Mel Blanc is a hero because of what he could do with his voice for all the Looney Tunes, the Warner Brothers cartoons, to be the voice of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig. To me, he's a great actor.

It's often said that doves provide valuable practice for duck season, but this strikes me as upside down. With their tiny profiles, wicked speed, and fighter-plane acrobatics, doves are more difficult to take down.

I think I just really understand what it is to feel like you don't fit in, within your society, within your world, within your family, within whatever. I've always felt like an odd duck so I really understood that.

One summer I was made housekeeper to my own family, making menus and shopping lists. It was my mother's idea of teaching me to be a grown-up. The main thing I remember is my father being so delighted to get roast duck.

In Holland, we have a saying: 'A knife cuts on two sides.' With the rubber duck, I'm trying to show people what they haven't been seeing in their public space. When the rubber duck is there and when it's gone, you know.

I make a mean pecan pie, and I have a great recipe for pralines - also using pecans. Pralines take a lot of patience, and patience is a must in the duck blind as well as in the kitchen. Good things come to those who wait.

The main motivation was to explore the empire's falling. I mean 'Duck City' is like an allegory for the Western Empire or the United States. And I was thinking what happens when it falls and declines like the Roman Empire.

Conservatives are routinely pilloried on television. A&E likely greenlit 'Duck Dynasty' in the first place because executives believed Americans would laugh at the redneck antics of the self-described 'white trash' family.

Mike Myers as Austin Powers makes me laugh - that was genius - and Daffy Duck makes me laugh, but I like odd behavior. I don't like hip dialogue and one-liners and all that sort of cool, sophomoric comedy. It's just not for me.

The first time it felt really dangerous, like the sort of thing you had to lock the doors and close the curtains on because if anybody saw you, God would strike you down with a thunderbolt. But I took to it like a duck to water.

Active-shooter scenarios have become part of the education lexicon. I had fire drills. My parents had duck and cover - nuclear and atomic bomb drills. Kids today grow up with this idea that this could happen at any point in time.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.

If you're a single Sheila and you're trying to find an Australian bloke, you duck off down there to Australia. You go to the Red Centre: you'll find there's a few shearers, a few stockmen, and there you will find an Australian bloke.

I'm a huge Howard the Duck fan. For people who don't know, I'm a huge Marvel Comics fan, but Howard the Duck was maybe my favorite character as a kid. I went back, and I collected all of those comics. I had every comic he was ever in.

You know, he would go and look at different funny books because he wanted his character to be different and make different faces. I saw a funny book in his room and it looked like the same character he was playing. It was about a duck.

I'm jamming 'Black Sabbath Vol. 4' all the time. Zappa's 'Cruising With Ruben & The Jets.' A lot of Gong lately. Some Hawkwind. The Residents' 'Duck Stab' is amazing. Some Fugs. Lots of stuff, man. I'm pretty schizophrenic with records.

My particular historical vantage point is a product of my upbringing as that odd duck, a native Washingtonian whose parents were not in government. The first presidential transition of my sentient lifetime, Kennedy's, I remember vividly.

Every once in the while I'll watch 'Duck Dynasty' and 'Kim & Kourtney Take Miami,' but outside of that, I don't really watch TV. Also, I don't text anybody, I'm hardly on Twitter or Instagram, and I'm very closed off. I'm kind of a hermit.

When I hear stories about the number of kids that have been lost to violence, where families grow up teaching kids 'duck and cover' long before they learn their ABC's or their colors, I know there is something profoundly wrong in our city.

Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular - typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings.

Daddy had a farm - cows, pigs, OK, a big garden, OK? We did live off the land, and then we would supplement all that with whatever we could kill or catch. Whether we'd kill squirrels, deer, duck, or caught catfish or brim, that was what went on the table.

When it comes to conservative social issues, it saddens me when sometimes my fellow Republicans duck and cover in the face of pressure from the left. Our loudest opponents on the left are never going to like us so let's quit trying to curry favor with them.

A lot of the websites built through the 1990s used Perl. The first webmaster of Sun Microsystems coined a wonderful phrase. He said Perl is the duck tape of the Internet - it's this language that people would write all these scripts that make things just work.

I met Matt when he was in Busted. I was working at MTV and I'd see him wearing baggy jeans, waddling around like a duck so they didn't fall down. He used to wear makeup and have weird hairstyles. But I remember thinking underneath all that was a really cute guy.

I've thrown vanilla beans into mustard. Nothing crazy or grainy, just normal dijon. It's great for duck. Smear some of that right on the duck, coupled with some roast plums, and it all comes together in that savory over sweet over savory over sweet way we all love.

On Christmas Eve, we have a duck or roast pork with caramelised potatoes, braised red cabbage and gravy. For dessert, we have ris a l'amande, a rice pudding, and whoever gets the whole almond in it wins an extra present. Then we dance around the tree and sing carols.

Human beings have a lot of problems identifying themselves with other human beings who don't resemble them exactly. But there's something about drawing that means that anyone can identify to a drawing. I mean, people can identify themselves with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.

I use Facebook, but I find that I'm... if I put up a picture of my dog there or a sunset or something, I get a million hits. If I mention anything to do with my career, three people respond. And/or if I say anything political, I have to duck afterwards. I try to be selective.

When I was little, we had a Golden Book that had all these Disney characters in one portrait on the first page. My dad used to read from it every night. We'd play this game of find Pluto or find Donald Duck. He'd read us stories and do all the voices. Those are great memories.

Bizarrely, someone involved in the children's show 'Sarah and Duck,' which I narrate, recently found a coat with my name on it in a secondhand shop. It's the coat I wore as Theseus in the 'Dream.' So it's back in my possession after all these years, which is rather strange and wonderful.

I was born trying to figure out why other kids were just playing in a circle. What are you doing in the circle? Duck, Duck, Goose? What is the goose supposed to do? You could be organizing; you could be producing products that are for sale. You have a circle, but how are you utilizing it?

In the early days I had a very black-and-white view of everything. I think that's kind of natural for anyone who's just embraced Islam - or any religion - as a convert. It was important for me to duck out of the fast and furious life I'd been living as a pop star. I was in a different mood.

Since 1890, the Tour d'Argent's basic recipe hasn't changed. If you find yourself at the restaurant tomorrow, you will eat duck in the confidence that it was what someone ate a hundred years ago. You will eat it in the expectation that someone else will be served it a hundred years from now.

If you're watching comedy movies, go back and check out the Marx Brothers in 'Duck Soup,' or Buster Keaton in 'The General,' or Laurel and Hardy or W.C. Fields or whatever - and see what pure talent really was, so that you can see where it came from, and then you can sort of gauge it from there.

Lame blades can dull relatively quickly, so after slashing several loaves the blade won't slice through the dough with tremendous ease. (When this happens, don't throw it away - it's still sharp enough to score duck or pork skin, or shave paper-thin slices of garlic and chives, like a hot knife through butter).

'Howard the Duck!' That's a really interesting movie. I appreciate my career, because I've had a lot of very interesting ups and downs, and most people... That movie is such a famous flop. In a land of a lot of flops, it's kind of awesome to be in a really famous flop. I mean, it's kind of a poster child for flops.

The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.

Some of the greatest shows in history - 'Seinfeld,' 'Everybody Loves Raymond' and 'House' - had puny starts but the benefit of schedule protection, increasingly scarce in today's DVR world. Cable nets can tolerate small ratings, building hits in progress like 'Breaking Bad,' or marathon their way to a 'Duck Dynasty.'

I actually did a project with my puppet one time in fourth grade. I made up a song that went with the rhythm to a song I do now. And I had to make up a song about a penguin and research and put information in the song about a penguin. And I sang it with my duck, because I didn't have a penguin puppet, but close enough.

Unfortunately, the Hindi film industry is a sitting duck; it is easy to hurl malevolent accusations. It is a systematic campaign to divert attention from real issues, failing economy, China border tensions, spiraling Covid cases, and farmers' agitation by putting the spotlight on the supposed ills of the film industry.

My father was retired military, and my mother was an educator. She was incredibly creative. I used to love going to her school during the summer and helping her decorate her classroom. I would draw Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck. She was a sixth grade teacher. She and my father are the ones that got me into my love of music.

I've spent so many years talking about lame ducks in the White House and Congress, and it's never occurred to me to find out what the heck it means. It turns out it's an old English hunting term - something about firing at a duck without quite killing it. In any case, the hobbled duck limps on, at a distinct disadvantage.

Evangelicalism's moral values are now articulated by reality stars like the Duggar family, who Mike Huckabee embraced, and 'Duck Dynasty,' whose patriarch, Phil Robertson, endorsed Cruz. Palin herself, an evangelical darling in 2008, has had two reality TV shows: 'Sarah Palin's Alaska' and 'Sarah Palin's Amazing America.'

As for meat, I'm not going to become vegetarian. I'm telling you that right now. I want me a steak. I want me a pork chop. I want me a lamb chop, even a piece of duck every once in awhile. We used to have ham and salami, all that crazy stuff. I can't eat processed food. I've got to find local farmers and get natural foods.

When I was a kid, politicians wanted to avoid talking about religion if they could. John F. Kennedy couldn't duck the issue, being Catholic and all. So how did he address it? By reminding Americans that religion shouldn't be an issue, that he was concentrating on big things like poverty and hunger and leading the space race.

Popular culture bombards us with examples of animals being humanized for all sorts of purposes, ranging from education to entertainment to satire to propaganda. Walt Disney, for example, made us forget that Mickey is a mouse, and Donald a duck. George Orwell laid a cover of human societal ills over a population of livestock.

I'm of the opinion that a duck does not change styles every time it crosses a state line. I think they sound the same way from Canada all the way to the coast. As far as championship calling... I realize that a duck could not win a world championship, and that's why I don't do that. When it comes to duck calling, our judges have wings.

In my books, there is no 'ugly duckling turning into a beautiful swan' syndrome because if you look at the Hansel and Gretel syndrome, it was a mistake. It wasn't a duckling, it was a cygnet, and that's why it turned into a swan. The duckling should with any luck turn into a nice clucking duck and get on with its life. Cluck! Cluck! Cluck!

We are the rags to riches story, okay, the Robertson's are. Okay? We had very humble beginnings. Everybody's trying to figure out what, what's behind it, and all the Robertsons say, 'Hey, it's divine intervention.' Me personally, okay, God's gonna take 'Duck Dynasty' where he wants it to go, okay, and to the people that he wants it to go to.

Luckily for me, my father had impeccable taste. No contemporary collector was he. His treasure trove of comics included gems such as 'Little Lulu,' 'Frontline Combat' and 'Classics Illustrated.' But the works that stood head and shoulders above the rest were Carl Barks's 'Donald Duck' and 'Uncle Scrooge' comics from the 1940s through the 1960s.

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