Ten top Dowager Countess Violet Grantham scenes from Downton Abbey.

Eagle Falconry, Altai Mountains, Mongolia

This 7:28 trailer for Human Planet, a BBC Ethnographic Travelogue series scheduled to begin broadcasting in March, has some striking images. Photographer Timothy Allen did the voice-over.

As to how it happens that our own Blue Ridge Hunt was recently filmed hunting at Persimmon Hill by a Korean NBC station for its news coverage. Principals featured included: retired Huntsman Chris Howells (releasing the hounds from the hounds truck), MFH Linda Armbrust and Huntsman Dennis Downing (both briefly commenting), and Charlie (dashing gallantly through the countryside).

1:49 video

Television’s Mythbusters had one of their experiments, apparently testing the velocity or the penetrating ability of a cannonball, go severely wrong. The projectile, intended to penetrate multiple barrels of water and a cinderblock then wind up buried in a hillside on an army base southeast of Oakland, instead sailed over the Diablo foothills and went right into the suburbs.

The misaimed cannonball went straight through the front door and the interior and exterior walls of one house in Dublin, California, then flew across a busy highway (luckily missing the passing cars), and took out the slate roof of a second house 50 yards away before coming to rest in a third family’s minivan.

I bet that program’s insurance will be markedly more costly next season.

CBSLA
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Vanderleun offers maps.

Andy Rooney was old, but he could effectively argue the superiority of his old manual typewriter over those newfangled personal computers that replaced them.

Scrooge McDuck and his nephew Donald were responsible for some pretty impressive cultural contributions.

Hat tip to Jose Guardia.
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According to Jay Black, Nathan Fillion is television’s Martin Luther.
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When the alien invaders arrive...

Clay Shirky, in a new book titled Cognitive Surplus, maintains that the post-WWII age of suburbanization was one of those eras of abrupt, dislocating social change which left Americans morose and seeking for self-medication just like 18th century Englishmen driven by economic change from the countryside to the city.

They used gin, a new, potent yet inexpensive distilled spirit, whose method of production had arrived from Holland as part of the the fashionable baggage accompanying William and Mary. Americans used television.

Shirky contends that the Internet is bringing about the end of the age of self-narcotization via sitcoms and game shows. Leisure time sucked down the television time sink, the cognitive surplus simply wasted previously, will instead be transferred to more useful and communitarian activities (like writing Wikipedia entries and blogging) and a wonderful new era of transparency, creativity, and productivity will bloom.

Hmm. I wonder if he has ever heard of World of Warcraft.

Barnes & Noble review.
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Jonah Leher brings formidable Friedrich Nietzsche to television’s defense.

I would disagree. In some peculiar way, if I hadn’t watched and re-watched The Sopranos then this sentence wouldn’t exist. (And I would have missed out on many interesting, intelligent conversations…) The larger point, I guess, is that before we can produce anything meaningful, we need to consume and absorb, and think about what we’ve consumed and absorbed. That’s why Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, said we must become a camel (drinking up everything) before we can become a lion, and properly rebel against the strictures of society.

William Hogarth, Gin Lane, Engraving, 1751

Vladimir Nabokov

From the history of American television:

In the 1950’s ABC television Close-up! documentary series, John Daly interviews Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling, pt. 1—5:41 video—pt. 2 5:51 video

Nabokov lispingly delivers dismissive apothegms in an effete and frivolous style inevitably reminding one of Anthony Blanche, while Trilling is earnest, grave, serious, and sometimes just a bit obsequious.

Great lines:

“I don’t want to touch hearts, and I don’t even want to affect minds very much. What I want to produce is really that little sob in the spine of the artist reader. I leave the field of ideas to Doctor Schweitzer and Doctor Zhivago.”

“It was fun to breed her in my laboratory,” says Vladimir Nabokov of Lolita.

Hat tip to Cynical-C via David Ross.

I’m not sure what those two guys have to do with one another, but the video is amusing, Karen and I both like Joss Whedon’s shows (Dollhouse not so much), and I tend to feel a personal responsibility in blogging to include as much Glenn Reynolds-friendly libertarian nerd culture material as possible. Besides, when I blog it, that means I don’t have to email it to friends.

2:10 video

Whedonesque—key Whedon fan-site providing information on new Whedon programming and a lot more than I want to know.

Hat tip to Brett via Karen L. Myers.

Ronald Reagan takes on James Dean in 6:03 video highlights from 1954 GE Home Theater drama “The Dark, Dark Hours.”

Appropriately enough, Ronald Reagan is a physician defending decency, home, and family. James Dean (who would get killed in an accident with his Porsche 550 Spyder a little over nine months later) plays a youthful criminal. 1950s criminality is represented as childishly impulsive, weak, neurotically insecure, and determined to express a transgressive subcultural identity by the use of hipster slang and a loud musical background of progressive jazz. The same dramatization would not be much different today in most respects. The criminal youth, of course, wouldn’t be white and blond. The music wouldn’t be jazz and the modernist patois would be different, but the same kind of childishness and the same sort of futile attempt to obtain respect through violence would work exactly the same way in an updated version just fine.

This parody perfectly captures the preferred format of a television news report.

2:04 video

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

CABLE NEWS RACE
TUES. JAN. 19, 2010
ELECTION NIGHT

FOXNEWS HANNITY 6,809,000
FOXNEWS GRETA 6,399,000
FOXNEWS O’REILLY 5,228,000
FOXNEWS BECK 3,446,000
FOXNEWS BAIER 3,338,000
FOXNEWS SHEP 3,241,000
CNN KING 1,681,000
CNN COOPER 1,508,000
CNN BROWN 1,308,000
MSNBC OLBERMANN 1,274,000
MSNBC MADDOW 1,236,000
CNN BLITZER 1,135,000
CNNHN BEHAR 845,000
MSNBC HARDBALL 798,000

I never watch late night talk shows, so I couldn’t possibly understand why NBC is paying Conan O’Brien and his staff $44 million to leave. Maybe it was what Nancy DeWolf Smith described as his “part Peter Pan, part Chucky doll” shtick that makes his removal worth that kind of money.

The courage of the elite: Metropolitan Museum prudentially removes images of Mohammed and renames Islamic Galleries.
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High rise buildings in Mecca make it evident that roughly 200 mosques are pointing in the wrong direction.
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Crime pays in Norway.. Foreigners qualify for welfare after a year in jail. If they serve three years, they get health benefits and qualify for old age pension. Hat tip to the News Junkie.
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Lawsuit begins in California federal court contending that the US Constitution mandates Gay Marriage. Wouldn’t Gouverneur Morris be surprised?
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Obama postpones State of the Union address in order to avoid preempting season opener of Lost.

The Chicago Tribune gleefully welcomes a new primetime Sci Fi drama which premiered on ABC last night. One of the principal aliens is played by Morena Baccarin, who was the beautiful courtesan in Firefly/Serenity.

The new show’s plot features some amusing parallels to reality.

Imagine this. At a time of political turmoil, a charismatic, telegenic new leader arrives virtually out of nowhere. He offers a message of hope and reconciliation based on compromise and promises to marshal technology for a better future that will include universal health care.

The news media swoons in admiration—one simpering anchorman even shouts at a reporter who asks a tough question: “Why don’t you show some respect?!” The public is likewise smitten, except for a few nut cases who circulate batty rumors on the Internet about the leader’s origins and intentions. The leader, undismayed, offers assurances that are soothing, if also just a tiny bit condescending: “Embracing change is never easy.”

So, does that sound like anyone you know? Oh, wait—did I mention the leader is secretly a totalitarian space lizard who’s come here to eat us?

Welcome to ABC’s “V,” the most fascinating and bound to be the most controversial new show of the fall television season. Nominally a rousing sci-fi space opera about alien invaders bent on the conquest (and digestion) of all humanity, it’s also a barbed commentary on Obamamania that will infuriate the president’s supporters and delight his detractors. ...

The aliens—who become known as V’s, for visitors—quickly enthrall their wide-eyed human hosts.

A handful of dissidents hold out against the rapturous reception given the V’s. Some are simply uneasy, such as the youthful priest Father Jack (Joel Gretsch, “The 4400”), who sharply criticizes the Vatican’s embrace of the V’s as divine creations: “Rattlesnakes are God’s creatures too.”