Hippocratic Oaf

 

Art by B. Smart (get it?)

The above is a May 1955 press release by the Los Angeles-based anticommunist (and anti-social justice) organization Keep America Commitee, which begs the question, keep America what? Sickly? How do these supposed threats to a kept Amercian stack up 70 years later? Let's start with the middle one. I've never met a single person born after 1960--the vast majority of the 2025 United States population--who's been stricken with polio, so I'd say Jonah Salk's legacy is secure. As for Mental Hygiene being a subtle and diabolical plan to transform a free and intelligent people into a cringing horde of zombies, well, I'm afraid that one is true if the 119th Congress is any indication. I'm just wondering why it took so long.

That leaves fluoridated water, which is apparently a threat again, at least according to the current Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Secretary has instructed the Center of Disease Control to recommend that cities and counties stop adding fluoride to their water supplies. Since the CDC just lost its 20-person Division of Oral Health in a recent round of budget cuts, there's been little pushback from the agency. Plenty of dentists from outside the CDC think the de-fluoridization of water is a terrible idea, but the Secretary, who has neither a D.D.S or an M.D. after his name, has shown he cares not a whit what the medical establishment thinks, and has gone so far to threaten government scientists from publishing their findings in medical journals. So what's his beef against medicine? He thinks it's corrupt. As someone who believes that any institution or establishment that's become too powerful potentially can go corrupt, I have a certain sympathy for that point of view. However, as the Secretary works for the Executive Branch of the federal government, itself an increasingly significant source of power...

  ...I'd just as soon take my chances with The New England Journal of Medicine. Corrupt away!

Quips and Quotations (Natural Shell-ection Edition)

 

What did turtles evolve from? Really, I want to know. And for God’s sake, don’t say lizards, because turtles are nothing like lizards. They could not be more different.

--Gwen Stefani

Vital Viewing (Preach Therapy Edition)

 

 

Not to be confused with a one-time cast member on Law and Order, screenwriter and director Richard Brooks was born on this date in 1912 (he died in 1992.) Among several well-known movies that Brooks wrote and directed were Blackboard Jungle (1955), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), In Cold Blood (1967) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), all worthwhile films, but the one I want you to recommend to you today is this 1960 adaptation of a best-selling novel of the Wild (Mid)West: 

Academy Award voters of the day seem to second my recommendation. But first a word from Bob:

I like Kitty's gown, but that's neither here nor there. What IS here or there is the trailer for the movie, a movie that also won Oscars for leading man Burt and the future Mrs. Partridge:

Elmer didn't get to become Pope either.

Quips and Quotations (Follicle Frolics Edition)

There was an Old Man with a beard,

Who said, "It is just as I feared!—

Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,

Have all built their nests in my beard.

--Edward Lear

 (Look carefully and you might see them.)

 

A Runaway Production

 

Now it's movies?

All I know is Jon Voight's name has been bandied about. Has to do with the company he keeps.

 

 

"Hey! I'm walkin' here!"

 

Vital Viewing (The Hannibal Run Edition)

Today's not Conan O'Brien's birthday, but there's reason to celebrate anyway as just the other day The John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington D.C. presented the man with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Now, you may have heard that thanks to an "Executive Order", TJFKCFPA has come under the thumb of the current occupant of the White House, something that may have been on O'Brien's mind as he gave his acceptance speech:

I've watched many of these Mark Twain Prize telecasts over the years, and the recipients very rarely mention the man the prize was named after, so as a Twain fan it pleases me to no end that O'Brien did and did so at such great length.

It also makes me think I should include an accompanying video of Twain, but that's not really possible. Late in life he did appear on film, but it was silent film, so we're denied the Great Man's acerbic witticisms. The best I can do is this:

And that's what Conan was talking about!

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1936-2025

The Mark Twain Prize seems to have passed Ruth Buzzi by, but that's the Kennedy Center's loss and not the loss for those of us who lived through a time when she was a regular, and a regularly hilarious, presence on television. Buzzi was best known for Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and on that once-well-known rapid-fire sketch comedy show she was best known for her portrayal of homely, purse-battering Gladys Ormphby, but she played other characters as well. Perusing through what YouTube has to offer, the following comedy of manners is what gave me the biggest laugh:

Twain, that old foe of propriety, would have loved it.