Word: carnac
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cetera, is already decided. If grades are supposed to be a measure of each student’s eventual mastery of the course material, how can a professor have figured out the grades before students have even been taught? The bell curve requires that professors have the skills of Carnac the Magnificent and can predict the distribution of their students’ talents and abilities before the undergraduates have had chance to show them off. While Harvard professors are some of the most talented people in the world, none of them has that kind of prophetic power...
...were the usual family high jinks: speedboating, bluefishing, tennis matches, horseshoes--let the games begin!--people riding around the Point on those fat-tired old bikes. The kids put on some hysterical skits one night at the Kennebunk River Club down the road. The old man dressed up as Carnac the Magician, and he and his sidekick Marlin Fitzwater reprised their favorite routines. Dubya's old friend Brad Freeman dressed up in a white wig and a dowdy blue dress and pretended to be Barbara. George's younger brother Marvin made fun of everyone, but the old ringleader himself...
...invented comedy bits that others copied (Allen's Answer Man become Carson's Carnac the Magnificent). He discovered or introduced talents like Don Knotts, Bill Dana and Tom Poston, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. He gave Elvis Presley his first national TV exposure, even before Ed Sullivan. He was, as the obits reminded us, a renaissance man who played jazz piano, composed thousands of songs (but only one hit, "This Could Be the Start of Something Big"), wrote a couple of dozen books and even dabbled in politics. Though a lifelong liberal - a union man to the end, opponent...
...commercial for his law practice. Guest Ellen DeGeneres has a touch of the flu? The show hires an ambulance to drive her onto the set. What separates Leno from Letterman (and from Carson before him) is the lack of any ironic distance. Carson made fun of those Carnac and Aunt Blabby sketches. Leno sells every bit like Professor Harold Hill in The Music...
...host for a talk show as satirize talk shows. He is following a trail blazed by Carson, who introduced a self-parodying subtext. Carson's famous "savers" -- ad-libs to salvage jokes that bombed -- along with his conspiratorial asides to the audience during corny bits like Aunt Blabby and Carnac, were a way of making the comedian himself the butt of the joke...