June 30, 2008

The Dust Off: Cheech and Chong

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The pending release (August 12) of Tommy Chong’s unauthorized biography of the infamous comedy duo Cheech & Chong shouldn’t be the only reason to revisit the duo’s raunchy, 70s- and 80s-era, marijuana-laden humor, such as:

According to Cheech and Chong News, the duo will hit the road in September to do a stand-up tour and there is talk of a new movie together.

But let’s not forget Up in Smoke, the 1978 flick that scores of stoners since have quoted at least once in their life:

Book, stand-up tour, movie: all of this big news begs the question, “but why?” Chong already wrote a New York Times bestseller about his arrest and imprisonment. Cheech went on to appear in that super lame, post-Miami Vice Don Johnson show, Nash Bridges and do a whole slew of voice-overs for animated features, not to mention star in a bunch of Robert Rodriguez films.

But I guess the bottom-line question is “why not?” We’ve revisited more family-friendly, 60s- and 70s-era entertainment such as The Brady Bunch, and Bewitched and Get Smart, so I guess it was inevitable that some late-70s raunch would resurface as well.

I mean, when your main interests are low-ridin, checkin’ out sexy mamas on the strip, and smoking labrador, an old (and probably new) fan base will no doubt resurface.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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