drat fink

View current page
...more recent posts

Tuesday, Apr 23, 2002

news reels

"But it's the History Channel that must really bother PBS, and not just because the upstart flaunts its illiberal jingoism and paranoia. As its obsession with shocking secrets suggests, the History Channel has much in common with the New York Post�and Oliver Stone. PBS treats making TV shows as if it were noble but tedious missionary work; the History Channel manages to create some comical, intriguing visual rants about "history"�and at the same time attract viewers. If the channel broadcasts downright bunk from time to time, it also curates vast quantities of old�and fascinating�newsreel footage. Sometimes all it takes to make an evocative show is jumpy period film of Antarctic explorers or the angelic-looking Alexei Romanov. With this material available, broadcasting vastly overhyped School of Burns documentaries�wide-angle beauty shots and buttery close-ups of Ivy League professors�begins to seem like a sucker's game."

rush job

douglas rushkoff joins the weblog universe.

inter view

"Pelton's blunt appraisals find their way into his travel books too; they focus on skulls and crossbones rather than sandy beaches. He's the author of "The World's Most Dangerous Places," a compendium of key information about how to get into -- and, more important, how to get out of -- various war zones, drug dens and atrocity-ridden enclaves the world over. The book is devoted to far-flung disaster areas like Sierra Leone and Somalia. Not surprisingly, Afghanistan gets a chapter. Pelton has been going there since 1995 to cover both the Taliban regime and the late Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud's efforts to topple it."

seti sun

"SETI has accomplished this feat of computational drudgery in just three ordinary years � by persuading some 3.5 million people to allow their personal computers to be yoked into a loose-knit skein called SETI@home. While no alien messages have been discovered yet, the project's success in using the Internet to assemble an impromptu grass-roots supercomputer is inspiring other researchers to turn to the masses for problems requiring more computation than they could otherwise afford."

Monday, Apr 22, 2002

le phew!

"On Sunday, April 21st, Jean-Marie Le Pen, an extreme-right nationalist, shocked France and the rest of the world by coming in second in the first round of the French Presidential election, eliminating the mainstream Socialist candidate and qualifying for a runoff with the incumbent, President Jacques Chirac. How dangerous is Le Pen? This Profile, from 1997, explores his history, his politics, and his ambitions."

older posts...