Posted on January 17, 2016 at 12:00 pm
This is the award show I love best because I get to vote! This year for the first time the Critics Choice TV and movie awards will be given out at the same ceremony. Be sure to tune in!
And you can send a drink to your favorite nominees and get a thank you back with #TweetADrink — During commercial breaks, fans watching at home #tweetadrink and then receive an autographed “thank you” photo.
Posted on January 16, 2016 at 12:32 pm
Army Rangers, Seal Team members, and other special forces tell the stories of some of their most dangerous and exciting missions in “Live to Tell,” from producer Peter Berg (“Friday Night Lights,” “Lone Survivor”), on the History Channel. Tomorrow night’s episode is ‘Afghanistan 2005″: A quick reaction force of Army Rangers sets out on a mission to rescue the lone survivor of a SEAL team that came under attack in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Posted on January 15, 2016 at 3:39 pm
Morgan Freeman’s new series for the National Geographic Channel is The Story of God, premiering April 3, 2016. Freeman, who has played God in films, has put together footage and interviews that cover all religions, cultures, and eras, even the future.
Each episode of The Story of God with Morgan Freeman is centered on a different big question about the divine:
Creation – Are there similarities among the religious creation stories from around the world? How do they compare with the scientific theory of the creation of the cosmos and the dawn of civilization?
Who Is God? – How has the perception of God evolved over human history? Is God just an idea, and if so, can we find evidence of a divine presence in our brains?
Evil – What is the root of evil and how has our idea of it evolved over the millennia? Is the devil real? The birth of religion may be inextricably tied to the need to control evil.
Miracles – Are miracles real? For many believers, miracles are the foundation of their faith. Others regard miracles as merely unlikely events on which our brains impose divine meaning. Belief in miracles, however we define them, could be what gives us hope and drives us to turn possibility into reality.
End of Days – Violent upheaval and fiery judgment fill popular imagination, but was the lore of apocalypse born out of the strife that plagued the Middle East two millennia ago? The true religious meaning of the apocalypse may not be a global war, but an inner revelation.
Resurrection – How have beliefs in the afterlife developed, and how has our reaction to the afterlife changed the way we live this life? Now that science is making such rapid advances, we may soon be confronted with digital resurrection. What will that do to our beliefs?
To explore each of these topics, host and narrator Freeman went on the ground to some of humanity’s greatest religious sites, including Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, India’s Bodhi Tree, Mayan temples in Guatemala and the pyramids of Egypt. He traveled with archaeologists to uncover the long-lost religions of our ancestors, such as those at the 7500 B.C. Neolithic settlement Çatalhöyük in Turkey. He immersed himself in religious experiences and rituals all around the world, and became a test subject in scientific labs to examine how the frontiers of neuroscience are intersecting the traditional domain of religion.
The Story of God with Morgan Freeman Season 1 on DVD January 10, 2017 and Season 2 premiers on National Geographic, January 16th.
Posted on January 10, 2016 at 2:02 pm
The New York Times reports that “Web Junkie,” a special to be shown January 11, 2016 on PBS, has some disturbing data for parents about the impact of screen time on children.
Excessive use of computer games among young people in China appears to be taking an alarming turn and may have particular relevance for American parents whose children spend many hours a day focused on electronic screens. The documentary “Web Junkie,” to be shown next Monday on PBS, highlights the tragic effects on teenagers who become hooked on video games, playing for dozens of hours at a time often without breaks to eat, sleep or even use the bathroom. Many come to view the real world as fake.
Chinese doctors consider this phenomenon a clinical disorder and have established rehabilitation centers where afflicted youngsters are confined for months of sometimes draconian therapy, completely isolated from all media, the effectiveness of which remains to be demonstrated.
This is consistent with the findings in Sherry Turkle’s new book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age
There is an amazing statistic that there has been a 40 percent decline in all the ways we know how to measure empathy among college students in the past 20 years and most of it in the past 10 years. That’s just an alarming number. And another fascinating experiment is that if you leave college students alone and just ask them to sit without a device and without a book for six minutes they will administer electric shocks to themselves rather than just sit quietly with their own thoughts. So there are two parallel developments: incapacity to emphasize and a lack of capacity for solitude.
I think these things go together because both of them are what you would expect if from the very youngest stages we give people a screen to go to at the moment they feel the tiniest boredom. And that’s what’s happening. There are screens for baby bouncers. There are screens on potty trainers. There are robots that will read to your child instead of you sitting and talking to your child. So when I first got into this project I was asked to consult by a middle school. It was just a regular middle school and their teachers were saying that the students were not behaving for example the way 12-year olds should behave on the playground. They were behaving more like seven and eight year olds. That is to say they were being cruel to each other and excluding each other and didn’t seem to be able to put themselves in the place of other children. They couldn’t seem to be able to imagine what other children felt like which of course is the signal accomplishment of empathy.
Posted on January 7, 2016 at 11:24 am
We mourn the loss of Pat Harrington, best remembered as “One Day at a Time’s” Dwayne Schneider, the building superintendent who thought of himself as a ladies man, but had a genuine affection for the single mom played by Bonnie Franklin and her two rambunctious daughters.
The Washington Post’s Adam Bernstein has a warm appreciation for Harrington, reporting that he urged that the original idea for the character, a lecherous married man, be shifted to something more likeable. “On Mr. Harrington’s insistence, Schneider was recast as a bachelor with a comically grandiose sense of his appeal to the opposite sex.”
Norman Lear talks about casting him in the show.
Here’s the opening:
May his memory be a blessing.
