martin.

For the most part, the mainstream media has continued to ignore the story even though there have been numerous similar reports of black mobs and individual blacks attacking innocent whites in the name of avenging Trayvon.

As I have recently argued, President Obama has contributed to the spread of this ugly, violent situation by failing to condemn such attacks and by allowing his attorney general to take no action against the New Black Panthers and by embracing the lead inciter of violence, Al Sharpton.  The failures of our president and his attorney general make all decent people of all races less secure.

This is SO “book deal”!

Come on, publishers and agents: You don’t want to lose out on this one. (Pssst: Frankfurt Book Fair…)

Check it out:

“Zero to Sixty” debuts today – sign up for regular updates via RSS.

From the first post:

My earliest car memories involve sliding around on the bench seat of my Uncle John Barnes’ late-’50s hunk of classic four-door Detroit, on one of the many visits we made to Hamilton with my widowed mother to visit her sister, John’s wife.

He was always my favorite uncle, patient and unusually kind, for reasons that would become clear to me later.

(He was, in fact, my grandfather, but that’s a whole other story.)

I had that memory vividly revived years later in Havana, driving around the city with musician Guillermo Barreto in his beautifully preserved ’56 Chevy, which actually smelled like Uncle John’s car, the tobacco smoke curing the leather upholstery in the humid Cuban air just as it had in my uncle/grandfather’s car many miles north in the heart of Canada’s rust belt…

I talked to Naomi Schaefer Riley to get her prescription for what ails the American college system…

Riley believes that the tenure system is far and away the key flaw in the higher education system.

Eliminating tenure, she believes, would automatically wipe many of these other problems off the white board.

“Teaching is a dynamic profession,” Riley explained, one “that needs to be evaluated on a regular basis. Tenure prevents this from happening.”

Yes, professors will object to student evaluations, citing the mean-spirited reviews found at sites like RateMyProfessors.

However, Riley insists that such evaluations would only make up part of the reformed procedure. She cleverly suggests asking students to grade their professors and classes a few years after graduation, for example. Doing so would allow student opinion to mellow somewhat, and eliminate their fears that critical reviews would impact their own marks.

Riley also suggests replacing tenure with multi-year contracts, thereby increasing opportunities for young adjuncts to move up the career ladder…

Today I received an email from a loyal 5FF reader:

Glenn Beck references the story of a young black man bleaching himself in shame for the colour of his skin.

As you know, the problem being it didn’t happen.

What Beck doesn’t know is where Bill Ayers/Barry Obama lifted the story from. The answer…

Dreams of My Father, published 1995.

[The Cracker episodes] “Men Should Weep” aired in November 1994:

“Floyd Malcolm is a young black man employed as a minicab driver while collecting social welfare. He is also a serial rapist. He cannot make love to his girlfriend because his legs are scarred after sitting in a bath of bleach when he was a boy which makes him very self conscious.”

The detail Ayers/Obama decided to omit from the biography is that Floyd Malcolm’s mother is white and he is raping white women in revenge for his mother’s supposed racism and as an expression of his deep seated self-loathing.

Whereas the storyline is an expression of the racism and deep seated self-loathing of British television writers.

***
I’m a big fan of the original Cracker series — who isn’t? — and recalled this plot line immediately.

However, I have my concerns about this theory.

So I replied:

ok but…

How would Obama/Ayers have seen Cracker in 1994? When was it available in the United States?  

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Welcome to my world!

Useless, confused, incompetent Toronto unionized-bureaucrats-for-life with guns police are at it again…

Joanne Hill of the Jewish Tribune:

In an expletive-laced rant, anti-Israel activist Jenny Peto instructed the group’s spokesperson not to speak to our reporter, and a large woman persistently attempted to physically block our videographer’s camera.

When our videographer deftly stepped around her, another protester angrily demanded that police remove him.

Despite clearly identifying themselves as journalists, one officer gripped the videographer’s arm and made him leave, and another firmly insisted that our reporter leave without allowing her time to ascertain the safest route from the scene.

Although police forced the Tribune’s journalists to leave the protesters’ side of the street, they permitted several protesters to cross the street to continue their harassment.

On the sidewalk directly in front of the Sony Centre, protesters stood behind and beside our reporter and raised their signs in a deliberate attempt to stop our videographer from taping her. Not one police officer intervened.

RELATED — Mark Steyn from June 2010:

The Toronto PD are your go-to guys if you want a fetching police escort for the Queers Against Israeli Apartheid float in the Pride Parade, but they don’t otherwise seem to perform any useful function.

Says this guy:

The main suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, was cleared after DNA evidence taken from the saliva of the Zodiac’s sealed letters exonerated him.

Mr Lafferty, who went to High School with Mr Allen, claims that the identity of the Zodiac killer has been known since March 15, 1971.

The ‘Mandamus Seven,’ a group of retired law enforcement officers, federal agents, a minister and a District Attorney banded together to prove, once and for all, who the Zodiac really is.

The motive for the killings, Mr Lafferty says, was adultery.

‘Mind and body ravaged by years of severe alcoholism, his blood-lusting revenge turned him into the most shocking and vicious killer in our 20th century,’ Mr Lafferty writes.

‘Through his tauntings of the police, his codes, ciphers, and letters, he was on a mission to redeem his shattered ego, to prove that he is better, smarter, and more clever than all the judges and police put together.’

Mr Lafferty says that the Zodiac started his killing spree after his wife had an affair with a Solano County Superior Court Judge…

***
Along with the “Home” episode of The X-Files, the recreation below, beginning 8:50, is one of the only things I’ve ever seen on TV that has genuinely scared me:

TALKERS.com:

Dial Global’s Dennis Miller to Perform with Adam Carolla in November.

Nationally syndicated talk host Dennis Miller had comedian, TV star and podcaster Adam Carolla on his program yesterday (5/14) and the two announced they will perform live on stage together at the City National Grove in Anaheim on November 16. 

Miller tells Carolla, “You know what I think about the way your mind works – it’s genius.”

In one deeply moving scene, Drew Carey, voice cracking as he fights back tears, describes his first performance on The Tonight Show, where he made Carson laugh hysterically and got invited to the couch—a rare seal of approval from Carson that was mythic among comedians.

As Jerry Seinfeld notes, there aren’t that many definitive moments in life than that one. “Before, you’re wanting to be a comedian—and after, you are one.”

PLUS — Drew Carey on Carson’s impact on stand up:

It may be hard to believe now, but until the early ’90s, the biggest influence on whether a stand-up comedian’s career took off was left to one man: Johnny Carson.

Not only would a shot on his version of The Tonight Show ensure that you could take a step up in the comedy world, but if he motioned you over to sit with him and Ed McMahon, you had the upper hand on any comedy club owner that ever tried to screw you over as you were coming up.

That’s what happened to Drew Carey, whose career skyrocketed after his initial 1991 appearance on The Tonight Show, where he cracked Johnny up so much that he was one of the lucky few called to the couch. Carey is one of the many who were interviewed for the American Masters documentary Johnny Carson: King of Late Night…  

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