An Ol' Broad's Ramblings
Archive for 20 August 2012
Rest In Peace
Comedienne Phyllis Diller dies in Los Angeles at 95
Phyllis Diller, the housewife turned comedienne who aimed some of her sharpest barbs at herself, punctuating her jokes with her trademark cackle, died Monday morning in her Los Angeles home at age 95.
“She died peacefully in her sleep and with a smile on her face,” her longtime manager, Milton Suchin, told The Associated Press.
Diller, who suffered a near-fatal heart attack in 1999, was found by her son, Perry Diller. The cause of her death has not been released.
She was a staple of nightclubs and television from the 1950s — when female comics were rare indeed — until her retirement in 2002. Diller built her stand-up act around the persona of the corner-cutting housewife (“I bury a lot of my ironing in the back yard”) with bizarre looks, a wardrobe to match (by “Omar of Omaha”) and a husband named “Fang.”
It’s kind of difficult to realize that all the comedic icons on your youth are dying away. It was like a ritual for whole the family to gathert around the black and white tv, watching the comics on the Ed Sullivan Show, and so many others variety type shows. These were class acts who didn’t need to use four lettered words to get a laugh. Now days, it’s almost impossible to find a comedienne who can’t get through one sentence without throwing in so many unnecessary words. Nope…they just don’t make ‘em like this lady anymore, mores the pity.
Rest in peace!
Hypocrisy Abounds
I’m not even sure what to say about this ass clown! A stupid kid feeds him sensitive information (He wants said kid to be released? Pfft!), twit Assange puts it out there for the whole world to see, putting lives in danger, and he’s asking D’Bama to stop hounding him…”to do the right thing”. Seriously?? He claims ‘freedom of expression’, and then goes and hides out in the embassy of a country that doesn’t allow such freedoms.
Ya know, in a way, it’s rather amusing that this bozo is asking the leaker in chief to back off. I mean, leaks coming out of the White House, putting American lives in danger, is pretty much the same thing that Manning and Assange was doing, right? So, I’d think that BOTH should be charged. Then again, both are more concerned with their own hides, rather than for those they have put in danger.
WikiLeaks’ Anti-Americanism Now Backed by Ecuador
The Foundry
Yesterday, WikiLeaks creator Julian Assange, a 41-year-old Australian fleeing rape charges, stood on the balcony of Ecuador’s London embassy and told the President of the United States to get off his back.
“I ask President Obama to do the right thing: the United States must renounce its witch-hunt against WikiLeaks,” Assange said.
HEY CHRIS!!! (aka Grammar Nazi)
I was trying to get my email in box cleaned up, and apparently, I tend to miss a few now and then. Apparently, one of those I missed was a link from Hilldale College to a column by a young fella by the name of Daniel Coupland about education. In it he stated:
The Education Department also recognized a need for a new course in English grammar and, with consultation from the college’s English Department, designed a comprehensive course in English grammar for future teachers. Language is the most important tool of the teacher’s trade. As Richard Mitchell (“the Underground Grammarian”) once said, “’Good grammar’…is the Law by which meaning is found and made.”
Yet as David Mulroy showed in his book The War Against Grammar (2003), most educators do not know how the English language works. He concluded, “Unfortunately, few…teachers now have the necessary educational background to teach grammar or to integrate it within their lesson plans. There is only one way for them to obtain this knowledge: it has to be taught explicitly in the college curriculum.” At Hillsdale, we recognize that language is the vehicle for thinking, learning, and teaching and the Education Department decided to make sure that the future teachers who graduate from our college have a solid understanding of how the English language works.
This explains a great deal, doesn’t it! I thought grammar was still be taught to some degree in schools, but apparently, not even those who are suppose to TEACH, are totally clueless. It’s no wonder today’s kids can’t spell, or construct a coherent sentence, with proper punctuation! Sheesh!
Daily Read – August 20
