On Friday I started the day with three hours of substitute-host-level Excellence in Broadcasting on America's Number One radio show. You can find a few moments from my guest-hosting stint here. Thank you as always to Mr Snerdley, Ali, Mike and the rest of the gang: the best team in radio, no question, and I treasure my many years in their expert hands.
~Although the grounded Nancy Pelosi and the underbussed Steve King predominated, we also found time to pose a few questions about my upcoming appearance with the great Dennis Miller in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania - like, how do you pronounce the name of the town? Opinions differed throughout the three hours. The "pure barry" of our headline is, of course, a Scottish expression. But I'm thinking of introducing it to Pennsylvania just to add another variation. At any rate, you can book for Dennis and me at the Kirby Center in Wilkes-Bar, Wilkes-Bear, Wilkes-Berry, Wilkes-Burrah, Wilkes-Berra or any proximation thereto here. And, with VIP tickets, you not only enjoy the best seats in the house but get to meet me and Dennis after the show.
~Speaking of Pennsylvania, earlier in the week I checked in with our bigtime Rush affiliate WPHT. Always fun to be on "The Big Talker", as I still think of it, and in this case with Rich Zeoli, who follows Rush every day at 3pm Eastern. We shot the breeze on various topics of interest. Click below to listen:
My grip on the Keystone State is getting more tenuous the more pronunciations of Wilkes-Barre I try out, but I think Philly is about an hour from Reading, which is where Dennis and I will be starting our Pennsylvania/New York mini-tour next month, at the Santander Arts Center. Tickets are available here, but don't leave it too late: the loges are gone, and there are only a few seats left in the orchestra.
~Today, Saturday, is the fifteenth anniversary of one of those rare episodes that, unbeknown to the fellow at the time, is the hinge moment of his life. January 19th 2004 was the date of the Iowa caucus. Vermont governor Howard Dean had been the avowed darling of leftie Internet-savvy youth. Alas, come the big night, they didn't realize you had to leave the house and go to this thing called a "polling station". Apparently, they thought you could leave your vote in the uptick of the chatroom on his blog, or whatever it was back then. So Governor Dean came up a bit short warm bodies-wise. That need not have proven fatal were it not for what became known as his "I have a scream" speech.
A few years later, appearing with Dean and Fred Thompson in Calgary, I saved my "Gotcha!" question for the end - when I asked the president-that-never-was to do an all-Canadian version of "I have a scream", with provinces rather than states. It's about a minute before the end here:
A chap has to be rather secure about himself and relaxed about the vicissitudes of life to reprise the moment when all ambition crashes to the ground ne'er to rise again. So I think the above speaks well of him.
~If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club please feel free to weigh in below. Dennis and I hope to see many of you at our live shows; and I'll be back this evening for another edition of Mark at the Movies.
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I'm a native of NEPA (Mountain Top) and work in Wilkes Barre. I believe the most appropriate pronunciation as spoken by the natives would be "Wilkes Berra", with the final soft "a" sound very subtle indeed. Will be at the Kirby for the tour. Looking foward to it!
Mark- contact me if you need a place to crash.
I miss good ol' Zachary and Jeremiah at Media Matters...or was it Zachariah and Jeremy...or Chad and Jeremy...or Zack and Miri Make a Porno? No matter, I trust they're well looked after in the Soros-funded retirement home for metrosexual millennials, sharing a double room next to the ObamaCare pajama boy with whom they often share a bottomless mug of hot cocoa. Lena Dunham lives there too, but none of the fellas go near her for fear of bogus rape claims. Kathy Griffin's on the waiting list, but she needs just a few more nips and tucks before she looks young enough to fit the demographic. She no longer can blink, and you could bounce a quarter off her taut cheeks, but the neck needs to be taken in a size or four.
I still stand by my berra pronunciation of Wilkes Barre. My dad worked in WB for over 30 years a couple days a month and did the commute from Philly. While my dad was a mechanical engineer he read Tennyson in his downtime and I think he would have been tuned in to things like pronunciations of Pennsylvanian towns. Unless there are different pronunciations that the Wilkes-Barreans came up with as a code to determine which part of the state one lived, I think you'll be safe just to emphasize the Wilkes part and cut the Barre short and nobody will know the better. Combined with hitting the bars and gittin' yourself a beer, you will get into the habit of saying, "i'll git me a cold be-uh in Wilkes baa-uh." The Berry sounds a little fruity to me.
I stand with you on "Wilkes--Berra". Having lived in Montrose and schooled there in the 50's. We are talking coal country...anthracite coal country and "berry" may sound nice to Gen-somebodies but not old timers. By 4th grade every school child knew the three types of coal.
Until I hear from the mayor of Wilkes Barre that it's pronounced any other way, I probably won't believe it:)
A certain close associate of mine speaks more refined Canadian English than I do (and as a consequence, I am understood by Americans; she is not....) One day I came home from work in Toronto and mentioned I had met with a certain individual, whom I named. My CCA was incredulous. "Hairy Horton? What kind of name is that?!" I said, "what do you mean, it's Harry Horton". "Hairy? Who calls anyone hairy??" This went on for some time, back and forth, until, in the fulness of time, it was revealed I was pronouncing the name Harry incorrectly. Who knew?? So: Is "Harry, from Wilkes-Barre" a true rhyme, a false rhyme, or not a rhyme at all -- hairy harry and merry mary from Wikes-Barre want to know!
And here I thought this was the song of the week with Cole Porter's Du Barry was a Lady.
The last mistress of Louis XV Madame Du Barry who came from humble beginnings was another victim of the guillotine.
It's amusing to listen to Dean wax poetically about the wonderful, dynamic, forward-looking EU back in 2010. It now seems that the EU was more Potemkin Village than a real political entity, with nothing but a veneer covering the corrupt, tyrannical technogarchy that it has always been. There's no "there" there and the importation of millions of decidedly non-EU "migrants" by the likes of Frau Merkel has only hastened its unmasking.
Re AOC (I prefer ACO, proper alphabetical order) and her comment on how she wants to "run train on the progressive agenda". Regardless of what the term means, the question remains, can she make the run train on time?
I still have my (unofficial) Fred Thompson for President T-shirt. "Kill the terrorists, Protect the borders, Punch the hippies."
Howard Dean reminds me of "Whitey" Whitney from the TV show "Leave it to Beaver" (as CNN reporter Jim Acosta now reminds me of California double-murderer Scott Peterson). The reprise does speak well of Howard Dean personally. His discussion before that is a light reprise of why I screamed, you screamed, we all screamed for the end of that candidacy. The policy prescriptions roll off his tongue as easily as the states and provinces. But if you're not sedated by his spiel, you quickly realize he's a quack. With a career as a physician preceding politics, at least he is able to have a sense of humor about himself, which is preferable someone who aspires only to be a politician, like Pure Barry (a good candidate for the Ben and Jerry's fro-yo line).
Mark,
On Rush yesterday you mentioned AOC's comment about "running a train on the dems..." and you didn't know the etymology of that phrase. Well I think you'll figure it out if you use your imagination: trains consist of multiple cars, they are linked together-one follows another, and they are all headed in the same direction at the same time. Now extrapolate that image to a gang bang and voila! you have an understanding of how AOC wants to sexually assault the dems with her "beliefs".
I heartily recommend the Urban dictionary (urbandictionary.com) if you want to understand what 29 year old congresswomen say.
I didn't understand it either, but your explanation reminds one of the faked-up attacks on Kavanaugh.
Leftists are guilty of that which they accuse normal people of.
That recommendation to keep urban dictionary on speed dial is no small thing in these times. It's stunning how much veiled messaging/mockery/threats is through ostensibly innocent choices of words and names, that are in fact so well known in the circuit, a reference source was built for them. The media can be frequently caught using those terms knowing the audience doesn't know the game. 'Tea baggers' is a prime example of this - introduced to the public on-air with a big smirk by Anderson Cooper (to open laughing by his fellow 'journalists/commentators' ) during the early days of the Tea Party citizen protests (exact equivalent = gilet jaunes). It seemed childish naming, but in fact is a slang term for a well-known sex act, the term easy to find in all its obscene permutations in the Urban dictionary. Oh, just a coy Cooper misunderstanding?
Now suspicious that the Gillette ad, which is actually somewhat hard to find being played, yet oddly is being aggressively promoted like crazy by 'news' is a different sort of messaging. Nothing about it makes sense to the public on the surface - if selling razors is the logical point. If it doesn't make sense, something isn't being said. Maybe the inexorably growing gilets jaunes movement is panicking the 'sommet' (summit) people as Macron recently so-humbly described himself and his crowd, who is seen by the French citizens as doing everything he can to make France disappear inside the EU monolith?
So, coincidentally the public was informed that Pelosi was secretly seconds to flying off to Brussels, (EU-Land HQ) until President Trump yanked her boarding card. Thumbing through the handy personal pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution, isn't foreign diplomacy expressly tasked to the Executive Branch? How does that work, showing up in foreign capitals as the leader of the opposition party to discuss anything different than what the Head of State has already discussed with them - assuming it's different because why bother flying out only to say the same things? Odds blood!
It's good to know Dean was a good sport in Calgary and handled the Gotcha with aplomb, but then he's a politician (or at least used to be) and in general that's what they do. But acting nice doesn't make him a decent human being, which we can judge by the fact that he still espouses a vile ideology responsible for oceans of blood. This means he is either totally clueless or morally bankrupt, either way underscoring the brilliance of the people's judgement in keeping him far away from power.
I am pleased to say that, longer ago than I care to recall, I invented the word "underbussing." You're welcome, everyone! :-)
Mark replies:
Thank you, Kathy. A fine coinage, and too useful in these grim times.
Nice work, Kathy. Is it as bad as being undertrained? It sounds like AOC means business.