The Spark

Highlights from this past week's shows!

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An evening with the Late John Cleese is set for Saturday night at the Appell Center for the Performing Arts in York.

Wait! The comedy legend, actor and all-around entertainer John Cleese is dead? Maybe you haven’t heard, but John Cleese was with us on The Spark Friday to confirm those reports in his own satirical way, " I died just over seven weeks ago. It was in all the papers. But I come from a Christian family, so on the third day, I was able to rise again. It's an old Christian trick, and it was taught me by a maternal grandmother of five Bertha. And it's very, very useful going back to life because I need the money."

Cleese looked ahead to the afterlife,"I know that there are many cats were very well looked after in his household. There'll be a whole host of ways me when I die again, because I believe that cats and dogs are far more important than anyone else in our lives. I've often said that I think it's much better to lose a friend and to lose a pet."

Cleese has ideas on how to live, die and the afterlife,"Once I get there and there'll be an instruction booklet, I think when we're born, we should be given a booklet explaining what our life is and what the purpose of life is and what we should be doing. We don't have a booklet like that, but when you get a GED, they have this lovely booklet that tells you exactly what's going on, all the things you have to do. And so there's no doubt about it. You just know what to do. I like that. It's very straightforward. It's much harder being a human being and not really knowing what the point of life is."

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Eric Deggans is NPR's first full-time TV critic.

Deggans came to NPR in 2013 from the Tampa Bay Times, where he served a TV/Media Critic and in other roles for nearly 20 years. A journalist for more than 20 years, he is also the author of Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation, a look at how prejudice, racism and sexism fuels some elements of modern media, published in October 2012, by Palgrave Macmillan.

Deggans is also currently a media analyst/contributor for MSNBC and NBC News. In August 2013, he guest hosted CNN's media analysis show Reliable Sources, joining a select group of journalists and media critics filling in for departed host Howard Kurtz. The same month, Deggans was awarded the Florida Press Club's first-ever Diversity award, honoring his coverage of issues involving race and media. He received the Legacy award from the National Association of Black Journalists' A&E Task Force, an honor bestowed to "seasoned A&E journalists who are at the top of their careers." And in 2019, he was named winner of the American Sociological Association's Excellence in the Reporting of Social Justice Issues Award.

In 2019, Deggans served as the first African American chairman of the board of educators, journalists and media experts who select the George Foster Peabody Awards for excellence in electronic media.

He also has joined a prestigious group of contributors to the first ethics book created in conjunction with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies for journalism's digital age: The New Ethics of Journalism, published in August 2013, by Sage/CQ Press.

From 2004 to 2005, Deggans sat on the then-St. Petersburg Times editorial board and wrote bylined opinion columns. From 1997 to 2004, he worked as TV critic for the Times, crafting reviews, news stories and long-range trend pieces on the state of the media industry both locally and nationally. He originally joined the paper as its pop music critic in November 1995. He has worked at the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey and both the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Pittsburgh Press newspapers in Pennsylvania.

Now serving as chair of the Media Monitoring Committee for the National Association of Black Journalists, he has also served on the board of directors for the national Television Critics Association and on the board of the Mid-Florida Society of Professional Journalists.

Additionally, he worked as a professional drummer in the 1980s, touring and performing with Motown recording artists The Voyage Band throughout the Midwest and in Osaka, Japan. He continues to perform with area bands and recording artists as a drummer, bassist and vocalist.

Deggans earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science and journalism from Indiana University.

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Disadvantaged communities sometimes struggle with making healthy or environmentally friendly choices. Often, it’s because there may not be better choices available to them.

Penn State Hershey’s College of Medicine has been awarded a nearly $1.2 million dollar grant by the Environmental Protection Agency to prevent pollution in disadvantaged areas in Pennsylvania and New York. Environmentally friendly or safer cleaning products will be the focus of the project.

The principal investigator for the project is Dr. Rebecca Bascom, a Professor of Medicine and Public Health Sciences at the Penn State College of Medicine and Theme Lead, Health and the Environment at the Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment.

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On February 14, 2018, a gunman opened fire inside Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida – killing 17 and injuring another 17. It was one of the deadliest school shootings in American history.

Tragically, there have been other deadly mass shootings at schools and places in the U.S. since.

David Hogg was a senior at the school at the time. When he heard the gunshots in another school building, he and other students hid and he started interviewing his classmates about guns and the National Rifle Association, while the incident was going on.

What students at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas did after the shooting was different than previous mass shootings. They fought back – not with violence, but with their voices and activism to try to stop gun violence.

Hogg and other students created March for Our Lives to try to eliminate gun violence. It started as a small group of students reaching out to Florida legislators but grew. On The Spark Wednesday, Hogg described how big the movement got,"We started talking about, okay, what can we do now? And the thing that we thought of was doing a march. So we decided to have a march on Washington, and we thought that we'd only get about a dozen people there, or maybe 90 people there. And we ended up having over 800,000 people there. And we had the largest youth protest in modern American history with tens of thousands of young people registered to vote and tens of millions of them turning out and voting at the highest rate ever for a non-presidential midterm in 2018."

Hogg was asked what that turnout said to him,"The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Americans support stronger gun laws. The NRA doesn't want you to believe that. They want you to believe that they represent all gun owners. They don't. And the reason why I know that is because my father is a gun owner. I was part of the shooting club in college. I know the power and responsibility that comes with these weapons. And I know the vast majority of gun owners do not agree with the NRA. They do not think that people who threaten to shoot up a high school should be able to continue owning an AR-15 like the shooter in my high school did. And Americans are incredibly fed up and they're showing up."

Hogg said there are ways to reduce gun violence,"One of the solutions that I advocate for that many states have adopted since Parkland is called a red flag law. It's a law that enables police to temporarily remove some of these firearms if they're believed to be a danger to themselves or others, for example, in Parkland or anywhere else. If this law is in place and there's somebody who's threatening to shoot up their local high school or elementary school or kill themselves, they can have their guns temporarily taken away by the police and be given a court date with a right to due process and counsel to prove that they're not going to go and harm themselves or somebody else."

Hogg also supports stronger background checks and more robust mental health screenings, although he added that mental health is not the main reason for gun violence.

David Hogg speaks at Elizabethtown College’s Leffler Chapel and Performance Center Thursday night at 7 as part of the college’s Lecture Series.

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Cassidy Hutchinson was the star witness at last year’s hearings of House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Hutchinson had worked as a special assistant to President Donald Trump and his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

In that position, she heard and saw what happened behind the scenes at the White House on January 6 when Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol. But Hutchinson also was witness to many other decisions and conversations during the Trump Administration.

Her new book Enough chronicles her life before, during and after time in the White House.

On The Spark Wednesday, Hutchinson indicated her book and experiences should serve as a warning for electing Trump as a president in 2024,"It's a cautionary tale that of what our nation continues to face. I think that as a whole and I certainly found myself in this position, and it's that our democracy is fragile and it's not guaranteed. Our democracy wasn't designed to be guaranteed. And I think that for Americans to be able to engage in an insightful conversation about that as we look forward to 2024 this next election, to me, this is it's more, it's bigger than politics. It's bigger than the Democratic Party versus the Republican Party. This is about saving our republic."

Hutchinson said she was privy to plans leading up to January 6 when Congress was scheduled to certify Joe Biden's victory in the election and sje was nervous leading up the day itself. She added she was anxious when the Capitol was under attack,"As the Capitol was besieged by the rioters -- I describe it and hopefully it translates almost like a bad car accident that you're watching happen and you want to be able to stop it, but you can't and there's nothing you can do about it. I worked at the Capitol. I have a lot of fondness for the institution, but it was more than just an attack on the building. It was an attack, a direct attack on our democracy."

In her Congressional testimony last year, Hutchinson said midstate Congressman Scott Perry was one of several legislators who was seeking a presidential pardon for any criminal acts. Perry has denied he asked for a pardon. On The Spark, Hutchinson wouldn't elaborate, but said she stood by her testimony.

Hutchinson talked more about Perry's role,"I think it is also important for central Pennsylvanians to know that Scott Perry was at the central, which was central to the planning of January 6th and central planning of operating the Justice Department officials to execute a plan that Donald Trump wanted. And what Donald Trump wanted was to essentially shred the Constitution in any way that he could to stay in power. And Scott Perry has a lot of information about that. And I think that Scott Perry owes it not only to Central Pennsylvania, but to Americans to share what he knows."

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Sharia Benn is the President Executive Artistic Director of Sankofa African American Theatre Company, and this weekend at the Gamut Theatre, they are putting on a two-day one-act play of Between Hevan and Eartha A not-so-tall tale about climate change. In this new play, inspired by and created for the Climate Solutions/StateImpact PA project, six very different people find themselves thrown together on a stormy night in Harrisburg—the evening isn’t going to plan, but maybe that’s why things finally get real.

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During the run up to the 2020 presidential election, former President Donald Trump fanned doubt on mail-in voting saying it had potential for fraud or could be manipulated. No widespread fraud ever materialized, even though there have been procedural errors throughout the country, including some here in Central Pennsylvania. However, many – mostly Republican voters – still don’t trust mail-in voting. A newly formed non-profit, non-partisan group called Keep Our Republic set out to build confidence in elections and worked with Dickinson College’s political science department to research mail-in voting. To tell us more about it on The Spark today are Sarah Niebler, Associate Professor of Political Science at Dickinson College and Ari Mittleman, Executive Director of Keep Our Republic.

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Brothers Matt and Greg Keasey started their brewing business out of a converted barn in Conestoga in 2007. In 2015, SpringHouse Brewery moved its operations to Lancaster City and renovated a former warehouse into a brewery restaurant. Now these brothers are onto new ventures, like their limited artist collaboration series, which connects local artist with the surrounding Central Pennsylvania community.

The Limited Artist Collaboration Series is an annually-rotating lineup of small-batch brews that are both inspired by, and adorned with, original works of art. Released monthly, the Artist Collaboration beers are a well-deserved spotlight on some super-talented independent artists, and interesting beer styles. 

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