Back again!

Wow. It has been some time since that last post. Lots of things have taken place.

Tweeting on Twitter has definitely been a past time. It's not that I haven't enjoyed blogging. Twitter is a little more immediate for me since I can actually have conversations rather than wait for someone to maybe read the post and maybe comment. I also don't get spam comments that I have to clear out.

What blogging does allow me to do is to explore an idea more fully than I can in 140 characters.

Social media is a curious animal. There are many who see people using it for anything other than business or making money as not worthy of notice or as flotsam. Especially if they are women and they are not in the coveted mommy blogger cabal. I am not a mommy-at least not yet. I don't know that I would blog about my child(ren) or engage in the communal sharing that I see happening in the blogosphere around that. It's not terrible, but much like as in real life, some women (and some men) think there;s something wrong with you if you don't share yourself or care about certain things.

Well, that's my feeling about that. Still looking for the blogger conference or unconference where people who aren't parent bloggers, overly in love with the code of the platforms and tools, are of a certain ethnicity, but that's not all they blog about and are not obsessed by all things vampire can attend and not feel as if they're the kids that were outside the clique in high school.

Do I have an opinion on Shirley Sherrod, the BP Oil catastrophe, education, Harry Potter, Apple's iphone flip off, the Celtics loss to the Lakers, Lindsay Lohan, Precious, the Twilight saga, The View or the upcoming end of As The World Turns?

Probably. And I'll get to those.

Right now, I'm watching the Pretenders in concert on my local PBS. Unfortunately it's tis the month o beggin' so what is usually a shorter show will be dragged out. Maybe I can blog during these breaks.

By the way, I'm not taking part in it, but there is a blogathon to support various charities. Please visit blogathon.org for more details.

Mammogram-Self Exam Gate

A new finding regarding mammograms and self exams in the battle against breat cancer has come out and many women are not happy about it.

My biggest disagreement I have with the findings is the recommendation that the self exams are useless, even if I grant that mammograms are not safe due to radiation and are expensive (though I think that Viagra sales out distance this). I echo the cry of those who offer proof of the effectiveness of self exams those who are currently alive because they caught breast cancer early because they did a self exam. This list includes the famous: Peggy Fleming, Shirley Temple, etc.

I am also annoyed at the fact that women's health care is usually reduced to birth control (it's only been recently that insurance will cover it), plastic surgery (hard to prove 'medically necessary' vs. 'cosmetic' especially when it comes to breast reduction) and maternity (drop and street them) - not that those aren't important as well. We are still a society that believes that women's health issues are usually "all in their head" and then wonder why they are reluctant to seek help. Never mind the fact that the above mentioned areas of women's health are usually subject to more inapproriate moral judgment than anything that men would suffer from, save HIV/AIDS.

I am increasingly annoyed at this idea that people who show up at the ER are a drain on our system, but on the other hand, they are discouraged from doing anything that is preventative or seeking preventative care because of financial cost and again if they are women, 'it's all in their head."

Here is the article.

Breast Cancer Screening Should Begin at Age 50, Panel Finds:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/health/july-dec09/breastcancer_11-16.html?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=fanpage&utm_campaign=pbs


Excerpt:

"A government medical task force recommended major changes in breast cancer screening guidelines Monday, suggesting that most women should not begin getting routine mammograms until age 50, and then only once every two years.

In 2002, the same panel -- the United States Preventive Services Task Force -- had, with different members, recommended that women receive mammograms every one to two years beginning at age 40.

The panel on Monday also recommended that most women stop getting regular mammograms after age 74, and that doctors should no longer teach women to do breast self-examinations.
Members of the panel, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said that screening for breast cancer too early and too often can lead to false alarms, unnecessary biopsies and unnecessary anxiety for women.

The study is the latest chapter in an ongoing controversy over early screening for breast cancer and other cancers, such as prostate cancer. Such screening saves lives, but in addition to sometimes showing false positives, can also reveal cancers that would have grown so slowly they might not ever need to have been treated. "

The Winter Season of Masterpiece Theater Classic

I caught the promos for the upcoming offerings for Masterpiece Classic last night during 'Waiting For God.' I was disappointed in it even more than I was in my January 4th blog post concerning the upcoming season.

I am not so much disappointed in the 'Celebration of Dickens,' taking place from February-May. With the exception of 'David Copperfield,' (a version that has future 'Harry Potter' stars Maggie Smith and Daniel Radcliffe-a clear bit of shameless tie-in with the 'Half Blood Prince' movie coming out this year) and 'Oliver Twist,' I am pleased that they are airing adaptations of stories by Dickens that aren't as read nowadays as they might have been in the past. An example being the 'Old Curiousity Shop,' which caused a sensation in its day not unlike the 2007 midnight release of 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.' In those days, Dickens published his tales in periodicals in monthly installments and ravenous readers had to be patient as each chapter unfolded at what we would consider now to be a slow and maddening pace. The oft-told story concerning 'Old Curiosity Shop,' is of people rushing to the docks in America as the periodicals were being delivered and asking if 'Little Nell was dead.'

Instead of the umpteeth adaptations of 'Oliver Twist' and 'David Copperfield,' I feel they should have included in their place both 'Bleak House,' (a Dickens adaptation that resuscitated the Masterpiece series recently) and the docudrama that produced in 2002 based on Peter Ackroyd's biography called simply 'Dickens.' Not only was the latter a well done insight into the art and the life of its subject, it also included clips from the film and tv adaptations of his novels, which were used here to also shed some light on certain aspects of his life.

I am disappointed that the upcoming Masterpiece Classic offerings include yet another adaptation of 'Wuthering Heights' and yet another adaptation of 'Sense and Sensibility.' Admittedly, the latter was a part of last year's well received celebration of Jane Austen (known as The Complete Jane Austen), which also resuscitated the Masterpiece franchise in 2008 and so I understand wanting to go with a winner. However, I don't understand the need to air yet another adaptation of 'Wuthering Heights.' I cannot imagine that there were not other adaptations that could have been commissioned or that exist out there that PBS could not use for this series that would not be 'more of the same.' Per the PBS site, they work with "producing partners in the UK" to develop content for these "seasons."
Great Britain is a place of quite a bit of diversity and it seems to me that one way to keep Masterpiece "accessible" and exciting would be not to again, "show more of the same."

There are clearly no stories about 'Hong Kong' between 1912-1997 or of India in the 1840s or of the British colonies in Africa where the protagonist is not Caucasian because:

A) It would mean acknowledging the imperialism of UK's past and
B) it is still a truism that many people will not put themselves in the shoes of someone whose culture is so foreign to them or that they cannot relate to or so it is believed.

I expect I will watch 'Little Dorrit.' According to Wikipedia, the actor that potrayed Charles Dickens in the 2002 docudrama 'Dickens' (Anton Lesser), will be in this version of 'Little Dorrit.' He was very good in the former and as an avid Dickens fan, I expect he will be as good in the latter. It is something to look forward to I suppose.

The new Masterpiece Theater season

Tonight, Masterpiece Theater features something from it's 'Classic' series, The tale is 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles,' which was written by Thomas Hardy and published in 1897. It drew much criticism as its heroine had premarital sex and was still portrayed as sympathetic.

I wish I could be more excited or engaged about this story since Hardy wrote such powerful stories. I suppose I feel that since Masterpiece Theater has changed reinvented itself over the past two years, that it could broaden its scope of stories that it presents. A very popular series of recent years for PBS has been African-American Lives, presented by noted scholar Henry Louis Gates, who in the 1980s helped to publish great literary works of Black Women through the Oxford University Press. I am puzzled why none of those stories make it to Masterpiece Theater. Why not a story like 'Our Nig' or 'Iola Leroy' or 'Contending Forces'?

For Masterpiece Contemporary, there are no dearth of titles either. PBS saw fit to air the Tony Hillerman adaptations, which were fairly faithful and no less entertaining. There are other such stories out there.

It may seem as if I am advocating for more productions to be aired that feature more people of colour as central characters rather than sidekicks or magical Negros or creatures to be rescued or worse yet, invisible. You would be correct. May some of these stories are coming down the pipe. If they are, I take exception to them being aired during certain times of the year. Not all stories or issues having to do with African Americans need to be aired in February, just like all stories having to do with Native Americans don't need to be only aired in November.

I know that money is tight for PBS. I do feel that if we stop being spoon fed these stories which are just more whiter shades of pale, that when PBS stations ask for pledges, more people will be willing to give because they will see that their diversity message is not lip service after all.