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So, one of the 100-some categories which have been created in SB’s WordPress system is “Year in Review.” Apparently it’s been used before not once, but twice: two years ago both Charlie and Josh assigned a post to this category. Given that it’s there, then, and that fast away the old year passeth, I suppose I might as well do a 2010 Year in Review of sorts.

I think the lead item, at least in reflecting on 2010, has to be The Gulf Oil Spill by BP.

Be honest, now: it’s hard to even believe that was this year, isn’t it? It feels like it was all so long ago, though of course the consequences are still playing out and will probably continue to do so for years. But it’s long-gone from the public consciousness, in sharp contrast to the weeks (which seemed like months) during which it was a full-scale four-alarm national obsession.

And at this point it’s really hard to avoid wondering, at least quietly, if it might all have been a bit of an overreaction…? Personally I think that it was, and at the same time, was just the opposite. (more…)

I see very little television. I watch a few History Channel shows on the web, and an occasional football or basketball game. But I don’t watch the evening news, or Mad Men, or SNL or whatever else people watch. I don’t claim that this makes me a better person, in any way (I’m not denying myself television because I think doing so is “good for me;” I just have no interest).

But it does make television, when I do see it, awfully strange. Especially television advertising.

For one thing, from what I can tell, if one judges by the assumptions made and promoted by TV commercials during most “mainstream” programming, one gets a very weird and rather dismal impression of male-female relations in American society. The near-exclusively prevailing concept of gender roles seems to depict men as affable-but-dim lunkheads, interested almost entirely in beer and sports. Women, meanwhile, are apparently all ballbusting shrews with no interests whatsoever, other than enforcing their total disapproval of, and maybe occasionally mocking, male behavior.

Presumably of course this is not meant to be taken seriously, but instead, “for laughs.” Ha, ha?

At present, of course, other television advertising is temporarilly crowded out by campaign ads. Most of my exposure to television programming comes while I’m at the Y; there are four TV sets at the front of the fitness area and if each one is showing a different channel, it seems like not a minute goes by without a campaign commercial displayed on at least one set.

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The History Channel has some good shows, these days. I’ve always appreciated History, but back say a dozen years ago we called it “the Nazi channel” and it was not an unfair label. (Not in terms of political content but rather because it seemed like at least nine out of ten programs featured World War II.)

Nowadays, though they may stretch the original concept of History somewhat, they’ve got some good things going on. Iowa’s own American Pickers, the brilliant Pawn Stars and, in its fourth season, Ice Road Truckers.

I do like IRT, a lot. If the show has lost a bit of the raw newness of seasons 1 and 2, well, it has added Lisa Kelly, which is worth quite a bit, in my humble opinion. And paterfamilias Alex’s goofy, barking laugh still brings a smile to my face every time.

Yet, as much as I enjoy the show, I can’t help occasionally considering that all of the daring, the risk-taking, the sheer determination to overcome some of the worst that nature can throw at man, all of that is applied in pursuit of what in the big picture is a really dismally stupid endeavor.

Courage, quick thinking and impressive feats of engineering are combined to maintain an operation up near the frozen top of the world, and for what? For the same thing that similar marvels are harnessed to operate beneath the bottom of the ocean. For the maintenance of an energy supply source which, aside from imperiling human civilization’s future, is simply a dead end.

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