Friday, October 5, 2007

War on TV

I've been watching a lot of The War, Ken Burns' multi-part documentary about World War II that has been playing on PBS. What can I say? I like history. Burns does another fine job of telling a story from a first person perspective using archival quotes and present day interviews.

Two things I didn't like. One is that I would be going through the channels and I would come across another episode of this show and I would get hooked and then miss whatever else I had intended to watch that night. (Note: I did see Cavemen, which was surprisingly funny. Lines that might have seemed ho-hum otherwise, were quite comical coming from less evolved members of the genus Homo.)

The other thing really pissed me off. It's well known that special interest groups claiming to represent Hispanics bullied and threatened Burns to change his creative work to add some particular correctness. It would be okay to ask that something offensive be removed - there have been plenty of cases of various groups doing that (btw, I almost called this post Fag Of Our Fathers, but I didn't want to offend anyone). It would also be okay to ask that future works include something of interest to you. What is not okay is to ask that a finished work be altered for no reason other than a political one. Shall the Sistine Chapel be altered to add representations of every other ethnic group in the world in addition to the pictured Italians?



I think coffee table picture books are generally a waste of money, but here is one I actually own and can recommend if you like the genre. The title is At Ease: Navy Men of World War II. It's got a lot of sexy photos of WWII military guys, with some nudity. It shows men not afraid to show their closeness and affection for one another.

These picture are obviously way before my time, but what makes them special is that average men used to be a lot leaner than they are today. When you see National Guard and reserve troops now, they really earn the nickname doughboy. The guys in this book are all meat.

Have any adult videos borrowed Tom Brokaw's book title yet to make Men of the Greatest Penetration?

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