PBS "The Great War" and Royal blood
Walter Amos (amos@sedl.org)
Mon, 11 Nov 1996 12:36:03 -0600 (CST)
On Mon, 11 Nov 1996, Michael Renjie Tom wrote:
You know last night I was thinking about recommending watching this show for
all the list members in the US who can get it, since LoGH is basically WW1 in
space...
> hmmm... sucks cause its sunday here on the Pacific coast for those of you
> that don't know, and there are lot of shows that jam up this wonderful day
> of days. At any rate was watching my Xfiles at the same time as my DS9
It's not just a problem on the west coast... I don't care for X-files or DS9
much however in Austin this is *also* the night they show Babylon 5, of which
I am a screaming jumping-up-and-down fan...
> ever so mindful of my lab that I had to prep for on monday so I missed the
> first hour of the PBS documentary series "The Great War and its Shaping of
> the Twentieth Century" Really quality programing that I had intended to tape.
Almost the same thing happened to me! I don't have a local TV listing and
forgot this show was on, but then I noticed it on the PBS listing on our DSS
satellite. However we don't get the regular networks through DSS, so for PBS
I had to check our local cable channels. It wasn't showing at the same time
the DSS said so I figured it wasn't on. Went out to dinner, came back an
hour later, and they were in the middle of it! ARRGH!!! Fortunately however
here they have a secondary PBS station which frequently repeats major
programming like this after midnight, so I was able to tape the whole episode
later.
> Not sure how many of you are out there just to see ships blast away
> at each other and how many are there because of the literature- I know
> that Walters a World War II buff but not sure who else. And not sure who
I dunno if I'd call myself a "buff"... I'm interested in it sure but I have a
number of friends who much more than me can look at a tank, gun, or plane from
the period and go "Oh that's a Panzer Mark3 blah blah blah" and recite all the
specs on the weapons. I don't care too much about all that stuff. So by
comaprison I don't know if I deserve the appellation "buff" ^_^
> else that also is into PBS docudramas. And not sure who else into PBS
> docudramas and also watched and taped "The Great WAr" Just tuned in on
> that part where Czar Nicholas II was making an impassionate plead with
> Kaiser Wilhelm to not go overboard with this useless posturing. They were
> cousins. Go figure. Royalty... *brrr* genetic disasters just waiting to
> happen.
Well as I said I taped it, so if you need a copy I'd be glad to make one for
you later.
As to royalty, that sort of "genetic disaster" crap was really much more of a
problem among European royalty than some others. In Europe they had the whole
idea about royalty and nobility being "different" from the common people and
so to keep the bloodline "pure" could only marry other nobles. But this of
course meant that over time a lot of the European nobility were related to
each other, creating the "Genetic disaster waiting to happen" problem.
This was much less of a problem among, say, Japanese nobility, where
frequently if a vassal or soldier had done especially good service for some
noble household he could be adopted into the family and so on, even if he was
of low birth. As a result the Japanese nobility kept getting infusions of new
blood every so often and avoided a number of these inbreeding problems.
==============================================================================
"Zu jeder Zeit, an jeder (sic) Ort, bleibt das Tun | Walter Amos
der Menschen das gleiche..." - Galactic Heroes II | amos@sedl.org