TVSquad

I love reporting on the occasional political stuff: it's like tossing raw meat to a pack of wild dogs and watching them tear at each other. Now read this post and fight! Fight and bite, my polemic pooches!

Sorry, I shouldn't refer to my readers as "polemic pooches," that's not very nice. Anyway, here's the news:

TMZ reports that back in 2005, a drunken Rachael Ray made some ugly remarks about Oprah, the woman who helped launch Ray into the spotlight. Then again, Ray may have done no such thing. That's pretty much the gist of the article. Careful readers will note that none of the sources are named, so I guess that's why it's called celebrity gossip. If Ray did indeed get drunk at an event in Century City and made racist remarks about the portrait of Oprah from Beloved that hangs in Harpo Studios, or referred to Angelina Jolie as a "backdoor c**t," it was muttered before people started filming embarrassing celeb moments with their camera phones. Now all we have is speculation about what someone may or may not have said two years ago.

If it makes Ray feel any better, I once called my little brother a "stupid doody idiot head" when I was five. I've always regretted saying it, and I hope no one was taping me, because I'd really hate for something I said when I was drunk to haunt me years down the road.

I was an alcoholic five year old. I forgot to mention that.

If you missed Michael Richards' appearance on Letterman's show last night after his racist tirade at a comedy club in West Hollywood, CBS' Late Show Web site has the video, which you can see here.

Setting aside Richards' racial slurs aside for a moment, watching the video of his onstage meltdown made me think of the kind of heated exchanges people get into where one becomes so enraged they reach deep into their reserves for the ultimate atomic bomb of an insult, the one word or phrase they can say that will completely flatten the person who is attacking them, and in Richard's case his racist comments . During his appearance on Letterman's show, Richards acknowledged that he lost his temper, and it seems fairly obvious to me that whatever self-censoring mechanism he had was overrode by his need to take down the people who were heckling him.

Thanks to Mack Swift for the info.

In 1951 Hanna Barbera created a Tom and Jerry short called "His Mouse Friday" that was later banned from television for its racist content. In the cartoon, which you can watch here, Tom is stranded on an island and Jerry paints himself up with black soot to resemble a cannibal and scare Tom. You'll notice that Jerry's dialogue and the dialogue of the island natives is muted. I'm not sure why that is, but based on what I found while scrounging for information on this cartoon, the dialogue was removed because of offensive slang. That information doesn't come from any official source, so take that for whatever it's worth. Questionable content aside, I don't think this is the best Tom and Jerry I've ever seen, though the scene where Tom is cooking in the stew pot and throws away the onion is pretty funny. And if nothing else, it's a nice little piece of animation history for fans of the medium.

(S01E07)

Mr. Noblet (after showing his class a tape of Martin Luther King, Jr's "I Have A Dream" speech): King's dream was of an America without racism of any kind. The tragedy of course is that all this footage is in black and white. Imagine how powerful it would have been in color.

In this episode, a student spray paints the N-word in the hallway, and all of Flatpoint High is turned upside down as they try to figure out who did it. The easiest humorous route to take would have been to mock those blatantly racist enough to do such a thing, but this episode, like the "Ginger Kids" episode of South Park, cuts much deeper, exposing the varying degrees of prejudice that exist in all of us. Or, as one student says, "The only thing we hate more than a racist is spics."