Stephen Colbert in the Zeitgeist – April 26, 2009

Greetings, Zoners! I hope you all had a great weekend. If you’re in the Northeast, like I am, we’ve had a great taste of summer for the past couple of days. But regardless of where you are, I hope you all got in some relaxing and recreating and are ready to take on a new week.

Here’s some of what’s been happening in the Colbert-centric newsosphere for the past week, in your zeitgeist for April 26th.

Dude, it’s a comedy show. Really.

• Satire and the Comedy Channel – DenverPost.com

  “Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are sometimes, no doubt, as silly as they come. But make no mistake, there is a core seriousness to their work, and more important, a core fearlessness that puts most other establishment (read ‘network’) political commentary shows to shame.

  Fools they are, in the best Shakespearian sense of the word. ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Colbert Report,’ under the cover of ‘comedy,’ have become among the most incisive political commentators working today.

  Perhaps the real stamp of Stewart’s and Colbert’s validity as important new voices on the political commentary scene comes from two disparate camps: Bill Moyers has wondered aloud if Stewart would have been a better choice to replace Tim Russert on ‘Meet the Press,’ and a number of right-wing commentators have begun to disparage the shows as adolescent and inconsequential, a sure sign of their nascent power.”

The COLBERT treadmill

• NASA’s ‘COLBERT’ Supplied by Wyle is Designed to Minimize House Calls – PR Newswire

  “NASA’s newest piece of astronaut fitness gear headed for the International Space Station, the COLBERT, is perfect for a facility that wants to avoid too many house calls for repairs.

  The COLBERT is designed to go up to 150,000 miles without a belt change.

  ‘The COLBERT represents the integrated efforts of our best engineers and scientists to deliver a highly reliable and very critical piece of flight hardware,’ said Jim Kukla, a group vice president at Wyle, the NASA contractor that has taken a commercial-off-the-shelf treadmill and modified it to meet spaceflight standards.”

The Colbert Name Game

• Stephen Colbert in Middle of Minor League Controversy – NBCSanDiego.com

  “Things have gotten so Colbert-crazy that some organizations and sports teams are opting to have a Colbert theme just in hopes of getting some free publicity. The latest case of this comes from Normal, Illinois, where the owners of a future minor league baseball franchise are having a contest for the team’s future fans to vote for the team’s name and mascot.

  One of the options? The Coal Bears.”

• Name selection for minor league baseball team in Downstate Normal gets interesting – ChicagoTribune.com

  “An experiment in democracy went awry this week in Normal, when online voting for a new minor league baseball team’s name ended up with a risque term hacked to the top of the list, a suspected hijacking by the Colbert Nation, and one popular suggestion that turned out to be a reference to the Ku Klux Klan.

  Officials knew something was off when they’d gathered more than 750,000 votes in less than seven days.

  There also was suspected vote tampering with The Coal Bears, which overnight received more than 150,000 votes, apparently from fans of comedian Stephen Colbert, perhaps frustrated that NASA named only a treadmill after him this month even though he dominated online voting for a new space station room’s moniker.” (ONLY a treadmill? It’s a space treadmill!! – Ed.)

The Dana Carvey Show

• Did the Dana Carvey Show Have One of the Greatest Comedy Writer Benches Ever? – Slashfilm.com

  “The Dana Carvey Show is now on Hulu. (Yay!! – Ed.) What’s the big deal? Well, when the sketch comedy show premiered on ABC in the mid ’90s — following a family-safe block of programming — millions were in awe at the stuff it got away with.” The show included an “insane roster of writers: Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, and Charlie Kaufman for starters.”

Stephen Jr.’s Latino cousin?

• Three falcon chicks hatch atop San Jose City Hall – MercuryNews.com

  “For a mother who just watched three offspring hatch — and is watching her fourth egg — Clara appeared to be in excellent health Tuesday from her perch atop San Jose City Hall.

  Clara, and her falcon lover du jour, Esteban Colbert, are now the proud parents of three chicks, technically called eyasses.”

  Haha, someone’s been reading Wigfield! You can watch the falcon cam, “starring Clara and Esteban Colbert,” here. I haven’t been able to see anything there yet because I keep checking it after dark.

(h/t Jennie)