"Kim Kardashian: How do Armenians feel about her fame?"

BBC homes in on the question everyone is asking.

"Kim is an Armenian and famous in the world, so this is enough for every Armenian to be proud of Kim. But because of cultural and traditional issues, they do not want to accept that she is an Armenian," [says BBC monitoring journalist Armen Shahbazian].

Stories about Kardashian are frequently a topic for comedy programmes, he says.

"They always compare the Armenian French singer Charles Aznavour, who they are proud of, with Kim Kardashian, who is seen in a more negative light. They don't want her to present their country," he says.

Deep into this article we get to some comparative material about what the people of Gibraltar think about fashion designer John Galliano and what the people of the Isle of Man think of Dan Quayle, who — "was internationally ridiculed when it appeared he could not spell the word 'potato.'"

"Earlier today, certain realms were affected by an in-game exploit..."

"... resulting in the deaths of player characters and non-player characters in some of the major cities," reports the BBC. This is news, right?

"So there you go: an internet troll. That's what they look like."

I thought this was a joke, but it's not. The BBC tracks down some piddling internet troll and confronts him.

"Poisoned cat stew 'killed tycoon.'"

Strange headline ranks second on the "Most Popular" list at BBC.com.

"I'm about as secular as a person could reasonably be..."

"... but not secular enough to grumble about other people's enjoyment of what they regard as the birthday celebration for their spiritual savior," says Geoffrey K. Pullum, at Language Log.

From my kitchen here in Edinburgh right now, I can hear the bell of Broughton St. Mary's Church calling the flock in for the Christmas morning service, and it doesn't make me bristle. And I don't mind the huge Norwegian Christmas tree that is always erected on The Mound behind the Scottish National Gallery (a gift from Hordaland in Norway in memory of close ties during the Second World War) being called a Christmas tree. The nativity scenes put up here and there annoy me to the same extent as the menoras in some windows, which is to say, absolutely not at all.

The Christmas Eve carol service from King's College Cambridge, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, is worth hearing by anyone who appreciates high-quality choral music, and if some public funds are used to get the outside broadcast trucks to Cambridge and the mikes set up, I say good, spend it. The BBC's short sermon each morning, "Thought For The Day", studiously circulates through Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Islam, so determined are they to be eclectic in their spiritual uplift. I disappear into the shower rather than hear the platitudes, but I'm not inclined to campaign for removing them from the airwaves. Considering that the UK actually is a theocracy (the reigning monarch is both head of state and head of the uniquely established church that the state recognizes), it's all pretty relaxed and inclusive and not worth a serious person's protest time.

The UK actually is a theocracy... but a serious, completely secular person shouldn't mind it at all.

"Defecating dog sparks US shootout."

Why did BBC publish this story? It's not exactly big international news!

Two neighbours in the US state of Mississippi drew weapons and fired at each other as an argument over a defecating dog ran out of control.... injuries are not life-threatening... "Just meet me at the levee and I'll shoot you down."...

I think the BBC is into stoking anti-hillbilly bigotry. Bob Wright was doing that yesterday:

"The man drove up to a Hell's Angels clubhouse near Munich, wearing only a pair of shorts and carrying a puppy."

"He dropped his shorts and threw the dog, escaping on a bulldozer from a nearby building site."

The news from Europe, as reported by the BBC.

"Straight away Jamie said 'that looks like God', and my other boys (Robbie, four, and Tomas, 11) even said they could see a face."

"People might think I'm nuts, but I like to think it's Jesus looking out for us. We've had a tough couple of months; my mum's been really ill and it's comforting to think that if he is there, he's watching over us."

And by "there," she means in the lid of a jar of Marmite.

I'm only linking to this because it's on BBC.com, where it's ranking #4 on the "most read" stories list (and thereby encouraging the once-proud network to print more nonsense).

"[T]he BBC has become this country's most pernicious climate-change-denying media outlet in the UK."

"The BBC is continually painted as some liberal-left dominated haven, but it remains deeply institutional and rightwing."

"The case against inviting the BNP to appear on Question Time is a case for censorship..."

"... the case, in other words, that (in the opinion of those who make it) the BNP's policies are so abhorrent and so liable to sow hatred and division that they should be excluded from this form of public discourse altogether.... [I]t is unreasonable and inconsistent to take the position that a party like the BNP is acceptable enough for the public to vote for, but not acceptable enough to appear on democratic platforms such as Question Time. If there is a case for censorship, it should be debated and decided in parliament."

A hot debate in the UK. 

More here.

"Will the BBC save Jack from falling down the hill, find Little Boy Blue's sheep and keep unhygienic Goosey Goosey Gander out of my lady's chamber?"

I think all those nursery rhymes seem too gruesome (or filthy) for children. Kudos to the BBC for protecting us from the despair that is Humpty Dumpty.

"TV is starting to feel waaay too slooooow."

Michael Parsons writes:

The complex fractal circular time-shifted way in which my media habits now play out – hear about Tina Fey doing a Saturday Night Live impression of Sara Palin on an RSS feed, watch the clip at work on YouTube, then go home to watch the same clip being shown on The Daily Show, and then read online about what happened on the daily show via an RSS feed – means that my experience of the election had a multithreaded, always-on quality I’ve simply never experienced before. ... [M]y home network went on the fritz at 2am on election night, leaving me with only my handheld Twitter and the TV. I felt positively unplugged....

The advantages of web technology here are clearly to do with intimacy, connection, and immediacy. Twitter is a great way to consume huge amounts of information when you’re trying to understand a complex real-time process.... However, I was also struck by a much bigger, tonal difference. The BBC ‘s snooze-making election coverage was shamefully poor, and seemed to consist of a sleeping Dimbleby and a bobbing Vine, along with a few other B-grade pundits who gave the evening all the drama and insight of a minor English by-election. Broadcast TV, with its narrow tone, its low-brow certainties, just felt hopelessly out of date....

Yeah, well, that was England. We had holograms. And Parsons knows that -- perhaps because the flashy high-tech junk on American TV was mocked on the first segment of "The Daily Show" the day after the election. (Watch it here, starting at 2:48.)

You can tell TV has a sort of blurry panicked fear that the web is eating its lunch. Something Must Be Done. This is why TV presenters used daft gizmos – swingometers, touch-screen displays, even in CNN’s case, holograms, to try and stay down with the tech kids. This is like trying to be an opera singer by putting on weight, mistaking an unrelated symptom for a fundamental cause.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade says:

"This is like trying to be an opera singer by putting on weight..."

TV: Wait! It's not over until the fat lady sings.

Us: But she can't sing, she's just fat...

It's over.

AND: XWL says the holograms were a lie:

[T]he so-called holograms were simply 2D images superimposed onto the TV broadcast.

The images were in fact tomograms, or images captured from all sides - in this case by 35 high-definition cameras set in a ring inside a special tent - reconstructed by computers and displayed on the screen.

Tomograms!

Finally, a post about Georgia.

(Via Wonkette.)

I'll have a post on Pakistan when Musharraf eats an article of his clothing on camera.

Euthanasia problems.

Driving through the snow just now and listening to BBC radio, I heard the tail end of a discussion about euthanasia. A man, who sounded perfectly cheerful and physically well, was talking about how he missed his dead wife and how he'd accomplished what he wanted in life. He was ready to close the book on life and thought he should be able to get a prescription for death with dignity. There was an expert on the show, a doctor who worked under the euthanasia regime in the Netherlands, and he said that even in his country that man would not be able to have what he wanted, because the law limited him to killing patients with physical illnesses. "It's a problem," he said. It's a problem!

Now, connected to the internet, I'm searching the BBC site for that program. I can't find it, but I see is this article about a woman with a frightful tumor on her face who sought euthanasia:

Former schoolteacher Chantal Sebire, a mother of three, was found dead on Wednesday after a court rejected her request to let doctors help her die....

Ms Sebire, 52, had appealed on French television last month for the right to die, saying she could no longer see properly, taste or smell. She described how children ran away from her in the street.

"It would be absurd to say that you can’t stick something under the fingernails, smack them in the face."

Antonin Scalia lets slip a quote that will enhance the loathing among those who loathe him but that others will easily guess comes from a discussion of the "ticking time-bomb" hypothetical.

The whole context, with audio and transcript, is at the link. Scalia is making the point that Bill Clinton, among many others, has made:

BBC: It’s a question that’s been raised by Alan Derschowitz and other people — this idea of ticking bomb torture. It’s predicated on the basis that you got a plane with nuclear weapons flying toward the White House, you happen to have in your possession — hooray! — the person that has the key information to put everything right, and you stick a needle under his fingernail — you get the answer — and that should be allowed?

SCALIA: And you think it shouldn’t?

BBC: All I’m saying about it, is that it’s a bizarre scenario, because it’s very unlikely that you’re going to have the one person that can give you that information and so if you use that as an excuse to permit torture then perhaps that’s a dangerous thing.

It's an old problem, and I've heard it discussed many times, and frankly what surpises me is not what Scalia said but how smart and articulate the BBC interviewer is. (Here's the whole interview, and you can see the interviewer's name is Clive Coleman.)

It's not just the classy British accent — which so often befogs the minds of Americans. It's the fast, articulate speech, the way he's unfazed when the Supreme Court Justice strikes at him with a question, and his instant formulation of a pithy and cogent response. The typical American journalist would harumph something about who's the interviewer and who's the interviewee.