The commonly held belief about a dog’s place in American life is that of a companion animal, or even a family member. However, in some parts of the world, dogs are another source of food, just as many in the U.S. view a cow or a chicken.
The World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) reports that an estimated 25 million dogs are killed worldwide to become food every year. In parts of Asia, tradition dictates that dogs (and cats) are part of the human diet.
Thankfully, the tide is starting to turn. Organizations like Animals Asia are dedicated to ending the cat and dog meat trade through its Cat and Dog Welfare program which includes our Friends or Food and Animal Therapy campaigns.
China has seen the rise of Animals Asia’s “Say No to Cat and Dog Meat Campaign” that focuses on the themes of “Partner in Growth,” “Guardian,” and “Stray,” which advise Chinese consumers to “Be Healthy. Say No to Cat and Dog Meat.” Even back in 2011, protests in China led to the ban of a “600-year-old dog meat festival, where around 15,000 dogs were due to be boiled alive, butchered, and then eaten over a period of three days in October.”
Now, according to Humane Society International (HSI), Vietnam has implemented a directive that “has banned the cross border trade of dogs for consumption into Vietnam. This is a big step, since Vietnam consumes 5 million dogs a year and many are illegally taken and cruelly transported from Thailand.”
As quoted in an HSI press release, Tuan Bendixsen, Vietnam director for Animals Asia said, “The dog meat trade has long been characterized by cruelty and corruption. Companion animals and strays are snatched and crammed into cages to be transported long distances. Their proximity and lack of care means diseases are rife. They are dangerous to those who choose to eat them and dangerous to anyone who comes into contact with them. Vietnam has long been the destination for trafficked dogs, from surrounding countries – if governments are serious about stopping trafficking then the corrupt and unregulated dog industry is the obvious place to start.”
And it seems as though the government is serious. Vietnam’s Department of Animal Health (DAH) has given specific instructions to sub departments to “strengthen the inspection and prevention of illegal import, transport and trade of animals or animal products. The government has also instructed the DAH to work with international organizations to raise awareness about the dangers of consuming dog meat, and the illegality of much of the cross-border trade.”
This move is a great step for public health, public safety, and building respect for all animals.
Facebook wants to dominate in the three areas WhatsApp excels in: apps, messaging, and usage in the developing world. ROBINSON MEYER
Late Wednesday, Facebook announced its purchase of WhatsApp for $16 billion. $4 billion in cash and $12 billion in Facebook stock were granted to the company, with an additional $3 billion worth of Facebook stock to come.
WhatsApp makes a glorified texting app. It lets you send text and pictures to another WhatsApp user’s phone. Free to use for the first year, it costs $1 annually after that.
Why, you may be wondering, would Facebook spend $19 billion on it?
Courtesy “Nick,” who—seriously, yes— did screenshot this and text it to me.
To answer, it helps to tell a story about two of my friends. They’re dating. Last year, one of them—we’ll call him Nick—lived in the small African nation of Lesotho. The other—we’ll call her Julie—lived in Chicago. This year, they switched. Nick lives in New York City. Julie lives in Mumbai.
On the home screen of Nick’s iPhone (at right), there aren’t many apps. There’s Google Maps, Gmail, a camera. There are three social networks—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—of which Facebook owns two.
And there’s WhatsApp. WhatsApp lets Nick and Julie text and send pictures across international borders, skirting international SMS feeds and only paying for the cost of data. They both use it daily.
They aren’t the only ones. In December, WhatsApp announced it had reached 400 million active monthly users, with 100 million of them having joined since just September. It’s now up to 450 million monthly active users. According to Facebook’s Wednesday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 70 percent of those people are active on a single day, and 1 million people download join WhatsApp every day.
That’s 315 million people using WhatsApp every day. In the same filing, Facebook claims that the amount of data that passes through WhatsApp rivals “the entire global telecom SMS volume.”
(For reference, by the way, Facebook said it had 945 million monthly active users for its own, non-WhatsApp services in January.)
But is it worth $19 billion? No one’s really sure. But as John Herrman writes at Buzzfeed, WhatsApp was “one of the only services that could plausibly claim to be cannibalizing Facebook on a large scale, and one of a small few that pose it an existential threat.”
What’s more, buying WhatsApp fits into a pattern that’s emerged from Facebook. For me, there are three clear reasons why Facebook spent crazy money on the new messaging giant.
1. Facebook wants to dominate among mobile apps. Facebook has a history of simply up and buying mobile apps when they start to dominate. It bought Instagram in April 2012 for $1 billion. It tried to buy Snapchat for $3 billion. And—as Herrman has reported—it spent $100 million last fall to buy the best mobile app analytics usage firm. If an app has tons of mobile users, Facebook knows, perhaps before almost anyone else.
It’s this same, mobile app-focused strategy that led it to release Paper early this month. Paper is a newsreading app, but it’s also simply a better mobile version of Facebook. It’s Facebook content through a new, designified lens—and it heralds a new “multi-app strategy,” wherein Facebook lets many different kinds of apps spring from its walled garden.
Facebook has a history of buying successful mobile apps, especially those with a social component. WhatsApp is a bananas successful mobile app. Ergo…
2. Facebook wants to dominate in messaging apps. It’s not yet a sure thing that Facebook users will keep wanting to, er, Facebook: to engage in the daily exchange of pictures, status updates, and wall posts that keep the social network feeling fertile. (That might be part of the reason why the service hasstarted to display more links to news stories on its News Feed: Web publishers are already making a product, on a daily basis, that’s meant to engage users.)
But messaging: People always have to chat with each other. And while messaging apps rise and fall quickly (when was the last time you AIM’d someone?), they also offer an enduring source of engagement. And if you can lock in users—lock in enough of people’s real-life social networks that there’s little reason to stray from the app—it doesn’t matter if other, better apps come along.
Messaging apps are also one of the few parts of the social web that grew over the past two years. It’s in response to WhatsApp, Snapchat, and the Chinese-centric WeChat that Twitter improved its direct messaging feature in December, after years of neglect. It’s in response to the same that Instagram created a direct photo messaging feature. Both Twitter and Facebook responded to WhatsApp and Snapchat by making it easier to send privately photos to other users.
3. Facebook wants to dominate in the developing world.
Facebook, like many of the major social networks, may have maxed out its membership among U.S. users. There simply aren’t many people who have yet to join who will ever join. The only place Facebook has left to grow is the developing world.
Since then, WhatsApp has won users in those places. In May 2013, Forrester research analyst Charles Golvin told Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel the following: “In places like Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and a number of other markets you see extraordinary numbers. Twenty-five percent of the time people spend on smartphones, they’re spending in WhatsApp.”
WhatsApp, in those countries, has often replaced SMS. (SMS charges everywhere can be exorbitant.) WhatsApp—with text and photo-sharing—is the rising social network Facebook wanted to be.
What’s more, WhatsApp often connects Western users with their friends in the developing world. Think of Nick and Julie above: WhatsApp is the link between two American Facebook users, each with a social network in India and Lesotho, respectively. If you’re trying to find users to whom you can show expensive ads, following the connections—from the U.S., out—isn’t a bad strategy.
That said, $16 billion—and maybe $19 billion, eventually—is a huge, insane amount of money.
NEW YORK (AP) — Four journalists who reported on the extent of the National Security Agency's secret surveillance based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden are among the winners of the 65th annual George Polk Awards in Journalism.
Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras of The Guardian and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post will receive the award for national security reporting for stories based on secret documents leaked by Snowden, a former intelligence analyst.
The awards were announced Sunday by Long Island University.
Journalists who wrote about massive traffic jams caused by bridge lane closures in New Jersey, a catastrophic garment factory collapse in Bangladesh and the struggles of a homeless family in Brooklyn also will be among those honored.
The Polk Awards were created in 1949 in honor of CBS reporter George W. Polk, who was killed while covering the Greek civil war. This year's awards will be given out April 11. Kimberly Dozier of the Associated Press will read the citations at the ceremony.
James Yardley of The New York Times will be honored for foreign reporting for coverage of the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,100 clothing workers.
The award for national reporting will go to Eli Saslow of The Washington Post for stories about some of the 47 million Americans who receive aid from the federal food stamp program.
Shawn Boburg of The Record of Northern New Jersey will be recognized in the state reporting category for articles on lane closures on the George Washington Bridge in September that created a monumental traffic jam in Fort Lee, N.J., and set the stage for later stories on the involvement of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's office.
Andrea Elliott of The New York Times will receive the award for local reporting for "Invisible Child," her five-part series focusing on Dasani Coates, one of 22,000 homeless children in New York City.
The award for political reporting will go to Rosalind Helderman, Laura Vozzella and Carol Leonnig of The Washington Post for reporting on the relationship between former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and a wealthy entrepreneur. Their stories spurred a federal investigation that resulted in a 14-count indictment of McDonnell and his wife, Maureen.
Two entries examining treatment of the mentally ill will share the award for medical reporting. Meg Kissinger of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel will be honored for a series of stories on the Milwaukee County mental health system, and Cynthia Hubert and Phillip Reese of the Sacramento Bee will be cited for their expose of a Las Vegas psychiatric hospital's practice of exporting patients to locales across the country via Greyhound bus.
Reporters Frances Robles, Sharon Otterman, Michael Powell and N. R. Kleinfield ofThe New York Times will receive the award for justice reporting for uncovering evidence that a Brooklyn homicide detective used false confessions, tainted testimony and coercive tactics to convict dozens of defendants.
Tim Elfrink of the Miami New Times will receive the award for sports reporting for showing that Biogenesis, an anti-aging clinic in Coral Gables, Fla., supplied some of baseball's biggest stars with performance-enhancing drugs.
The George Polk Award for Business Reporting will go to Alison Fitzgerald, Daniel Wagner, Lauren Kyger and John Dunbar of The Center for Public Integrity for "After the Meltdown," a three-part series demonstrating that regulators have failed to hold a single major player on Wall Street accountable for the behavior that sparked the 2008 financial crisis.
Freelance reporter Matthieu Aikins will receive the award for magazine reporting for aRolling Stone story that presented evidence that a 12-man U.S. Army Special Forces unit and their Afghan translators executed 10 civilians in the Nerkh district of Wardak province of Afghanistan. The Army has opened a criminal inquiry, and human rights organizations have called for impartial investigations.
The award for network television reporting will go to Michael Kirk, Jim Gilmore, Mike Wiser, Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada for "League of Denial," a "Frontline" documentary that on PBS that traced the National Football League's efforts to quash evidence linking head injuries suffered by players to the brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
Noah Pransky of WTSP, a CBS affiliate in the Tampa Bay, Fla. area, will receive the award for local television reporting for disclosing how state and local officials and a contractor bilked drivers out of millions of dollars in fines by reducing the period of time before yellow caution lights turn to red at intersections monitored by cameras.
Columnist, author and editor Pete Hamill will be honored with the George Polk Career Award, which is named in memory of Professor Robert D. Spector, chair of the George Polk Awards for 32 years until his death in 2009.
After “an alarming increase in worker deaths” last year, the U.S. Labor Department is urging mobile phone providers to redouble their focus on safety at cell tower sites across the nation.
According to the department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), 13 workers died at communication tower worksites in 2013 — more than in the previous two years combined. Four more were killed in the first five weeks of 2014, continuing what the agency called a “disturbing trend.”
“Tower worker deaths cannot be the price we pay for increased wireless communication,” said David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor at OSHA, in a statement.
During the last eight years, the number of U.S. smartphone subscribers has shot up by a factor of 44, from 3.5 million in 2005 to 156 million in 2013, according to comScore. However, the surging demand for better and faster cell phone service has come at a steep price.
A 2012 investigation by FRONTLINE and ProPublica found that between 2003 and 2011, nearly 100 climbers were killed on radio, TV and cell towers, a rate that was about 10 times the average for construction workers. Fifty of those deaths were at cell sites.
The investigation, Cell Tower Deaths, found that a complex web of subcontracting has allowed the nation’s major phone carriers to avoid scrutiny when accidents happen. Deaths were found to result from climbers lacking the proper safety gear or because they were sent hundreds of feet into the air with little training. To meet urgent demands from carriers or contractors, climbers sometimes worked overnight or in hazardous weather conditions.
Findings from OSHA suggest continued cause for alarm across the entire industry. In a letter sent to mobile firms this week, the agency voiced concern “about the possibility of future incidents, especially when the hazardous work is done by employees of subcontractors.” OSHA said that a “high proportion” of deaths were cause by “a lack of fall protection,” and that over the last several months, tower workers have been injured or killed by falling objects, equipment failure, and collapsing towers.
In a somber assessment, the agency concluded, “Every single one of these tragedies was preventable.”
He was the Brando of TV comedy. Look today at his work on the four shows he anchored in the medium’s infant days: Admiral Broadway Revue (1949-50), Your Show of Shows (1950-54), Caesar’s Hour (1954-57) and Sid Caesar Invites You (1958). There, in “live” sketches with a wit, drive, sophistication and narrative shapeliness put to shame all that came after, you will see the first and greatest Method comic.
Caesar’s physicality calls to mind no other comedian; he summons images of Robert De Niro (even to the mole on his cheek), Nicolas Cage, James Gandolfini, Christian Bale. Sid dominates, he broods, he hulks. A large man, not really handsome but imposing, with huge hands and barely controllable strength, he intimidates the small screen, fills all its space, sucks out its energy.
Caesar, who died yesterday, Feb. 13, 2014 at 91, was actorish in another way. He lacked the laugh-at-me, love-me assurance of the stand-up comic; Sid, introducing Your Show of Shows each Saturday night, had exactly the poise and flair of his Sunday-evening counterpart, Ed Sullivan. “Without a character to hide behind, Sid was lost,” Caesar writer Larry Gelbart recalled in his autobiography Laughing Matters. “Sid simply did not know how to play Sid.” At a 1996 Writers Guild reunion of the Caesar staff, Sid tried to describe working with his Show of Shows co-star Imogene Coca: “As soon as we met, there was a certain, ah — uh — camaraderie. A certain — I — ya can’t —there’s no name for it.” Next to him, Mel Tolkin, Caesar’s longtime head writer, murmurs helpfully, “Try ‘spark.’ That’s as good as anything.” He fits the image of the big-lug serious actor, inarticulate but sensitive.
And given to fits of rage — as Gelbart says, “Sid and rages were a perfect fit” — especially in the writers’ room, where the weekly script was prepared. Neil Simon recreated that tension in his 1993 Broadway comedy Laughter on the 23rd Floor, starring Nathan Lane as TV comedian Max Prince. Here’s Simon’s description of Max: “He dominates a room with his personality. You must watch him because he’s like a truck you can’t get out of the way of.”
In the play, Max puts his fist through a writers’ room wall, then has the hole framed in Tiffany’s silver. In real life, according to Gelbart, “Sid yanked an offending washbasin out of a wall with his bare hands.” In 2001, Caesar was asked by a Toronto Sun reporter if it was true that in a fury he’d seized little Mel Brooks and hung him from an 11th floor window. He replied, “Nooo. It was the 18th floor.” And was Mel funnier when Caesar hauled him back in? “Nah, but he was grateful.”
You wouldn’t know it from the reminiscences, but Your Show of Shows was not, strictly speaking, a comedy show. It was an old-fashioned vaudeville bill, new each week — what Variety called “vaudeo” — and perhaps half of the 90-minute show was consumed by musical acts. Bill Hayes and Judy Johnson crooned pop tunes; Marguerite Piazza sang opera; the Billy Williams Quartette offered suave rhythm stylings; the Hamilton Trio or the duo of Bambi Lynn and Rod Alexander performed a dance number. Those parts of the show were the property of Max Liebman, its producer and a Ziegfeld of the 12-inch screen, who put the whole thing on for a miserly $64,000 a week. (When Sid mentioned this at the Writers Guild reunion, Caesar writer Sheldon Keller snapped, “I saw the same show at Kmart for $28,000.”) You also wouldn’t know, from studying The Sid Caesar Collection, furtively available on video, who actually directed these shows. For the record, the names are Greg Garrison and Bill Hobin for Your Show of Shows, Clark Jones for Caesar’s Hour.
NBC / Getty Images
Sid Caesar in Your Show of Shows.
You might also not know, unless you were (like me) a comedy-crazy kid at the time, the gifts of Caesar’s supporting cast. Carl Reiner, who was also a writer, and earned TV immortality for creating The Dick Van Dyke Show, was the main foil, invaluable for keeping a straight face through Caesar’s preemptive ad-libbing. In skits he had the height and stern visage to play the villain. He also had a hilarious and acute tenor wail, too rarely displayed.
Howard Morris (later a director of many sitcoms, including Van Dyke), had an endearing elfin verve; of all the Caesar players, he knew best how delicately a gesture could be pitched to the camera — though as Uncle Goofy in the famous “This Is Your Story” sketch he went gloriously bonkers, clinging to Caesar’s leg and, in one inspired moment, jackknifing from his backward sprawl over a couch arm up into Sid’s clutches. He and Reiner were both adept in foreign-language double-talk; they could keep up with Caesar in the Italian, German, French and Japanese parodies that provided the shows with their most dizzying comedy.
Of Sid’s leading ladies, Imogene Coca (1949-54) played her tiny stature cunningly against Sid’s bulk; she was a superb pantomimist whose deft mugging surely served as the model for Carol Burnett. On Show of Shows she got nearly as much solo time, in musical and comedy bits, as Caesar; none appear on the Sid-vid cassettes. Her successor, Nanette Fabray (1954-56), had the perky looks, easy glamour and a trained soubrette soprano that helped enlarge the scope of the parodies the writers could attempt — as on the “Shadow Waltz” sketch, where she sings Harry Warren’s lilting waltz while Sid loses his fake mustache and swats a fly that has landed on her face.
Most people, though, think of early sketch TV as a writer’s medium. Indeed, the Caesar shows may be remembered less for their terrific sketches than for the later careers of the people who wrote them. Gelbart: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum on Broadway, Oh, God! and Tootsie in the movies, M*A*S*H on TV. Tolkin:All in the Family (he wrote 36 episodes). Aaron Ruben directed The Phil Silvers Show, aka Sgt. Bilko, and produced The Andy Griffith Show and Sanford and Son. Gary Belkin wrote scripts for Newhart and Sesame Street. Lucille Kallen wrote the C.B. Greenfield mystery novels. Selma Diamond became a familiarly rasping voice on Jack Paar’s late show and lots of cartoons. Joe Stein and Mike Stewart went to Broadway; one wrote the book for Fiddler on the Roof, the other the libretti for Bye Bye, Birdie, Hello, Dolly and Barnum. Brooks and Simon and Reiner you’ve heard of; and Woody Allen, who came in toward the end of Caesar’s nine-year reign.
The very phrase “Caesar’s writers’ room” conjures up a maelstrom of comedy competition. Looking back, the survivors sound proud and grateful. They say writing for Caesar was like playing for the Yankees, or in Duke Ellington’s band. Neil Simon called it “the Harvard of comedy.” But the reality was closer to a grudge handball match. Says Gelbart: “It was very much like going to work every day of the week inside a Marx Brothers movie.” Some writers were businesslike (Tolkin), some quick and professional (Gelbart), some were quiet (Neil Simon would mumble a fine gag sotto voce, and Carl Reiner, sitting next to him, would pitch it). And one was nuts. If Caesar focused the writers’ fear and awe, Brooks channeled their fury. “He was always late,” says Gelbart. “He’d come in with a Wall Street Journal and a bagel. He wanted to be a rich Jew.” Brooks recalls it differently: “I should’ve been impressed but I wasn’t, because I was a cocky kid, and I was filled with hubris and this marvelous ego. I thought I was God’s gift to creative writing — and it turned out I was.”
Here is the voice of the tummeler, the wise-ass Jewish kid. For many watchers of early TV, the Caesar spectacle provided their first taste of sophisticated Jewish wit. (Milton Berle, Eddie Cantor and Jerry Lester walked a lower road; Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis swerved manically, dementedly off it.) The writers’ room didn’t contain that many college graduates, but the comedy aspired to be simultaneously high and low, elite and vulgar, educated and vigorous. Their skits in German double-talk typically use Yiddish for the punch lines. Indeed, almost anything could sound Yiddish. Consider this skit, set in an Indian restaurant, with Sid as a customer and Carl the waiter:
Sid: “What have you got to eat?” Carl: “Klochmoloppi. We also have lich lop, slop lom, shtocklock, riskkosh and flocklish.” Sid: “Yuch!” Carl: “We have yuch too. Boiled or broiled?”
“We were just a bunch of very gifted, neurotic young Jews punching our brains out,” Gelbart says. And Caesar, who supervised this menagerie and had final say over their offerings, rewarded the writers by letting both their manic wit and their ingenuity run amok. “Everything, every subject, was fair game,” Gelbart writes. “Nothing was too hip for the room. He had total control, but we had total freedom. We were satirizing Japanese movies before anyone ever saw them, fashioning material for him that sprang from our collective backgrounds, our tastes in literature, in film, in theater, music, ballet, our marriages, our psychoanalyses.”
In the ’50s shrinks were blooming all over New York; and smart showbiz types who were paid good money to make jokes about their mothers-in-law then paid some Sigmund even better money to listen to them talk about themselves. “Nearly everyone on our staff at Your Show of Shows was in analysis,” says Caesar in Where Have I Been, the story of his 25-year dependency on pills (e.g., chloral hydrate) and booze. As Simon writes of Max/Sid inLaughter, he “gets into his limo every night after the show, takes two tranquilizers the size of hand grenades and washes it down with a ladle full of scotch.”
The addiction is understandable; he was in front of the camera, selling their skits and himself in 60- and 90-min. shows that went out live each week. To quote again from Laughter, “We WRITE comedy. Max [Sid] DOES comedy. It’s his ass out there in front of the cameras every week.” Caesar was the boy who has the nerve to stand up in class and say rude things the smarter kids have whispered to him. He also had the gumption to do comedy about his weaknesses. In “A Drink There Was” he enacts the ravages of demon rye; in “The Sleep Sketch” he gets hooked on a stimulant he thinks is a tranquilizer and spazzes into a manic jazz dance to the tune of “Piccolo Pete.”
So there is something of the tragic hero in Caesar the great. As Ira, the Mel Brooks character in Laughter on the 23rd Floor, says of his boss: “He was Moses, for crise sakes. The man is a giant. He’s Goliath. Maybe he’s Goliath after David hit him in the head with a rock, but there’s fucking greatness in him, I swear.” Watching these sketches today, I swear Ira’s not exaggerating.
NBC / Getty Images
Imogene Coca and Sid Caesar in Your Show of Shows
It had to end. No one, not even the mighty Caesar, could perform this mammoth battle, an exhausting mixture of love and war, every week. By 1958, not even he could carry a comedy show angled to the smarty-pants portion of the audience, which declined in proportion as more people bought TV sets. In the beginning, as Gelbart notes, “The audiences were smarter. It was an earlier time in television: sets were more expensive, only the most affluent people bought them, and most of them were better educated. The audience has been dumbed down to a great degree, and so has the comedy — so they’ll get it.”
The Dream Team of Comedy broke up, the writers occasionally hiring their old boss. Simon wrote the Broadway show Little Me for Caesar — eight roles, as the men in the life of a showbiz sexpot — and cast him in The Cheap Detective. Brooks gave Caesar roles in Silent Movie and History of the World, Part I. In another movie, Brooks memorialized an incident from the Caesar legend: as Gelbart tells it, Sid “once punched a horse in the face, knocking it to the ground because the animal had had the audacity to throw his wife off its back.” Brooks gave the bit to Alex Karras as the lumbering Mungo for one of the most memorably audacious moments in Blazing Saddles.
Caesar never regained his huge stride. He had startled, with movie-actor threat and menace, in a medium that came to prize miniature likability, that relied on little stars whom the audience could welcome, like a docile dinner guest, each week into their living rooms. He starred in “Little Me” on Broadway, but on TV, at 36, he was finished. He never again fronted his own series on American TV; his film appearances were guest shots except for starring roles in two lame William Castle mystery-comedies of the mid-60s, The Spirit Is Willing and The Busy Body.
Old fans would see him in the corners of Grease (in which he replaced porn star Harry Reems!) and Airport 1975and wonder what happened to Sid. Kids would ask, Who is that man? Or, rather, they wouldn’t ask. They didn’t notice. The man who was too big for TV had become invisible in movies. Caesar thus became the first in a long line of skitcom geniuses (Dan Aykroyd, Martin Short, Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman) whose short-form talents were wasted in indifferent films.
In 2001 Caesar returned, marketing his glorious past in The Sid Caesar Collection (frustratingly not available today). Conquering his addictions must have taken a lot out of him, for in the interview segments of his video compilations he looked frail and gaunt: great Caesar’s ghost. Only his voice reminds us of the frantic majesty he brought to TV six decades ago. Any child today, digging through YouTube like a pop-culture archaeologist, will discover Caesar’s greatest sketches and feel the exultation of Schliemann when he unearthed ancient Troy. And in the video rubble, a thriving civilization, built on smart comedy and ruled by a Method emperor. Hail, Caesar!
(Reuters) - Comcast Corp's proposed $45.2 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable Inc could face close scrutiny from U.S. antitrust regulators because of the deal's potential to reshape the country's pay TV and broadband markets.
The company resulting from the merger of the top two U.S. cable service providers would boast a footprint spanning from New York to Los Angeles, with a near 30 percent share of the pay TV market as well as a strong position in providing broadband Internet services.
The all-stock deal, announced on Thursday, would put Comcast in 19 of the 20 largest U.S. TV markets, and could give it unprecedented leverage in negotiations with content providers and advertisers.
The friendly takeover came as a surprise after months of public pursuit of Time Warner Cable by smaller rival Charter Communications Inc, and immediately raised questions as to whether it would be blocked by the Department of Justice or the Federal Communications Commission.
Time Warner Cable shares jumped 6.8 percent to $144.50, still substantially short of the $158.82 per share value that Comcast put on its offer, indicating investors' worries about regulatory clearance. Comcast shares fell 3.5 percent, cutting the per-share offer value to $154.
"I don't know if the deal is too big to fail to be approved but it is definitely too big to sail through either the Department of Justice or the FCC without serious, serious examination," said former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt.
"Only Comcast could have paid this price and the combined company, if approved, would tilt the balance of power at every negotiating table in media and content and broadband and equipment industries."
Comcast Chief Executive Brian Roberts said he was confident about getting the green light from regulators as the two companies plan to divest 3 million subscribers, so that their combined customer base of 30 million would represent just under 30 percent of the U.S. pay television video market. He said no decisions have been made on which markets to sell.
The new cable giant would still tower over U.S. satellite competitor DirecTV, which has about 20 million video customers.
Comcast argued that the acquisition would be beneficial to consumers in that it would roll out its more advanced cloud-based set-top boxes to Time Warner Cable customers. It also said the deal would eventually result in higher broadband speeds.
"Significantly, it will not reduce competition in any relevant market be because our companies do not overlap or compete with each other," Roberts said. "In fact, we do not operate in any of the same zip code."
The new partners are concentrated in different cities. Comcast would fill in its New Jersey and Connecticut portfolio with Time Warner Cable's New York City customers, for instance, and add major markets such as Los Angeles and Dallas.
Hedge fund manager John Paulson, whose Paulson & Co is one of Time Warner Cable's top 10 shareholders, called the merger "a dream combination."
ADVERTISING SYNERGIES
If successful, the deal will be the second time in little more than a year that Comcast has helped reshape the U.S. media landscape after its $17 billion acquisition of NBC Universal was completed in 2013.
"The negative is that NBC Universal ownership further complicates regulatory approval with implications even for usage-based pricing," Wunderlich Securities Matthew Harrigan said in a research note.
Representatives for the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department could not be reached for comment.
Comcast's offer price is roughly what Time Warner Cable demanded from Charter and a 17 percent premium from the No. 2 cable provider's closing price on Wednesday. Charter shares slid 6.2 percent.
Comcast and Time Warner Cable expect to create $1.5 billion in operating savings, with 50 percent of those savings expected in the first year. The proposed deal will be accretive to Comcast, which plans to expand its stock buyback program to $10 billion at the close of the transaction.
Comcast is interested in advertising synergies it would gain by owning the New York City market as well as the opportunity to expand its business services unit, its fastest-growing cable division, to a larger footprint.
"For Comcast, adding New York and Los Angeles has advertising potential, along with Time Warner Cable's sports assets, which provides an acquisition target that is simply too compelling to ignore, especially with an (under-leveraged) balance sheet," said BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield.
The two companies expect to close the deal, which would give roughly 23 percent of the merged company to Time Warner Cable shareholders, by the end of the year. Unusually for a transaction of this size, there is no break-up fee.
Analysts noted that smaller cable operator Charter, which went hostile this week by nominating a slate of directors to replace the entire board of Time Warner Cable, could still be a candidate to acquire some of the assets to be divested.
Charter offered $132.50 per share in a cash and stock deal last month that was rejected as too low. Officials at the company did not respond to a request for comment.
SPORTS NETWORKS
Talks between Comcast and Time Warner Cable started about a year ago, but negotiations gathered pace in recent weeks, people familiar with the matter said. Time Warner Cable had told Comcast it considered Comcast to be its preferred buyer once Charter had approached them, the sources said.
Comcast had also been in talks with Charter about the possibility of carving up Time Warner Cable markets, but opted not to participate in a hostile situation, the people said.
Comcast also likely was attracted to Time Warner Cable's two regional sports networks in Los Angeles, where it has spent billions on local TV rights for LA Lakers basketball and LA Dodgers baseball.
The deal would be a coup for Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Rob Marcus, who just ascended to the top job on Jan 1. Filings show that the former mergers and acquisitions attorney is set to pocket $50 million if Time Warner Cable is sold and he is replaced while he is CEO.
J.P. Morgan, Paul J. Taubman, and Barclays Plc acted as financial advisors to Comcast. Morgan Stanley, Allen & Company, Citigroup and Centerview Partners are financial advisors to Time Warner Cable on the deal.
Alexis Croswell 
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