Stateside With Rosalea: Anything Good On TV?

It's a lazy, lazy holiday weekend here in the US. Well, no chance of being lazy if you're the checkout operator at the smaller, faster warehouse store, of course--bags of briquettes and ice were going out the door faster than their contents will burn and melt. At one of the local bargain stores for the past week, all the customers have been given 12-inch American flags (made in Taiwan).

My first week of Nojob has been very nice, thank you. The senior center downstairs hosts Tai Chi classes, so I've been going to those to give me olde rickety knees a workout and get rid of the tension in my shoulders brought about by sitting at a computer all day.

I cannot wean myself from the screen. Since getting DSL I've had to resort to making sticky notes and putting them on the monitor to remind me what exactly it was that I came to sit down at the computer for. A couple of hours go by and I find I've done nothing but drift from one intriguing story to another.

Like there's the online spat over San Francisco-based Current TV, which will be starting up on August 1 and broadcasting on satellite and some cable stations. It's the brainchild of Vice President Al Gore and entrepreneur Joel Hyatt.

Current's website says: "We're rethinking the way TV is produced, programmed, and presented, so it actually makes sense to an audience that's accustomed to choice, control, and collaboration in everything else they do.

"So, we're creating a network in short form. Whenever you tune in to Current, you'll see something amusing, inspiring or interesting. And then, three minutes later, you'll see something new. It'll be a video iPod stocked with a stream of short segments and set to shuffle."

All very well until you have to deal with actual pesky content creators, who have the unbelievable effrontery to think they should be paid for providing the content and own it too. And the organiser of the local Meet-up group who dares to criticise Current's policies.

Read all about it at http://thisrevolution.blogspot.com/

At the press launch in April, Television Week reported: The content shown to reporters lacked the ideological slant that many assumed Mr. Gore's network would carry. "We have no interest in being a … TV version of Air America," he said, referring to the left-leaning radio network. "[We want] to engage in the dialogue of democracy."

And very engaging it is!

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