News You Can Bruise for 2005 August 23

Tue Aug 23 2005 07:50 PST Friday Catt Blogging: "...and then the catt was lockt in the chamber, and kept a great mewing, and leapt upon the bed, which made me I could not sleep a great while."

Tue Aug 23 2005 10:50 PST Take That: "Intelligence is whatever humans can do but machines cannot."

(1) Tue Aug 23 2005 21:29 PST And That's How You Narrate A Documentary: I may have been too hard on the narration of March of the Penguins. I'm slowly making my way through a Discovery Channel documentary I Tivoed and its narration is just ridiculous, full of bombast and unnecessary verbiage and what Mark Twain called the right word's second cousin. In fact that's why I Tivoed it, because I couldn't resist the title "What Killed The Mega Beasts?"

Outside of this documentary, mega beasts are known as megafauna, but clunky CGI renditions of the wolly mammoth and the buckeye giant beaver demand a clunky partial translation into English. Everything must be MEGA in this world of 64-ounce colas and ever-larger computers. Uh, computer monitors.

Quotes from the program so far, from memory:

• "The mega beasts were united by only one thing: their size."
• "Eleven thousand years ago, these wooly mammoths suffered a mysterious fate: total extinction."
• "...not realizing that they, too, were about to become the hunted."
• "Humans had both opportunity and motive for megabeast extermination." Yes, the butler, who I'm convinced, first gored the Colonel to death before trampling him to smithereens.
• "McPhee's disease theory sounded plausible, but it lacked one crucial element: evidence. ... Perhaps the beasts of Monster Beach could give it to him."

I love how often a line of narration in this documentary has the structure of a joke, and is funny, but is not actually a joke.