July 2003 Archives

Francis Davis wrote this in The Nation back in June. Read the whole thing here, but in the meantime, here are a couple of excerpts.

This first excerpt reflects on the political Bob:

He has more in common with Jane Fonda than either might realize--they both were casualties of Vietnam. She's always going to be "Hanoi Jane" to right-wing talk-show hosts, and the left is never going to forgive him for mistaking Vietnam for Iwo Jima.

I say it's time we granted Hope amnesty, not because we owe it to him but because we owe it to ourselves.

He never made a movie as good as Klute or They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, but at least he never made one as sappy as On Golden Pond or as heavy-handed as Coming Home.

The second excerpt puts the comic Bob into perspective and is instructive for anyone under the age of 40:

Hope's influence has been ubiquitous, both as a stand-up comedian and as a comic actor.

Without him as the prototype, there would be no Johnny Carson, Steve Martin or Bill Murray--to say nothing of Maxwell Smart, Austin Powers, George Costanza, Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife and even M*A*S*H's Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce...

Conan O'Brien, when announcing that his guests that night include a supermodel or leggy movie star, might lick his index fingers and use them to smooth his eyebrows, like Hope primping for what he's only been led to believe will be a romantic rendezvous (it's usually some sort of scheme, with him as the sucker).

The host of Late Night also occasionally growls when an attractive female guest says something provocative, a variation on Hope's ejaculatory woof! And the premise of many of O'Brien's best sketches is either that he's sexually inadequate or that nobody thinks he's funny--two more pages straight out of Hope's book, as O'Brien would be the first to admit.

[Woody Allen] once admitted that "it's everything I can do at times not to imitate him."

RIP, Bob.

Dean Esmay and I were talking about the "Uranium Niger" flap or firestorm (take your pick). Dean suggested that the whole thing would die down in a week. I said I wasn't convinced that it would.

We were about to place a friendly wager on it, but first I suggested that we use the hit-count at Google News as the metric.

So, I went to the site at 8 am EDT, Saturday, July 12. I entered the keywords Uranium Niger (no quote marks). I got back 2700 hits.

We finally agreed (after some bargaining) that if the number of hits were less than 1350 after 7 days, then we could say the whole thing had "blown over."

I'll call this "The Rubyan Effect": the geeky desire to track the length of a story's legs, over time.

***Update: as of 10 am EDT, 7/12/03, the hit-count was 3000.***
***At 7:30 am EDT, 7/13/03, 3500.***
***At 11:30 am EDT, 7/14/03, 4200.***
***At 8:30 am EDT, 7/15/03, 4700.***
***At 8:30 am EDT, 7/16/03, 4400.***
***At 1:00 pm EDT, 7/17/03, 4800.***
***At 8:30 am EDT, 7/18/03, 5100.***
***At 8:30 am EDT, 7/19/03, 5100.***
***At 9:30 am EDT, 7/20/03, 5500.***
***At 6:30 pm EDT, 7/21/03, 5900.***