Comedy Keeps Irony Alive In US
October 16th, 2008 by admin | Comments Off | Filed in Company, Overnight, VideoComedy keeps irony alive in US
US elections 2008: By Sarah Strickland
The British have long asserted that Americans have no sense of irony. Something about their can-do, earnest “have a nice day” approach and flag-waving, church-going lifestyle gives the impression that they simply don’t get it.ῠ That and speaking in sentences that go up at the end? After living here a year, albeit in the Democratic Republic of Washington D.C., I can hereby confirm that irony is alive and kicking in the USA. Perhaps not in everyday life, but in razor-sharp, inventive and agonisingly funny form on its satirical TV news shows. With interest in the current election at fever pitch, record numbers are flocking to three shows in particular.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report, both on the cable channel Comedy Central, have seen huge increases in their viewing figures, while NBC’s Saturday Night Live is enjoying its highest ratings in 14 years. For SNL, Sarah Palin has been a God-send.ῠ One of its former stars, comedian Tina Fey, happened to be the spitting image of the Republican vice-presidential candidate and agreed to return to the show to play her. Appearing first alongside SNL’s Hillary Clinton, she responded to talk of foreign diplomacy with a perky “And I can see Russia from my house!” More than five million people have gone online to watch Ms Fey’s impression of Ms Palin’s cringe-making CBS interview with Katie Couric.
“I had 15 to 20 false alarms in New York where I thought I saw Osama bin Laden driving’ a taxi,” she confides with a wink. What was so clever, and damaging, about the parody was that much of it was almost verbatim.ῠ Ms Palin’s answers were so hilariously incoherent, the script-writers didn’t need to embellish that much. Until, with a folksy gosh-darnit, Fey delivers the killer punch line.
“Katie, I’d like to use one of my lifelines,” she chirps, stumped by a question on foreign policy. “I’d like to phone a friend”.ῠ With the real Palin withheld from the media for so long, the alternative version filled the gap - something that may have damaged her reputation for good.
“What political satire does is fix the political persona in peoples’ minds,” said Alan Schroeder, associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University, Boston.ῠ “The comedic version that gets established is very hard to counteract.” He puts the flourishing of satirical comedy down to the Bush administration.
“Things got so surreal over the last eight year that journalism was not providing the same check and balance to government any more,” he said.ῠ He recalls Steven Colbert, in his manic right-wing TV pundit persona, mercilessly lampooning George Bush at the annual Whitehouse Correspondent’s Association dinner in 2006.
“It was illuminating, being in a room full of journalists whose job it was to provide that sceptical eye - and he was the one who got the job done. Comedians have always been the ones who have had license to speak truth to power. In a time when dissent is not looked on favourably, comedy is one of the few outlets for acceptable political dissent.” Someone who has more or less escaped the satire is Mr Barack Obama - perhaps because he is African-American or maybe because he simply isn’t funny. “Maybe that’s what we need after eight years of Bush,” says Mr Schroeder. “But there’s a price to pay in entertainment value.”
The writer, a British journalist based in Washington, will file a weekly feature on the US presidential election for this newspaper
Russian lawyer ill, poisoning suspected
Moscow, Oct. 15: A prominent Russian human rights lawyer says she and her children are ill after a suspicious substance was found in their car in France. The incident has kept Ms Karinna Moskalenko away from preliminary hearings Wednesday at a Moscow court in the trial of four men in connection with the 2006 murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
Ms Moskalenko is a lawyer for Politkovskaya’s family and for imprisoned former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.ῠ She also represents Russians pressing claims against the government at the European court of human rights in Strasbourg.ῠ Ms Moskalenko told a Russian radio station that her husband found a large amount of a mercury-like liquid in the car they use in Strasbourg. Rights groups have voiced concern about what they called an apparent poisoning. The situation has taken a grave turn and the authorities are looking into the matter.
Attacks backfire on McCain: Poll
New York, Oct. 15: The McCain campaign’s recent angry tone and sharply personal attacks on Senator Barack Obama appear to have backfired and tarnished Senator John McCain more than their intended target, the latest New York Times/CBS News poll has found.
After several weeks in which the McCain campaign unleashed a series of strong political attacks on Mr Obama, trying to tie him to a former 1960s radical, among other things, the poll found that more voters see Mr McCain as waging a negative campaign than Mr Obama. Six in 10 voters surveyed said that Mr McCain had spent more time attacking Mr Obama than explaining what he would do as President; by about the same number, voters said Mr Obama was spending more of his time explaining than attacking.
Over all, the poll found that if the election were held today, 53 per cent of those determined to be probable voters said they would vote for Mr Obama and 39 per cent said they would vote for Mr McCain. The findings come as the race enters its final weeks, with two candidates scheduled to hold their last debate on Wednesday.
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US economy in recession: Fed chief
New York, Oct. 15: The US economy “appears to be in a recession,” the head of the San Francisco branch of the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, said on Wednesday. “The recent flow of economic data suggests that the economy was weaker than expected in the third quarter, probably showing essentially no growth at all,” said Janet Yellen in an address in Palo Alto, California.
“Growth in the fourth quarter appears to be weaker yet, with an outright contraction quite likely,” she said. “Indeed, the US economy appears to be in a recession.” Ms Yellen spoke just hours after official data showed the budget deficit tripled in size in the 2007-08 accounting year to $ 455 billion, or 3.2 per cent of gross domestic product.
Her remarks also followed a dramatic period that saw the US government, for the first time since the Great Depression, partially nationalise major banks in its latest move to restore confidence to badly shaken financial markets. Economic downturns are a double blow for government budgets because they reduce tax revenue for governments and increase the need for social security spending in the form of unemployment benefits.
Recession is broadly defined in the United States as more than two quarters of decline in real GDP. “By now, virtually every major sector of the economy has been hit by the financial shock,” Ms Yellen told the Silicon Valley chapter of Financial Executives International. “Employment has now declined for nine months in a row, and personal income, in inflation-adjusted terms, is virtually unchanged since April. Household wealth is substantially lower as house prices have continued to slide and the stock market
has declined sharply.”
Bruni sways Prez to halt extradition
London, Oct. 15: Carla Bruni, the glamorous wife of Nicolas Sarkozy, has sparked an outcry after influencing the French President to stop the extradition of a terrorist to Italy. A French court approved the extradition to Italy and an order to this effect was signed by the French Prime Minister. However, France’s First Lady visited Marina Petrella, a wanted Red Brigades terrorist who killed a police chief, and assured her that “you will not be extradited”.
“I have a message from my husband - you will not be extradited,” Ms Carla was quoted as telling Petrella by the Mail online. The former supermodel was asked by her sister Valeria to block an Italian request to have convicted murderer Petrella, who is lodged a Paris hospital, sent back to Rome after more than 15 years on the run in France. The move to halt the extradition has kicked up a row, with Italian officials saying Franco-Italian relations had been “severely damaged”.
Government circles in Rome are amazed that Ms Carla was involved in the row as the Bruni family had fled Italy in the early 1970s over terrorism fears. “It has amazed everyone considering that they are Italian citizens who left Italy because their father, an industrialist, feared they were possible kidnap targets by the Red Brigades,” an official at the ministry of justice in Rome said. Italian legislator Luigi Lusi said: “It will severely shake relations between the two countries.”
Russian arms for Venezuela
Moscow, Oct. 15: Russia plans to sell Venezuela armoured personnel carriers and multiple rocket launchers, the Russian arms export agency said on Wednesday. “We are preparing to deliver a large number of BMP-3 armoured personnel carriers” and multiple rocket launchers, Igor Sevastyanov, deputy director of Rosoboronexport, was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency.
Venezuela has already bought 24 Sukhoi fighter jets, 50 helicopters and 100,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles from Russia in contracts worth a total of 4.4 billion dollars signed between 2005 and 2007, officials said. During a visit by the Venezuelan President, Mr Hugo Chavez, to Moscow last month, Russia announced it was giving Venezuela a one-billion-dollar credit to buy Russian weapons and the two countries discussed nuclear energy cooperation.
They are also planning joint naval exercises in the Caribbean in November. Two Russian Tupolev-162 strategic bombers - each capable of carrying 12 cruise missiles armed with single 200-megaton nuclear warheads - carried out exercises in Venezuela last month. US military chiefs have said they are concerned about the military build-up in Venezuela and the US State Department has said it will be watching the Russian-Venezuelan naval exercises “very closely.”
Russia has announced that a small naval flotilla led by the nuclear battlecruiser Pyotr Veliky (Peter the Great) had paid a call at the Libyan port of Tripoli.ῠ The ships were to conduct exercises at unspecified locations in the Mediterrannean Sea before heading toward Venezuela for joint exercises in November, officials said.
China beans contaminated
Tokyo, Oct. 15: Japan on Wednesday ordered retailers to pull frozen green beans imported from China off the shelves after a woman fell ill eating them, the health ministry said. The woman felt numb in her mouth on Sunday after eating a dish using frozen green beans from China which she had bought at a Tokyo supermarket, a health ministry official said.
She went to hospital and was released with no apparent health problems after an overnight check, the official said.ῠ The health ministry instructed retailers and importers nationwide to suspend sales of the beans from the Chinese supplier “until the cause of the incident becomes clear,” the official said.
The Tokyo metropolitan government conducted tests on Tuesday and found that the beans had 34,500 times the pesticide residue level permitted by the Japanese government. The importer, Tokyo-based Nichirei Foods, said it procured the beans from a company called Yantai Beihai Foodstuff in eastern Shandong province. “We conducted an inspection on a sample of the beans before importing them but did not detect pesticides,” a Nichirei Foods spokesperson said.
It is the latest scare in Japan about Chinese-made food products. Ten people suffered pesticide poisoning in December and January, and thousands of others reported feeling sick after eating frozen dumplings imported from China.ῠ Meanwhile, China ordered all milk products more than a month old pulled from store shelves for emergency testing as another child in Hong Kong developed kidney stones after eating melamine-contaminated products and a Thai company recalled packaged cookies.
China’s move was the largest blanket withdrawal since infant formula laced with the industrial chemical killed infants and sickened tens of thousands of children. All milk powder and liquid milk produced before September 14 must be tested by manufacturers nationwide, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported
Cool, smileys, lol is language of terrorists
London, Oct. 15: A London court has been hearing how two suspected terrorists messaged each other on the internet, employing the chatty and informal language of teenagers while planning deadly attacks on targets in London and Glasgow. The prosecution told Woolwich Crown Court Kafeel Ahmed, an Indian PhD student in Britain, and Iraqi-born doctor Bilal Abdulla had discussed via internet messaging how they would “start experiments sometime soon” months before the June 2007 attacks.
A laptop seized by police contained a conversation in which Ahmed told the Abdulla: “Bro, inshallah [God willing], I think we are gonna start experiments sometime soon,” the jury heard. Abdulla replied “Oh cool” to Ahmed’s message, before adding a smiley face symbol.
During the conversation, in February 2007, Ahmed continued: “Lol [laugh out loud]. Probably in a week or so we will have a meeting,” the jury was told. Abdulla is being tried with another alleged accomplice for attempts to blow up two bomb-laden cars in central London on June 29 and a bid to attack the main terminal of Glasgow airport with a burning Jeep a day later.
Both attacks failed but Ahmed, who drove the Jeep Cherokee into Glasgow airport, died of burn injuries later. Earlier, the court was told that the terrorist who led the “mission” had left a will addressed to Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden that he planned to kill in revenge for “injustices” against Muslims by the British and US soldiers.
The draft will written by Abdulla was found on a badly-burnt laptop in the remains of a Jeep Cherokee that ploughed into the Airport’s main terminal last year.ῠ The laptop also contained videos of attacks on allied forces in Iraq, coffins of US soldiers and clips of speeches by Bin Laden.
The prosecutor said Abdulla wrote the document because he expected to die alongside the Jeep’s driver Kafeel Ahmedῠ Abdulla, set up the suicide attack after attempts to detonate car bombs in London the previous day failed, the Woolwich Crown Court was told.
Indian mass inspired me: Adiga
London, Oct. 15: Indian-born Aravind Adiga was remarkably composed when the chairman of the jury Michael Portillo announced his name as the winner of the Man Booker Prize 2008 after 10 pm at Guildhall in London on Tuesday. Explaining that his jetlag was responsible for “vision of composure,” the 33-year-old Adiga said his work as a journalist and his experience of life in North India had inspired him to write The White Tiger. His book was an “attempt to capture the voice of the men you meet as you travel through India - the voice of the colossal underclass.”
Travelling along the Ganga, he said, inspired him to think in a new way. Adiga said he realised the dark humour of these people. It is “very similar to that of black Americans and people living in Jewish ghettos in Europe.” “This voice had not been captured,” he added, “and I wanted to do so without sentimentality or portraying them as mirthless humourless weaklings as they are usually.”
Explaining how he created the main protagonist of the book, Balram Halwai, Adiga said he met a group of rickshaw-pullers during an assignment in Gaya, Bihar. “One of them was called Balram and another one was a Halwai, who went on to tell me his life story. The guy called Balram had a lot of anger inside him and said to me that he didn’t understand why he was wasting time talking to me when I would return home and promptly forget him,” Adiga added. However, he never forgot this man and used him to fashion his protagonist.
“The White Tiger at its heart is a story about a man’s quest for freedom, set in a social and political context. This is about a man trying to understand self, without any help from his background, without any help from his family, being put in an entirely new world. He mulls on how to get out of the trap,” he explained.
Adiga zeroed in on tiger as a metaphor to explain the character of Balram. He chanced upon a white tiger during a visit to Delhi Zoo and promptly decided to use the rare animal to explain the journey of a uneducated villager to city where he became a driver and then an entrepreneur.
Adiga, who was born in Chennai, did his schooling in India and Australia. He has an Australian passport. He went on to get degrees in English literature from Columbia and Oxford Universities. He dropped out from his doctoral studies at Princeton University to become a journalist.
Explaining the reason for becoming a journalist despite the fact that he always wanted to become a novelist since childhood, Adiga said, ” It was always my aim to travel, both geographically and culturally and socially within India. To get to meet new kinds of people and becoming a journalist allowed me to do that. I always wanted to just write fiction, but I wanted to write fiction about someone very unlike me. Being a journalist was part of that endeavour.” Adiga said that living in Sydney has helped him grow up.
Internet use is good for brain
London, Oct. 15: Internet use benefits the brains of middle aged and older people as it stimulates the brain’s decision-making and reasoning centres, according to a study by the US scientists. The team of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, found that searching the Internet stimulates parts of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning, BBC News reported. The study found that Internet use might even help resist age-related physiological changes in the brain such as shrinkage of cells, which reduces its performance. The study results have been encouraging.ῠῠ
It’s splitsville for Madonna
London, Oct. 15: Speculation that pop singer Madonna and her husband Guy Ritchie plan to divorce grew on Wednesday after a report in a British newspaper said the couple would announce the split “imminently.”
When asked about the report in the Sun tabloid, Barbara Charone, Madonna’s London-based publicist, replied, “No comment.”
Madonna and British filmmaker Ritchie have denied previous reports that they planned to end their eight-year marriage. The Sun quoted a “highly-placed source” as saying Madonna, 50, and Ritchie, 40, “just couldn’t live together any more” and could “not bear the pretence of being happily married.
Rumours that the London-based couple planned to split have been circulating for months, fuelled by reports in the summer that the singer had lined up Fiona Shackleton, a lawyer who acted for former Beatle Paul McCartney in his divorce. Madonna is in the middle of her Sticky & Sweet world tour. Ritchie has seen hisῠ career recover from a series of critical duds and he is now making major Hollywood blockbuster Sherlock Holmes.ῠῠ
UK Indian cooks next to corpse
London, Oct. 15: An Indian origin restaurateur in Britain has been banned from the food business for life after he was caught making kebabs even as a dead body lay in the same room. Jaswinder Singh of Pappu Sweet Centre and Catering in Wolverhampton did not stop cooking although one of his workers died and his body lay on a sofa in the kitchen.
A local court refused to give Singh any kind of reprieve after finding that he had a multitude of health violations listed against him in the past. Singh had been in business since 1996. Singh was caught cooking next to the dead worker in August by a police officer investigating the employee’s sudden death. The constable was so disgusted, he immediately closed the premises, The Telegraph has said.
The list of violations includes staff smoking and spitting on the floor, rodent infestation with a dead rat found under a pan in the kitchen, refrigerators running at more than 20 degree Celsius, mouldy food and filthy conditions. Singh, unrepresented in court and speaking through an interpreter, admitted to some of the charges of unhygienic conditions, but pleaded with the judge to be given “one last chance” to improve.
But the judge refused to relent and adhered to his decision. This is extremely serious as the initial findings included dead vermin, rotting food and rather all the unpleasant details of the findings in August.ῠ
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Words can reveal human nature
Oct. 15: Dr James W. Pennebaker’s interest in word counting began more than 20 years ago, when he did several studies suggesting that people who talked about traumatic experiences tended to be physically healthier than those who kept such experiences secret. He wondered how much could be learned by looking at every single word people used - even the tiny ones. This led Dr Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas, down a winding path that has taken him from Beatles lyrics (John Lennon’s songs have more “negative emotion” words than Paul McCartney’s) all the way to terrorist communications.
By counting the different kinds of words a person says, he is breaking new linguistic ground and leading a resurgent interest in text analysis. Take Dr Pennebaker’s recent study of Al Qaeda communications - videotapes, interviews, letters. At the request of the FBI, he tallied the number of words in various categories - pronouns, articles and adjectives, among others. He found, for example, that Osama bin Laden’s use of first-person pronouns (I, me, my, mine) remained fairly constant over several years.
By contrast, his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, used such words more and more often. “This dramatic increase suggests greater insecurity, feelings of threat, and perhaps a shift in his relationship with bin Laden,” Dr Pennebaker wrote in his report, which was published in The Content Analysis Reader.
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