The Books of Bokonon

This is part of my job that I enjoy the least. #March32Forever [image or embed] — Communies ( @communiess.bsky.social ) April 1, 2025 at 7:15 AM

I normally do a midweek cafe and lounge at Progress Pond, but the site is undergoing some much needed maintenance while maintaining its presence on the internet tubes. So, I'll just post here what I would have posted there. This time around, I am going to pay tribute to my favorite TV series, Community . These videos appear from the closing credits from two of the Christmas episodes that were released during its six-season run. If you know the series, these will bring back good memories. If you haven't seen Community, what are you waiting for? That last one is a mirror image of what you would normally see on the screen, but otherwise, it's fun. Cheers, and happy holidays!

Obviously, after the returns last Tuesday from the Blue Wall states showed a clear trend toward Trump, I was no longer in the mood for late night comedy. Thankfully, Pinku-Sensei from Crazy Eddies Motie Blog was more on the ball than I was. You can find most of the talk show video links here . The link to Jon Stewart's pep talk is here .

Before I try to catch a few hours of sleep, I wanted to post Jon Stewart's opening monologue. It's great to have him back at The Daily Show, even if only for Mondays. This week, he discusses Donald Trump's unhinged ramblings. What's great is the setup. One of the big complaints I read or hear among the legacy media talking heads is how Kamala Harris does not articulate a specific set of policies. So he plays a few clips of some of her talking points, which do address precisely those sorts of concerns and then contrasts that with....whatever the hell Trump is babbling on about. Here's the segment: Obviously Trump's fandom is going to do whatever fandoms do. The reality is that Trump gets portrayed is this heroic action figure when the reality is drastically different. The Trump that you are getting at rallies and interviews is the incoherent fool whose ramblings can only be interpreted as a cry for help from Adult Protective Services and not those of a person who...

Sarah Cooper's videos where she lip-synced Donald Trump's unhinged ramblings were easily one of 2020's highlights. Her approach truly highlights just how deranged Trump is. This one she says is the last one, and if we're lucky, she'll be right. Still, she'll end that chapter of her comedic career on a high note. Enjoy:

If you've ever been part of a studio audience for any comedy series (whether sitcom or late night talk), it's fairly common for the cast members or host to warm up the audience, tell a few jokes, interact. What you get is something unscripted, unrehearsed, and very human and unpredictable. A few decades back, I might have been in one of those live audiences. Jon Stewart does that on nights when he is hosting The Daily Show . And these clips of Jon doing his thing are evergreen. Jon Stewart and I are very close to the same age and as products of the latter part of the 1970s and early 1980s, it's safe to say we probably have some overlapping life experiences. When asked to recommend some books worth reading, Jon Stewart recommended the work of Kurt Vonnegut. He has his reasons, which aren't all that different from my own reasons for recommending that author in particular. So it goes. Anyway, here is the video. Enjoy.

I'm sure Sarah Cooper would rather Trump vanish into thin air than do the Trump parody lip sync videos that made her famous in 2020, but I am glad she keeps giving us good reason to laugh at how loony Trump really is:  

Stephen Colbert usually delivers. He did again after Kamala Harris' acceptance speech Thursday night:  

Jason Bateman has some fun with this bit on The Daily Show:   After so much chaos aren't you craving normal? Maybe that is what our "change election" this year will be about: the pursuit of normality that has eluded us since the Trump era.

I am glad to have Jon Stewart back. He's consistently funny, and he is not one to pull punches. Here is his recap of Day 4 of the DNC convention:   Jon Stewart's take on Fox News' coverage was brilliantly brutal. Jesse Watters comes across as the GOP's "Baghdad Bob". If you are too young to know who that is, Wikipedia is your friend. The absurdity of reporting on how miserable the convention-goers are while literally next to a screen showing the convention-goers having the time of their life is truly a sight to behold. He loves highlighting the internal contradictions of the Democratic coalition. Speaking as a Democratic Party member, I can tell you that we are truly a big tent party, and perhaps even more so this election season. We can be a bit like herding cats - always have been. Diversity is our strength, but the DNC programmers' choice to not focus on Palestinian Americans strikes both Stewart and me as something that may come back to haunt them lat...

Let's see what the late night talk shows have posted already this evening. I'll start off with Seth Meyers: Desi Lydic of The Daily Show also has a few words about Trump's latest speech or rally, or whatever the heck that was:   I'm sure I'll have more for you later. Cheers!

That's the question keeping Jimmy Kimmel up at night : “I don’t know if there will be any late-night television shows on network TV in ten years. Maybe there’ll be one but there won’t be a lot of them,” he said on the Politickin’ podcast. “There’s a lot to watch and now people can watch anything at anytime, they’ve got all these streaming services. It used to be Johnny Carson was the only thing on at 11:30pm and so everybody watched and then David Letterman was on after Johnny so people watched those two shows but now they’re so many options. Maybe more significantly, the fact that people are easily able to watch your monologue online the next day, it really cancels out the need to watch it when it’s on the air and once people stop watching it when it’s on the air, networks are going to stop paying for it to be made.”  I doubt Jimmy Kimmel will have much to worry about the Monday after his last late night broadcast, whenever that happens (hopefully not for a long time). But he is ...