#com

Like all young reporters - brilliant or hopelessly incompetent - I dreamed of the glamorous life of the foreign correspondent: prowling Vienna in a Burberry trench coat, speaking a dozen languages to dangerous women, narrowly escaping Sardinian bandits - the usual stuff that newspaper dreams are made of. ↗

— Russell Baker

#brilliant #coat #correspondent #dangerous #dozen

Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on 'canned' laughter, grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years. ↗

— Russell Baker

#been #canned #comedy #dead #grafted

The early commentators who put down the pre-presidential Roosevelt as an empty-headed young lightweight, all ambition and no talent, now seem comically wrong to a modern book-reading, movie-going, television-watching, legend-loving American public conditioned to think of him as one of the presidential giants on the order of Washington and Lincoln. ↗

— Russell Baker

#american #american public #commentators #conditioned #down

There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance. ↗

— Russell Baker

#because #business #comfortable #competent #concerned

Those who remember Washington's cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan's intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva - alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! - with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev. ↗

— Russell Baker

#astonished #cold #cold war #communist #culture

Of all the toys available, none is better designed than the owner himself. A large multipurpose plaything, its parts can be made to move in almost any direction. It comes completely assembled, and it makes a sound when you jump on it. ↗

— Stephen Baker

#any #assembled #available #better #comes

People didn't stop spending money, they just spent it on things that complement their PCs. ↗

— Stephen Baker

#just #money #pcs #people #spending

To bathe a cat takes brute force, perseverance, courage of conviction - and a cat. The last ingredient is usually hardest to come by. ↗

— Stephen Baker

#brute #brute force #cat #come #conviction

I have never described the time I was in Doctor Who as anything except a kind of ecstatic success, but all the rest has been rather a muddle and a disappointment. Compared to Doctor Who, it has been an outrageous failure really - it's so boring. ↗

— Tom Baker

#been #boring #compared #described #disappointment

We are pre-disposed for fantasy, there is a natural impulse for human beings to want to get off their heads or out of their heads in something in a substance or a drink or an idea or a religion which will comfort them and make life exciting. ↗

— Tom Baker

#comfort #drink #exciting #fantasy #get