By Steve Rhodes
I truthfully never paid any attention to Bernie Mac, and in fact I assumed he wasn’t very funny at all because he struck me as just another mediocre TV sitcom comic, but when he first got sick I asked a friend whose judgement I respect and she told me that, no, he was actually really good.
I can’t speak to that and I won’t pretend I was a fan. But reading through the tributes and obits, I wish now I had paid closer attention.
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“Born Bernard Jeffery McCullough in a poor part of Chicago, he vowed to become a comedian after witnessing his single mother cry with laughter when watching Bill Cosby on television,” the London Independent writes. “‘I came from a place where there wasn’t a lot of joy,’ he said in 2001. ‘I decided to try and make other people laugh when there wasn’t a lot of things to laugh about.’
“However, his first attempts to entertain his friends and family backfired. ‘My first monologue that I did, eight years old, I got a spanking,’ he recalled. ‘I used to mimic people. I was mimicking my grandmother and my grandfather at the dinner table.’ Despite the punishment, he said, ‘I was so into the joke, I did it again. That’s how dedicated I was to the joke. It started then.'”
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AP Report: Stars Pay Homage
Bad Mother
I have a little more familiarity with Isaac Hayes. Damn right.
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Song of the Moment: Theme From Shaft.
Olympic Opening
“The scope, precision and beauty of the production were, you will agree, astonishing,” Roger Ebert writes.
The regulars at the Beachwood certainly agree. We were pretty frickin’ amazed.
“What other Olympics will have a $300 million budget for the ceremony?”
Uh, wait, don’t answer that.
“Certainly this was the most expensive theatrical spectacle in history.”
I suppose that could be true, I really don’t know. But man . . . it was really something. The only government I can think of that could top it is the Obama campaign.
Honest John Edwards
Exclusive video! See what he told Citizen Kate.
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Keep Kate on the trail!
Cop Chop
“Chicago Police officers will no longer be paid overtime to attend monthly beat meetings or community policing functions in a budget-cutting move that, critics warn, could put the 15-year-old program ‘on life support’,” the Sun-Times reports.
Students of community policing – you know, like police reporters ought to be – know that Chicago has never truly had community policing, and the fact that attending beat meetings required overtime is just the latest factoid revealing the lack of commitment to a strategy exploited for public relations purposes not doing a better job of protecting and serving the, um, community.
“The Rev. Albert Tyson, pastor of St. Stephen A.M.E. Church, 3050 W. Washington, called the ban on CAPS-related overtime ‘another indication that they’re backing off community policing’ as a law enforcement tool.”
The key word there is “another,” though it’s hard to back off something that was never actually entered into in the first place.
Fake Trend Addiction
The Sun-Times “reports” that the “top five obsessions of those addicted to the Internet” are pornography, role-playing games, shopping, gambling, and chatting.
My guess is that it’s not the Internet that folks are addicted to, it’s activities like pornography and gambling. In other words, if you could take drugs online, that would be a drug addiction, not an Internet addiction.
A Cop and His Chair
Our very own Kathryn Ware is back with the second in a series looking back at the TV classic Ironside. She really put a smile on my face this morning.
The Beachwood Tip Line: Wheels up.
Posted on August 11, 2008