Now I've Heard Everything

Very few professional athletes are best remembered for the game, or the play, that ended their career. But Joe Theismann maybe one of them.

It was on this date, November 18th, 1985 -- 35 years ago --  that Joe Theismann sustained a gruesome, career-ending injury before a national TV audience.

I met him two years later, after he had written a book about his football career an d the play that ended it.. 

Tomorrow, November 17th, is National Entrepreneurs Day. And perhaps no one better embodies what the day is about that Paul Orfalea.

Back in 1970, the young man with e kinky red hair started a small business, making photocopies for students at UC Santa Barbara.

The business took off, and before long Orfalea -- known to his friends as Kinko -- was a successful entrepreneur.

Not all funny people on TV are comedians. Some are weathermen, like NBC's Al Roker.

For years, Roker has been a fixture on The Today Show. And in 2000, he wrote a funny book about fatherhood, and especially the challenges of raising children years apart in age. 

But as you're about to hear, it wasn't all jokes and humor. Al Roker had some serious and poignant things to say about fatherhood.

Like many of my fellow Baby Boomers, I grew up watching Phyllis Diller on TV and in movies. She was one of America's first female stand-up comedians, inspiring the likes of Joan Rivers, Roseanne Barr, and Ellen DeGeneres, among others.

Diller was known for her wild outfits, her even wilder hair, her self-deprecating humor, a cigarette always in a long holder, and her jokes about her long-suffering husband whom she nicknamed Fang.

Phyllis Diller wrote a memoir in 2005.  She was too frail at that point, in her late 80s, to go on a book tour, so I interviewed her byphone.

By now you've heard the sad news that Jeopardy host Alex Trebek passed away early Sunday.

So today, we'll be revisiting my interview with him from some 30 years ago. He was promoting a book called, appropriately enough, The Jeopardy Book.

And get ready for some real Insider information about the show he hosted since 1984.

For nearly two decades, Chris Jericho was a fixture of the WWE. In fact, he was widely considered one of pro wrestling's best.

But since the end of the 1990s, he has also been a rock star.

I met him in 2011, when he wrote the second volume of a memoir.

It was an iconic White House photo. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, shaking hands on a peace deal at the White House, with a smiling President Bill Clinton looking on.

Just a couple of years later, in 1995 - on this day in 1995, November 4th - Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated.

Less than a year-and-a-half later, his widow, Leah Rabin, wrote a memoir. Not just a memoir of the military and political leader Yitzhak Rabin, but of the husband, father, and grandfather Yitzhak Rabin was.

Tomorrow is the presidential election. It's been a tough campaign, with not a lot of humor.

But politicians, and their constituents, need a good sense of humor. In 1998, Bob Dole, the unsuccessful GOP nominee in 1996, compiled a book of presidential and political humor.

Now, Dole himself was hardly known for his comic genius. But when I interviewed him in 1998, I found out how funny even conservative Republicans can be.

It's Halloween weekend, so, I have to give you a little bit of a scare, don't I?

If you've ever seen the 2009 movie The Haunting in Connecticut, you know the story that you're about to hear. That scary movie was koosely based on real events, in which a family moved into what used to be a funeral home in Connecticut. 

Turned out, it was a haunted funeral home.

And that's where Lorraine Warren comes in. She and her husband Ed, both paranormal investigators, or "ghostbusters," were called into help the family.

Some of you, if you're old enough, grew up listening to Cousin Brucie on New York City radio from 1961 to 1974. Others remember him from the movie Dirty Dancing. And still others know him from his show on Sirius XM in the last 15 years.

Bruce Morrow, known on the air as Cousin Brucie, is one of America's most famous, and most popular, disc jockeys.

I first met him in 1987, when he wrote A Memoir of his broadcast years.

And yes, he's just as wacky and funny in person as you'd expect him to be.