RIP George Carlin

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George Carlin mourned as a counterculture hero By KEITH ST. CLAIR, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 10 minutes ago



George Carlin, the frenzied performer whose routine "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television" led to a key Supreme Court ruling on obscenity, has died.

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. He was 71.

"He was a genius and I will miss him dearly," Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.

Carlin's jokes constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the "Seven Words" — all of which are taboo on broadcast TV and radio to this day.

When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.

When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government's authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening.

"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," he told The Associated Press earlier this year.

Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a television staple through the decades, serving as host of the "Saturday Night Live" debut in 1975 — noting on his Web site that he was "loaded on cocaine all week long" — and appearing some 130 times on "The Tonight Show."

He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" in 1989 — a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (and sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).

"Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?" he once mused. "Are they afraid someone will clean them?"

He won four Grammy Awards, each for best spoken comedy album, and was nominated for five Emmy awards. On Tuesday, it was announced that Carlin was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which will be presented Nov. 10 in Washington and broadcast on PBS.

Carlin started his career on the traditional nightclub circuit in a coat and tie, pairing with Burns to spoof TV game shows, news and movies. Perhaps in spite of the outlaw soul, "George was fairly conservative when I met him," said Burns, describing himself as the more left-leaning of the two. It was a degree of separation that would reverse when they came upon Lenny Bruce, the original shock comic, in the early '60s.

"We were working in Chicago, and we went to see Lenny, and we were both blown away," Burns said, recalling the moment as the beginning of the end for their collaboration if not their close friendship. "It was an epiphany for George. The comedy we were doing at the time wasn't exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a different direction."

That direction would make Carlin as much a social commentator and philosopher as comedian, a position he would relish through the years.

"The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things — bad language and whatever — it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition," Carlin told the AP in a 2004 interview. "There's an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. ... It's reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have."

Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, and grew up in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, raised by a single mother. After dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, he joined the Air Force in 1954. He received three court-martials and numerous disciplinary punishments, according to his official Web site.

While in the Air Force he started working as an off-base disc jockey at a radio station in Shreveport, La., and after receiving a general discharge in 1957, took an announcing job at WEZE in Boston.

"Fired after three months for driving mobile news van to New York to buy pot," his Web site says.

From there he went on to a job on the night shift as a deejay at a radio station in Fort Worth, Texas. Carlin also worked variety of temporary jobs including a carnival organist and a marketing director for a peanut brittle.

In 1960, he left with Burns, a Texas radio buddy, for Hollywood to pursue a nightclub career as comedy team Burns & Carlin. He left with $300, but his first break came just months later when the duo appeared on Jack Paar's "Tonight Show."

Carlin said he hoped to emulate his childhood hero, Danny Kaye, the kindly, rubber-faced comedian who ruled over the decade Carlin grew up in — the 1950s — with a clever but gentle humor reflective of the times.

It didn't work for him, and the pair broke up by 1962.

"I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn't really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people," Carlin reflected recently as he prepared for his 14th HBO special, "It's Bad For Ya."

Eventually Carlin lost the buttoned-up look, favoring the beard, ponytail and all-black attire for which he came to be known.

But even with his decidedly adult-comedy bent, Carlin never lost his childlike sense of mischief, even voicing kid-friendly projects like episodes of the TV show "Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends" and the spacey Volkswagen bus Fillmore in the 2006 Pixar hit "Cars."

Carlin's first wife, Brenda, died in 1997. He is survived by wife Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law Bob McCall; brother Patrick Carlin; and sister-in-law Marlene Carlin.

___

Associated Press writer Christopher Weber contributed to this report.

Words of wisdom

In life, the difficult periods are the best periods to gain experience and shore up determination. As a result, my mental status is much improved because of them.

--The Dalai Lama

Long days

My hip just seems to have a will of it's own. The damn thing is healing so slowly I could jst scream. Dr. Harvey told me it could be 6 to 8 months. YIKES! I just haven't felt like doing anything. To top it off I have a cold. How the hell did I get that? Most likely when I go shopping.

My Zen for the day:

You ask why I live in the mountain forest,
I smile, and am silent,
and even deep within remain quiet:
the peach trees blossom,
the water flows.

- Li T’ai-po (701-?)

Yet another hip surgery

Feeling kind of down today. My third and final (hopefully) hip surgery is scheduled for Monday, April 21. I am so tired of the pain. I have such a bad time with IV's that I am already getting scared of the whole ordeal! I think I will ask for sub clavian line. One that they put in a major vein in your neck during surgery. It sounds a lot less painful that being stuck over and over again.

For today:

My Daily Zen

The capacity of Mind is vast and great:
It is like the emptiness of space;
It has neither breadth nor bounds;
It is neither square nor round; neither large nor small;
It is neither blue nor yellow nor red nor white;
It has neither upper nor lower, long nor short;
It knows of neither anger nor pleasure;
Neither right nor wrong;
Neither good nor evil;
It is without beginning and without end.

- Sixth Patriarch

Daily Zen

The entire universe is one bright pearl.
When the right time comes,
The essence of the bright pearl can be grasped;
It is suspended in emptiness,
Hidden in the lining of clothes,
Found under the chin of dragons
And in the headdresses of kings.
This pearl is always inside our clothing,
That is, inside us, our real nature.
Do not think about putting it on the surface;
Is should be kept in headdresses and under jaws.
Never attempt to wear it on the surface.


- Dogen (1200-1253)

Daily Zen

I repaired a damaged friendship on Easter Sunday. What a great gift to receive. I love you Sissy.

Every day priests minutely
examine the Dharma
and endlessly chant
complicated sutras.
They should learn
how to read the love letters
sent by the wind and rain,
the snow and moon.

- Ikkyu (1394-1491)

Sea Shepherd News

Sea Shepherd News
News Releases


03/12/2008


Sea Shepherd To Tackle The New Improved “Bash And Slash” Baby Killers Of Canada

From the icebergs off the coast of Antarctica to the ice floes off the coast of Eastern Canada - there is little rest for the Shepherds of the Sea.

The Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin is scheduled to return from chasing and harassing the Japanese whaling fleet on March 15th after three and a half months of successful interventions against the Japanese whale poachers.

But there is no time for rest or sitting on our laurels. We have to get to the other side of the planet to board our ship the Farley Mowat in Bermuda. On March 24th we are scheduled to depart northward into the ice packs of the Gulf of St. Lawrence to once again act as shepherds to the greatest herd of sea lambs on Earth - the harp seal pups.

Canada, as if to slap the Europeans in the face for threatening to ban seal products, has set this year’s kill quota at 325,000 seals.

It’s hard to believe that this is the 21st Century, when a government of a wealthy nation like Canada continues to promote and encourage the largest and most sadistic marine wildlife massacre on the planet.

Canadian Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn set the high quota without any scientific justification and without any market justification. The Canadian taxpayers will continue to foot the bill to send uneducated sadistic killers onto the ice with spiked clubs to bash in the skulls of seal pups. It is nothing more than a glorified welfare scheme to give East coast fishermen enough work to justify their unemployment insurance payments.

In announcing the new quota Hearn said that the seal slaughter has been improved with new rules to make the hunt more “humane”.

The new rules call for the sealers to sever the arteries of seals under their flippers after they have been shot or clubbed.

It’s “bash and slash” now instead of just “bash” and that is considered to be an improvement.

To say that this makes the seal slaughter more humane is to say that a psychopath is a better person if he slashes the throat of his victim after bashing in his or her skull.

The new rules are being imposed in an attempt to convince the European Parliament to not ban seal products into Europe. Canada is spending a small fortune in sending delegations to Europe to plea for the right to continue to massacre seal pups.

As a Canadian I am hopeful that the European Parliament will act soon to ban all seal products. All of my life I have been sickened and disgusted by this annual ritual of death where grown men kick seal pups in the face, bash in their skulls, skin them alive and stain the ice floes red with the blood of hundreds of thousands of seal pups, turning the nursery floes of these gentle creatures into a living hell of spewing blood and gore amidst the pitiful screams of dying and injured young animals.

There is no other place on Earth where the arrogance of humankind can be seen in all of its primitive and ignorant glory than on the ice floes under assault by blood-stained men with hearts as hard and merciless as iron.

We have no choice but to challenge them and to do whatever we can to disrupt their vicious rape of the seal nurseries.

As always it will be difficult. The sealers are protected by the Seal Protection Regulations that make it a Federal offense to witness or document a seal pup being killed. In Canada if you see a sealer club a seal pup and you don’t have a permit to witness the slaughter you can be arrested, jailed and fined up to $100,000 or sent to jail for a year.

It’s hard to believe, but Canada is a nation where killing is a subsidized recreational activity and compassion is severely punished.

We need to demonstrate to the European Parliament just how brutal the Canadian seal hunt is by again going into the ice packs ourselves and placing our lives on the line in defense of the seals.

It is important that we make this issue as hot as possible before the Europeans vote by demonstrating that people of compassion are willing to risks their lives and freedom to abolish this atrocity.

So it’s out of the Southern deep freeze and into the Northern freezer, from saving whales to saving seals - the work of a shepherd of the sea is never done.







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