With all the upheaval in the late night talk show world, well all the upheaval at NBC’s The Tonight Show, the Van Gogh-Goghs decided to hold a draft for their Late Night Talk Show Fantasy League. The draft was an 8-round snake draft and participants had to pick the following:
1 show host, 1 second banana or band leader/band or featured player, 2 guests, 1 musical/comedy performance guest, 2 comedy bits, 1 show host for a follow-up or lead-in program
Once a person or bit is picked they/it are unavailable for the rest of the draft. The draft order:
Charles
T. Mike
Galen
Alan
Jason (Jason was unavailable for the draft, but he was allowed to pick his team from the scraps left over from the others’ choices)
Round 1:
Charles: David Letterman
T. Mike: Johnny Carson
Galen: Arsenio Hall
Alan: Dick Cavett
Predictably the first round went to lock up the host slot for each of the shows. Big surprises in the first round: neither Conan or Leno are picked.
Round 2:
Alan makes sure he has a strong second banana with his second pick of Andy Richter.
Galen looks to the comedy bits in this round and chooses Triumph the insult comic dog.
T. Mike gets his follow-up show host locked in with Conan O’Brien.
Charles ends round two by choosing Top Ten Lists to go along with his Letterman pick.
Round 3:
Charles starts round three by rounding out his comedy bit picks with Carnac.
T. Mike tries an Ed Sullivan move with his third pick and books The Beatles as his musical guest.
Galen finishes his comedy bit picks with Stupid Pet Tricks.
Alan rounds out the 3rd round with his first comedy bit pick Marlon Brando (as played by Chris Elliott).
Round 4
Alan’s fourth pick is another comedy bit, Art Fern.
Galen uses the fourth round to to start working on his guests. Guest number 1: Barack Obama.
T. Mike finally gets around to his comedy bits and picks Viewer Mail as his first bit.
Charles’s fourth round pick for guest number 1 goes to Jonathan Winters.
Round 5
Charles goes to the follow up show host category to lead the 5th round and finally Jay Leno is picked.
T. Mike finishes up his comedy bit picks by picking Letterman’s suits made of weird stuff.
Galen picks his number 2 guest and takes Robin Williams to bring some humor to his guest chair.
Alan’s 5th round pick causes a bit of a debate, leading to the Van Gogh-Goghs throwing out his first pick: Throbbing Gristle featuring Miley Cirus. Since this pairing has never happened it couldn’t be picked. So Alan picks De La Soul for his musical guest.
Round 6
Alan begins the sixth round with a surprise, but solid, pick for his first guest: Fidel Castro.
Galen finally gets around to his musical guest act and picks Prince.
T. Mike’s sixth round pick goes to Steve Martin as his first guest.
Charles goes with musical guest in this round and threatens to throw a party on his show with P-Funk.
Round 7
After a head fake and making T. Mike think he was going with Ed McMahon, Charles goes with Paul Shaffer as his second banana/band leader.
T. Mike, feeling threatened, snags Ed McMahon to fill the seat next to his Carson.
After a little confusion over whether Charles’s Shaffer pick also takes The World’s Most Dangerous Band off the table, Galen goes with Doc Severinson.
Alan finished the next-to-last round with his second guest pick of Bill Murray.
Round 8
Alan’s final pick is follow-up host and he goes political with presidential offspring Ron Reagan (yes, he had a talk show).
Galen also is left with his follow-up host as his final pick and also goes political with Bill Maher.
T. Mike only has his second guest left to pick and goes political as well with John F. Kennedy.
Charles rounds out his team and finishes off the draft with his second guest and gets two guests for the price of one with Penn and Teller.
To recap the Late Night Talk Show Fantasy League shows picked in the draft:
Charles: David Letterman with Paul Shaffer, Top Ten Lists, Carnac, Jonathan Winters, Penn and Teller, P-Funk and Jay Leno as the follow-up host.
T. Mike: Johnny Carson with Ed McMahon, Viewer Mail, Suits Made of Weird Stuff, Steve Martin, JFK, The Beatles and Conan as the follow-up host.
Galen: Arsenio Hall with Doc Severinson, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, Stupid Pet Tricks, Barack Obama, Robin Williams, Prince and Bill Maher as the follow-up host.
Alan: Dick Cavett with Andy Richter, Chris Elliott’s Marlon Brando, Art Fern, Fidel Castro, Bill Murray, De La Soul and Ron Reagan as the follow-up host.
Jason: Zach Galifianakis with Chris Elliott, Crushing things with an 80-ton hydraulic press, The Fugitive Guy, Andy Kaufman, Fred Phelps, GG Allin, and Jimmy Kimmel as the follow-up host.
2010! Happy New Year! It’s the future again, only this time, it’s even MORE the future! The year 2010 is almost as futuristic as the year 2000. Once again, it’s time to welcome our new robotic overlords! And also placatie their foul tempers with soothing, flattering songs of praise! So here’s a song about robots from some weird French kid’s album from 1979 by one Suzanne Pinel:
What the Hell is Boxing Day?
Several Theories as to its Origin
by an American Citizen
As a member of the great American calendar-owning public, there are some things I don’t appreciate. Like Easter getting moved around every year. Can’t the pope make up his damn mind?! I also don’t appreciate it when the calendar manufacturers try put two days on the same square with a diagonal slash through it. Cheap bastards. And lastly, I really, really hate it when they put lousy stinking foreign commie, non-U.S. holidays on MY calendar, like Cinco de Mayo, Kwaanza, and Boxing Day.
Hey, the last time I checked I was still living in AMERICA and not North Korea! Let those filthy reds celebrate all the heathen Kwaanza they want, but keep it out of OUR calendars! Children read those things for God’s sake!
Which brings us to Boxing Day. There it is, every damn December 26th. What the hell is it?! I mean, all those other weirdo holidays are in the crazy moon-man language non-American countries tend to use, so you can write them off as crazy foreign pinkoness. But I used to think we could trust our fellow English-speaking countries, like Britain and Canada (excluding the People’s Republic of Quebec). But then they had to go behind our backs and invent “Boxing Day” on us, just to try and steal some of our thunder for having invented Christmas. Why else would they have stuck it on December 26th? Sneaky bastards.
Since whatever they claim to be the “official” reason for Boxing Day will obviously be state-disseminated lies and propaganda, I have decided to investigate the truth. Since I recently spent an entire afternoon in Canada, I think I am pretty well qualified to speak authoritatively on the origins of Boxing Day. After considering the matter thoroughly for several minutes, then cracking open a cold beer and thinking some more during the commercial breaks of a Home Improvement rerun, I have come up with the following theories:
* Boxing Day is a Canadian plot to try and steal credit for inventing corrugated cardboard by making a national holiday out of the day it was patented- which is patently absurd! Everybody knows that corrugated cardboard was invented at Bell Labs in Menlo Park, New Jersey by Nazi scientists we snagged from Germany after WWII, working under the direction of Steve Wozniak. Granted, the Canadians did invent REGULAR cardboard, if you call that inventing. Hell, I could have invented that.
* Boxing Day is how the former English colonies commemorate getting their ASSES WHUPPED by Johnny Chinaman during the Boxer Rebellion in China at the last turn of the century. Sure, they try to play it off like Memorial Day, honoring their war dead and crap, but if it hadn’t been for us Americans bailing their butts out then, they’d be speaking Mandarin all the way from London to Vancouver right now. And do you think they ever thanked us? Pfft! No! Ungrateful bastards.
* Boxing Day has something to do with the game of Cricket. There’s some kind of box involved in there somewhere. Probably. I’m pretty sure.
* Boxing Day is an invention of the Canadian kite industry to try to popularize the more expensive “box” kite, as opposed to the cheap regular kind. It further shows how the Canadians are trying to undermine the youth of America by encouraging kids to go outside and play with sissy kites instead of watching manly sports on TV, like boxing and anything with the word “extreme” in it.
* Boxing Day is just some crap Canadians made up so they could get the day after Christmas off. And what do we get? Martin Luther King Jr. Day, way the hell out in the middle of January where it doesn’t do anybody any good! Why the hell couldn’t he have been born on December 26th?! I say the next national martyr we assassinate better damn well be born on (or, possibly, get killed on) December 26th. Hell, if we can find martyrs from Christmas through New Year’s, so much the better! Whose bright idea was it to put those two holidays just far enough apart that you still have to work half the week, anyway?! Probably the pope. Papist bastard.
Novelty songs are always hit or miss, but Christmas is a time of especially egregious examples of eccentric tunesmithery. Here’s a couple of raptastic, craptastic examples from 1992 by “Crew X” with all the best beats a cheap drum machine can make, and hitting all of your fave public domain rave-ups. Hark! The Herald Angels Sing Twelve Days Of Christmas
It’s Rosh Hashanah! Happy Jewish New Year!!! To all the members o’ the tribe, Happy 5770! In honor of this high holiday, we have the 1984 track “The Shofar That Almost Missed Rosh Hashanah” as read by a pixie on helium. Listen and delight as plucky Jewish schoolkid Barbara goes up against a sticky-fingered goy with a case of shofar envy! Show and tell was never so full of intrigue.
From a set of 45 rpm records by Graded Press; Bible Festivals: Today and Long Ago.
The fine print: All downloads are provided for entertainment purposes only. VGG.COM not responsible for any religious epiphanies from listening to mp3s.
As Tommy Lee Jones said in Men in Black, “Damn, I guess I’ll have to buy the White Album again.” 09-09-09 is the big welcome to the future for the Beatles. Beatles Rock Band is coming out. New Beatle CDs with better sound quality.( I can hardly wait to buy them and rip them to MP3 and listen to them through tiny ear buds.) Well if you find yourself not getting enough of the Fab Four this week, then try out the Food on the Grill. The world’s only Beatle themed restaurant (that I know of). Get EAT-lemania!
Travel back in time with us from 2009 to 1999 with the hot new reality show The 1999 House, which follows an real-life modern family living in a house painstakingly restored to late-’90s conditions. Watch them struggle with decade-old technology as they learn to cope, learn to care, and learn a little something about… themselves.
Confirming what for years had been only a persistent rumor, undercover VGG.com reporters have determined that the July 1969 Apollo-program moon landings were indeed an elaborate government deception. Forty years of lies ends today!
Today’s post is to help celebrate Bastille Day, the day of the French Revolution when the French triumphantly stormed the hated prison, and proudly emptied it of its forgers, lunatics, and the Marquis deSade. And what Frenchman speaks to us so loudly across history but that famous French mime, the Ur-mime Marcel Marceau (1923-2007). And yet mime was only one of his many talents. You know, like how David Hasselhoff thinks he can sing, or have a non-Knight Rider-related career. Welp, Marceau also saw himself as a visual artist. Below is a bizarre, epic, apocalyptic drawing he did that appeared in a program for one of his shows in 1973. Despite a certain “I am 12 years old” quality to the drawing, it appears to have been done in 1961, when Marceau was about 38. Hmm.
Also, sorry ’bout the rusty staples in the center.
Here’s the left and right pages in extry-huge format so you can really appreciate the fine detail.
(click pix to embiggen)
Allow us to try to narrate Marceau’s dark vision, his “Marceaucalypse,” if you will: As a massive earthquake causes mighty skyscrapers to lean and teeter dangerously and a tornado and fires ravage the city, and a large ocean liner sinks in the background, the terrified populace plunge to their certain deaths from the buildings or rush into the streets where they are attacked by bats and escaped zoo, or quite possibly circus, animals. Under a sky filled with strange planets, angry and helpless soldiers futilely throng the streets colliding with impromptu religious parades of every stripe, where citizens turn to a nonexistent God to save them, moments before they stumble into a river of hungry crocodiles. While silent movie star Charlie Chaplin cavorts in the crowd, the twin angels of comedian Harpo Marx and Bip (Marcel’s everyman mime character) begin their happy ascension to heaven under the gaze of several large, floating, disembodied eyes with great lashes. Also, there’s an owl.
