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Interesting Articles.. post some interesting articles that other might enjoy.
No credit was given so I have no idea the source this came from..
He was almost out the door — then he turned around and accidentally built a legacy.
On the day John Ratzenberger walked into an audition room in 1982, he had a plane to catch.
He had been living in London for nearly a decade — acting, writing, performing improv comedy across Europe with a two-man theatre group that had played to standing-room-only audiences for 634 consecutive shows. He had appeared in small roles in some of the biggest films of the era: Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Superman, Gandhi, A Bridge Too Far. He was a working actor, but nobody's idea of a household name. That day, he was in Los Angeles on a writing assignment, and his ticket back to London was already booked.
He had one audition before he left. A new sitcom about a bar in Boston.
Both Ratzenberger and another actor, George Wendt, were reading for the same role — a minor patron named George who had a single line: "Beer!" It was barely a part at all. But Ratzenberger wanted the work, so he went in, and the moment director Jimmy Burrows told him he was there to audition, not have a conversation, he felt the energy in the room go cold. By his own account, all the blood rushed out of his body. He delivered a forgettable read. The casting director thanked him on the way out — the polite, final kind of thank you that everyone in show business learns to recognize.
He saw his headshot tilting toward the wastebasket.
He was almost through the door when something stopped him. Not calculation. Not strategy. Just the instinct of a man who had spent a decade doing improv and knew that the moment before you leave a room is sometimes the best moment you'll ever have.
He turned around.
"Do you have a bar know-it-all?"
The producers didn't know what he was talking about. So he told them. Every bar in New England, he explained, has one — some guy who acts like he has the knowledge of all mankind stored between his ears and is not even slightly shy about sharing it. He had grown up around exactly this type: a man named Sarge at his father's regular bar, who could answer any question with absolute confidence whether he actually knew the answer or not. The room would ask Sarge the length of a whale's intestine and Sarge would shoot back: "Baleen or blue?" And somehow, everyone deferred to him anyway.
Ratzenberger launched into an improvisation right there — the Boston accent, the lean against an imaginary bar, the slightly too-long explanations of facts nobody had asked for. The producers watched. Then they laughed. Then they asked him to do more.
George Wendt got the role of the bar regular, renamed Norm Peterson. And the producers, convinced by five minutes of improv from a man on his way out the door, wrote an entirely new character into the show.
His name was Clifford Clavin. United States Postal Service.
Cheers debuted on NBC on September 30, 1982, to nearly catastrophic ratings — finishing 77th out of 100 shows that week. The network came close to canceling it in the first season. But the show found its audience, and then it found a much bigger one, and then it became one of the most beloved television series ever made. It ran for 11 seasons. Ratzenberger appeared in 273 of 275 episodes. Cliff became the man at the end of the bar with the white socks and the questionable facts and the magnificent certainty — the guy everyone tolerated and secretly enjoyed, the kind of person every room has and everyone pretends to find annoying and would immediately miss if he disappeared.
Ratzenberger was nominated for Emmy Awards in 1985 and 1986. By the time the show ended in 1993, Cliff Clavin was embedded in American culture as one of the great comic characters in the history of the medium.
That should have been the whole story.
But in 1995, a small animation studio in California was preparing to release its first-ever feature film. Pixar had been working on Toy Story for years, and one of the voices they needed was for a sarcastic pink piggy bank named Hamm. They called Ratzenberger.
He showed up. He recorded the part. And something about the collaboration clicked — not just the performance, but the friendship. Ratzenberger became close with Pixar's creative leader, John Lasseter, who directed or executive-produced every one of the studio's early films. And a tradition was quietly born: Ratzenberger would appear in every Pixar movie, somewhere, in some form.
P.T. Flea the circus ringmaster in A Bug's Life (1998). The Yeti in Monsters, Inc. (2001). A school of fish in Finding Nemo (2003). The Underminer in The Incredibles (2004). Mack the truck in Cars (2006) — where Pixar even included a meta-joke in the end credits, having Ratzenberger's own character watch car-themed versions of earlier Pixar films before realizing with horror that all the characters are voiced by the same person. Fritz in Inside Out (2015). Film after film, a voice that audiences slowly began to recognize threading through an entire cinematic universe.
The streak ran from 1995 through Onward in 2020 — more than two decades, more than 20 films, billions of dollars at the global box office. Pixar called it a good luck tradition. Fans called it an Easter egg. Ratzenberger simply showed up.
The man who was nearly out the door in 1982 had become, almost by accident, one of the most consistently employed voice actors in the history of American animation — not because of a grand plan, but because of a habit he had developed doing improv across Europe in the 1970s: the habit of turning back around when something tells you the room isn't finished with you yet.
Cliff Clavin once described himself as the "wingnut that holds Western civilization together."
It was meant as a joke. But for two extraordinary chapters of American entertainment — a bar in Boston and a universe of animated films — John Ratzenberger has been exactly that.
The wingnut nobody planned for. The one that held everything together anyway
He was almost out the door — then he turned around and accidentally built a legacy.
On the day John Ratzenberger walked into an audition room in 1982, he had a plane to catch.
He had been living in London for nearly a decade — acting, writing, performing improv comedy across Europe with a two-man theatre group that had played to standing-room-only audiences for 634 consecutive shows. He had appeared in small roles in some of the biggest films of the era: Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Superman, Gandhi, A Bridge Too Far. He was a working actor, but nobody's idea of a household name. That day, he was in Los Angeles on a writing assignment, and his ticket back to London was already booked.
He had one audition before he left. A new sitcom about a bar in Boston.
Both Ratzenberger and another actor, George Wendt, were reading for the same role — a minor patron named George who had a single line: "Beer!" It was barely a part at all. But Ratzenberger wanted the work, so he went in, and the moment director Jimmy Burrows told him he was there to audition, not have a conversation, he felt the energy in the room go cold. By his own account, all the blood rushed out of his body. He delivered a forgettable read. The casting director thanked him on the way out — the polite, final kind of thank you that everyone in show business learns to recognize.
He saw his headshot tilting toward the wastebasket.
He was almost through the door when something stopped him. Not calculation. Not strategy. Just the instinct of a man who had spent a decade doing improv and knew that the moment before you leave a room is sometimes the best moment you'll ever have.
He turned around.
"Do you have a bar know-it-all?"
The producers didn't know what he was talking about. So he told them. Every bar in New England, he explained, has one — some guy who acts like he has the knowledge of all mankind stored between his ears and is not even slightly shy about sharing it. He had grown up around exactly this type: a man named Sarge at his father's regular bar, who could answer any question with absolute confidence whether he actually knew the answer or not. The room would ask Sarge the length of a whale's intestine and Sarge would shoot back: "Baleen or blue?" And somehow, everyone deferred to him anyway.
Ratzenberger launched into an improvisation right there — the Boston accent, the lean against an imaginary bar, the slightly too-long explanations of facts nobody had asked for. The producers watched. Then they laughed. Then they asked him to do more.
George Wendt got the role of the bar regular, renamed Norm Peterson. And the producers, convinced by five minutes of improv from a man on his way out the door, wrote an entirely new character into the show.
His name was Clifford Clavin. United States Postal Service.
Cheers debuted on NBC on September 30, 1982, to nearly catastrophic ratings — finishing 77th out of 100 shows that week. The network came close to canceling it in the first season. But the show found its audience, and then it found a much bigger one, and then it became one of the most beloved television series ever made. It ran for 11 seasons. Ratzenberger appeared in 273 of 275 episodes. Cliff became the man at the end of the bar with the white socks and the questionable facts and the magnificent certainty — the guy everyone tolerated and secretly enjoyed, the kind of person every room has and everyone pretends to find annoying and would immediately miss if he disappeared.
Ratzenberger was nominated for Emmy Awards in 1985 and 1986. By the time the show ended in 1993, Cliff Clavin was embedded in American culture as one of the great comic characters in the history of the medium.
That should have been the whole story.
But in 1995, a small animation studio in California was preparing to release its first-ever feature film. Pixar had been working on Toy Story for years, and one of the voices they needed was for a sarcastic pink piggy bank named Hamm. They called Ratzenberger.
He showed up. He recorded the part. And something about the collaboration clicked — not just the performance, but the friendship. Ratzenberger became close with Pixar's creative leader, John Lasseter, who directed or executive-produced every one of the studio's early films. And a tradition was quietly born: Ratzenberger would appear in every Pixar movie, somewhere, in some form.
P.T. Flea the circus ringmaster in A Bug's Life (1998). The Yeti in Monsters, Inc. (2001). A school of fish in Finding Nemo (2003). The Underminer in The Incredibles (2004). Mack the truck in Cars (2006) — where Pixar even included a meta-joke in the end credits, having Ratzenberger's own character watch car-themed versions of earlier Pixar films before realizing with horror that all the characters are voiced by the same person. Fritz in Inside Out (2015). Film after film, a voice that audiences slowly began to recognize threading through an entire cinematic universe.
The streak ran from 1995 through Onward in 2020 — more than two decades, more than 20 films, billions of dollars at the global box office. Pixar called it a good luck tradition. Fans called it an Easter egg. Ratzenberger simply showed up.
The man who was nearly out the door in 1982 had become, almost by accident, one of the most consistently employed voice actors in the history of American animation — not because of a grand plan, but because of a habit he had developed doing improv across Europe in the 1970s: the habit of turning back around when something tells you the room isn't finished with you yet.
Cliff Clavin once described himself as the "wingnut that holds Western civilization together."
It was meant as a joke. But for two extraordinary chapters of American entertainment — a bar in Boston and a universe of animated films — John Ratzenberger has been exactly that.
The wingnut nobody planned for. The one that held everything together anyway
Phaseout of 3G Network
- By ozonetrooper
- Vehicles
- 8 Replies
FM band modulation always swings the wattage up.
I used to talk alot of skip on the flat side of my beam. I used a 100 watt digital linear and on side-band and the flat side it would go a long way !
Yeah who would have thought that anything could replace that feeling .... And then came the internet !
Hy- Gain DSB, (double side band/upper and lower), with the clarifier modded to slide, as well as the dial up oscillator box, I could hit alot outside of the 27MHz band.
There was (and may still be) a CB magazine named S9. It had monthly listings of those caught exceeding the limits of radio boundaries set by the FCC.
I had a copy that had my name on the list, for years, but living like a gypsy it has gotten lost.
I had 2 agents from the FCC show up at my door one day and want to see my station .... Got me a 50 dollar fine for operating illegal power and operating on illegal frequencies ...
Lost the magazine but still have pics of the station. Oh and I still have my memories, but those are subject to retention, dependent on how much older I get !
That all was over 50 years ago !
I used to talk alot of skip on the flat side of my beam. I used a 100 watt digital linear and on side-band and the flat side it would go a long way !
Yeah who would have thought that anything could replace that feeling .... And then came the internet !
Hy- Gain DSB, (double side band/upper and lower), with the clarifier modded to slide, as well as the dial up oscillator box, I could hit alot outside of the 27MHz band.
There was (and may still be) a CB magazine named S9. It had monthly listings of those caught exceeding the limits of radio boundaries set by the FCC.
I had a copy that had my name on the list, for years, but living like a gypsy it has gotten lost.
I had 2 agents from the FCC show up at my door one day and want to see my station .... Got me a 50 dollar fine for operating illegal power and operating on illegal frequencies ...
Lost the magazine but still have pics of the station. Oh and I still have my memories, but those are subject to retention, dependent on how much older I get !
That all was over 50 years ago !
Random Thought Thread
That's excellent.Today was one of those lucky ducky days. I did my spring service on my mowers and equipment today. Normally, after sitting all winter, I have trouble with something. Not so today. Everything started and was more enthusiastic about mowing than I was.I changed oil and lubed the mowers and cleaned the air filters. I sharpened the blades and cleaned the decks. I even mowed my grass today and will start mowing Thursday. I'm more than ready!
We have had such spring weather that I have already had to start up the irrigation system. It's an annual chore I dread, because something is always broken or messed up. Same deal this year, but at least it's all nozzle-related repairs, so I don't have to dig anything up.
An added benefit of living in big brother country (California) is that you can't buy regular in-ground sprinklers anymore. They have to be pressure-regulated to 30 pounds so they're about double the cost if you have to replace one. The huge downside is that old systems were based on higher pressure, so if you you have to replace one, it won't cover the same area due to the lowered pressure. Thanks, CA!
