#Random Colbert Report Segments | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

arabellaflynn · 5 years ago

Text

Text of a test monologue. Would you like to see me deliver this on camera, with no makeup, no lighting equipment, and using Notepad as a TelePrompTer? Head on over to my https://www.patreon.com/ArabellaFlynnPatreon, and for a dollar a month you too can see me waffle on in real time.

Hi, all. You may notice that I am on video now. I was going to shoot a couple of tests and apologize for the poor quality of the footage, and explain that I want to start vlogging and streaming in addition to writing, but I need some equipment to do it properly and for that I need to raise some funds... But fuck it. This is going out first instead.

As I record this, it is the fourth of July. You can probably hear the fireworks outside my window. I know I can. There are a lot of those, because we've all been inside and bored for the past four months.

I know a lot of people who have opted not to observe the holiday this year. The 4th of July is often viewed as a celebration of the American institution, which is a little bit on fire right now, with a few people determined to squirt lighter fluid all over the flames like a bored suburban dad at a barbecue. On the other hand, it's also Independence Day, and marks the end of the long, painful process by which a population broke free of distant, uncaring overlords who cared mainly about the financial dividends of their colonies, and ignored the grievances of the people until they started breaking shit. So YMMV.

I would comment on some of the details, but I don't know them. The Late Show is on hiatus, and John Oliver doesn't air until tomorrow. I, like a lot of my demographic, get most of my current events from comedians. There's a reason for that.

I actually watched a lot of news as a teenager.

Well, "watched" might be too strong a word. It's easier for me to fall asleep if there's some sort of droning noise in the background. When I was about fifteen, I discovered that, unlike the main CNN channel, which has actual shows and documentaries, CNN Headline News just runs the day's top stories over and over again in an unending 30 minute loop. Interesting enough to keep me from falling into a train of thought that will prevent me from sleeping, boring enough that I don't want to stay up and listen.

I have no memory of the desk anchors. I'm sure they were consummate professionals, but they also had no distinguishing human characteristics whatsoever. I know they were updating the loop live, because occasionally a story would be added to the list and another one would drop off the back, and occasionally one would flub the text on their prompter, but other than that there was no hint that the face at the desk was attached to a living, breathing person.

I do remember a couple of the correspondents. One was Christiane Amanpour. Her voice stood out; CNN is an American news station that was originally restricted to American cable networks, and the vast majority of the staff is from the US. Amanpour is British-Iranian, having split her childhood between Tehran, before the revolution, and London, after. They liked to send her to the bowels of Eastern Europe to report from the war-torn streets of Citygrad in Countrystan. She had already caught some criticism on her reporting of the Bosnian War, for advancing the apparently controversial opinion that genocide was bad. I didn't know that at the time; I just thought she sounded more like she told real stories than read off lists of facts.

Another was Anderson Cooper, who was not nearly such a big deal then as he is now. Cooper, a self-described adrenaline junkie, was a war correspondent at the time, with a habit of ducking only briefly for explosions before standing back up to continue his piece to camera. He wouldn't be infamous until his coverage of Hurricane Katrina years later, both for the overall stellar job he did, and also for that one time he got tired of getting non-answers from some government toad in a live interview and very professionally flipped his shit at the lady, asking if she realized how tone deaf it was to sit there thanking other politicians for doing essentially nothing while there were still bodies in the street.

I quit watching the news when I moved away to college. It wasn't necessarily that knowing was worse than not knowing, but I felt a lot of pressure to be "adult" about it at that point, and watching proper news shows made me anxious to the point where I wouldn't sleep. I outright avoided it to the point where I made it to a canceled class at 4 pm, Mountain Standard Time, on September 11, 2001, before anyone told me what was going on.

I wasn't able to put my finger on why I found the news so horrible until many years later. I can't remember what rabbit hole I'd fallen down, but I ended up sitting on YouTube watching segments of the live news coverage of the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan. Reagan was shot in the side and later recovered without complications, but his Press Secretary, James Brady, was struck in the head and sustained considerable neurological damage. Brady, together with his wife Sarah, later went on to be a noted advocate for gun control, but at the time was reported to have died on the scene.

I wound up watching a lot of one of the news desks -- ABC, I think. It started out like all the others, until the anchor tripped up a couple of times and referred to Press Secretary Brady as "Jim", and I realized: He knows these people. Personally. He's a member of the White House Press Corps, or a friend of the Bradys, or both. I'm watching a journalist reporting on a moment of historical significance to the American people, and a human being who has to tell the entire nation about someone's personal tragedy. His investment did not make him any less professional or informative than any of the others, but it did make his coverage feel very grounded in reality in a way that most news, then and now, does not.

The older I get, the more disquieting I find it to have a talking head behind a shiny desk read me a list of horrible things that have happened today without any apparent reaction. It makes it seem like these things are a randomized representative sample of the cruelty of the universe, rather than what they are, which is a list of things so unusually terrible they made the news. I realize that this is part of an effort to remain impartial so that the viewer can decide how they feel about events, but it's also disturbingly normative. Yes, everything is on fire, everything is always on fire, this is nothing new.

I can't say I'm any more enamored of the opposite, either, the more recent style where the news anchor's entire job is to tell you that entirety of human existence is awful and here's what you should prioritize being afraid of this week. Everything around you is on fire, the fire is racing right at you, and here's whose fault the fire is.

A lot of Americans, especially younger ones, have taken to getting their news mostly from political satire because-- well, one, because for about the past twenty years, our comedians have been better at fact-checking than our actual newsrooms. You can thank Jon Stewart for getting a bee in his bonnet over that. But also because their coverage of major issues takes neither of those paths. The Daily Show alumni write up stories like they actually live on the planet they're reporting from. You're on fire? They're on fire too! Holy shit, let's all find some water!

The conceit behind the comedy of The Daily Show and the Colbert Report and Full Frontal and Last Week Tonight and now the monologues on The Late Show is not that this is a normal amount of fire for everything to be on so it's fine, nor establishing that someone has set you on fire on purpose and here's who should be punished for it. It's bewilderment and frustration at the way we somehow keep catching on fire over and over again. Yeah, they crack jokes, because it's their job, but all the jokes are predicated on the idea that this is, above all, just very, very, inexplicably stupid. We can, and we should, be better than this. And the hosts stubbornly refuse to just give up and internalize as immutable all the reasons why we aren't.

You wouldn't know it to look at him, but Jon Stewart has accumulated "fuck you" money from his time on The Daily Show, among other things. I really hope the rest of them are doing the same. Because we need some figureheads who are able to say "fuck you" to a lot of authority figures right now without having to worry about how their family is going to survive the next month. John Oliver has HBO backing and I'm pretty sure Last Week Tonight has roughly equal budgets set aside for handling lawsuits and shoveling money at charity. Stephen Colbert has been insulting Donald Trump as hard as he possibly can since day one, and he just re-upped until 2023. Samantha Bee has her husband holding the camera to shoot her monologues out in the woods.

They've all figured out how to produce their show over the internet, so at least we have something to watch in the After Times.

I really hope the neighbors run out of fireworks soon. Aside from not wanting the neighborhood to be literally on fire at any point, one of my housemates has a dog, and the dog has epilepsy, so this has been an interesting evening. Sorry about the fireworks, sorry about the camera, sorry about the country, sorry about the state of the world. Imma go find my Xanax. G'night.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/2ZKD4d6 via IFTTT -------------------- Enjoy my writing? Consider becoming a Patron, subscribing via Kindle, or just toss a little something in my tip jar. Thanks!

#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

2 notes · View notes

saleintothe90s · 6 years ago

Text

381. It Came From the Daily Show: one episode from June 1999, and one from July, 1999

(April and May, 1999)

I fell behind on this series because Daily Show (especially back then) only worked for about 2 weeks out of every month during the Summer. There was slim pickings. Also, I have to get this out of the way so we can discuss the episode of Daily Show where Jon makes fun of Garth Brooks for being Chris Gaines!!

June 24, 1999

Intro - “I’ma’ gonna totally sign your yearbook!” “ I can’t believe we’re going to college in the fall! BFF!”

Headlines - Spike-O Killer - Son of Sam is upset about the movie about him, Summer of Sam, “demands more Summer, less Sam.” Son of Sam says the film is “hurtful to society”, and the audience dies laughing. He’s also mad that he’s being played by “the fat guy from The Practice”.

Headlines - “Deep Ship” - Bob Ballard has found two of the oldest shipwrecks off the coast of Israel. Obligatory Gilligan’s Island three hour tour reference. We also learn about Polyphemus?! Don’t worry, Jon didn’t know about him either.

Correspondent Bit - “Another World”. Stephen Colbert discusses the NBC soap opera Another World being canceled. Jon would never leave Lilah in an elevator shaft while in labor during the big ball! Does he ever wonder about his bastard elevator baby?! Does Stephen Colbert look french? Daddy?! I love it when they did stupid bits like this back then, I’m also just a sucker for when they changed the lights in the studio.

(There’s also a hilarious bit from the summer of 2001 where Steve Carell cries over Luke and Laura from General Hospital finally divorcing.)

Special Report - Terror in the Toy Chest. I love it when Jon talks about mundane things such as toys. In this case, its a Tarzan doll that makes a masturbatory gesture, a prudish woman is filing a obscenity complaint against Toys R Us selling an Austin Powers doll that says “do I make you horny, baby?”, and pool dive sticks have been impaling children in the butt. I remember the pool dive sticks being recalled!

Cherilyn Paulsen of Silver Spring, Md., wishes she had taken the dive stick away from her daughter. In August 1997, Paulsen’s daughter was jumping and playing in an inflatable pool in the family’s backyard, celebrating her 6th birthday.

“The next thing I heard was my daughter’s blood-curdling scream,” Paulsen remembered.

The girl had been impaled on a dive stick brought to the party by a friend. Paulsen’s daughter was flown to an area children’s hospital, where she underwent two hours of surgery.

“It tears through children’s bodies,” Paulsen said of the toy. “It looks harmless, but people need to realize how much harm they can do.” 1

Take a listen to the hotline the company has set up:

See also:

Other News: Purple Reign - Phil Jackson is named coach to the Lakers.

This Just In: Commie Dearest - Khrushchev’s son passes the U.S. Citizenship test. We’re all fish theologists?

Public Excess - Karaoke King - I’ve probably mentioned this before, but Public Excess was one of my favorite bits back in the day. Rich Brown would introduce the craziest and the dumbest clips from the dying format of public access TV. I know some people who review old Daily Shows don’t like the segment, but we didn’t have YouTube back then! This was it for us if we wanted stupid people! In this edition, a guy in a crappy suit sings a song about a teenager in love and says the song is all about him, Lorenzo dances around in a gold jacket with some fancy effects, and a muppet looking guy who is proud to be a federal worker? Omg, this guy crank calls and asks how he keeps his head so shiny!

July 22, 1999

If memory serves me correct, Daily Show always goes on a big break in July, so these pickings were real slim. also, the Vance DeGeneres Tales of Survival field piece is missing a part off of the Comedy Central Website. I’m 90% sure I don’t have this episode on vhs either. I did, however find the commercial breaks from this episode.

Headlines: MissPentagon - Congress blasts Pentagon for misuse of military funds--including a Comanche helicopter that is so loaded down with weaponry, the pilot has to weigh under 110 pounds. In 2004, the program was finally canceled.

Headlines: Lemmingway - George Hemingway turns 100. There was a look-a-like contest and a key lime pie eating contest in Key West. Gross.

Correspondent Piece - A Tale of Survival: S.J. Sharkie - Okay, so the doofus who cut these episodes of TDS up forgot to include the first part of Vance DeGeneres’ bit about S.J. Sharkie, the San Jose Sharks hockey mascot being stuck in the rafters of the stadium during a bit where he was supposed to be descended upon the ice. Staff lowered him down another rope and he was able to reel back up to safety.

Other News: The Patch is Prologue - Women might finally get birth control patches -- “putting an end to all loud speaker condom price check jokes”.

I just remembered that annoying Ortho-Evra commercial from 2003 where the lady keeps flashing us her underwear.

This Just in: Friends in Greed - “NBC pays five million dollars an episode for Friends. Cast of Suddenly Susan to receive new fanny packs.”

Al Up in That: Milk - 91 year old Daily Show consumer advocate, Al Green the Bedspread King of Long Beach rants about milk. I don’t know where they found this guy. Either Stacey Grenrock-Woods did a field piece about him, or they found him on Public Access?

Note to Al, Cofeemate isn’t milk. ‘Crap’s not even dairy.

1.Fields, Robin, “Swim Pool ‘Dive Stick’ Toys Recalled,” Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1999. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-jun-25-mn-49982-story.html

5 notes · View notes

perfectirishgifts · 5 years ago

Text

Is It Influenza Or Covid-19 Coronavirus, How To Tell The Difference

New Post has been published on https://perfectirishgifts.com/is-it-influenza-or-covid-19-coronavirus-how-to-tell-the-difference/

Is It Influenza Or Covid-19 Coronavirus, How To Tell The Difference

Both Covid-19 and the flu can cause fever, chills, muscles aches, headache, diarrhea, nausea, … [] vomiting, or fatigue. But the influenza is not the Covid-19 coronavirus. (Photo: Getty)

The influenza virus is not the Covid-19 coronavirus. The Covid-19 coronavirus is not the influenza virus. Both are respiratory viruses. Both can infect cells in your respiratory tract. But they’re not the same.

The two are completely different viruses. Since viruses are very small and don’t wear little name tags, how then do you tell whether you’ve been infected by one or the other or even both?

A key point to remember is that the Covid-19 coronavirus, otherwise known as the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV2), is a novel virus. In this case, novel doesn’t mean that it appeared in the novel 50 Shades of Grey. Instead, novel means new to humans. That’s what happens when a virus that normally infects another type of animal attains the ability to infect humans for the first time. This means that your immune system probably has never seen the SARS-CoV2 before this pandemic. As a result, your immune system ends up behaving like an inexperienced guy on a date for the first time. Except, this date is with a sphere covered in spikes. It looks a bit like a spiky massage ball, except that this spiky ball gives terrible massages:

(Illustration: Getty)

Imagine, as a result, your immune system getting very confused, saying something like, “hey you didn’t mention spikes on your dating profile,” and not knowing quite how to react. When your immune system realizes that the date with the virus has turned out to be something bad, really bad, it can start firing in random directions.

By contrast, the flu virus is more akin to that classic bully, like Biff Tannen, Joffrey Baratheon, Bellatrix Lestrange, or a racoon carrying nunchucks. There’s a good chance that your immune system has seen bullies like this before. Getting the seasonal flu vaccine can provide a preview of this kind of bully. If your immune system has seen a given influenza virus already, it will have a better sense about how to react. Your immune system may simply say “be best” and respond rapidly and effectively.

So not only are the Covid-19 coronavirus and the influenza virus two completely different viruses, your immune system’s experiences with them to date are likely very different. Therefore, the damage caused directly by each virus and by your immune system’s reaction to each can be very, very different.

That being said, it can frequently be difficult to determine whether you have the flu or Covid-19 without actual testing. Nonetheless, here are several possible differences between the infections with a big caveat at the end:

1. Covid-19 symptoms tend to take longer to emerge after you’ve been infected.

Covid-19 symptoms can develop two to 14 days after you are first infected. On average it takes about five days. That’s about half a Scaramucci, one fifth of a Flynn, or one fortieth of a Bannon or a Gorka. Meanwhile, flu symptoms tend to develop one to four days after infection or one tenth to four tenths of a Scaramucci, somewhat sooner

2. Covid-19 symptoms tend to emerge more gradually.

Covid-19 symptoms may be more gradual or unpredictable, leaving you guessing what you may have. … [] (Photo: Getty)

The flu can hit you like a ton of bricks. Picture yourself feeling fine, going about your daily business watching latkes heat up in your microwave while singing Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” to them, when suddenly you begin feeling lousy. It’s a sudden onset of symptoms like a fever, chills, muscles aches, headache and fatigue. Instead, of a latke to deal with, you quickly have a lot of symptoms to deal with within a few hours.

By contrast, the onset of symptoms for Covid-19 can be quite different. Instead of a ton of bricks, it can feel like bricks of varying sizes, shapes, and consistencies being tossed at you in various directions or stuffed down your pants. You may notice a loss of taste and smell first. Or a fever. Or a cough. Symptoms can appear gradually and can be mild at the beginning. But after the first week, like the movies Dark Phoenix and Lucy, things can go from a not-so-great beginning to much worse.

3. The course of Covid-19 is more unpredictable.

Covid-19 symptoms can wax and wane each day and even each hour. (Photo: Getty)

With the flu, symptoms tend to follow a more typical trajectory. You feel most like doo-doo early on, soon after symptoms appear. If things are going to go downhill, they usually do so during the first several days of symptoms. Otherwise, your symptoms will likely improve with time. Of course, there are exceptions. For example, things may be different if you subsequently get infected by something else like bacteria causing pneumonia in your lungs or a racoon hitting you with nunchucks.

On the other hand, the course of Covid-19 can be much more all over the place. It can be somewhat like a groundhog piloting an airplane in a storm while drinking tequila: highly unpredictable with significant ups and downs. You may feel reasonably OK during the first week and then spiral downhill the second week. Or your symptoms can change on a day-to-day or even seemingly on an hour-to-hour basis. It is much more difficult to predict what may happen. It can be unsettling trying to determine whether your new onset shortness of breath is a reaction to a video of BTS singing “Dynamite” or a sign that you may need to go to the hospital soon.

4. Covid-19 can cause a loss of taste or smell.

Losing your sense of taste is not typical for the flu. In this case, losing a sense of taste doesn’t mean wearing velour tracksuits or plating all of your walls and furniture with faux gold. It means not being able to sense different flavors in your mouth. So when you have avocado toast in your mouth and you don’t get all the feels, consider Covid-19 as a possibility.

Loss of smell is another possible Covid-19 symptom. As a Late Show with Stephen Colbert segment showed, such a symptom left actor Hugh Grant wanting to smell people’s armpits:

This is not typical when you have the flu, assuming that smelling other people’s armpits is not usually your thing. So if your roommate’s B.O. suddenly goes B-no, be on the lookout for other signs of Covid-19.

5. Covid-19 can have a wider range of unusual symptoms.

As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicates, both Covid-19 and the flu can result in fever, chills, cough, shortness of breath, difficulty breathing, fatigue, sore throats, runny or stuffy noses, muscle pain, body aches, headache, vomiting, or diarrhea.

However, eye problems, skin rashes, and an erection lasting longer than four hours are just some of the usual symptoms that have been reported for Covid-19. Physicians are still trying to figure out all of the possible problems that Covid-19 can cause. Certainly, if you have an erection lasting longer than four hours, don’t just say, “oh, darn it’s the flu again.” Similarly, any unusual or unexpected symptoms in combination with more common symptoms such as fever, cough, and diarrhea should make you consider Covid-19 as a possibility. The words erection and diarrhea don’t typically go together.

6. Covid-19 is more likely to cause serious problems, including long-term problems.

Covid-19 has a significantly higher risk of death than the flu and seems more likely to leave you with persistent symptoms. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “80% of infections are mild or asymptomatic, 15% are severe infection, requiring oxygen and 5% are critical infections, requiring ventilation. These fractions of severe and critical infection would be higher than what is observed for influenza infection.” It’s not typical to see 20 out of every 100 or two out of every 10 people with the flu requiring oxygen or ventilation.

The WHO also indicates that “mortality for COVID-19 appears higher than for influenza, especially seasonal influenza. While the true mortality of COVID-19 will take some time to fully understand, the data we have so far indicate that the crude mortality ratio (the number of reported deaths divided by the reported cases) is between 3-4%, the infection mortality rate (the number of reported deaths divided by the number of infections) will be lower. For seasonal influenza, mortality is usually well below 0.1%.”

There are also more and more reports of people suffering from long Covid-19, symptoms that persist well beyond the initial infection for weeks, even months. For example, in the following 60 Minutes Australia segment, actress Alyssa Milano described her struggles with “long hauler” Covid-19:

It’s not clear what percentage of Covid-19 progress to long Covid-19, but the longer your symptoms continue, the more likely you have Covid-19 than the flu.

7. Covid-19 is more contagious than the flu.

Covid-19 is more contagious than the flu. (Photo: Getty)

While a single person (meaning one person and not someone who is unattached) with the flu on average can transmit the virus to one to two other people, a single person infected with the Covid-19 coronavirus on average can on average transmit the virus to two to four other people. The Covid-19 coronavirus also seems to float in the air further and for longer periods of time than the flu virus. So the more people around you who are getting sick, the more you should consider the possibility of a Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak.

Testing may be the only way to really tell Covid-19 from the flu. (Photo by JACK GUEZ / AFP) (Photo … [] by JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images)

Here’s the big caveat. Don’t try to self-diagnose and try to determine whether you have Covid-19 or the flu by yourself. Covid-19 is not like having a marmot dressed in a trench coat on your head. You usually can tell pretty clearly when you have a marmot in a trench coat on your head. One way is by looking in the mirror while brushing your hair. The other is when people on a Zoom conference tell you, “we can’t hear you. You are muted. You have to unmute. Oh, you are unmuted? Well, then maybe that marmot in a trench coat on your head is covering your mouth because we still can’t hear you.”

As you can see, diagnosis of Covid-19 is more complex. Many of the distinctions between Covid-19 and influenza aren’t super clear-cut. In fact, they can be quite fuzzy. Often, it may be difficult to tell Covid-19 from the flu, especially when symptoms are mild.

That’s why Covid-19 testing is so important. Testing may be the only way to really tell whether you have Covid-19 versus something else. During the pandemic, follow these two rules: don’t go breaking my heart and don’t go self-diagnosing yourself. If you are concerned that you may have either Covid-19 or the flu, contact a trusted healthcare professional. It is important to distinguish the two because their clinical courses can end up being quite different.

Of course, viral infections aren’t like Zoom backgrounds. Just because you have one of the two viruses in your body doesn’t mean that you can’t get the other at the same time. As I’ve described before for Forbes, studies have shown that simultaneous infections with the Covid-19 coronavirus and the influenza virus are possible. So there is the chance that your answer to the question “is it influenza or Covid-19” may indeed be “yes.”

From Science in Perfectirishgifts

0 notes