In Other News

I got an AppleTV recently, and it's pretty cool. I made it a whole 26 hours before voiding the warranty by upgrading the hard drive, but then fell to a nasty stomach flu and became the emir of Upchuckistan for a few days, too sick to even play with it. This isn't really a post about AppleTV, though.

Every morning, I use the AppleTV to watch the BBC Breakfast Takeaway video podcast while I'm eating my eggs and bacon. It appeals to me for a lot of reasons. No ads, unlike CNN's podcasts. The presenters have fantastic accents, which is probably far less of a novelty for their viewers back home. Even the name is cool for its British-ness. It's not "breakfast takeaway" in the USA corp-speak sense of "takeaway" as a noun for information gained from a meeting. It's the UK idiom for "to-go," as in it's the to-go version of the BBC's Breakfast program(me).

The best thing, though, is that watching the news from a British perspective gives me a useful filter than CNN lacks. I get local British-interest news, and world news, but I can be relatively sure that if there's American news on the show, it's probably important enough for me to pay attention to. CNN will run any old thing, whereas the BBC has a (necessarily) higher bar for US-centric items.

Not that the BBC doesn't indulge in American celebrity soft news, of course. This morning there was a clip of the press conference on the paternity of Anna Nicole Smith's daughter. It looked for all the world like a surreal scene from CSI: Miami, except that nobody got shot, or dramatically donned a pair of sunglasses. The story pointed out that little Dannielynn stands to inherit a significant fortune, and the presenter observed "Half a billion dollars? No wonder everybody's queueing up to be the dad."