BBC - Coal/God - Israeli 'thug' on 'death-bed'

The BBC ranks pretty highly in my books I have to say. It is an institution that apart from the odd accusation here and there has very resiliently stood up to its impartial brief and public scrutiny and is possibly the most respected 'global' broadcasting operation. When people complain about the cost of the licence fee here in the UK, it is worth stacking up what we get for that. All the TV, radio and excellent web services - and always seemingly bang on the button with the latest technological advances to make sure, most of the time, the audience gets the best experience.

Undoubtedly even some of the stuff it has been highly praised for does not meet with my particular taste, however it is very hard to knock Strictly Come Dancing when, in the schedules, it is up against ITV's The X-Factor, as horrifically similar they may be in some ways than others.

The BBC is still championing very high quality drama, natural history and comedy for that £10 per month, though. And what about the bought in/collaborative content we get for the money? If anyone has seen Rome on BBC2, I understand, being an HBO production, you would have had to pay good money to get to see it in the USA. This has been one of the highlights of the BBC2 schedule of late, a vivid masterpiece of historical recreation, looking, broadly, much more believable than things we have seen before, whether it really is or not, and I know the 'historical' knives are out over inaccuracies and 'artistic licence', but hey, the joy of these times is there's a lot we don't know for certain, right?

Also on Mondays at the moment we can see Balderdash and Piffle at 2100hrs. This is a splendid show, asking us to look at origins of words within the English language and trying to engage us into finding earlier evidence of use of particular words, for example, 'Ploughman's Lunch' in the first show, to help make the Oxford English Dictionary more accurate.

This is wonderfully worthy I think, although the main presenter, Victoria Coren, disappointed me a little because she has been to that apparently recently invented BBC course where they ask women to either a) position their bodies slightly off angle to camera and then look straight to camera or b) position their bodies to camera and then tilt their head slightly to the right as they address the camera. I can only call this pose 'coquettish' and it seems to be a relatively recent invention employed mainly by regional BBC news presenters, some TV presenters and the like. I haven't seen men doing it, but who knows, it is rather off-putting and obviously pandering to some nonsense 'engage the public' factor. Victoria, if you are reading, you seem delightful in this prgramme, for all the slightly 'forced' nonsense you seem to have been asked to do. You have a difficult job though, trying to engage a public who increasingly are interested in fewer and fewer words, so who am I to stop you throwing a bit of 'flirt' at the subject? For what it's worth though, I for one love the English language, yet tend to hear less of what you say when you stare into the camera like a cheeky little minx.

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Do you remember hearing when you were a child that the first time you hear a new word, you will hear it again within 24 hours?

I thought of that when the sad news of this US coal mining disaster in West Virginia. Incidentally, almost every time I hear of something happening in the US I wonder where the bloody hell it is, and that's with an A Level in Geography. Make me a little more understanding every time someone takes the piss about US citizens who don't know where places are either. Apart from GW Bush, of course, because he has no excuse.

Anyway, for whatever reasons, it was harsh these people were told their loved ones were alive, when that was not the case, however it is interesting they went off, for some part - although this was obviously very 'report-worthy' - on some singing of hymns 'God' stuff and there was talk of miracles. I wonder if this was all reported the same way in the US because I feel the way we see these things, in our slightly more secular society, these people looked a bit simple. The crushing blow was when they were told they had been mis-informed and some openly started to question the existence of 'God' because it seemed he had abandoned them. I couldn't watch it any more. The background of the mine's recent sale and alleged neglect said most of what I needed to hear.

The fact is though, just like the US military, these are apparently the only jobs for 'good' money a lot of people in these areas have access to. I guess you often need all the help you can get to put yourself in spots like that, which is perhaps why many of these people seem to seize on to their faith.

Coal has come onto the energy agenda again, very recently. As oil and gas reserves are depleted, some see a race between the US and China to build new coal-fired power stations - a resource they both have plenty of without depending on other countries - as a very possible outcome to the current energy debate.

In my UK-based ignorance, the weird thing is, I hadn't even considered the US had coal-fired power stations until today.

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Ariel Sharon is on his 'death-bed' apparently.

This man is responsible for suffering on quite a serious scale. In his career he has been responsible for civilian massacre and trauma and culpable of uprooting tens of thousands of Palestinians through settlement expansion. I hope whoever comes after him will have a greater eye on peace and understsanding than he has. I suggest they bury him under his big, fat, illegal concrete wall. Once he's dead, of course.