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.)

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.

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.

(I don’t mean to make my mother sound so awful, although like all mothers, she could be, doing brilliant stuff like picking an alcoholic, rage-aholic pervert for Husband #3. Frankly, these morbid, pragmatic speculations were actually the things I liked about her. They showed some evidence of thought…)

I still own that damn plot; when she died I tried to unload it on the cemetery but they didn’t seem too interested. In fact, they seemed to suggest I couldn’t sell it, which sounds fishy to me.

I really need to get rid of this thing, by the way. I love that I have the world’s cheapest burial plot but I do NOT want to be buried in Hamilton.

If you do, maybe we can work something out.

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.

PLUS: Behind the scenes at today’s podcast…

I suck.

Adam Carolla doesn’t ALWAYS hire morons…

That “Magic Johnson’s ear” shot? He’s actually facing a second of three cameras.

They got the shots fine.

Audio explanation starts 12:55 minute mark:

As the show opens up, Adam talks about an edited clip on Celebrity Apprentice where members of the ACS crew were made to look like idiots.

Keep listening while Carolla complains:

“I’m the one who reads all the tweets — ‘Can’t you hire good people…?’”

Yeah, that was me.

Sorry, Semi-Retarded Gary, and Semi-Retarded Gary’s mom.

UPDATE — The only reasonable recap I’ve read:

It was heartening to see Adam Carolla back, and while they provided us with ANOTHER cliffhanger ending (the suspense is killing me, by boring me to death) which seemed to tease that Adam’s crew had ruined the Magic footage, I am willing to bet dollars to donuts that there is another take where Magic talks directly to camera.

Cruellers to kroner! This is not the only take. Although if there isn’t a second take, wow, Adam. Just wow. Aside from a moment of pique at Magic facing away from the camera during the first take of footage, Arsenio seemed way laid back in the smart, shrewd company of offstage comedians (as someone who’s spent time with off-duty comedians plenty, outside of a green room they’re the most pleasant company in the world. Inside a green room, look out! They will try to casually practice their material at you until you want to hide under a moving car. Green rooms: the ultimate crucible of the human psyche.) Meanwhile, the musicians had quickly dissolved into a quivering lump of wounded egos and scattered melodies.

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…

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…

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?

What month in 1995 was the book published? Final ms are “locked in” by publishers months before publication.

***
If anybody out there wants to take this on, go for it and let me know what you come up with, via email.

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.

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:

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.”

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…

I talked to Drew about the experience — he envisioned the night before that he’d be called over to the desk — how things changed in the aftermath, and how he’s taken cues from Johnny while hosting The Price is Right.

***
“Got a development deal at Disney. That was in November, and by the end of the year, I had a development deal with Disney. They gave me enough money that I could pay off all my student loans, all my old taxes, I was debt free.

“I didn’t have any money left after I paid it all off, but I was debt free.

“I remember writing all the checks and I was like, ‘Man, I am out of debt, because of this development deal with Disney. Because I got it from doing The Tonight Show.’ That was crazy.”

MORE here from Drew Carey:

“It was all based on your performance, and if he liked you a lot, he would wave you over,” Carey recalled. “The closest thing I can relate it to is (that) when I was in junior high, I joined a Pentecostal church — a really evangelical Assembly of God church, and I got saved. There was an altar call, and I went up and got saved — I rolled around, talked in tongues, all that stuff you’ve heard about.

“Being called over to the couch by Johnny Carson was the closest thing I ever came to that. I’m not even saying that as a joke. There was just this feeling of … like people talk about the feeling of the Holy Spirit going through you and your body changing, and you feel like something’s changed in your life forever and ever — that’s what I felt like going over there, and I felt like I was in a dream the whole time. It was like being saved by Jesus, honestly.”

Carey added that the impact of that one appearance on that one late-night television show was immediate and irreversible.

“It was very rare (to get called over),” he said. “Like, very few people, and they all became really famous. Ellen DeGeneres got called over to the couch. Roseanne Barr got called over to the couch. I got called over to the couch. If you look at the people who got called over to the couch on their first Tonight Show appearance, they all became really famous. It was crazy … he would wave you over, and then the next thing you know, you’re in show business.”

Let’s let Colby Cosh explain, talking about the difference between Canada and the US in 2002, but the point is equally applicable, if not moreso.

Luckily, not everybody at the League is a complete beta.

My first reaction to that over-discussed TIME magazine cover showing a woman breastfeeding her way-too-old son was:

“Wait—TIME magazine is still around?”

Predictably, this naked example of stunt publishing has been the subject of countless OpEds and blog posts. Breastfeeding became the obvious call-in topic for lazy talk-radio producers across the nation.

The TIME cover even got the Saturday Night Live treatment over the weekend.

(Wait—Saturday Night Live is still on…?)  (…)

Even by midweek, the media still hadn’t squeezed the last drop of milk from this teat.

After feigning their dedication to “informing the public” (about something of which the public was already aware), the media quickly moved on to covering the really important topic:

Itself!

Just a note:

Old white people in Middle America not always decent and noble.

And each and every one is gonna cost you a minimum half-a-million bucks while they take their good sweet time to die.

Then it dawned on me–Obama’s internal polls must show him losing to Romney, and handily. The latest Rasmussen certainly show the Golfer-in-Chief in trouble and behind the GOP nom.

He must realize it’s over and is now simply looking to establish his “legacy,” while reinforcing leftist relationships he desperately wants to keep–like with Hollywood–after we kick his ass to the curb.

For an obsessed, cynical and narcissistic president like Obama, he only makes moves that serve his agenda one way or another–and the only upside to this exists out of the White House.

UPDATE:

Awesome, of course…