Mind the Gap

These two topics are completely unrelated but I've thinking about both of them so they are getting squished together.

• I've been watching Mr. Bean on DVD and it is distributed by A&E Video which means there a a short promotional clip prior to menu which show David Suchet from Poirot and scenes from their excellent adaptation of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth. And I realized that I miss the old A&E. The one that used to show PBS/BBC mysteries and Law and Order (including a "Kids Kill" marathon for one New Year's Eve) and made really good literary adaptions of Jane Eyre, Emma, Tom Jones and Horatio Hornblower. I am not digging the current A&E at all. I will still watch City Confidential or American Justice from time to time, but the rest of the shows are just crap like Criss Angel and Gene Simmons. And the their TV movies are few and far between and terrible. I watched the new Andromeda Strain which was just terrible (and strayed so far from the book that I didn't even watch the 2nd half). So seeing the clips from A&Es glory days (in my opinion) really bummed me out.
  
• The announcements from the Nobel Prize have been made throughout this week and the prize for literature will be made in the next few days. But there is little likelihood that an American writer will receive the prize because the permanent secretary for the association, Horace Engdahl, said that recent American writers are not deserving of the Nobel prize. He claims that ""The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining." This of course has caused a firestorm in the American literary community. Not only are people upset about the insult to some of the great current writers like Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike and Philip Roth (I love his book The Plot Against America), but the Nobel committee has become more political in their choices, especially honoring writers how dislike the US (and I was reading the history of the Nobel Prize for Literature on Wikipedia and that article mentions that the committee strove to be more neutral during and after World War I). Last year's winner Doris Lessing said that the September 11th attacks were "neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as [Americans] think," and said of Americans that "They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be." There is a really great article at Slate.com about this issue (read it here!). I personally hold little stock in the Nobel Prize in any subject because of the lack of acknowledgment for Roslind Franklin's contributions to determining the structure of DNA (she had passed away before Watson and Crick won but she was barely mentioned in their speech) although I did get to hear a lecture from a Nobel Laurete while I was at Iowa.
  

PEGGY: Let's practice. I'll be Kahn. A-hem: You are a dumb redneck!
HANK: That sounds more like Minh.
PEGGY: Leave my wife out of this, hillbilly!