Craig Ferguson, am I the last to know?

Often times I am at the cutting edge. I will feel as if I am a 'trend spotter', and predict that something new I have been turned onto will become part of the popular culture soon enough. For example, I once predicted there would be a huge fad of young people joining Freemasonry in the near future. (Whatever became of that? Oh, wait, I think Saint Charles Lodge has been raising about 40 guys a year of the past two years. What do I know...) While I could give numerous other examples of this I am also sure there are a number of exceptions where I got onto the bandwagon just a little bit too late.

I believe, now, my biggest sin of omission is not recognizing the comedic genius of Craig Ferguson. I mean, sure, I knew the man existed. He was on that Drew Cary show for a few years and was mildly amusing; kind of like the whole show. So, even if I was vaguely aware he took over the late late show, it never occurred to me to actually watch it.

Lately, at my job, I have been finding myself with too much free time on my keyboard. My iteration cycles have become quite painfully slow; and, if you don't know what that means, I won't bother to explain it. I currently have, sitting on my desk, a total of 8, yes that is *eight* Pentium processors embedded in three physical machines. I have a dual core machine, a dual processor machine, and my latest addition a quad-core with 4 gigabytes of ram.

So, of course, I find myself constantly waiting with nothing to do. And, so do my processors. I have, on average, a 100% of 7 Pentium CPUs just sitting there whistling Dixie waiting for something to do while my single CPU is thrashing my hard drive in a fruitless effort to compile, optimize, link and run.

I'm used to iteration cycles measured in seconds, not minutes, and this is driving me crazy. For this reason, so at least one of my idle Pentium's has something to do, I browse the Internet while waiting for a link to complete. In so doing I stumble across various YouTube videos from time to time.

I have seen the skateboarding bulldog (very cute) and the guy running across non-Newtonian fluids (even cooler) but just the other day I stumbled across a video of comedian Craig Ferguson.

The reason I did is because I typed in the word 'Craig' into YouTube to see if there were any funny parodies posted about that Senator Larry Craig. I found a few, but I also ran across some hits for comedian Craig Ferguson as well.

(Parodies of Senator Larry Craig as follows:)








The top video on YouTube for comedian Craig Ferguson is a rant (and you know by now that I am quite fond of rants) about his personal issues over making fun of a celebrity with a drinking problem when he was, in fact himself, a recovering alcoholic. In this piece he bared his soul and shared one of the most personal stories ever extolled on a TV program all of the time maintaining a high level of humour and self-deprecation.

Personally, I'm voting the man as an honorary Freemason whether he wants it or not. (After all, he is Scottish, the birthplace of Freemasonry as we know it.)

Since both the Daily Show with John Stewart and The Colbert Report are on vacation this past two weeks I decided to program my Tivo to record the late-late-show with Craig F.

I have now watched two, fairly typical episodes I presume, and I am simply amazed. I'm sure he must work off of prepared cue cards and material but his presentation style is so completely off of the cuff and spontaneous that it is like watching a high wire act without a net.

If you enjoy absurdest humour and wry observation I strongly recommend you Tivo the Craig Ferguson show. It is really something special to watch!