Happy almost TGIF, Zoners! Time to take a mad dash through the news from this week, with your zeitgeist for May 7th, the It’s-Almost-the-Weekend-OMG-YAY edition.
Earlier this week, POLITICO posted an article that took an in-depth look at “Better Know a District” and its impact on the congresspeople who have dared to appear in the series. I admit that I wasn’t a big fan of BKAD when I first started watching the show, but I’ve come to appreciate the humor in the exchanges between “Stephen” and the guests who do their best to keep up with him.
- Stephen Colbert brings down the House… or does he? – POLITICO.com
“Participating members often spend at least two hours being interviewed by Colbert, who usually heads down from New York to Washington to tape multiple segments at a time. Occasionally, members will tape episodes at Colbert’s studio, in an office that is set up to look like one on Capitol Hill. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), for example, stopped by ‘The Colbert Report’ earlier this year while en route to a freshman orientation conference in Boston.
“‘He is exceptionally good,’ said Chaffetz. ‘Off-the-charts good. One of the things that differentiate him from almost any other reporter is the depth of his research. He had five pages, single-spaced, of background and data. He was pulling out facts from my life that I had never been questioned about before.’
“‘The Colbert Report’ remains one of the best opportunities a not-quite-name-brand member of Congress has to reach non-C-span audiences, push issues they care about and prove that they are, in fact, warm-blooded, bipedal and not completely humorless.”
Here’s an update on the COLBERT treadmill, courtesy of NASA. The article has plenty of nerdy technical details, which I found fascinating. The space geek part of me is loving this.
- COLBERT Ready for Serious Exercise – NASA.gov
“‘I think it’s great for NASA that Mr. Colbert got his audience interested in the space station,’ said Curt Wiederhoeft of Wyle. He is the project manager for the treadmill under the bioastronautics contract. ‘Comedy Central attracts a lot of younger viewers, and the space program’s going to need the next generation’s support and interest.’
“Now that the treadmill and its support system are designed, built and delivered to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, another team of engineers is getting it ready to survive the rigorous vibrations of another kind: launch.
“COLBERT has been disassembled into scores of parts and separated into more than six bags that will be strapped to racks inside the Leonardo cargo module. Leonardo, one of NASA’s multi-purpose logistics modules, or MPLMs, will be carried to the station by space shuttle Discovery during the STS-128 mission later this year.”
Cliff Sloan, who was on TCR yet again on Tuesday to discuss the selection of a new Supreme Court justice, provides a glimpse into how he acquired “friend of the show” status.
- Skadden’s Cliff Sloan Tangles with Stephen Colbert – The Am Law Daily
“I was first on in November because Stephen Colbert had decided he wanted a cabinet position [in the Obama administration]. One of his producers knew I had been involved in vetting candidates at the White House counsel’s office. So I did a vet of Colbert for a cabinet position, which was a vet unlike any other. There was a lot of vet-able material…. We actually taped about two hours of [footage], which they’ve since released as Web-only segments because there was so much material. [Click here, here, here, and here for Parts 1 through 4 of Sloan walking Colbert through the vetting process.]“
Finally, in Tek Jansen news, illustrator Christopher Mitten has posted the cover he did for the fifth issue of “Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen” on his blog. (Click here for full size pic.) Issue 5 will be available in stores on Stephen’s birthday, May 13th.
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