So I'm watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann the other night when I see a commercial which shows an orangutan in a pharmacy aisle using a Droid X smartphone and buying Robitussin® cough medicine. This was a lot to process. My first reaction was concern that the...
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey recemtly, and during the hour, Oprah showed brief clips of the Harvard Commencement speech Ms. Rowling gave on June 5, 2008. Those excerpts were intriguing enough to make me want to hear the whole...
Above is the island of Lanai in Hawaii, seen from Maui. Billionaire David H. Murdock owns 98 percent of it. He also owns Dole Food Company, real estate development company Castle & Cooke, and hundreds of thousands of acres of land in 94 countries around the world....
A baffling practice on public television here in the USA is the way the program schedule gets swapped out whenever fundraising time rolls around. While public radio stations typically interrupt abbreviated versions of their regular shows to ask for money, public TV...
By now, most of us are familiar with Rainn Wilson from The Office, where he plays Dwight Schrute, the megalomaniacal nerd paper salesman from a German beet-farming family with semi-Amish values. Wilson is also a huge celebrity in the Twitter world where, as...
Speaking of Oprah, Sarah Terez Rosenblum has a Chicago Sun-Times story today about Robyn Okrant, a writer-performer who has been living her life according to Oprah for darn near a year now: "... I have to breathe a certain way, I have to savor every meal, I have to be...
Apart from losing my job this morning, my biggest disappointment was that Steve Dahl never got around to reading Christopher Borrelli's outstanding Tribune story about the amazing and wondrous Oprah Winfrey Show snow globe, available at the Oprah Winfrey store. (The...
Now I understand how David Letterman must have suffered. It's like an unexpected punch in the stomach. It's difficult to even breathe, and I just sit here in absolute disbelief wondering what I ever did to deserve this. In the hopeful early morning hours of October...
Late in November of 2005, Oprah Winfrey was on my TV getting all effusive over Memoirs of a Geisha. To hear Oprah describe it, it was the most moving, most beautifully filmed cinematic masterpiece in the history of box offices. Having...