Stephen Colbert in the Zeitgeist – September 6, 2009

Hey, Zoners, I hope everyone is having a great weekend so far. It’s been relatively quiet on the Colbert news front, with the notable exceptions of the arrival of the C.O.L.B.E.R.T. at the International Space Station, and of course the new issue of Rolling Stone with Stephen on the cover and a fantastic feature article. (If you haven’t picked that up yet, run, don’t walk, to your nearest magazine seller and get a copy. You don’t want to miss this article.) Only one more week of break to get through, folks, and I think we might just about manage it. Here’s a selection of the Colbert news that’s been floating around the Interwebs, your zeitgeist for September 6th.

More COLBERT updates

• Over on the Colbert Nation boards, ronsmytheiii has been posting updates on STS-128 as the mission progresses, and recently posted a diagram of the COLBERT and pictures of the rack base that will hold the treadmill. You can view those here.
• Following up on that hilarious fake press release that was included in the daily execute package sent to Discovery’s crew earlier this week, a friend of mine who works for NASA shared an additional bit of info about it:
  

  The folks that come up with this is the Flight Activities Officer (FAO) and the backroom position MATS who puts together the execute package each morning that is uplinked to the crew and printed on board. … Most of the time the subject matter or the joke is … relevant to anything comical going on in the flight control room or onboard. Most of the time it involves taking some serious jabs at each other involving a lot of engineer geek humor.

  Well hey, if there’s anyone who gets geek humor, we do around here. (Okay, maybe not engineer geek humor…) So the humor is usually some kind of inside joke, but not this time. Whoever came up with it did a genius job, right down to the use of “thingy.” NASA folks are such it-getters.

Creating comedy

• Fight It, Colbert, Fight It! Also, Comedy That Goes Somewhere – Macleans.ca

  In addition to reporting on Allison Silverman’s departure from TCR, this article from Maclean’s discusses writing comedy in general, and writing for the Report as compared to The Daily Show: …[I]t seems like Colbert would be a more demanding show to work on than The Daily Show, because Colbert has to be in-character with everything he says, so they can’t just write straightforward jokes; every joke has to be a commentary on current events and something the Colbert character would plausibly say. (And then there’s “The Wørd,” where they have to write those two-level jokes while also coming up with jokes for the talking-points sidebar.)

Stephen Colbert as The Riddler?

• Riddle Me This: Why Not Let Stephen Colbert Play the Riddler? – Huffington Post: The Riddler is intellectually curious, wickedly funny, and relentlessly creative — all of the things I would associate with Stephen Colbert. Add in the usual debauchery, mischief and shenanigans and Colbert could really pull it off.

  Okay, having Stephen play The Riddler in the next Batman movie sounds like a great idea, but Stephen has this little problem called time. Most importantly, the lack of it. When would he fit movie-making into his insane schedule? Not that I don’t think he could do a good job, but honestly, it would be virtually impossible for him to do it. Interesting suggestion, though.

Something for the fangirls

• Ultimate Hotties: EW’s staff picks – EW.com’s Popwatch: Mandi Bierly: 10 Hot Men From The Past Year: #4 Stephen Colbert: I just wanna sit in bed and watch a Golden Girls marathon with him, which is how I know when I really like a guy. (Which explains why I’m still single?)

  I could argue with her placement of Stephen at #4 on that list, but at least she had the good taste to put True Blood‘s Alexander Skarsgård at #2.

Add a touch of Colbert to your iGoogle page

• A Little Bit of Truthiness on your iGoogle Page with Stephen Colbert Quotes – MalekTips.com: If you’re a fan of “The Colbert Report” and cannot get enough of Stephen Colbert (especially during multi-week show breaks), display a daily quote on your iGoogle page with the “Stephen Colbert Quote of the Day” gadget for iGoogle. In the spirit of one of the sketches on his show… Web browser side effects may include: Phantom double mouse pointers, spontaneous bookmark combustion, involuntary back button spinning, and Wandering Web Address Bar Syndrome.

One of these things is not like the others

• Donohue’s book now available – Catholic League press release: The Catholic League has chosen to promote the new book by their president (and former TCR guest) William Donohue, Secular Sabotage : How Liberals Are Destroying Religion and Culture in America by releasing a few endorsement blurbs from a fairly predictable group of suspects, with one notable exception: “Wake up, America! The secular minority has cut the brake cables on America’s In-God-We-Trust-Mobile! Not even all 43 of our Christian presidents can save us now.” — Stephen Colbert, host of “The Colbert Report” (Yeah, I think someone at the Catholic League didn’t quite get the joke. Stephen’s blurb bears absolutely no resemblance to any of the others.)

Random name dropping

• I don’t have a link for this one, but Jenny with a Y caught a reference to Stephen in a “Sound of Young America” podcast that featured someone from Second City. This person claims that Stephen still holds the record for selling the most Second City t-shirts ever when he worked in the gift shop there. I believe it. All he’d have to do is smile at me and I’d buy one.

(h/t DB, Ms I, Jennie, Jenny with a Y, and extra thanks to my nameless buddy at NASA)