"Robert Green" wrote:

wrote in message
.. .
"Robert Green" wrote:

Slightly off-topic, I was watching leftist PBS last night at two
programs,
one about the Parthenon, the other about sunken Roman ships. The second
program turned out to be a lot more about the Roman Empire itself, and
how
they made engineering a facet of every part of their lives. What's also
fascinating is how much the US resembles Rome, in both positive and
negative
ways.

snip

It's been a long time since my writing's
been edited. Don't worry. I don't mind. I've been red-penciled for a
long, long time.

I enjoy reading your posts, for at least the reason that you provide
an educated rebuttal to the republican whack jobs one sees here all
the time, but sometimes I see you deviating from the facts and it
makes me sad. When you make an easily correctable error one has to
wonder what else is wrong.

This is not particularly directed at you. We have the same with the
medical industry (for example) who for decades have touted the health
benefits of increasing HDL cholesterol particularly by using a
niacin-based drug but now admit that while niacin will increase HDL it
does nothing to reduce the incidence of heart attack and stroke. If
you read the fine print (not new) on the leading statin (Lipitor)
you'll find that it also has little proven effect on coronaries and
strokes. Just why are we taking these drugs? And more importantly and
pertinently to my point, can we rely on the blatherings of the medical
researchers and the muckety-mucks (Sp? Ask an Englishman familiar with
G&S IIRC) of the industry in general? They screwed up here so they've
probably screwed up in a lot of other areas. The credibility of
people, especially about things you know little about, relies on their
being right on the rest of their pronouncements.

Nova as most of the non-fiction programs on PBS still brings in an
unnecessary element of suspense. Here it was something to do with five
days (maybe the narrator turned into a pumpkin?). There's also an
element of false risk as here they talked about (and showed) a
dangerous dive where there was no one to help the diver if he got into
trouble. How about the cameraman, guys? This is not supposed to be
fiction.

Jeez, Knuckle, have you ever *produced* a weekly anything? Once in my life
I edited the campus weekly. You run out of new ideas around week 10 if
you're VERY lucky. These guys have been on how long? Decades? Quarter
centuries? That they can still find *anything* that would keep people
watching is a miracle to the nth power. I learned something new and even
went to the 'net to learn more. That's a successful program.

Excessive
showmanship? They're probably guilty as charged.

If you want to do "showmanship" do fiction. In this area (ancient
Rome), "I, Claudius" is fascinating, intellectual, and, to the best of
my knowledge, factually correct. Far more riveting than, for example,
this episode, and we really haven't done more than touch on minor
points (e.g. Julia). For example, their hypothesis about why the ship
sank (cargo instability) doesn't ring true. If it was correct, we'd be
seeing a Mediterranean littered with sunken intact ships. Surely the
ship owners of the time would have noticed something wrong and made
corrections.

Do I care? Considering
what else was on at the hour I'd be lying if I said I cared. "Minute to Win
It?" Oy!

Oh, I'll give you some topics that to my knowledge haven't been
touched (I don't know where they actually belong though):

- Engineering marvels of the Victorian era such as the Manchester boat
lift (and the associated ship canal). There's a similar but more
modern one at Strasbourg.
- For the politically incorrect: the development of the original VW
with a side view of the autobahns. While in Germany, the development
of cures for Syphilis and TB and the formation of Koch's postulates.
- Also major political incorrectness especially this Memorial day: How
FDR caused Pearl Harbor and our involvement in WW2. (Just what do you
think we'd do if someone cut off today all our access to oil?)
- Politically neutral: the fight of the Polish POW's back to their
homeland at the end of WW1 (the Trans-Siberian figures heavily)

At the end talking about Julia you said:

** She turned out not to be a slut, but a political conspirator
against her father.

My comment:

I obviously saw the program but I thought they said that the idea of a
political conspiracy was just the musings of some historian and had no
solid evidence.

Yes, I think that was what we call a "dramatic hook" to keep the wives of
the guys that actually found this program interesting from changing the
channel. Accusing a woman of being a slut and then having her exonerated as
a bold political conspirator - is that not a "chick" story line? I can
imagine at least three layers of useless PBS upper management demanding such
a "hook" for the sake of political correctness. If I cared much about the
real Julia, I would have looked her up.

I don't think you'd find anything very reliable.

My knowledge of Roman history is
cinematic, from the wonder spectacle movies of the 50's (Ben Hur, The Robe,
The Chalice, Spartacus) so it's clearly deficient in many ways.

Nothing wrong with that. My knowledge of ancient Egypt comes from the
novels of Mika Waltari.

There was another hint that sealing her up for slutty behavior was probably
not the reason for her exile since the island was routinely visiting by
ships full of what I assume to be always horny sailors.

Hmmm. Totally different class of people. I don't think so. You could
make the same comment about her keepers and it'd probably be at least
dubious for the same reasons.

What, you want them building the bridges you ride over every day? But
seriously, your misogyny might offend the no more than 10 women I've seen
post here regularly in the last year. I don't care *who* argues with whom
about dead Romans or even whether chipmunks are higher on the evolutionary
scale than suicide bombers. I do care about sensitive professions
(sensitive meaning "can they kill me trying to help me?") being licensed and
regulated because I know human nature. Your comment almost requires asking:
"So what woman passed YOU over for promotion?" (-"

No misogyny. I love women, especially the young and pretty ones g
but in 1960 (the year of the approval of the BC pill), they lost their
main jobs (breeding and the care of the young) and from that point on
they've been changing the facts in an effort to horn in on the male
preserve. Good thing that they lost their jobs otherwise we'd be even
more awash with surplus people than we currently are (witness: Arab
Spring) but instead of trying to turn into pseudo men they should have
split apart the breeding into the pre-production and main event as the
pill and many of the feminists of the sixties promised. I'm still
waiting for that promise to be fulfilled.