Free Republic

Welcome to the weekend, the last weekend of 2019 moving into 2020 in just a few days. The Queen's honors list in the UK with a massive list of names and oops, a thousand addresses mistakenly published. Sir Elton John gets special status as a Companion of Honour which only 65 people can hold at one time. Olivia Newton-John will be made a dame (she received an Order of the British Empire in 1979) for "services to charity, cancer research and entertainment"..... Hey the name of that song "Will It Go Round In Circles" as we remember hearing it back...

Comedian and actor Arte Johnson, Emmy-winning star of 1960s and ’70s comedy sketch show “Laugh-In,” died July 3 in Los Angeles of heart failure. He was 90 and had been battling bladder and prostate cancer. On “Laugh-In,” he was most familiar as Wolfgang, the heavily accented German soldier who thought World War II was still going on. His catchphrase “Very interesting…” was one of many that caught on from the hit show. Johnson won one Emmy for the show and was nominated two more times.

Judy Carne, who has died aged 76, was a bouncy, auburn-haired British actress who won overnight fame in the 1960s as the Sock It To Me girl...

Radio, TV and voiceover performer Gary Owens died on Feb. 12 at his home in the Encino neighborhood of Los Angeles. Owens, who was 80, had been a diabetic since the age of 8. Owens was probably best known as the announcer on NBC’s “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” (1968-73), with his trademark hand-over-the-ear announcing style. On the show, John Wayne once imitated Owens announcing. The phrase Gary created on his KMPC radio show, “Beautiful downtown Burbank,” later became a nightly catchphrase on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show.” Owens also lent his voice to more than 3,000 cartoons, providing the voice of...

Alan Sues, an actor whose loud, clownish comedic style made him an invaluable cast member on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” one of the top-rated shows on television in the late 1960s, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 85.

Those of you older than dirt will perhaps recall a phrase from the old hit TV show, “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In:” “Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls.” It came into popular usage at the time probably because it WAS a funny sounding name and “Funk” was as close to that other “F” word they could never get away with in the late 60s and remain on the air. For those of you NOT older than dirt, from 1910 until they went under in the 70s or so, Funk and Wagnalls published little green encyclopedia books. Some time after...

Henry Gibson, a wry comic character actor whose career included "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In," "Nashville" and "Boston Legal," died Monday at his home in Malibu after a brief battle with cancer. He was 73.

Dick Martin, the zany half of the comedy team whose "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" took television by storm in the 1960s, making stars of Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin and creating such national catch-phrases as "Sock it to me!" has died. He was 86. Martin, who went on to become one of television's busiest directors after splitting with Rowan in the late 1970s, died Saturday night of respiratory complications at a hospital in Santa Monica, family spokesman Barry Greenberg said. "He had had some pretty severe respiratory problems for many years, and he had pretty much stopped breathing a week...