Enternewsment

Man, I used to love those kid shows-- Seasame Street, Square One, 3-2-1 Contact, and Channel One in the afternoons at school. I still watch them, too, although Glenn was right about Elmo's World: stoopid. But if you're home from work in the mid-morning, Seasame Street and Dora the Explorer are still better quality TV than any 6-hour long morning news show with 20 minutes of real information that just gets recycled and drawn out with fancy graphics and 'teasers.'

Last night I camped out in front of the History Channel all night watching shows about the battle of Thermopylae, pirate history and technology, and historial sexual practices from around the world. And then I watched TAPS, the SciFi ghost hunter show I mentioned before (although not educational in the least, I do love that show).

I have to agree that the History Channel is sometimes way too much of the WWII Airplane Channel. But when it's not that, it's usually really interesting. I pretty much only watch the Discovery Channel when they have one of those medical freak shows on, but I can get that same fascination with less of the freak show guilt by watching House. Watching these channels, though, I do run into the Dragon Problem-- I've been told I'll believe anything with a footnote (I think I was searching for irrefutable truth to support my deep suspicion of aspartame at the time), and I have to stop myself from getting too wrapped up in the conspiracy or future predicting shows. Like the one I saw the other night on the History Channel that said several completely unrelated ancient cultures, all renown for their learning and intelligence, have independently predicted that the world as we know it will end on December 21, 2012. Try sleeping after that.

I don't consider news shows educational in the least. Everytime I happen to pause on one, I last about 15 minutes before they're either repeating stories or sensationalizing the ones they have to an unrecognizable degree. Garbage, garbage, garbage. We don't need multiple 24-hour news stations. We don't need fancy graphics and politically polar pundits. We need the news, we need to know what's going on in the world, and we need to be reminded to how we got to this point. Tell us about events present and past, not theories about the future laced with 'angles' and 'spin.' Please, leave the future predicting to the History Channel.