This is his Wikipedia entry for more background.

For me, Don Knotts was one of several people, including Ernie Kovacs, Pat Harrington, Jr., Louis Nye, Bill Dana, Dayton Allen and Tom Poston, who were part of Steve Allen’s Tonight Show that I saw while stationed at remote sites around the world, about five years after it was off the air.

The man on the street episodes were a hoot as they were barely scripted and heavily dependent on the personalities that each of the comedians developed to interact with “Steverino”.

You have to be of an age to react to “Schmock! Schmock!”, an in-joke from a long time ago.

The US Attorney’s office has charged Sheriff Billy McGee of Forrest County, Mississippi with the heinous crime of getting two trucks of ice for his county.

Just unbelievable.

Very ancient element in the medicine bundle of wise women, ergot. Probably responsible for some of them being burned at the stake as ergot poisoning is suspected in many of the “witch episodes”.

It is occasionally useful to be aware of naturally occurring medications, if only to know what to avoid.

It’s probably a problem for grain farmers on the Great Plains.

You can see the ports at the Official P&O site, or at Uggabugga for graphic goodness by Quiddity.

Then Sadly, No joined in the bleg, although there is no mention of cat pictures.

Now Ms. World O’Crap and Julia are asking.

If you have the stomach for it, go vote.

For some reason, the list of academics is sorted by school, not by the name of the person, so you have to find Penn State University to vote for Michael.

Don’t hang around and read the page or really look at the results. They’re wingers, spelling is optional. Maybe “Berkelil” is a winger Berkeley joke. As for the switched column headings on the results page, proofreaders are expensive.

I do wonder why there’s no one from Harvard or Yale on the list.

Having been idolized by the full weight of the Party apparatus, “Uncle Joe” had achieved the position of a god in a supposedly atheistic society, and that was the primary charge leveled at him: he had created a “cult of personality” [культ личности] in a classless society.

As an insider, Khrushchev knew where the bodies were buried and how many there were. Nikita blasted the “generalissimo” for preventing an effective response to the initial invasion of the Soviet Union by the Wehrmacht, refusing to believe that Hitler was actually casting aside their non-aggression pact.

The purges and starvation in the 1930s were laid bare in the common language that Khrushchev cultivated.

The speech was given in a closed meeting and the details were released in a slow and measured matter to avoid the disruption that would be caused by finding out that the savior of Mother Russia was a brutal thug only interested in himself.

It is of interest that young people in today’s Russia have a much better opinion of Stalin than their parents and grandparents. There would appear to be an effort to rehabilitate the image of the Georgian murderer. Now who would want to have people think kindly of a brutal, power-mad, autocrat?