Cultural relevance

I'm not sure how many people managed to catch The New Americans miniseries on PBS when it was on a month or two ago. It's been sitting on our TiVo and we just finished watching the third and final episode last night. (There were three episodes of two hours each.) It was made by the same guy + team that worked on the excellent Hoop Dreams and and more recent and interesting Stevie. The series documents the experience of immigrants moving to the US from several locations around the world: Nigerian political refugees; a Palestinian woman from the West Bank getting married to a Palestinian-American guy who is awful, awful, awful; two Dominican minor-league baseball players; a Mexican laborer trying to move his whole family to the US; and a computer programmer from Bangalore. The stories varied considerably, some of them pretty heart-rending. In any case, if you didn't catch this the first time around, I'd really recommend watching it on a reair (none scheduled right now as far as I can tell) or renting it when it's available. You can read about it here:

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/newamericans/

Also yesterday I finished reading Salt: a World History, by Mark Kurlansky. It turns out that there's a lot to say about salt. (Good read, though. Recommended.)

Thus ends our detour into culturally relevant blogging.

Speaking of things that aren't now and never will be culturally relevant, I was snookered into watching the premiere of North Shore Monday night. Furthermore, we stayed up late to do so. Now I don't want to suggest that it was Chris who snookered me into it, because that wouldn't be fair, even though it's just what you might expect since it was Chris who snookered me into watching The Simple Life and bad dating shows on the WB. No, in this case it was those marketing geniuses at FOX who snookered me into it, even though I knew from the get-go that relying on FOX was a bad idea, and that teenie bopper dramedies on FOX are a bad idea when they don't involve Josh Schwartz, and hence that North Shore would be no The OC. Ah, FOX. They're good at promoting the hell out of loser dreck like The Littlest Groom and Oliver Beene, but creative and wacky stuff like Arrested Development they nearly resign to the death pile.