The Royal Wedding: Should we care? Yes.

Yes, I got up and watched the Royal Wedding of William and Catherine this past Friday. I also TIVO'd it on two channels -- CBS for the American coverage and PBS for the British coverage -- so I could watch it more in-depth later.

It was breathtaking. I almost cried when the camera panned down from the ceiling of the Abbey during the procession. Some of my friends were just as excited as I was, such as my friend Christine who baked English scones the day before and sent one over to me.

But many other friends just didn't 'get it'

"Why would you get up so early just to see a wedding?" one asked.  Another, a bit disgusted at the coverage, wondered "With so many horrible things going on, why are people caring about this?" Still others were barely aware it was happening.

So I found myself wondering, why did I care so much? Why was this so special? I've come up with three key reasons:


A chance to see living history

The BBC coverage was better than a history lesson. It provided a crash-course in British political, religious, cultural, and art history for the past thousand years in the 'pre-show' hour. Some of the facts about Westminster Abbey were fascinating. And I loved the way one historian described the progress of royal weddings from the pre-arranged 'mergers and acquisitions' hundreds of years ago to the vibrant public spectacles they have become in the last century.

Want to see how a formal carriage is driven? Watch a Royal wedding. Want to hear about how traditional lace is woven? Watch a Royal wedding. Want to hear how medieval tile floors were constructed? Watch a Royal wedding. Want to see history WWII airplanes in flight? Watch a Royal Wedding.

I showed segments of the broadcast to my 3-year old son. He jumped with glee to see the Abbey's bells, from inside the tower. (We've watched that 10-second clip over and over more than his favorite episode of Dinosaur Train, and that is saying a lot.) He loved the royal trumpeters, who heralded the Queen's entry into the Abbey. He was mesmerized by the boy choir. He proclaimed "Look at that big church!" when Westminster Abbey was shown in his entirety. And he cheered when the "big plane and the little planes" flew over the Palace. These images got him really excited; he understood that something big and important was happening and he loved it.

A reminder of the importance of family heritage

My mother's side of the family is very in touch with our history. We still run the Rosebud Perfume Company; we still have pieces of my great-grandfather's drugstore from the late 1800s. As my cousin, who is in her late 80s, said last year "We are so blessed to know our roots and our family history. Some people today seem so lost; they don't know who they are or where they came from."

The Royal Family is a reminder of how precious and wonderful such a history can be. The ability to trace back, to see signatures of great-great-great grandparents, to walk where they walked.  They are the ultimate in family heritage preservation. It's not everyone who has the means to preserve a 110-year-old family carriage, but they do and they have. It's a treasure to be able to glimpse such heirlooms not in a museum, but actually cared for and in use by the same family, generations later.


Some good news, for a change

We're so used to the Media covering bad news, that we almost feel guilty when they cover something good. But quite frankly, news is by definition neither good nor bad. It's news. And it's good for us all to share in something positive.

David Starkey, a Royal Historian who did commentary for CBS, stated it very well:

"It [the wedding] really has caught the imagination. This is a bit of a grim time. We've had recession. We've got declining incomes. People want a bit of fun. Monarchy is brilliant at creating fun and entertainment. So many of the people I saw and listened to [on the street on the way here] were American, clearly coming back home in a funny kind of way and watching the royal family that -perhaps rather controversially - you got rid of."

 
I generally despise the media, but in this case, I found their coverage wonderful. Kudos to all the press teams who worked very hard to pull together commentary, history and coverage that would highlight all aspects of this fabulous event.

Besides the witty commentary by Royal Historian David Starkey, other highlights for me included BBC television's broadcast of the space station crew sending their best wishes
 and designer David Emanuel's breathless commentary upon catching the first glimpse of Kate's dress as she emerged from her hotel. (He designed Princess Diana's dress.) It's infectious to experience someone who really knows their craft and can share that knowledge and excitement.

Thank you for sharing it with us.

Hey, Congresspeople! This isn't kindergarten

It's like a big, festive carnival up there on the Hill. Whee!

I'm going to digress to politics for a week. (I'm in DC; I can't help it.)  But it's not as much of a digression as you might think. When it comes to our elected officials, we're all the customers. We elect them, and we pay for their salaries and their utterly fabulous benefits. So, I expect and demand a little service in return.

And what I'm getting now is a cross between a soap opera and a circus, with as much nuance as a kindergarten recess.  I just read the current status: Principal Obama has invited the kids to come have snacks and juice in his office so that they can all work it out. I only hope that all the snacks are locally grown so that I can have some kind of positive feeling about the whole thing, because otherwise it's just a giant mess.

Seriously, this is how Paul Kane and Jon Cohen of the Washington Post described it today:

As the deadline neared, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) exchanged insults, each side blaming the other for the stalemate.

Swell. Did they fire their Nerf guns at each other, too?

You've got a job to do folks. Stop the drama, and start behaving like the educated negotiators that you all claim to be.

A little more Science on Science Friday

This past friday, Science Friday did a Persuasion, Energy, and Behavior segment. Generally, I'm very pleased with National Public Radio. They tend more toward objective, in-depth reporting than anything else on the radio. And this is a really great show; encouraging science is something we need to do in this country.

However, I found this piece much less NPR Science and much more mass-media Editorial. It was disappointing. Some of the concepts were interesting -- i.e., are some people not trying to be energy-efficient due to their political views -- but the overtone of "If you don't use Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFLs), you're stupid" was insulting. I've certainly had misgivings about CFLs in the past -- their technology and their disposal -- and I don't consider myself 'Stupid'.

I was pleased to note that there are multiple pages of similar commentary on the segment page forums, so hopefully the producers will take note.

Can't NBC find ANYONE better?

Every Olympics, ever since Bob Costas became host, I have written to NBC. This year is no exception.

GET RID OF BOB COSTAS; HE IS AWFUL. He is utterly negative, always looks miserable, wants nothing more than to create DRAMA, and clearly could not care less about sports.

I hate the way he covers the Olympics.
My husband hates him.
My folks hate him, my husband's folks hate him, my friends hate him, my co-workers hate him.

He is just so awful. Thank goodness we have TIVO so we can fast forward through him. Please NBC, replace him with any of the field event correspondents; replace him with anyone who shows even a drop of enthusiasm for the Olympics. Surely there is SOMEONE somewhere in the US you can find to do a better job. Perhaps even for a lower cost. Win-win for everyone, eh?

On a more positive note, these Vancouver winter olympics seem to have had fewer of the drama-ridden athletic 'close-ups', so I'd like to cheer NBC for that. And to reiterate what I alluded to earlier, the correspondents covering the individual events are pretty darned good. I just wish that Jim McCay was still with us, to serve as host. I can only hope that someone someday will be able to fill his shoes. And it ain't ever going to be Costas.

Everyone needs a new TV by Feb 2009, huh?

Years ago, when I first heard about the government mandated shift to high definition, my first thought was "Yeah, right. This is going to be an exercise in permanent postponement" Shockingly, I have been correct in this assessment. Yet again, the mandatory transition from analog to digital television broadcasting has been postponed, from February 17 to June 12, 2009.

The part of this whole ordeal that is surprising is how little Media attention this has garnered over the past months.

• Why haven't there been complaints regarding the vast government sponsorship of the electronics industry? In particular the companies manufacturing these converter boxes?
• Where is the social commentary? The poor and the elderly are clearly impacted by this transition. Heck, I imagine that some people don't even know it is going to happen, honestly, and they'll just be very surprised one day when their TV stops working
• Have I somehow missed the environmental uproar? Given that most affluent consumers are simply going to trash their old TVs -- for no other reason than this mandated change -- and get new ones? And thousands of perfectly good TVs are going to end up in our dumps?
• Is there not one investigative journalist who thought it would be interesting to compare the lobbying effort that helped to pass this mandate with the combined forces that made marijuana illegal (thus boosting the tobacco, cotton, and wood pulp industries in the process) and the Great American Streetcar scandal (where established urban streetcar systems were dismantled by the american automotive industry, in order to sell more automobiles. )

Not one journalist thinks any of these topics are worth investigating? I guess not. I suppose this is because they've all been too busy covering the more important stories, like the ever-growing family size of Brad and Angelina.

But now that the Campaign is over, and Obamessiah is in office, and the Pitts aren't quite ready to have another baby, we are finally starting to see a few stories on this topic. Will the transition ever happen? Maybe. Personally, I've got my coupons in hand and I'll be going to get my boxes, soon. Do I need the coupons? No. Can I pay for the boxes myself? Of course I can, just like most folks who have requested these coupons. But I guess this topic isn't interesting to reporters, either. Oh look ... is that Britney over there? Quick! There's news to be told!

Cover the Event, Please

Unless you are hibernating in a cave somewhere, you probably watched, listened, or read about the Obama Inauguration today. This was one of my days home with my 1-year old (he'll be 1 year old in about 2 hours!), and so I was lucky enough to be able to watch a great deal of television coverage.

I rotated between the big 3 TV networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC.
As we live 15 minutes outside of Washington DC, we had non-stop coverage all day, even when the nationals went to 'local' coverage.

I want to applaud the local coverage. It was interesting. They talked about road closures, metro issues, parking problems, etc. It was just the sort of stuff that we locals can't really get enough of.

The national coverage went off the path a bit. What I wanted to see and hear about was what was happening right then and there. But for the most part, especially during the parade, what the announcers were talking about had nothing to do with what was being shown on the screen.

Example:
As the new first couple left the Capitol building, the cameras showed a very interesting colonial marching band. I wondered ... is this a military band? A band from Colonial Williamsburg? Unfortunately, the announcers were interviewing some talking head pundent (I think it was Jesse Jackson in this case, on ABC) about race relations in the USA, blah-blah. This is what people have been talking about for MONTHS. Could they have not covered the moment and talked about what was happening? As my husband wryly commented, "Of course not ... that would take research. It is much easier to just snap photos and editorialize so you don't need to really know what is going on."

Some of the stations did better at times. I believe it was NBC who had a former police chief with them, and he was talking about security. For example: He noted that the motorcycle police had the side carts on their motorcycles so that the motorcycles would be stable at such low speeds. That was interesting.

Even if the quality of commentary was not exactly what I was hoping for, it was still great to see such an array of live coverage. It really felt like being there, but about 60-degrees warmer.

Read the Fine, Green Print

Earth Day was April 22nd. In honor of this, the Nitpicky Consumer is taking the time to ponder environmental issues. Unlike the Media Machine (as I'll call the collective world media), I'd like to take a step back from the hype. There are very few resources available that provide a thoughtful comparison of environmental alternatives from A-Z, i.e. throughout the whole life-cycle of the product or service.

• Is it created using 'green' methods? Using recycled materials? What does it take to produce its core components, in terms of energy and resources?
• How maintainable is the product? i.e. How soon will it need to be replaced?
• Once the product does need to be replaced, can it be recycled or must it be trashed? If it can be recycled, how easy is it for the 'average consumer' to understand and do?

Easy Example of the Machine in action, hyping the good side of a new idea while completely ignoring the potential pitfalls:
Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs (CFLs), also known as Compact Fluorescent Lamps.

Go to any major media resource online, and it will be easy as pie to find articles about the amazing energy-saving properties of CFLs and how great it would be to stop using halogens and other designer lights. And of course anything as fabulous as this needs to be mandated, so there is a lot of recent attention on governments trying to figure out how to force everyone to switch, either by raising taxes on traditional incandescents or even making incandescent bulbs illegal. The CFL benefits are easy to list.

But I couldn't find much info on the downsides: i.e. the things that you might not think about right away. My neighbors rightfully pointed out to me that you can't use a dimmer/rheostat with compact fluorescent lights. Well, you CAN, but it costs several hundred dollars so most average consumers won't be making this switch. And quite frankly, dimmers save energy, too. We only use our kitchen table light, dimmed quite low, as an addition to candles. I imagine our dimmed light is not using much more energy than a CFL would in that same fixture (though I can't yet test this as I haven't gotten a hold of one of the nifty gizmos that let's you track such things).

By looking past the main-stream media, you can find more general info about how the CFLs are manufactured, how they actually work, and their life-cycle.

Now, better informed, you have a clue into the downside of CFLs: what happens when they break or wear out. Now you've definitely left the Media Machine behind, and you're reading text-heavy government documents. An EPA fact sheet on CFLs and an Energy Star FAQ on proper disposal of Compact Fluorescent Lights shed some light on this facet of CFLs, which probably won't get full Media Machine attention for several years:

• Compact Fluorescent Lights, just like any fluorescent light, contain mercury. There is currently no substitute for this mercury. Each one contains about as much as the tip of a ballpoint pen.
  
• If you break a CFL you should NOT touch any part of it with your bare hands. Unfortunately, as some of them look from the outside like regular incandescents, I am quite certain that not everyone is going to realize this.
• And most important of all, old/used CFLs should NOT be disposed of in the trash.
  

Well then ... what do you do with them when they break or wear out? As the helpful FAQs explain, you can call various numbers and visit various websites or call your local government to find the closest disposal location. I went to earth911.org (the site recommended by energystar.gov), and was thrilled to find out that the closest disposal site to me is -- wait for it -- 46 miles away.

At this point, if you're like most average consumers (especially in America), you'll simply toss it into the garbage bin and hope it doesn't cause too much of an issue. But once we have a million of these, broken and leaking mercury in our landfills, or being incinerated into the air we breath, I suspect we're going to have an issue.

Am I against CFLs? Certainly Not. I am starting to switch to them myself.

Do I think that there should be legislation requiring them? Certainly Not. Let's allow people to make their own decisions, although government may need to become involved in disposal.

It seems to me that a good balance for a home at this point would be to have a 50-50 mix of CFLs and Incandescents (on a rheostat). And it wouldn't hurt to have one neighbor who volunteers to drive the 46 miles to dispose of everyone's old fluourescents, once every 5 years or so.