6’6 240 to host CD release party at 123

By Marc Basham

 

Local rapper 6’6 240 will unveil his latest CD titled “Hard Work and Dedication” at a release party Sept. 23. The party will be at 123 Pleasant Street, and 6’6 240 will perform with A Breezy. 6’6 240 is perhaps most well-known for this annual “Gold and the Blue” songs, which are about the WVU football team and have updated lyrics to match the current team roster.

One of the more recognizable names in the Morgantown music scene is hosting a party to celebrate the release of his new album, and everybody is invited to join the festivities.

Rapper 6’6 240, the man behind the unofficial anthem of West Virginia University football, "Gold and the Blue," has a new album titled "Hard Work and Dedication," scheduled for release Sept. 23.

To celebrate the new release, 6’6 240 and 123 Pleasant Street are hosting a release party Thursday night to debut songs from the album and hear some new music from the rapper and other acts.

According to 6’6 240, the new album was a tireless effort but well worth it for his loyal fans in the area.

"There was a lot of hard work and dedication put into this new album, hence the name," 6’6 240 said. "I made a conscientious effort on this album to make music for my family and the many people who have supported me throughout the years."

The performer also believes that staying close to home on this new album brought out the best in his music.

"It seems like I’ve been trying to take over the world since 2000, but my main support has always remained local," 6’6 240 said. "This album, and all of the dedication I put into it, is for my fans and supporters in West Virginia."

6’6 240 has become most recognizable from his WVU football anthem "Gold and the Blue," a song that he says has evolved over the years.

"Every year, I try to make ‘Gold and the Blue’ better, and this year, I think is one of the best," 6’6 240 said. "Up until last year, we had Pat (White), Steve (Slaton) and Coach (Rich) Rod, but now WVU football is moving into a new era with Coach Stew and Jarrett (Brown) at the helm. I wanted this year’s version to also reflect that evolution into a new era."

With the release party, 6’6 240 is also trying something new – performing with a live band.

"I have been working with my band for about a month and a half," 6’6 240 said. "This event is going to be a great way to give back to my fans and showcase some of my new music. We have several other acts performing, too, so it’s going to be a good time."

6’6 240’s release party featuring A Breezy is set for Thursday night at 123 Pleasant Street. There is a $5 cover at the door.

To hear samples of 6’6 240’s new album and the 2010 version of "Gold and the Blue," visit his Web site www.myspace.com/mrdubvee.

Three found, busted after getting lost in sewer

BY Brendan Brosh, Alison Gendar, Jonathan Lemire and Wil Cruz
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Wednesday, October 15th 2008, 11:17 PM

 

Rescue workers converge at manhole in Kissena Park, Queens, to rescue three teen boys (below) who became lost and trapped inside sewer.

 

Cowabunga!

Three blockheaded teenagers were busted playing in a sewer Wednesday in Queens - after getting lost while pretending to be Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, police sources said.

Schiller Milfort, 16, of Hollis, and Marvin Ottley, 17, of Bellaire, along with an unidentified 15-year-old boy, were shirtless and in their shorts and sneakers when firefighters plucked them out of a sewer in Kissena Park.

The make-believe heroes were crawling around the sewer system when they got confused and lost their way, police sources said.

They were not injured, officials said.

"These three idiots were playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and wanted to go into the sewers," said one police source. "They were never in danger, just goofing off and being stupid."

Milfort and Ottley were charged with criminal trespassing. The other teenager was released to his parents.

Sapp says Kiffin treated unfairly, blames Davis for Raiders' mess

Sapp, who retired after the 2007 season -- his fourth with the Raiders -- said that Lane Kiffin, fired this week by owner Al Davis, never got a fair chance in Oakland.

"He came in there with a change of mentality. The whole system," Sapp said on "Inside the NFL." "He changed how the locker room looked because it was going to take that kind of overhaul for Oakland to become the proud franchise we all knew it was."

Sapp said Oakland won't change for the better until Davis doesn't own the team anymore.

"[Davis] is the common equation," Sapp said on "Inside the NFL." "You take him out, put him at home watching film or whatever he is doing -- you have a functioning football organization. But once he comes over the top, he goes and starts moving it around.

"Al Davis knows football -- it's just '60s and '70s football. That's what it is. He's thinking that Cliff Branch is outside and [Jim] Plunkett is dropping back and you can throw it 80 yards down the field -- deep ball, deep ball, deep ball."

Sapp even said that Davis would call in plays when Sapp was playing for the Raiders.

"I remember the first two weeks I was there, we played a preseason game. Somebody came up one time and said, 'We're going deep right here, dog.' I said, how do you know? He said, 'The phone just rang.'

"All the preparation that goes into a week of work is there, the practicing that you have to put in order to do these things, sometimes [Al Davis] messed with that part of it and that's what kills you," Sapp said on "Inside the NFL."

Comedian George Carlin dies at 71

Anti-establishment icon gained fame with his ‘Seven Dirty Words’ routine

George Carlin, who died of heart failure Sunday at 71, leaves behind not only a series of memorable routines, but a legal legacy: His most celebrated monologue, a frantic, informed riff on those infamous seven words, led to a Supreme Court decision on broadcasting offensive language.

The counterculture hero’s jokes also targeted things such as misplaced shame, religious hypocrisy and linguistic quirks — why, he asked, do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?

Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas.

“He was a genius and I will miss him dearly,” Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.

The actor Ben Stiller called Carlin “a hugely influential force in stand-up comedy. He had an amazing mind, and his humor was brave, and always challenging us to look at ourselves and question our belief systems, while being incredibly entertaining. He was one of the greats.”

Carlin constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the “Seven Words” — all of which are taboo on broadcast TV to this day.

When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.

When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government’s authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening.

“So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of,” he told The Associated Press earlier this year.

First host of "Saturday Night Live"
Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a television staple through the decades, serving as host of the “Saturday Night Live” debut in 1975 — noting on his Web site that he was “loaded on cocaine all week long” — and appearing some 130 times on “The Tonight Show.”

He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” in 1989 — a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (and sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).

“Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?” he once mused. “Are they afraid someone will clean them?”

In one of his most famous routines, Carlin railed against euphemisms he said have become so widespread that no one can simply “die.”

“’Older’ sounds a little better than ‘old,’ doesn’t it?,” he said. “Sounds like it might even last a little longer. ... I’m getting old. And it’s OK. Because thanks to our fear of death in this country I won’t have to die — I’ll ‘pass away.’ Or I’ll ‘expire,’ like a magazine subscription. If it happens in the hospital they’ll call it a ‘terminal episode.’ The insurance company will refer to it as ‘negative patient care outcome.’ And if it’s the result of malpractice they’ll say it was a ‘therapeutic misadventure.”’

He won four Grammy Awards, each for best spoken comedy album, and was nominated for five Emmy awards. On Tuesday, it was announced that Carlin was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which will be presented Nov. 10 in Washington and broadcast on PBS.

“Nobody was funnier than George Carlin,” said Judd Apatow, director of recent hit comedies such as “Knocked Up” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” “I spent half my childhood in my room listening to his records experiencing pure joy. And he was as kind as he was funny.”

Carlin started his career on the traditional nightclub circuit in a coat and tie, pairing with Burns to spoof TV game shows, news and movies. Perhaps in spite of the outlaw soul, “George was fairly conservative when I met him,” said Burns, describing himself as the more left-leaning of the two. It was a degree of separation that would reverse when they came upon Lenny Bruce, the original shock comic, in the early ’60s.

“We were working in Chicago, and we went to see Lenny, and we were both blown away,” Burns said, recalling the moment as the beginning of the end for their collaboration if not their close friendship. “It was an epiphany for George. The comedy we were doing at the time wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a different direction.”

That direction would make Carlin as much a social commentator and philosopher as comedian, a position he would relish through the years.

Taking on 'obscenity'
“The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things — bad language and whatever — it’s all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition,” Carlin told the AP in a 2004 interview. “There’s an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. ... It’s reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have.”

Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, and grew up in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, raised by a single mother. After dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, he joined the Air Force in 1954. He received three court-martials and numerous disciplinary punishments, according to his official Web site.

While in the Air Force he started working as an off-base disc jockey at a radio station in Shreveport, La., and after receiving a general discharge in 1957, took an announcing job at WEZE in Boston.

“Fired after three months for driving mobile news van to New York to buy pot,” his Web site says.

From there he went on to a job on the night shift as a deejay at a radio station in Fort Worth, Texas. Carlin also worked variety of temporary jobs including a carnival organist and a marketing director for a peanut brittle.

Getting his break on Jack Paar
In 1960, he left with Burns, a Texas radio buddy, for Hollywood to pursue a nightclub career as comedy team Burns & Carlin. He left with $300, but his first break came just months later when the duo appeared on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show.”

Carlin said he hoped to emulate his childhood hero, Danny Kaye, the kindly, rubber-faced comedian who ruled over the decade Carlin grew up in — the 1950s — with a clever but gentle humor reflective of the times.

It didn’t work for him, and the pair broke up by 1962.

“I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn’t really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people,” Carlin reflected recently as he prepared for his 14th HBO special, “It’s Bad For Ya.”

Eventually Carlin lost the buttoned-up look, favoring the beard, ponytail and all-black attire for which he came to be known.

But even with his decidedly adult-comedy bent, Carlin never lost his childlike sense of mischief, even voicing kid-friendly projects like episodes of the TV show “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends” and the spacey Volkswagen bus Fillmore in the 2006 Pixar hit “Cars.”

Carlin’s first wife, Brenda, died in 1997. He is survived by wife Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law Bob McCall; brother Patrick Carlin; and sister-in-law Marlene Carlin.

imnosuperman

Sources say ABC is in negotiations to pick up 18 episodes of the show from Disney corporate sibling ABC Studios, which has produced the series for NBC since 2001.

A broadcast show switching networks, though often discussed during contract renewals, is a rare event. Previous network jumpers include "JAG" (NBC to CBS) and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (The WB to UPN).

The writers strike cut short NBC's 18-episode final-season order for the Zach Braff medical comedy to 12 episodes. Sources say the network has been reluctant to order additional episodes for next fall, citing the fact that it already has some fresh episodes in the can. NBC reportedly floated various end game scenarios to producers, including ordering one final episode, or producing the remaining episodes direct to DVD.

Details of the ABC deal are still being hammered out as contracts for most cast members and writers have not been picked up beyond the current season.

After struggling in recent years to launch a hit comedy, ABC scored this season with Christina Applegate freshman "Samantha Who?" The "Scrubs" pickup will give ABC another half-hour title with a built-in audience, and it makes financial sense for Disney.

It's been a rocky ride for "Scrubs" on NBC. The network has repeatedly shifted the critically praised but modestly rated show around its schedule. For the past two seasons, NBC also waited until the 11th hour to pick up the comedy series with partial season orders.

Most recently, "Scrubs" has aired as part of NBC's Thursday night lineup along with "The Office," "My Name Is Earl" and "30 Rock," where the medical comedy was often the lowest-rated of the bunch.

source

Please oh please oh please!

That's all that can be said about the latest buzz whipping through Hollywood today regarding NBC's notoriously underappreciated comedy, Scrubs.

Inside sources at ABC confirm to us that the "wheels are in motion" to bring Scrubs to the alphabet network, and one highly placed insider says it is looking "very likely" that the move from NBC to ABC will go down.

Say it with me now: Holler!

Word is, although Scrubs honcho Bill Lawrence had planned to wrap up the series at the end of this season, the prospect of a new network—one which appreciates and actually promotes the series—has made him willing to produce...wait for it...18 episodes for a very solid eighth season next year over at ABC.

Even better news? Word inside the Sacred Heart inner circle is that Zach Braff—and all the key players—are also on board with an 18-episode run on ABC.

Obviously, this is jaw-droppingly good news for us fans, who have been deeply concerned there would be no proper ending to Scrubs, which was halted six episodes before finishing out what was to be its final season on NBC. Peacock-net insiders say the options NBC had offered Lawrence to close out the series were "disappointing" and "just not enough," including one final episode to wrap up the storyline or a straight-to-DVD finale.

Just last week at the Independent Spirit Awards, Zach Braff had this to say about Scrubs' status: "The network is figuring out how many they want. The studio is figuring out how much they want so…this is the last season. It’s over but we’re not exactly sure how many more they’re doing." Well, ZB, how about 18 more on a network that will love you?! How's that sound?
Stephen McPherson

Scrubs, which is produced by ABC Studios (formerly Touchstone), has been courted by ABC before, and is a personal favorite of ABC President Steve McPherson, who helped develop the show while he was at Touchstone, alongside Lawrence (with whom he remains good friends).

Last May, when NBC announced it was picking up Scrubs (so ABC could not have it) McPherson told me: "I am bummed. Bill and I developed that show together, and we had a beer early last week and we were hoping it would work out. But I'm happy for those guys that they got another year. It's such a great show."

Clearly.

(A request for comment from NBC has not yet been returned. We'll let you know if we hear anything more.)

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Man Arrested for Singing Lil Boosie Song