can you imagine a world without Monty Python?

Terry Jones:

The show started in limited access in America, on PBS, and before that the tapes were very nearly wiped. Howard Dell, who was our video editor suddenly rang me up one day and said, "next month they're going to wipe the first series," because in those days it was BBC policy to wipe tapes, especially comedy and light entertainment. You'd keep opera and concert performances and ballet and things like that, cultural things, but light entertainment got wiped so they could re-use the tapes. So I organized with Howard to get the tapes illegally transferred onto the only home system at the time, which was Phillips VCR, a strange system where you had two tapes one above each other in a cassette. So we got a cassette player, which was the first one out on the market, and we had all the Python shows transferred onto these cassettes - fifteen or thirty minutes was the most you could get. There was a period of a few months when I thought, "that's going to be the only record of Python, these Philips cassettes sitting in my cellar." But then what happened was that Ron Devillier, who was in charge of the Public Broadcasting System in Dallas, Texas, had heard about the shows and approached BBC Enterprises. He said he'd like to see these "Flying Circus" shows and BBC Enterprises, according to Ron Devillier, told him, "No, no, we don't think you'd like them, they're not a circus, we don't think yod'd be interested really. " Ron insisted and he got all three series sent over and he spent a weekend watching the shows and became conviced that he had to put these on. But he had to get eleven other stations to show them so that he could actually afford to buy the shows. So he persuaded some other stations to take them on and they started putting these shows out and that's how it really took off in the States, it started in Dallas of all places. Once the BBC found they had a sale over there, they decided not to wipe the things, and so we survived by the skin of our teeth, fortunately.

Apparently, this happened in 1975

Bush Suspends Davis-Bacon Rules for Rebuilding

The Davis-Bacon Act

September 14, 2005

Congress approved a second Hurricane Katrina emergency spending package and President Bush Sept. 8 waived Davis-Bacon Act prevailing wage rules on all federal construction in the hurricane region.

Federal procurement laws allow the president to suspend the prevailing wage law during a national emergency.

( Read more... )

AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney denounced the president's waiver, calling the White House action "unbelievable and outrageous." Taking advantage "of a national tragedy to get rid of a protection for workers the corporate backers of the White House have long wanted to remove is nothing less than profiteering. Congress must reverse this short-sighted action," Sweeney said. The federation's Building and Construction Trades Dept. did not issue a formal comment, but some construction unions privately expressed their disappointment.

( Read more... )

Okay, who can give me some positive spin for this?

nine months

That's how long it took me to finish the book I got for Christmas, called, The Pythons Autobiography by the Pythons. It's a really good book if you're into that sort of thing.

Okay, now I've got three more books to finish before this Christmas. That's one book a month. Even though i've got no remodeling projects going I'm not real optimistic about finishing them ni time.