“Soupy Sales, whose zany television routines turned the smashing of a pie to the face into a madcap art form, died Thursday night. He was 83.
“Mr. Sales’s former manager, Dave Usher, said the entertainer died in a hospice in New York City after suffering from multiple health problems.
“Cavorting with his puppet sidekicks White Fang, Black Tooth, Pookie the Lion and Hobart and Reba, the heads in the pot-bellied stove, transforming himself into the private detective Philo Kvetch, and playing host to the ever-present ‘nut at the door,’ Soupy Sales became a television favorite of youngsters and an anarchic comedy hero for teenagers and college students.
“Clad in a top hat, sweater and bow tie, shuffling through his Mouse dance, he reached his slapstick heyday in the mid-1960s on ‘The Soupy Sales Show,’ a widely syndicated program based at WNEW-TV in New York.” (cont’d @ NY Times)
“A Philadelphia cable network’s early morning broadcast of a Good Friday service at the Vatican abruptly changed to something wildly different – a 30-second ‘
“In order to keep some 6.5 million TV screens from going dark two weeks from now, both houses of Congress have now voted to postpone the deadline for a changeover from analog to to digital television transmissions from February 17 to June 12. The president has been pushing for the delay, and despite delays from peevish Republicans, he got it. It remains to be seen whether the postponement will be enough to resolve what has by now become a completely failed government program–another parting gift from the Bush administration, which managed to raise government incompetence to new levels, while always seeming to shaft the nation’s most vulnerable people.”
The 'Not-So-Rough' Guide 