new york post

I haven't seen Rita Cosby on MSNBC in several weeks. Not that I've really noticed, because I try to avoid her whenever possible. It's the voice. Yeah, sorry, no offense, but I just can't stand listening to her raspy voice. But now the NY Post is reporting that, after a three week vacation, the rasp is gone!

Supposedly, the three week break was an "enforced" vacation, and besides the rest that she got, Cosby won't go into details on what she did to change her voice. I'm assuming she didn't go through puberty, like that episode of The Brady Bunch where Peter's voice changed.

Can any TV Squad readers confirm this? I'm going to check MSNBC to see if she's on today.

[via TV Newser]

I was watching comedian Kathy Griffin on Larry King Live a few weeks ago, and I remember thinking, why is she on this show? Beyond the publicity, why is she on the show of someone she would usually dump on or say funny, nasty things about? And yes, I'm aware that's a terrible sentence, but you can see my point. Larry King seems like someone Griffin would insult or pick on, not appear on his show.

But now comes word that Griffin dumped on King an interview at the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center last week. She says that King is either deaf or doesn't listen:

We reported last week that the Lifetime biopic on American Idol contestant Fantasia Barrino shows that the producers of the hit reality show actually pushed Barrino to quit the show after news of the baby she had as a teen and her educational background came out. Now a producer of the show calls the allegation "absolutely and totally untrue."

Ken Warwick tells the NY Post that they knew all about Fantasia's background from the very first day she was on the show, and they never asked her to quit. He calls it a "complete fabrication."

It's interesting because not only is this scene in the movie, it's the opening scene, and serves as a jumping off point for the rest of the movie and is shown again at the end, to frame the pic. It's also interesting because the movie uses actual footage from the show, including her audition, her performances, and the reactions of Simon, Paula, and Randy. So Idol must have OK'd the film.

Hmmm...

There's a phrase that Dave Barry uses to describe people who don't understand his columns are supposed to be funny. He calls them "humor impaired." I love that phrase, and use it often, and famous Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings used it quite appropriately when responding on his blog to a recent article in The New York Post that accused him of bashing the show that made him a millionaire. Here's the thing: Jennings did no such thing. His post titled "Dear Jeopardy" was a hilariously scathing tongue-in-cheek indictment of the show that suggested Alex Trebek had actually been replaced by a robot called the "Trebektron 4000" and that the Clue Crew "look like they beamed in from some 1970s PBS show." He also suggests ideas for better categories, such as "Skanks from Reality TV Who Got Naked in Men's Magazines." It's funny, very vicious, and nothing more than a good-natured barb in the "Don Rickles" vein.