Saturday Night Live will give good ol' George Carlin a proper sendoff by airing an episode he hosted — an extra special episode — the first SNL ever. I've never seen it, and after watching the clips here, I'm looking forward to it. When Carlin died last week of apparent heart complications, there were a lot of articles, news packages and blogs remembering him as an edgy, foul-mouthed trouble-making comedic genius with drug problems, an arrest or two, and some hilarious routines that have gone down in history.
With that sort of reputation, it's interesting that my children know him only as the conductor from "Shining Time Station" — the miniature magic man (video) who introduced them to Thomas the Tank, who regularly offered up nuggets of wisdom, and appeared and disappeared in a poof of pixie dust.
I think it was this paradoxical personality that appealed to so many of us.
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