An Interesting Article

This is a
somewhat interesting article about a model suing a jewelry company because
the ad they made with her makes her look lewd. It's interesting because the
model says she's made a point to keep a wholesome reputation (and as a
graduate student in education, presumably hoping to become a teacher, I'll
buy it -- especially with the way we've already seen tarnished reputations
negatively impact educational careers years later), and because the
description of the shooting makes it seem more than a little deceptive. I
haven't seen the ad, so I don't know how much of the filming was cut, but
apparently there was some kind of a comedic storyline which culminated in
the guy giving the girl a necklace and the girl getting excited. Apparently
'excited' meant something different to the producers than to the model, as
they asked her to re-shoot the "getting excited" part, "without smiling."
Presumably this re-shooting constitutes the bulk of the internet clip that
the model is complaining about.

The News Today

Something that generally bothers me is how out-of-touch I feel I am with
current events. i try to stay up on things that are going on around the
world, what people are doing and why they're doing it and what the
implications are. I have a tab on iGoogle with over a dozen news feeds
pulling from blogs, news sites, and places like Slashdot and Wired; I
refresh this tab every hour or so and pick over the articles that show up.
Once in a while, if something strikes me particularly, I'll post a link up
here on my journal and say a few words about it.

I've never, really, watched The News on TV. Back in the 90s when I was a
teenager just beginning to recognize that there was a world beyond my school
district, I glanced at it a few times, but nothing ever struck me. It was
never engaging, it was never insightful, it was always sensationalistic,
negative, and lacking any kind of human connection. My brothers and I were
joking the other night that some news anchor looked like he was animatronic,
and it strikes me that most of them seem robotic. Even now, as a
twenty-something trying to grasp the world around him, I don't ever think to
watch The News. Part of it is because I refuse to schedule my life around
the TV, but it's also because there's still nothing on that I would blog
about.

This
Article, from the guy who used to do Dateline on NBC, pretty much
sums up (and adds insight into the corporate origins of) pretty much
everything that I dislike about The News. If The News was more like what he
says it ought to have been rather than what it is, if it did more of the
stories he proposed and educated more than entertained, if it
was about saying things that were rather than reassuring us with some
"emotional center", then I'd probably watch it. I'd probably enjoy it.