Fresno State's pitching coach should be a familiar name to Dodger fans.

http://www.sportsline.com/columns/story/10874562

Actually, I am pretty sure that stand up moment happened in 1988. It seems to add up. I think George wanting to know the scores was a product of his passion for the game itself, not as much the Dodgers.

The only other possibilities are 1977, 1978, or 1981.

The episode that forever made me a fan was with host Richard Pryor in Decemeber 1975. Pryor performed in sketches (Carlin did not appear in any sketches), most famously the word association skit with Chevy Chase and a Samurai sketch with John Belushi.

Carlin most famous routine is among the topics in this interview on Fresh Air that was recorded in 2004.

http://tinyurl.com/3zagxt

I remember George Carlin's entire story childhood baseball memories because he had an interview with Kiley and Booms (remember that show?) on Fox Sports Radio 8 years ago. That's my reference for my own anecdote in the last thread.

Jon: This man roughed up conventional wisdom in a way that was almost sweet, the way he brought you along for the ride.

True, well said.

Alex Belth and Scott Long are also coming to terms with his passing.

You "come to terms" with your daughter passing in a freak accident, not some comedian you've never met.

It wasn't until much later I got to hear his signature material on CDs: seven dirty words, baseball and football, and all the rest. He seemed more jovial then, and his voice wasn't even gravely yet. I'm glad I got to enjoy his work that spanned so many year.

Imagine. I'm 2 weeks away from boarding an airline flight to NY, and I'm thinking of his long, hilarious routine about the Airport. I will truly miss the genius of George Carlin.

People who go to Las Vegas, you've got to question their intellect to start with. Traveling hundreds and thousands of miles to essentially give your money to a large corporation is kind of moronic.

Thankfully his final HBO special this year "It's Bad for Ya" was a winner. He had some great bits about obsessive parenting that really hit home. Guy was really a genius.

--

Off topic, but both Eric Enders and myself are among many to have contributed to this list o' Westerns:
http://www.thecinematheque.com/00_top5_40_westerns.html

(I could probably pick 5 different films and be just as happy.)

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/75/75a.phtml

My dad is crushed - Tim Russert and George Carlin in 2 weeks.

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=7163

What to say about Carlin? I remember he seemed more like my friends and I than Belushi, or Cosby, or anybody else. We laughed and riffed off his stuff for days.

And tough guy Walter Brennan as the head of the Clanton family.

1. My Darling Clementine
2. Red River
3. Unforgiven
4. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
5. The Ox Bow Incident

I don't know who that refers to at all.

That is one silly statement.

2. She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, my favorite of the cavalry trilogy. Combined with Red River, this film gives Wayne a chance to develop his characters.

3. My Darling Clementine, Henry Fonda does a jig.

4. El Dorado, okay this was basically Rio Bravo with James Caan in the Ricky Nelson role, but I loved the interplay between Mitchum and Wayne.

5. The Man Who Shot Libery Valance, Wayne calls Jimmy Stewart pilgrim.

She was really cute in grease...

I'm probably one of the few people here who is so old that one of his all time favorite movies is still a western. :-) But my all time favorite, Shane, didn't make the cut.

I don't know how I could do a top 5. I always like challenges like that, I just put in what's in my head at the moment. I've recently seen a bunch of these and I was on a Ford kick for the past year. I will have to check out some that I haven't seen. Sometimes I just see what my Tivo's recorded and watch whatever it is, like The Professionals.

Aren't you missing an "only" in there?

But otherwise:

The Shootist
Stagecoach
Butch/Sundance
Fort Apache
My Darling Clementine

I haven't seen Fort Apache since I was a kid, so I don't know if I'd feel the same way today, but I might have watched it a dozen times back then.

Butch gets knocked down mainly because of those annoying ba-ba-ba-ba-ba singers.

8 - I appreciate the compliment on the one line. But I can come to terms with what I'm going to have for lunch today - I'm not sure that line is worth nitpicking.

He expanded upon what Bill Shaiken said in yesterday's LA Times.

Some others I love but was unable to find room for on my list are Bad Day at Black Rock, The Ox-Bow Incident, and The Shootist.

I need to watch My Darling Clementine again. I've only seen it once, a long time ago, and my reaction might be different now. At the time I thought it was the most visually stunning of Ford's films, but story-wise there's no there there.

The other names mentioned don't strike me as being worth sacrificing long term potential in exchange for short term need.

I have to admit I don't think I've seen "My Darling Clementine".

When you pull a gun, kill a man.

Red River
Lonely are the Brave
The Cowboys
The Searchers
Rio Bravo
Cat Ballou
Gunfight at the OK Corral
Broken Arrow
and I really liked the remake of 3:10 to Yuma from last year.

Shame on all of you.

Eric, yeah I really agree on your "Dances" take, the only other movie I liked Costner in was the one where he's an ex-ball player radio talkie that falls in with a widow. I'll definitely check out some of everybody's recommendations. I really need a new TV. :-)

Someone mentioned Outlaw Josie Wales. That one slipped my mind; it's great.

Also I forgot The Wild Bunch.

43 I hadn't thought of Bad Day at Black Rock as a Western because it's set in present day, as it were, but now that you mention it, it really does fit the mold in many other respects. Such a great script, regardless.

And of course, Blazing Saddles speaks for itself.

Just kidding

That music is the soundtrack to my life!

At least when I'm fleeing the law.

One of John Ford's better unheralded westerns is "Sgt. Rutledge," starring Jackie Robinson's UCLA teammate Woody Strode in the leading role.

I grew up watching a lot of westerns since my dad was obsessed with them. "The Searchers" was revered in our house, and when VCRs first came out I remember him spending like $75 on a videotape of it. (Yes, kids, VHS movies used to cost seventy-five bucks.) In fact, I was almost named Ethan instead of Eric but my mother nixed that at the last minute.

66
No, everything I did in sports was under the name of Go Deep and at 49 I don't think I'd be playing in a flag football league as much as I'd like to:)

http://tinyurl.com/524ooh

"So you're Jack Wilson."
"And what does that mean to you, Shane?'
"I've heard about you."
"And what have you heard, Shane?"
"I've heard that you're a low down Yankee liar."
"Prove it."

Let's just hope Quentin Tarantino doesn't read this thread.

Is that all you got?

But when I watched The Searchers, I just thought it was remarkably racist. I could see the appeal outside of that rather major issue, but I just didn't get how I was supposed to get past it. I never revisited it after my first viewing, though I've always suspected I misjudged it.

Eric, what year do you think the song "Black Cowboys" takes place in? What was the channel that showed a Western movie every day?

1. James Caan vs. Ricky Nelson
2. No forced relationship (Angie Dickinson)
3. I liked Dean Martin in his role as the drunk deputy but it just works better with Robert Mitchum as a drunk town marshall.

Now it must be said that the original idea behind Rio Bravo was to counter High Noon's theme of a town not willing to help their marshall (Gary Cooper) in his fight whereas Wayne's friend offers to help and gets killed in Rio Bravo. That element is completely gone in El Dorado.

My final reason on why El Dorado is better, there is a scene where Wayne and Mitchum and company are looking for the men who shot one of the sons of the family whose land the "bad guy" wants and the background music sounds like it is from a "Batman" episode.

The Left-Handed Gun
Hombre
Chato's Land
Valdez is Coming
Bite The Bullet
Hud
Destry Rides Again

No love for Dead Man? (as neo-Westerns go...)

Good questions both, and I have no idea. I've always pictured the song as taking place in the fifties, but I have no concrete reasons for believing that.

The racism of "The Searchers" is a topic that could be discussed endlessly. When I was in college and we watched it in film class, the first question the professor asked afterward was, "Do you think this film is racist, or is it a criticism of racism?" The answers were about evenly split but it seems to me that the obvious answer is "both." Really the only way one can draw the conclusion that the film is blatantly racist is if you believe the film is portraying its protagonist in a positive light. IMO the film's attitude toward the Wayne character is ambivalent at best, and by portraying him as such an oaf, Ford is condemning the character's views on race and his outlook on life in general.

On the other hand, even if you buy that theory, you must still deal with the racism of the scenes involving Look, the Native American wife, which are not so easily explained away.

little Dodger mention in a 1999 interview with The Onion:

O: Well, you more or less hate society anyway, don't you?

GC: Um, I'm very disrespectful of it, and I'm contemptuous of it, but I don't think hate is in me, although we use that word the same way we use love: "Oh, boy, I love ice cream and I hate the Dodgers." But it is a distaste, a contempt, a dissatisfaction, a disillusionment, and a lot of qualities and feelings that come together and appear as anger on stage. I don't experience them as anger; I experience them as a deep distaste.

http://tinyurl.com/2us9x8

The second one... well, when the absolute best thing about a movie is the Bon Jovi song, you know it's a pretty forgettable movie.

1) Navigation is slow and disorganized. Want to find a baseball game? Great! Once you've brought up the main menu, you need to shift to programming by category, select Sports, and select Baseball. But once there, your choices are not arranged by airtime, but apparently randomly. Since you don't get to see when the program airtimes are, and if there are multiple instances of the same show/game (as when the Dodgers are playing on both NTSC and HD, for instance), all you get is that there is a baseball game at a certain time but nothing beyond that. Because of this inconsistency, if you click on an intermediate menu item for a program with only one instance (instead of one with two or more), you get transported out of that deep menu you were just in and to that channel. If this was a mistake, you have to go through the whole ridiculous process all over again FROM THE TOP.
2) Picture-in-picture is needlessly large and covers too much of the screen. This is really annoying when I'm trying to watch two baseball games at once; the PIP almost inevitably covers the catcher, or the scoreboard strip at the top, or some other vital part of the game.
3) No mute. Really! The remote that comes with it doesn't allow you to mute the audio stream as it goes through the cable box (it did on our other Time-Warner DVR, one which is becoming more and more fondly remembered with time).
4) HD recording tics. We haven't seen them lately, but there have been significant problems recording HD programming (skipped content, etc.).

I would love to get my own gear and replace the lot of it. Unfortunately, because the hardware is all proprietary, I'm stuck with whatever garbage Time-Warner wants to stiff me with. The same is true on every other maker's hardware, whether it's DirecTV or Verizon's FIOS.

I loved the part when (somebody) says, "Yoo-hoo, I'll make you famous." BLAM!

I've always pictured that as being an awesome scene.

I think that would be a great TV viewing experience.

Would MLB allow it?

I should write a sequel to a Western... "Shane II: The Return"? The boy as dottering senior citizen still pining for Shane. Nah...

George Carlin on names.

"I'm getting really sick of guys named Todd. ... Where are all these goofy boys' names coming from? Taylor, Tyler, Jordan, Flynn — these are not real names. You wanna hear a real name? Eddie."

1a) The SELECT button is frequently used where the arrow buttons should be, and vice versa. I can't tell you how many times I've ended up having to restart from the top because of this.

2a) ... and there is no way to alter this. Our old DVR offered two sizes for PIP.

5) Boot times measured in MINUTES. Heaven help you if you need to start your DVR from a power outage, or if tech support requests you reboot it. My Mac doesn't take this long.

In general, Scientific Atlanta is producing junk.

Considering MLB Gameday Audio allows you to listen to either home or away radio broadcast teams, and SAP allows for multilingual audio channels right now, I have to believe that home or away feeds are coming.

If I were a White Sox fan, I might be tempted to just turn off all broadcasters and listen to the crowd.

Do you mean transfer the files, or display the video?

http://tinyurl.com/4723ea

That can't take that much more time.

There was no Shane II but several years ago I was watching cable when Alan Ladd appeared in a movie that began with him wearing the same outfit he had on when he rode off at the end of Shane. So there's that. :-) He was in Canada so it may have been Saskatchewan. When he arrived at the ranch at the beginning of Shane he said he was "heading north" but I wasn't expecting him to ride that far. :-)

129 Ah, I see. I just found that direct link via the ItD blog.

http://tinyurl.com/45b8ks

I've contemplated building one but I just stream ripped music and DVD's from my computer through other devices. I don't watch enough TV to want to record shows.

My favorite John Wayne western is the Searchers for many of the reasons stated in past comments. Indeed, I felt it was showing the futility of racism. It is easier for someone to be racist against a certain anonymous segment of a population than it is to be racist against someone you have a vested interest in and knowledge of.

One of the easiest ways to pick out your favorite western movies is to pick your favorite western star and list his movies. I also noticed nobody mentioned a Jimmie Stewart western. Kirk Douglas & Burt Lancaster were two of the most athletic of western heroes.

Okay, so he wasn't as far from Wyoming as I thought. :-)

{sigh}

143 Okay, okay, I know -- the Dodgers are always off.

No, I love DT all the time, but it's fun when we're less fixated on the team and talking about other stuff. Like movies!

Home Theater PC

And, now that Netflix streams tv and movies, I pay 8.95 a month and I get to watch quite a bit on my tv. The quality is surprisingly good

/sheepish

And Destry Rides Again!

1. Unforgiven
2, The Searchers
3. Shane
4. The Wild Bunch
5. For a Fistful of Dollars

I miss the old Screen Jam movie/tv chat days. :)
vr, Xei

I dislike Silverado

When Brando says "Get up you fat tub o guts" I always think of Terry Forster.

152 I've only seen the one with Jar Jar Binks.

With that abomination aside, I wonder if I would enjoy the original Star Wars any more or less as a first-time viewer in 2008.

And I'm sorry, Star Wars borrows from Westerns, but I don't see it as a Western. Thankyoucomeagain.

I love Little Big Man, too.

--

I wonder if the Dodgers players have a list of their favorite Westerns.

Speaking of Arthur Penn, there are all sorts of great quasi-westerns that may or may not qualify:

Bonnie and Clyde
Lone Star
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Bad Day at Black Rock
Hud
The Last Picture Show
Giant
The Milagro Beanfield War
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
etc etc

So, what defines a western?

Is it the time period? Westerns can't have cars in them, is one definition I've heard, but that eliminates the Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy.

Another definition I've heard: A western is any movie in which the protagonist wears a cowboy hat. Of course, this would mean that Midnight Cowboy is a western, and that She Wore a Yellow Ribbon isn't.

Is it the location? The movie has to take place somewhere in the American west? This means that "Boyz n the Hood" qualifies but "The Man From Snowy River," a quintessential western, doesn't.

In one supreme starburst of energy, commitment, and focus, Peckinpah captures the decidedly dark, dark heart of 1968-1969 in a genre picture. Raw, chaotic, and brutal, but also shot through with romantic fatalism, this is not only to my mind the greatest Western of all time, but also one of the two or three greatest American films, period.

2) Once Upon a Time in the West

The yin to Peckinpah's Wild Bunch yang, this is a profoundly langorous and poetic statement from a maestro filmmaker who had never even spent any time in the West. Absolutely impossible to describe, it boasts some of the finest casting in the history of the genre a for-the-ages soundtrack -- it doesn't look like any other Leone movie ever made -- hell, it doesn't look like any other movie ever made

Wow! John Wayne vs. Montgomery Clift in what is quite possibly the greatest of all classical Westerns! (I have always preferred it to the John Ford films, with the possible exception of Stagecoach.) John Wayne plays as unsympathetic a bastard as he plays in The Searchers (thank goodness John Wayne was generally a Good Guy, because grungier roles like these suggest that he would have been a truly terrifying Bad Guy.) His antagonist is Montgomery Clift, in his audacious and ultracool screen debut -- it's like the Old Guard of Hollywood Acting is meeting the New Guard (with the conflict deeply rooted in the film's story as well) and is certainly one of the great matchups in the history of Hollywood movies. Clift really holds his own against the icon, Wayne – and the result is pretty much a masterpiece. The script is jaw-droppingly quotable, with one classic sequence after another (watch closely as Coleen Gray almost manages to steal the whole show in her three minutes of screen time at the beginning of the movie); the B&W cinematography is unbelievably lustrous and beautiful; and the sparks that fly between Clift and Wayne need to be seen to be believed.

4) McCabe and Mrs. Miller

Some people think it's the worst Western ever made, many people think it's one of the very greatest American films of all, but I don't think anybody who has seen McCabe & Mrs. Miller has really ever forgotten it. Robert Altman's singular masterpiece is truly like no other movie you have ever seen. It's a passionate, timeless reverie about what the West was like precisely at the moment that it was becoming civilization as we know it – it occupies an exalted, unique crossroads position in America's history (and in film history). As a dense, elliptical, hard-to-hear work of frontier poetry that nonetheless tells a deceptively straightforward story, it is unparalleled. Every element of the production works toward a common goal, and it is all of a piece. Even catching a chopped-up, censored, pan-and-scan version of it on television as a teenager, I knew immediately that this film was something special – something pulled deeply from the troubled, mystical, mythical subconscious of the American experience for all of those who have chosen to go west to make our fortune.

Altman was on a tremendous roll between 1970 and 1975, cranking out no fewer than eight fascinating films from M*A*S*H to Nashville in that short span of time – a run that represents an amazing gambler's winning streak in American movies. McCabe & Mrs. Miller may well be the best of these great works. The early 1970's were indisputably one of the golden ages of American cinema, and you would be hard-pressed to find too many more films from that bygone era that are more perfectly conceived and executed than this one.

I am generally shaded several degrees cooler towards Ford's work than Howard Hawks's, for example. I'm no particular fan of the much-beloved Searchers, for examples -- not so much because of the cloudy, ambiguous racial attitudes, but rather because so much of the film is clumsy and ham-fisted.

I do think that Stagecoach, however, is one of the all-time greats -- a genre picture that clicks right into place at every turn. I can see why Welles (claimed to have) watched it 40 times while prepping Citizen Kane. The push-in to John Wayne as he wields his rifle and stops the stagecoach is one of my all-time favority movie intros -- right up there with the aforementioned Welles's snap-CU as Harry Lime when Joseph Cotten yells at him outside Alida Valle's apartment in The Third Man.

I know, another Peckinpah. But while The Wild Bunch is assuredly the First Great Modern Western, this small flick might have been the last of the Great Classic Westerns. Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea may give the best performances of their careers as two aging former gunslingers trekking a cash payload across the Sierras, and the whole thing comes across as achingly poignant. Really great stuff.

Honorable Mention: Shane (of course), Winchester '73, GBU and also For A Few Dollars More, Unforgiven, Man of the West, The Tall T -- heck, any of those Budd Boetticher or Anthony Mann classics from the 1950s. How about Johnny Guitar?

So many riches -- an endless adaptable genre.

What defines a Western? I was thinking about plot. Strong, independent, but existentially lonely hero, alone or with a few equally gruff buddies saves a town of folk tamed and civilized, but weakened in the process and vulnerable to barbaric attack. That's ONE plot. Is Shane one of those? I can't quite remember. 7 Sam/Mag 7, El Dorado, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, High Noon, uh, My Daughter Clementine. It seems in most of the "classic" versions, all made before 1968, I THINK, the civilizing effect of law and order, while somewhat effeminating, is regarded as both good and inevitable. Children are safe and go to tiny schoolhouses, people go to worship God on Sundays in small, wooden churches with steeples, and meet during the week in stores where they flirt and gossip innocently while purchasing dry goods.

Then come the late '60's, early '70's and the questioning of not only the moral consistency and validity of our previously more-or-less secure values, but also the historical accuracy of the myths that we had erected to exemplify them. McCabe and Mrs. Miller has a horrifyingly realistic sense as he fights a death-battle with the truly vicious killers (who have demonstrated graphically their depravity earlier) while she puffs herself into oblivion. What's he giving his life for? Is that meant to fictionally parallel in any way the experience of the returning Viet Nam vets who were spit upon by their partially debauched young compatriots, while we watched on Cronkite a slightly more real depiction of war than we had gotten previously from movies and journalistic accounts, one that amounted mostly to a bunch of killing and suffering?

I'm done for now. Got to go to bed. Thanks.