I often think about the luck I’ve had in getting to speak to the comedian, Mike DeStefano. Mike had been around a long time, then went on NBC’s Last Comic Standing — and almost won.
I got to speak to him a couple of times, one of which was for an audio interview for Shambhala SunSpace. It’s good stuff and I do recommend you checking it out. But if you really want a concise taste of who Mike was, check out this new piece, “Uneasy Rider,” culled from the WTF Podcast for “These American Lives,” a NYT piece curated by Ira Glass about people who died in 2011.
Mike was hilarious, and a beautiful, fearless guy.
(Thanks to the great Sam DeWitt for the heads-up on this one.)
Photp by Kristin Dos Santos (w/permission)
Thanks to friend Konchog Norbu for the heads-up on this one — it’s hardly news, but it’s kinda cool when celebs go public with their interest in dharma. Seems David Duchovny (of Californication, X-Files, and Larry Sanders-crush fame) just did a retreat at what sounds to be Zen Mountain Monastery, and he’s told Perez Hilton’s pet-gossip site (yes, you read that right) TeddyHilton.com about the experience.
Again, not news, but at least Duchovny’s not looking for star treatment. “I’m a beginner,” he says, “I’ve only been meditating for a little while. You pay a fee to go for this weekend and what I didn’t know is that even though you pay a fee they put you to work immediately. You go there and first you bus some tables after you eat and they had me working in the garden everyday for an hour-and-a-half. It was fun, I was shoveling horse shit out there. You pay money and then you shovel horse shit!”
Zen, life…. Sounds like Duchovny is getting the basic gist of it.
More here.
Thanks to friend Konchog Norbu for pointing out this Mercedes-Benz ad from a couple years back. I kinda thought I’d posted it here, but no.
Nice find via Brad Warner’s Facebook page: James Coburn tries to teach Animal to meditate. Or at least to relax, relax, relax.
Considering that meditation has played an ongoing and meaningful role in the Occupy protests — note for example the related coverage my colleagues and I have been posting on the Shambhala Sun blog — it will be interesting to see how Buddhists respond to this Conan segment from Thursday night, in which Triumph the Insult Comic Dog takes on Occupy Wall Street and a meditator gets in his line of fire. …You’ve been warned. But will you laugh anyway?
There’s been lots made of the Steve Jobs/Buddhism connection. Thanks to eagle-eyed friend and reader Sam DeWitt for sending on this latest example. Sam writes:
“Walter Isaacson, author of the new biography Steve Jobs, was interviewed on The Daily Show. He talks about Steve Job’s ‘Zen stare,’ in which he would not blink when staring down an opponent — or something like that. Buddhism is also mentioned a few times in the interview, and it is just all-around fun. (It is The Daily Show after all).”
See what Sam is talking about, watch here. (In Canada? Then go here, and watch the third segment of October 25th’s show.) Thanks as always, Sam!
Last night, Chef Jose Andres joined Coco to talk rum and other concoctions. While we’re told by the Conan’s Facebook page that “Buddha” appears in the segment, that’s not quite right. It’d be more accurate to say that it’s Hotei, aka, the “fat Buddha,” or the “happy Buddha” who makes the cameo here, at around the 5:20 mark. Also appearing are lots of disembodied replicas of his body parts — all made of Jell-O.
This is not the first time Hotei and rum have made a pop-culture appearance together; see the entry for Pyrat rum on this page of the Dharma-Burger archives. But it’s almost certainly the oddest.
“One time I read all of Siddhartha at a traffic stop.” — Chris Traeger, Parks And Recreation‘s performance-obsessed state auditor
In the opening scene from Wednesday night’s new South Park the boys are watching a Terrance and Phillip cartoon set on some sort of Buddhist location:
What happens in the T&P cartoon? Well, suffice it to say that Phillip turns to Terrance and says, “Take that, Dalai Terrance.” And if you can’t guess what happens next, perhaps we should just leave it unsaid.
And then the show veered off in a total ‘nother direction, as it does. That was it for Buddhist Terrance and Phillip.
