It is Halloween! Boo! Did I scare you? No? How about President Cruz. The thought of that should send shivers down any rational person's spine.
Tonight's guests are Mark Fainaru-Wada on TDS and Bill Bryson on Colbert.
Mark Fainaru-Wada joined ESPN in November 2007 as an investigative reporter for ESPN’s Enterprise Unit, which is charged with developing long-form, investigative features to be presented across multiple platforms.
The San Francisco-based Fainaru-Wada contributes to all aspects of ESPN’s news and information programming, including SportsCenter, Outside the Lines and ESPNEWS, as well as ESPN.com, ESPN Radio, and ESPN the Magazine.
espnmediazone.com
I will leave it to Mark Fainaru-Wada himself to explain his presence on TDS tonight.
Amazon has a synopsis
“PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL PLAYERS DO NOT SUSTAIN FREQUENT REPETITIVE BLOWS TO THE BRAIN ON A REGULAR BASIS.”
So concluded the National Football League in a December 2005 scientific paper on concussions in America’s most popular sport. That judgment, implausible even to a casual fan, also contradicted the opinion of a growing cadre of neuroscientists who worked in vain to convince the NFL that it was facing a deadly new scourge: A chronic brain disease that was driving an alarming number of players -- including some of the all-time greats -- to madness.
League of Denial reveals how the NFL, over a period of nearly two decades, sought to cover up and deny mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain damage. amazon.com
Even if you are not a fan of
sport, this sounds like it could be an interesting interview.
Bill Bryson, according to his Wikipedia entry
is a best-selling American author of humorous books on travel, as well as books on the English language and science. Born in America, he was a resident of Britain for most of his adult life before returning to the U.S. in 1995. In 2003 Bryson moved back to Britain, living in the old rectory of Wramplingham, Norfolk, and was appointed chancellor of Durham University.
He is also on to discuss a book, his being
One Summer: America, 1927.
The summer of 1927 began with one of the signature events of the twentieth century: on May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first man to cross the Atlantic by plane nonstop, and when he landed in Le Bourget airfield near Paris, he ignited an explosion of worldwide rapture and instantly became the most famous person on the planet. Meanwhile, the titanically talented Babe Ruth was beginning his assault on the home run record, which would culminate on September 30 with his sixtieth blast, one of the most resonant and durable records in sports history. In between those dates a Queens housewife named Ruth Snyder and her corset-salesman lover garroted her husband, leading to a murder trial that became a huge tabloid sensation. Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly sat atop a flagpole in Newark, New Jersey, for twelve days—a new record. The American South was clobbered by unprecedented rain and by flooding of the Mississippi basin, a great human disaster, the relief efforts for which were guided by the uncannily able and insufferably pompous Herbert Hoover. Calvin Coolidge interrupted an already leisurely presidency for an even more relaxing three-month vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The gangster Al Capone tightened his grip on the illegal booze business through a gaudy and murderous reign of terror and municipal corruption. The first true “talking picture,” Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, was filmed and forever changed the motion picture industry. The four most powerful central bankers on earth met in secret session on a Long Island estate and made a fateful decision that virtually guaranteed a future crash and depression.
Sorry, Bryan Adams has not yet recorded a song about the Summer of 27. It sounds like this guy has some good stories though
Bryson writes prose as lucid as a pane of glass and often aims for (quite successfully) readers’ funnybones with colorful and humorous stories.
For instance, Bow, in addition to being the most celebrated Hollywood icon of her era, was also famously promiscuous, Bryson notes. She had a slew of boyfriends, many of them at the same time. Bryson tells of one boyfriend who arrived at her house only to realize that another man was hiding in the bathroom. The aggrieved boyfriend, Bryson tells us, demanded that the hidden man “come on out so I can knock your teeth out!” When the bathroom door opened, heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey sheepishly appeared. The aggrieved boyfriend wisely kept his fists to himself, and the hulking Dempsey departed in shame-faced silence.
REVIEW: 'One Summer: America, 1927,' by Bill Bryson
A bit more Halloween
Yes, that is a Nyan cat pumpkin. It was taken at a large display of jack-o'-lanterns that a local resident used to host, once he passed away, the family held it one final time in his memory.
More from that display, you can see the overall size here.
The community pitched in and carved pumpkins for the display.
A pumpkin I carved one year.
Next Week's Guests
THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
Mo 11/4: Bob Woodruff
Tu 11/5: John Goodman
We 11/6: Monique Brinson Demery
Th 11/7: Patrick Stewart
THE COLBERT REPORT
Mo 11/4: David Folkenflik
Tu 11/5: Julius Erving
We 11/6: Brian Lehrer
Th 11/7: Daniel Lieberman
Happy Halloween!