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Simmons inducted into College Football Hall of Fame
Ex-FSU star, ‘59 Heisman winner Cannon among 12 inductees
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Shortly after Bobby Bowden became coach at Florida State in 1976 he heard from Bill Franklin, one of his former players at South Georgia College in Douglas.
“Bill had settled in Warner Robins and he told me about a player that he really wanted me to see,” Bowden said in an interview last summer. “We were really just getting started (at Florida State) so I went.”
That player was Ron Simmons, an All-State defensive lineman from Warner Robins High. Simmons would sign with Florida State where he would become a two-time All-American.
On Thursday Simmons, who now lives in Marietta, was one of 13 players named to the College Football Hall of Fame.
“This has to be one of the greatest honors that I have ever received and I can’t tell you how thrilled I am,” Simmons told the AJC on Thursday. “When I look at all of the great players who are in the Hall of Fame, I can’t believe I’m on that list. This a tribute that I share with all of those guys who got things started at Florida State.”
Simmons was one of the first big-time recruits signed by Bowden at Florida State. Bowden, who turns 79 on Nov. 8, is set to begin his 33rd season in Tallahassee as college football’s all-time winner (373 victories) in Division I-A.
“Back then it wasn’t a popular choice to go to Florida State but coach Bowden sold us on the dream,” Simmons said. “I grew up in central Georgia and that was Bulldog country. It was not a popular choice around my house.”
Florida State was 39-8 in Simmons’ four years and he led the Seminoles to the Orange Bowl as a junior and a senior. He was eventually inducted into the Orange Bowl Hall of Fame.

ajc.com

Funny you should ask, Late Night audience member. That guest, seated alongside Will Ferrell and Rashida Jones, was officially billed as “Fred Simmons, the King of the Demo,” a martial arts instructor from Concord, NC. He was, in fact, comic actor Danny R. McBride, who you might recognize from Hot Rod, and who you can catch in upcoming releases Drillbit Taylor and Pineapple Express. (Not to be confused with the stuntman/Underworld screenwriter Danny McBride.) McBride created the role of the bumbling Simmons for The Foot Fist Way, a movie from 2006 that will finally hit theaters on April 11.This Conan appearance was an Andy Kaufmanesque attempt at viral marketing for the upcoming release. So feel free to laugh away, feeling little to no agitation or discomfort!
If you were unable to decipher, after more than 50 seconds, that the character was a piss-take, then I fear you and wish you nothing but the best in your future. But seriously, just stay away from me.
I knew it was fake but it still made me horribly uncomfortable. I wanted to crawl inside Will Farrell’s basketball “shorts” and hide.
@SteamyMcFirecrotch: It is King of the Demo. I guess ya have to see the movie.
I’m becoming a fan of this Danny McBride guy. Just saw some of his stuff from the upcoming “Drillbit Taylor” on You Tube a couple of days ago. Very funny. The awkward energy in this bit reminds me a little of Chris Elliot, when he used to appear on Letterman back in the 80’s.
And that’s high praise indeed!
@mtnmacgrl: Same here - it was obviously not real, but also nowhere near as funny as satire bits on Conan usually are (not really funny at all, actually). It was very confusing.
But I’m glad to at least know why he looked vaguely familiar - he was also in All the Real Girls, with the best character name ever - Bust-Ass.
I’d never heard of this guy. During the segment I kept wondering “Is this for real? This can’t be real.” By the end, I had good feeling that it was fake. Still a shadow of a doubt, though. It wasn’t until I started googling that I found out the truth. I’ll admit, they had me for a bit.

defamer.com

There’s a scene in the postmodern chase movie No Country For Old Men where Javier Bardem — playing the assassin Anton Chigurh — goes into the office of a trailer park looking for a man he wants to kill. The man isn’t there, and the manager of the park, a large woman, refuses to give Chigurh his work address because it’s against trailer park policy.
It’s a funny scene because Chigurh, an unstoppable killer, actually looks a little intimidated. At the Cannes film festival, where the movie had its premiere, Bardem recalled that the scene had to be shot several times because he kept breaking up over the deadpan performance of the woman playing the manager.
Her name is Kathy Lamkin, and although she appears to be just an ordinary person recruited to be in a Hollywood film, she’s a veteran actress who had small roles in three movies last year — including In The Valley of Elah and The Heartbreak Kid — and is probably most famous as “the Tea Lady” in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre films.
Lamkin is not up for an Oscar. She probably never will be. But she was one of the performers who added texture to No Country For Old Men, who grounded it in authenticity so that its flightier notions — of a mythical Evil stalking the land — could take hold. (Another such actor was Gene Jones, who played the gas station manager who flips a coin for his life.)
Lamkin is one of those actors who prove that not every memorable movie moment or performer gets an Academy Award nomination. Sometimes great artists are snubbed, and sometimes what they do isn’t really Oscar-worthy. It’s just wonderful.
Sometimes they seem to have been forgotten. Take the non-nominated song Pop! Goes My Heart, as sung by Hugh Grant in the romantic comedy Music & Lyrics. The movie was a pleasant diversion that probably benefited from low expectations, but the musical video, a straight-faced parody of Wham!, is one of those catchy and inspired movie moments that was pure pleasure.
We all understand that only five performers can be nominated in each category, but it is still too bad that there was no room for what Nicole Kidman accomplished in Margot At The Wedding, a mostly ignored family drama in which she played an angry and unhappy woman who, in one scene that sticks with you, climbs a tree just to prove that she can do it and gets stuck up there. Kidman was up a tree of one sort or another for most of Margot At The Wedding: She created a woman who was selfish, insensitive and bravely unlikable.
And two cheers for Catherine Keener, whose hippie mother figure lent such warmth to the chilly adventure story Into The Wild. It was a movie brimming with snubs — notably for director Sean Penn — but it would have been nice to acknowledge Keener, who has been bringing a sexy humanity to movies for 20 years (and has earned two Oscar nominations in the process).
We also loved J.K. Simmons, a character actor who has been delighting us for years both as the dyspeptic newspaper editor in the Spider-Man films (”If we get a picture of Julia Roberts in a thong, we can certainly get a picture of this weirdo!”) and now as the unexpectedly understanding father in Juno, another movie that relied on its supporting cast (Allison Janney as the mom, Olivia Thirlby as the best friend, Michael Cera as the boyfriend) to make a realistic landscape in which its unlikelihoods could unfold.
A movie forgotten in the rush for the statuette was Zodiac, a complex true-life crime mystery that is never solved, just another of the unresolved stories of 2007. It was a tough movie to connect with, but there was real, unnominated pleasure in watching Robert Downey, Jr., play a fidgety newspaper reporter: His line of fast-spoken, irreverent patter would be a healthy addition to any newsroom.
Another movie that came and went and didn’t seem to accomplish much but gave me pleasure was The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson’s somewhat disconnected but always rollicking train trip through India. Owen Wilson is hilarious as the eldest of three brothers — the others are played by Adrian Brody and Jason Schwartzman, each of whom has his moments — and an Indian actor named Waris Ahluwalia was a small-scale delight as the steward who tries to keep order. None of them was acknowledged, but that doesn’t diminish their achievements.
Nor will there be an Oscar for another unlikely character, Steve Zahn, who played one of the desperate escapers in Rescue Dawn and almost made you forgive the fiasco that was Strange Wilderness, or for Christian Bale, who imbued his role in the film — the true story of a hair-raising escape from a POW camp during the Vietnam war — with such desperate hunger. Laura Linney’s nomination as best actress for The Savages was deserved, but that left out Philip Seymour Hoffman as her brother and Philip Bosco in a wonderfully realized performance as her ailing father. And it didn’t take everyone long to forget Ben Foster, who was the best thing about 3:10 to Yuma as Russell Crowe’s sidekick, or Peter Fonda, almost unrecognizable as the doomed bounty hunter. No Oscar? No problem.

canada.com