This week, the NPR quiz show Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me! is broadcast from Texas, and the guest contestant is news journalist Dan Rather -- who is from Texas and still lives there, so rather than calling in like most guest contestants he's in studio with host Peter Sagal. While not a warm and open interview, it's interesting and surprisingly funny. And the 'Not My Job' quiz is a touch different from most for a reason I don't want to give away, and hilarious.
By the way, when they refer a couple of times to "Bill," they are talking about Bill Kurtis who is the show's announcer, but before that had had a long career as a TV anchor in Chicago and then went on to be a national correspondent for CBS and co-hosted the CBS Morning Show with Diane Sawyer. And then later hosted several syndicated TV shows, like American Justice -- and even was the narrator for Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy.and its sequel. And as I've mentioned, I found out only a few years ago that he was good friend with my dad's cousin (and my second cousin) Marion Elisberg Simon, and wrote the introduction to her autobiography. But I digress... Back to the show --
0 Comments
The other day I had a video of Bernadette Peters in Hello Dolly!, so I thought it was good timing to throw her hat in the ring with her entry of singing "Just One Person" with The Muppets. And as I've noted previously, though the song is widely identified these days with The Muppets, in fact it was written for another beloved children's source. The song is from the off-Broadway musical Snoopy!!!! -- which was a sequel to You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown -- with a score by Hal Hackady and Larry Grossman. This should be an enjoyable video for most people, but especially those who have been watching the f/X mini-series, Fosse/Verdon. But surprisingly, it's particularly fun for the latter not because of the musical number, but the conversation that comes latter. The musical part, though, is quite wonderful. This is a clip from the old daytime talk show, The Mike Douglas Show. It's Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera doing an absolutely great job performing one of my favorite songs from the Kander and Ebb musical Chicago that they starred in on Broadway (and then latter on tour in Los Angeles, where I saw them, as well as Jerry Orbach). And which was directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse. And then the song is followed by them doing the Hot Honey Rag. Making a appearance in between is Douglas's guest co-host for the week, Hal Linden, who fills in as the musical's emcee for the number. (Though most people know Linden for his series Barney Miller, he was an accomplished stage musical performer, and even won a Tony Award for the show, The Rothschilds, by Harnick and Bock.) The video continues afterwards for the talk portion of the evening, and often I'll click away at that point, but this time -- given the people involved -- I decided to keep watching...and am glad I did. That's because later in the interview, Gwen Verdon talks about a disastrous flop she was in, which as she was describing it, I felt certain that it was the show her character just began rehearsals for at the end of last week's episode of the mini-series -- and it's not going well -- called Children, Children. And sure enough, as she continues the story....it is! If you want to jump to that, it starts around the 8:00 mark. The video quality is not very good, it's quite washed out, but it's still a big treat -- whether you watch the interview or not. And for those who have been watching the mini-series, you'll not only enjoy the story but appreciate even more the terrific job Michelle Williams is doing as Gwen Verdon. This may seem small, but it's huge. In 2016, Trump surprisingly won Michigan by only 12,000 votes, one of the three states he won by only a total of 70,000, which pushed him over the Electoral College line by just 39 votes . A panel of judges yesterday ruled that Michigan -- which has 15 Electoral votes -- must redraw its districts which "deliberately discriminate" by the 2020 election.
(And the ruling may include state districts, too, which has been a hurdle the cities like Detroit that has been required to be governed under the state's "town manager" law, and Flint which has not been able to have its disastrous water problem fully-addressed..) The decision came as a result of a lawsuit by the Michigan League of Women Voters. The Democratic Secretary of State (elected during the recent Blue Wave) offered Republicans a more modest settlement, but they turned it down, choosing to let the panel of judges decide. Michigan Republicans said they will appeal the decision to the Supreme Court -- though last year the Supreme Court ruled in favor of two lower-court decisions in favor of redrawing districts in Pennsylvania and Virginia. You can read the full story in more detail here. This is an article from ZDNet by Jo Best that I don't fully understand -- though I get the point of it well-enough that I'm utterly fascinated by it. It's about medicine and technology, and how one of the impressive things about their future is also one of the most problematic -- how being able to collect data on a patient remotely (like those with pacemakers) and provide diagnostics is also fraught with risks due to hacking, since when you send anything by remote, it has the possibility of that data being read by those who shouldn't have access. The hacking has to be done reasonably near by, within about 30 yards, but in a medical facility that could be most anybody. However (and this is the utterly fascinating part, even if I don't have the technology exactly right), when there is a wire connecting servers it's more difficult to intercept -- one would have to be within centimeters -- and researcher's at Lafayette's Purdue University have recently found that one way to accomplish this is for the person with the implanted device to basically be the "conduit" themselves! Sensors would be attached to the patients and the signal would be routed through their body, "which dramatically cuts the distance over which any data can be read." What the researchers have developed is a way to keep the signal completely within the body.
As I said, I have no idea how this actually works or why. The article goes into meta-details which meant nothing to me, but skimming to the readable parts was able to get across the basics. Including that the technology not only helps prevent hacking, but is actually much more efficient which has its own benefits. "'When you take information and put it onto electromagnetic carriers to communicate, which is what we do with our wireless technology -- Bluetooth, 5G -- you take a lot of energy because you have to generate that high-frequency electromagnetic wave...' Dr Shreyas Sen, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, tells ZDNet. "'When you communicate over a wire,' Dr. Sen continued, 'it's 1000x more efficient. We started exploring how we might use the human body as a wire -- bringing the wireline kind of techniques into the human body to make it act like a wire. It really created interest in this technology.' "That means EQS-HBC has a practical advantage over wireless body networks: less energy demand means longer battery life for any implantable devices using the network. And a longer battery life means such devices won't need replacing as often -- for someone with a pacemaker, that could add up to a whole lot fewer invasive surgeries over their lifetime. There's a great deal more in the article that's worth reading -- even if (like me) you can't grasp it all (like talk about nanojoules and picojoules, and that's some of the easy part...). However, that's why God created skimming, and it's very simple to get through it all and come away with a lot that way. You can find the whole article here. |
AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
Archives
February 2025
Categories
All
|
© Copyright Robert J. Elisberg 2025
|