Classic Johnny Carson

Two jokes from Junes long gone.

On June 14, 1985, Johnny asked the Tonight Show audience whether they had ever been to a barbecue in Beverly Hills? It's a little different from a barbecue elsewhere. "What your chauffeur does, he drives the hamburger patties over to a tanning salon."

On June 8, 1989, Johnny helpfully pointed out that the Census Bureau had taken to using combo forms for city names to describe metropolitan areas. Thus, there was the area between Chicago and Pittsburgh, known as Chipitts. "I'm not making all this up. Now, if you live exactly midway between Burbank, Gardena, Dublin, Cheeseborough, Smolensk, and Freiburg, Germany, you are in Burger-Double-Cheese-Small-Fries."

And here is a photo of Johnny in Carnac regalia, just for the heck of it.

From my calender

Still no friggin' sound card.  This is really ticking me off.  But for now let's forget about this, and focus on something amusing.

As I've mentioned, my day-to-day calender this year features a joke each day, taken from the long tenure of Johnny Carson at The Tonight Show.

I'll share three of these today.

On September 20, 1972, he told of a trip he had made to Hollywood Boulevard.  "So I was roaming around up there, and a nice elderly lady stopped me, and she said, 'Did you know, that in Los Angeles, a woman gets molested every sixty seconds?' I said, Well, what do you want me to do about it?' She said, 'You got a minute?'"

On September 26, 1973, Johnny told his audience:  "I found out an interesting fact about Tommy Newsom [a saxophone player in the NBC orchestra]. He's a great musician but not the most exciting man to be around. When he was a kid he didn't have to have his appendix taken out -- it left of its own accord."

On April 2, 1976 there was a bit of an archeology lesson.  "Three thousand years ago they didn't even have any toothbrushes to clean your teeth. Egyptian dentists just took you out during a sandstorm and made you smile."

Wooka wooka wooka.

My three calenders

For my week-by-week desk calender through 2012, I will rely on an unflashy but serviceable volume from American Express. As with last year's calender, there are factual tidbits on each page about various destinations where I can presumably enjoy a debt-financed vacation with my Amex card. One of the early pages tells me, for example, with reference to Kauai, Hawaii, that a native of Kauai was "the only royal-born person ever elected to the U.S. Congress."  Prince Jonah Huhio Kalanianaole served as a delegate to Congress from the then-Territory of Hawaii from 1903 to 1922.

This year's Amex calender doesn't have the "30 years ago this week" feature that last year's did. I wonder why they axed it?  I would imagine that 1982 was at least as interesting a year, week-to-week, that 1981 was.

Maybe they simply realized that I can always check out 30-years events at websites like this: CED Magic. 

Separately, my month-by-month calender for the coming year, from Universe Publishing, provides me with classic illustrations from the career of Tintin, now the protagonist of a Spielberg movie.  The movie has been in the works for a long time, apparently since soon after the death of Tintin's creator, Hergé, in 1983. At one time it was to be a Universal/Paramount partnership, but Universal pulled out, and the movie now in theatres comes to us from Paramout and Sony. Personally, I hope it proves to be a long and successful franchise. It seems to give Spielberg a good excuse to revert to his Indiana-Jones phase.

Finally, for the day-to-day or "box" calender on the top of my dresser, I am done with "non sequitur" and have propped up a box consisting of one witticism a day from Johnny Carson, in the glory days of the Tonight Show.

Out with the old, in with the new!  

Ed McMahon

Ed McMahon, the sidekick from the old Carson-era Tonight Show, is getting foreclosed on.

How does someone like that get behind in payments on a friggin' house? Did he buy one mansion too many?

Ed McMahon. Not just the Tonight Show, either. There was Star Search (which came in between "The Gong Show" and "American Idol" -- every generation gets to laugh at amateurs) and the Publishers' Clearinghouse. Don't folks like that have financial advisers who keep them out of the sort of situation where you can be foreclosed on?

Or is it really possible to run through the kind of money an Ed McMahon must have made in his heyday?

Color me naive, but this story just seems absurd to me.

By the way, I'm trying a new look for this blog. Hope you (idealized reader "you") like it.