Talk:Shields and Yarnell

General cleanup

I'm embarrassed that nearly 4 years hasn't produced a better article. I was about to save an edit, having worked only on the last sentence, with the summary

More thoro paraphrase; also rem PoV "Sadly"

(Well, full disclosure: i'm about to say so many unpleasant things that my little crack reading

(Joke abt what mimes deserve omitted here)

would have been too harsh if left in the summary; here on the talk page, perhaps i can say in my defense that i haven't looked for a place in the article for Nathan Lane's remarks about them -- which called my attention to them -- about having be their lover back in the day tho he was never sure which was what sex, and doubted that they were sure themselves.)
But i fixed the non-standard abbr "b." (for "born"), then disentangled the places of birth from the dates, and then found my nose being rubbed in a predecessor's blithe assumption that the unsourced assertions of a performer's agent constitute established facts. (The 10% is for the basic service of spinning straw into publicity gold, and extras like lying convincingly about what year the client was born are presumably how the agent wins a client's undying loyalty.) Any ref should indicate more than the title of the work cited, and citing the agent repeatedly -- as if each instance were an independent source! -- is shamefully uncritical. And those elevated paired tick marks are called "quotation marks", and may not be used for a description you make up for something. In the case of the title param in {{cite web}}, they have to be the title of the page cited.
I have removed completely the ref

"Past Winners Database".

to a pg that makes no mention of the show, nor to the statement it supposedly supports,

The 1978 Shields and Yarnell Show episode "with John Aylesworth" was nominated for an Emmy Award in the Best Direction of a Comedy-Variety Series category.

which, even if verifiable, would show that the network found it worth hiring a good director, but is so tangential to the duo that the danger of misleading rules out its mention in the accompanying article.
I've done the onerous work of adding additional superscript refs where the existing refs provide verification, and fact tags where nothing does.
The {{vague}} tag is for the weasel-word "at", which invites the picture of him inside, fooling their customers into thinking he was a waxwork, and then moving. But it equally applies to being at the entrance to their building; the 4 'Frisco arrests a year or two later suggest charges of begging or trespass: the result of standing in front of a place of business and performing for their customers, perhaps transgressing the business's property line or perhaps just inviting freely given funds from them (rather than demonstrating that their intent was to pay an admission necessary to seeing the performance).
Not perfect, but now a work in progress, rather than in ugly, deceptive stasis.
--Jerzy•t 07:39, 22 April 2009 (UTC)