Andrew Geoffrey Kaufman (January 17, 1949 - May 16, 1984) was an American entertainer, actor, writer, wrestler and performance artist. While often called a comedian, Kaufman described himself instead as a "song and dance man". He disdained telling jokes and engaging in comedy as it was traditionally understood, once saying in a rare introspective interview, "I am not a comic, I have never told a joke. ... The comedian's promise is that he will go out there and make you laugh with him... My only promise is that I will try to entertain you as best I can."
After working in small comedy clubs in the early 1970s, Kaufman came to the attention of a wider audience in 1975, when he was invited to perform portions of his act on the first season of Saturday Night Live. His Foreign Man character was the basis of his performance as Latka Gravas on the hit television show Taxi from 1978 until 1983. During this time, he continued to tour comedy clubs and theaters in a series of unique performance art / comedy shows, sometimes appearing as himself and sometimes as obnoxiously rude lounge singer Tony Clifton. He was also a frequent guest on sketch comedy and late-night talk shows, particularly Late Night with David Letterman. In 1982, Kaufman brought his professional wrestling villain act to Letterman's show by way of a staged encounter with Jerry "The King" Lawler of the Continental Wrestling Association (although the fact that the altercation was planned was not publicly disclosed for over a decade).
Kaufman died of lung cancer in 1984, at the age of 35. Because pranks and elaborate ruses were major elements of his career, persistent rumors have circulated that Kaufman faked his own death as a grand hoax. He continues to be respected for the variety of his characters, his uniquely counterintuitive approach to comedy, and his willingness to provoke negative and confused reactions from audiences.
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Cal in Vermont said:
The late , great Andy Kaufman.
Alan J answered:
Andy Kaufman.
mj wrote:
The man who challenged women to wrestle
Andy Kaufman.
Dave responded:
Andy Kaufman. He had a screwy sense of humor that often left his audience puzzled, which I guess was the point? Probably Kaufman is most remembered as the goofy foreign mechanic on the terrific TV 1970's - 1980's sitcom Taxi. I remember he was on an SNL skit lip syncing to a record of the Mighty Mouse Theme (Here I Come To Save the Day). Jim Carrey starred in a 1999 film, Man on the Moon as Andy Kaufman.
zorch replied:
Andy Kaufman.
My Libtard Snowflake friend, Roy, still hunkered down in isolation in Tyler, TX wrote:
That's Andy Kaufman, who played Latka Gravas on Taxi.
Jim from CA, retired to ID, responded:
Andy Kaufman
Micki replied:
Andy Kaufman.
John I from Hawai`i says,
Andy Kaufman
Randall wrote:
Andy Kaufman
Billy in Cypress U$A said:
Andrew Geoffrey Kaufman who played Latka Gravas on "Taxi" is the answer today.
Mac Mac answered:
Andy Kaufman
Dave in Tucson replied:
That's the one & only (& late) Andy Kaufman!
Deborah responded:
I feel like I should know who that is, I recognize the face, kind of, but I don't know his name. I'm stumped.
Michelle in AZ said:
Andy Kaufman
DJ Useo wrote:
That fellow is Andy Kaufman. I saw him live back then, & he was so stinking funny.
Kevin K. in Washington, DC, answered:
Tony Clifton's alter ego, Andy Kaufman.
Daniel in The City responded:
Andy Kaufman. See the film Man in the Moon with Jim Carrey
Barbara, of Peppy Tech fame replied:
The answer is Andy Kaufman.
Harry M. said:
Andy Kaufman
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BttbBob has returned to semi-retired status.
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Music: "Quisiera olvidarte" [I Wanna Forget You] from the album SANDHY & MANDHY (BEAT GARAGE ROCK * ARGENTINA) (1969)
Artist: Sandhy & Mandh
Artist Location: Argentina
Info: The album is reissued by Repsychled of Lima, Peru.
"Repsychled: Peruvian independent label. We manufacture high quality reissues from Peruvian rock music of 60s & 70s. Most of them came from original master tapes, and were remastered very carefully to avoid any distortion who affects the original intention of the albums' recording. All our releases are fully licensed from labels or artists."
Price: 1 Euro for track; 7 Euros for 15-track album.
• African-American bluesmen Robert Johnson and Johnny Shines once played in a little town in Illinois where the residents had never seen black skin before. They stayed a couple of nights, but stopped when they realized that people were paying admission not to hear the music but to see the color of their skin. Mr. Shines says, "We didn't want to be part of a freak show. The guy thought we wanted more money, but we just wanted to get the h*ll out of there. After all, a man have pride. What is it to sell his pride for a few pennies?"
• While playing jazz in Chicago, Fats Waller was approached by men who stuck a gun in his ribs and forced him into a limousine. Soon, Fats found out what the men wanted. Gangster Al Capone was having a birthday, and Fats was a gift for the boss. At the party, Fats performed for three days, playing request after request. With each request came a handful of paper money, and at the end of the three days, when he was finally driven away from the party, he was several thousand dollars richer.
• In 1951, the BBC offered Sir Thomas Beecham the extremely low fee of £15 for the right to broadcast his arrangement of Michael Balfe's operetta Bohemian Girl. Insulted, Sir Thomas wrote to the BBC, "That arrangement has involved the thought of 25 years … at no time and nowhere in the course of a long career have I received such a preposterously inadequate, thoroughly imprudent, and magnificently inept proposal from anyone." The BBC made a second, much higher offer.
• By age 20, Will Smith was a millionaire because of his rapping talent - he had not started to act yet. Like many young people, the way he spent money was fast and furious. He even owned six cars, even though his father told him, "Why do you need six cars when you have only one butt?" (Soon, Mr. Smith got into trouble with the IRS. Later, he got out of trouble with the IRS, but for a while, he says, "It was weird because I had six cars and couldn't buy gas.")
• Blues singer Bessie Smith's talent made her a lot of money. When she recorded with a young musician named Louis Armstrong, he received his very first $100 bill, for which he needed change. Ms. Smith lifted her skirt, under which she was wearing a carpenter's apron with many pockets. In the pockets were stuffed wadded-up dollar bills of many denominations.
• Tenor Tito Schipa was known for his very clear diction, which made him unpopular with the sellers of libretti in Italy. Because Mr. Schipa sang so clearly, members of the audience did not need to buy a libretto on nights when he sang, thus cutting the profits of the sellers of libretti.
• Jazz saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker once had a chance to play in Duke Ellington's band - until he mentioned how much money he wanted to be paid. Shocked, Mr. Ellington told him, "Bird, for that much dough I'd work for you."
• Graffiti are often witty. Back when millions of dollars were in dispute during the divorce of Paul McCarthy from Heather Mills, this graffito appeared on a wall outside Abbey Road studios: "Marry me, Paul. I have my own money."
The kittens, more often referred to as 'the shittens', have reached the stage where watching the toilet flush is damn near a mystical experience.
Tonight, Friday:
CBS begins the night with the FRESH'The Greatest Of #StayAtHome Videos', followed by the FRESH'Bravery & Hope: 7 Days On The Front Line', then a RERUN'Blue Bloods'.
On a RERUNStephen Colbert (from 4/29/20) are Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and HAIM.
On a RERUNJames Corden, OBE, it's TBA.
NBC starts the night with a FRESH'The Blacklist', followed by 'Dateline'.
Scheduled on a FRESHJimmy Fallon are Dwayne Johnson, Daveed Diggs, and the Head and the Heart.
On a RERUNSeth Meyers (from 1/29/20) are Kristen Bell, Desus & Mero, Little Big Town, and Chris Coleman.
On a RERUNLilly Singh (from 3/30/20) is Tyra Banks.
ABC opens the night with a FRESH'Shark Tank', followed by '20/20'.
On a RERUNJimmy Kimmel it's TBA.
The CW offers a FRESH'Masters Of Illusion', followed by another FRESH'Masters Of Illusion', then a RERUN'Masters Of Illusion'.
Faux fills the night with FRESH'WWE Friday Night SmackDown'.
MY recycles an old 'CSI: Miami', followed by another old 'CSI: Miami'.
A&E has 'Live PD', followed by a FRESH'Live PD: Rewind', then a FRESH'Live PD'.
AMC offers the movie 'Gladiator', followed by a FRESH'Friday Night In With The Morgans', then the movie 'The Perfect Storm'.
BBC -
[6:00AM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Phantasms
[7:00AM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Dark Page
[8:00AM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Attached
[9:00AM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Force of Nature
[10:00AM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Inheritance
[11:00AM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Parallels
[12:00PM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - The Pegasus
[1:00PM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Homeward
[2:00PM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Sub Rosa
[3:00PM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Lower Decks
[4:00PM] STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION - Thine Own Self
[5:00PM] INFERNO
[8:00PM] GHOST
[11:00PM] THE GRAHAM NORTON SHOW - Sandra Oh, Rob Beckett, Romesh Ranganathan, Stanley Tucci and Niall Horan.
[11:40PM] GHOST
[2:42AM] INFERNO
[5:44AM] HIDDEN HABITATS - Yellowstone (ALL TIMES EST)
Bravo has 'Real Housewives Of Atlanta', 'Married To Medicine: LA', another 'Married To Medicine: LA', followed by the movie 'Sex & The City'.
Comedy Central has 3 hours of old 'Tosh.0', and 'Gabriel Iglesias: Aloha Fluffy'.
FX has the movie 'Girls Trip', followed by the movie 'The Hangover Part III'.
History has all old 'Life After People' all night.
IFC -
[6:00A] That '70s Show
[6:30A] That '70s Show
[7:00A] Silent House
[9:00A] Sleepy Hollow
[11:30A] Dark Shadows
[2:00P] That '70s Show
[2:30P] That '70s Show
[3:00P] That '70s Show
[3:30P] That '70s Show
[4:00P] That '70s Show
[4:30P] That '70s Show
[5:00P] That '70s Show
[5:30P] That '70s Show
[6:00P] Two and a Half Men
[6:30P] Two and a Half Men
[7:00P] Two and a Half Men
[7:30P] Two and a Half Men
[8:00P] Two and a Half Men
[8:30P] Two and a Half Men
[9:00P] Two and a Half Men
[9:30P] Two and a Half Men
[10:00P] Two and a Half Men
[10:30P] Two and a Half Men
[11:00P] Two and a Half Men
[11:30P] Two and a Half Men
[12:00A] Two and a Half Men
[12:30A] Two and a Half Men
[1:00A] That '70s Show
[1:30A] That '70s Show
[2:00A] That '70s Show
[2:30A] That '70s Show
[3:00A] That '70s Show
[3:30A] Sleepy Hollow (ALL TIMES EST)
Sundance -
[6:00am] The Andy Griffith Show
[6:30am] The Andy Griffith Show
[7:00am] The Andy Griffith Show
[7:30am] The Andy Griffith Show
[8:00am] The Andy Griffith Show
[8:30am] The Andy Griffith Show
[9:00am] The Andy Griffith Show
[9:30am] Zodiac
[1:00pm] Law & Order
[2:00pm] Law & Order
[3:00pm] Law & Order
[4:00pm] Law & Order
[5:00pm] Law & Order
[6:00pm] Law & Order
[7:00pm] Law & Order
[8:00pm] Law & Order
[9:00pm] Law & Order
[10:00pm] Law & Order
[11:00pm] Law & Order
[12:00am] Law & Order
[1:00am] Law & Order
[2:00am] Law & Order
[3:00am] Liar
[4:01am] The Andy Griffith Show
[4:30am] The Andy Griffith Show
[5:00am] The Andy Griffith Show
[5:30am] The Andy Griffith Show (ALL TIMES EST)
SyFy has the movie 'xXx: Return Of Xander Cage', followed by the movie 'The Fifth Element', then hours & hours of old 'Futurama'.
It's been nearly two months since Gal Gadot united us in a searing hatred for her tone-deaf "Imagine" singalong, which went on to spawn a number of very good parodies. We thought there was no juice left to be squeezed from the bit, but David Cross and Bob Odenkirk proved us wrong on Wednesday night when they paused their Mr. Show reunion for a celeb-studded rendition of Weird Al Yankovic's deeply silly "Eat It."
Odenkirk's Better Call Saul co-stars Rhea Seehorn, Michael Mando, and Michael McKean deliver some heartfelt lines, as does Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's Rachel Bloom, and Veep's Tony Hale. Mr. Show alums like Sarah Silverman, Jack Black, Scott Adsit, and Patton Oswalt also lend their pipes alongside a number of other notable actors and comedians.
Check it out, and stick around until the end for one very special cameo.
Ian Anderson has released a statement clarifying his diagnosis of COPD, an incurable lung disease that the Jethro Tull frontman first opened up about in an interview with Dan Rather.
"Thanks for your concern but no worries about my diagnosed COPD and asthma," he writes. "I have had 14 months with no infections and no bronchitis so last year was the first since my twenties when I didn't get sick at all. The conditions I have are early-stage and I plan to keep them that way."
Anderson clarified that when he mentioned that his "days are numbered" to Rather, he meant as a singer, not days to live. "After all, I am 73 years old this August! But I should be OK for a few more years if COVID doesn't get me first."
"A mild COPD or asthma are just things to live with for the millions around the world who suffer," he wrote. "But no impact at all on my daily life as long as I don't catch a cold or flu virus and suffer the subsequent heavy bronchitis which, for me, historically follows since I was a young man. But on the upside I don't suffer from Hemorrhoids or erectile disfunction. So, things are looking up, not down. (Puns fully intended)."
A cybercriminal ring claiming to have stolen a huge cache of data from a major media and entertainment law firm - whose clients include Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Elton John and Lady Gaga - is demanding a $21 million ransom payment, according to a published report.
New York-based Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks this week confirmed its computer systems were hacked, an incident that allegedly resulted in the theft of 756 gigabytes of private documents and correspondence. It has declined to comment further.
The hackers issued a ransom demand of $21 million to the law firm, the New York Post reported Tuesday, citing an anonymous source. The attackers have threatened to gradually release batches of the purloined data if they don't receive payment. The firm is not negotiating with the cyberattackers, while the FBI is said to be investigating the case, the Post reported.
On Wednesday, the group apparently responsible for the attack tried to share an initial 1-gigabyte collection of documents and files to the Mega file-upload service - however, the hackers' account was terminated by Mega for violating terms of service, and the download link was disabled. In an online post, the hackers cited Coveware, a ransomware remediation firm, as the "sponsor" of their attempted document leak and taunted Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks by saying it was "a mistake to hire a recovery company in the negotiations."
More than 400 human footprints preserved in hardened volcanic sediment are providing a rare peek at social life among ancient East African hunter-gatherers.
These impressions, found in northern Tanzania near a village called Engare Sero, add up to the largest collection of ancient human footprints ever found in Africa, say evolutionary biologist Kevin Hatala of Chatham University in Pittsburgh and his colleagues.
People walked across a muddy layer of volcanic debris that dates to between around 19,100 and 5,760 years ago, the researchers report May 14 in Scientific Reports. Dating of a thin rock layer that partly overlaps footprint sediment narrows the age range for the footprints to between roughly 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, the team says.
At Engare Sero, Hatala's team analyzed foot impression sizes, distances between prints and which way prints pointed. One collection of tracks was made by a group of 17 people walking southwest across the landscape, the researchers found. Comparisons with modern human footprint measurements indicate that this group consisted of 14 women, two men and one young boy.
They carry high-powered rifles and wear tactical gear, but their Hawaiian shirts and leis are what stand out in the crowds that have formed at state capital buildings to protest COVID-19 lockdown orders. The signature look for the "boogaloo" anti-government movement is designed to get attention.
The loose movement, which uses an '80s movie sequel as a code word for a second civil war, is among the extremists using the armed protests against stay-at-home orders as a platform. Like other movements that once largely inhabited corners of the internet, it has seized on the social unrest and economic calamity caused by the pandemic to publicize its violent messages.
In April, armed demonstrators passed out "Liberty or Boogaloo" fliers at a statehouse protest in Concord, New Hampshire. A leader of the Three Percenters militia movement who organized a rally in Olympia, Washington, last month encouraged rally participants to wear Hawaiian shirts, according to the Anti-Defamation League. On Saturday, a demonstration in Raleigh, North Carolina, promoted by a Facebook group called "Blue Igloo" - a derivation of the term - led to a police investigation of a confrontation between an armed protester and a couple pushing a stroller.
The coronavirus pandemic has become a catalyst for the "boogaloo" movement because the stay-at-home orders have "put a stressor on a lot of very unhappy people," said J.J. MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University's Program on Extremism. MacNab said their rhetoric goes beyond discussions about fighting virus restrictions - which many protesters brand as "tyranny" - to talking about killing FBI agents or police officers "to get the war going."
The violent rhetoric is dramatic escalation for a online phenomenon with its roots in meme culture and steeped in dark humor. Its name comes from the panned 1984 movie "Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo," which has become slang for any bad sequel. Another derivation of "boogaloo" is "big luau" - hence the Hawaiian garb.
Prominent evangelical pastors, including one who has since died of COVID-19, have promoted baseless claims about Bill Gates, implantable microchips that could be used to control the population under the guise of tracking COVID-19 infections and immunity, and a link between coronavirus vaccination and the mark of the beast, a signifier, in biblical prophecy, of submission to the Antichrist. Such ideas have since spread beyond evangelical circles.
Some Christian scholars have recently sought to debunk attempts to link the coronavirus vaccine to the mark of the beast through detailed biblical analysis. But the general impulse among evangelicals is skepticism toward secular authority, including measures taken in the name of public health.
"I think that Christians, especially evangelicals, are very nervous about the government. They've always been nervous about the government," said Ryan Burge, an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, who studies the intersection between religiosity and political behavior. Burge is also a pastor at First Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, Ill., which he described as a "main-line … moderate version of Baptist." He told Yahoo News that "if you get really deep into evangelical theology, you can see that they have a martyr complex."
"They love the idea that they're being oppressed, and that they're being persecuted," he said, adding that evangelicals are "always on the lookout for times when the government sort of oversteps its bounds and starts to infringe upon religion."
Jared Yates Sexton, an associate professor of writing and linguistics at Georgia Southern University, described his religious upbringing as "a split between Baptist and Pentecostals." He also emphasized the role persecution and martyrdom continue to play in the evangelical identity, "even though they have a large power base in America, and they've determined large swaths of American political history."
How does a plant develop a taste for flesh? In the play Little Shop of Horrors, all it takes is a drop of human blood. But in real life, it takes much more. Now, a study of three closely related carnivorous plants suggests dextrous genetic shuffling helped them evolve the ability to catch and digest protein-rich meals.
Carnivorous plants have developed many devious ways to snare prey. Pitcher plants, for example, use "pitfall traps" that contain enzymes for digesting stray insects. Others-including the closely related Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), the aquatic waterwheel plant (Aldrovanda vesiculosa), and the sundew (Drosera spatulata)-use moving traps. The sundew rolls up its sticky landing pad when mosquitoes get caught. And the Venus flytrap uses modified leaves, or pads, that snap shut when an insect lands-but only after the pads sense multiple touches on their trigger hairs.
To find out how these traps evolved, researchers led by computational evolutionary biologist Jörg Schultz and plant biologist Rainer Hedrich, both of the University of Würzburg, sequenced the genomes of the sundew, the aquatic waterwheel, and the Venus flytrap, which are all closely related. They then compared their genomes with those of nine other plants, including a carnivorous pitcher plant and noncarnivorous beetroot and papaya plants.
They found that the key to the evolution of meat eating in this part of the plant kingdom was the duplication of the entire genome in a common ancestor that lived about 60 million years ago, the team reports today in Current Biology. That duplication freed up copies of genes once used in roots, leaves, and sensory systems to detect and digest prey. For example, carnivorous plants repurposed copies of genes that help roots absorb nutrients, to absorb the nutrients in digested prey. "That root genes are being expressed in the leaves of carnivores is absolutely fascinating," says Kenneth Cameron, a botanist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Hedrich and his colleagues conclude that carnivory evolved once in the ancestor of the three species and, independently, in the pitcher plant. Adding these two new origins to others already documented, the researchers conclude that meat eating has evolved at least six times.
Weird, multisided geometric shapes called buckyballs have been discovered in an unexpected place: marine animals that lived 80 million years ago.
Microscopic forms of buckyballs have been found in molecules within cosmic dust, in gases and in some types of rocks. But researchers were surprised to find them at a much larger scale in fossils of two species of Cretaceous crinoids, which are relatives of modern starfish and sea urchins. The plates on the crinoids' bodies created multifaceted, hollow structures that the scientists identified as buckyballs.
Their discovery is the first evidence that the bizarre buckyball shape occurs naturally at such a large scale, the scientists reported in a new study.
Buckyballs, short for "Buckminsterfullerenes," are large spherical molecules, that are made up of 60 carbon atoms linked together in pentagons and hexagons, forming a surface like that of a soccer ball. These strange molecules, first discovered in space in 2010, got their name from architect Buckminster Fuller, who popularized a similar structure in the 1940s called a geodesic dome.
In space, buckyballs exist in gas and in particles. They have also been detected on Earth in gases emitted by burning candles and in certain minerals, according to NASA. However, that distinctive buckyball shape was previously unknown to exist in animals - living or extinct, said study co-author Aaron Hunter, a research fellow at The University of Western Australia's School of Earth Sciences.
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