Ars Mortifera

The target of this post is appropriate for anchorbutt, but my prose can not rival that of tormp's previous post, so I'll just link on through.

national pornographic on youtube

national geographic has a lot of content hosted on youtube. the presentation has been foxnewsinated for the youtube generation, albeit in a sad way that suggests discomfort with the whole enterprise.

EXHIBIT A: LAGOMORPH DEFILED TO SATISFY POPULAR BLOODLUST

discussion / spoiler alert
What the hell is dad thinking? "My daughter doesn't know yet, so I wanted to, you know..."? NO! How many sane ways can you complete that sentence? ZERO. Also, aren't 5-year-olds all internet-savvy now? Seeing "Thumper" disintegumented on YouTube over and over again will be less traumatic than confronting her erstwhile friend's return to the void? Asshole.

I think the subject matter and production here seems geared to match TLC-level "edutainment": a presentation of tawdry subject matter whose entertainment value clearly lies in schadenfreude or other base titillation, and not in the, eh, noble facade of learning something stimulating about taxidermy.

EXHIBIT B: WHEN CETACEANS ATTACK

It's a clever tactic, anthropomorphizing the side that wins from the first couple of frames. This reminds me of an interaction I had with Kyl's uncle, over an adorable new calf that was stumbling around their farm in NE Ohio. "Did you give him a name?" "Lunch."

Seriously, this is not the N.G. that I grew up with: the dispassionate egghead explication attending hours of nothing but blank-eyed lizards clambering over dry dirt and rocks, punctuated by fleeting moments of mind-rending horror. To what end is this progress? John Madden narrates the Serengeti?

Administrivia

OK, I think if you scroll down and look on the left side of the Anchorbutt page, you'll now find not one but two atom feeds: one for posts and one for comments. Blogger's help was a bit misleading, but I think I guessed my way into the right thing. The comments feed seems to just be a chronological list of comments, without the context of the original post, so that's a bit less than completely desirable.

Maybe one of my fellow anchorbutters is smarter than I am and can make it more gooder.