Virginia Is For Families

Last night I was glued to the tube watching Frontline and their documentary about life in China. It is not reality tv. It is harsh reality television.

It is “Thank God I don’t live there” television. I was walking around today thinking about the young woman who had to fight off her parents and her community to avoid an arranged marriage. And finally managed to do it.

The alternative? She has a job working in the city in some sort of high tech factory. And she works eleven hours per day seven days per week. Her task is to put four wires into a receptacle six hundred times per hour. That is ten times per minute for eleven hours. Over and over again.

Maybe she gets a half hour for lunch.

But the good news is that she meets someone she genuinely likes and they fall in love. So she has some happiness in her life. And she is a cute little thing. I feel like sending her a wedding present.

She will probably insert millions of wires into receptacles before she is done.

AAggghhhhhhhh.

Anyway. Moving on. There are many interesting characters that we discover. There is a young guy with a winning smile and a very attractive shirt who plans to tailor shirts for individuals and sell them on the internet. And the next time we see him he has ten women working on sewing machines and boxes of shirts ready to go. Amazing!

He becomes a Christian and seems totally satisfied. There’s no girlfriend in the picture so he doesn’t have to worry about supporting a family. It’s just him and dear old mom.

Smart guy!

Most of them are not so lucky. Loneliness takes its toll. But everything revolves around money. Relationships suffer. It’s a hard life. I couldn’t handle it. I would have to take a slow boat to the United States. And that option is available to some of them. But the parents exert an amazing influence on them and they stay.

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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/youngchina/

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How did I miss this?  I don’t know.  But it’s funny and maybe somebody else missed it too.  So here it is.  David Cook, the American Idol winner, is being interviewed by Kimberly Caldwell and takes the opportunity to ask her out.

That’s the first time I have ever seen that done. There have been some marriage proposals go down on live television.  But this is much more serious!  A request for a date is a major opportunity to be rejected and there is no silver lining.

Do I have to explain that?  So moving on here is the video.   I was trying to catch up on David’s activities and he has been to the Walmart deal and the Tonight Show.  You can see those here if you are interested.  But this is the one that is most fun imho.

OOoooops. I left my PlugonHogDetector on for a few hours while I was off getting lost in my bookmarks. That’s not good. It leaves all these funny numbers on your blog and on top of other stuff. But all it is really doing is discovering how fast your blog is loading. So you don’t use too much CPU.

So your host doesn’t shut you down in the middle of writing a post…

Here is where it lives in case anybody would like to try it. Just please remember to turn it off after you are done using it so it doesn’t make your blog look like it was hacked.

Nobody has commented on my new poem I see. And probably NOBODY EVER WILL. Why?

I wonder. . .could it be the subject matter? No. Not possible. I see this stuff every day all over the television. Maybe it’s just a lousy poem. Or maybe everybody is outside doing fun things like I should be doing.

Are you having any trouble with plugins lately?  Do you ever feel like you have too many?

Tomorrow evening is the season finale of The Tudors.

Do you know what that means? Yes my friends. Henry VIII is going to have Ann killed. But that is not the unusual part. Lovers quarrel and kill each other all the time.

Henry on the other hand manages to kill his wife after he obtains a legal document granting him permission to do it. And he convinces thousands of his fellow citizens that it is a good idea for their queen to be beheaded.

They all have a party. And then she is escorted to the block and they watch as a guy with a mask chops her head off. A remarkable precedent is set and as we see in the next two centuries one that is not forgotten. First the queen. Then the king.

All of this pretty much blows my mind.

Ann should have known it was time to RUN long before this fateful day. Here is a portion of a love letter Henry wrote to her years earlier. There are love letters between the two that have been saved, ironically enough, in the Vatican Library. The love smitten King of England says. . .

“No more to you at this present mine own darling for lack of time but that I would you were in my arms or I in yours for I think it long since I kissed you. Written after the killing of an hart at a xj. of the clock minding with God’s grace tomorrow mightily timely to kill another: by the hand of him which I trust shortly shall be yours.”

Henry R.

Nice. He was probably trying to tell her something.

“I love you my dear. Run like a deer! I find it necessary to kill things when I am thinking of you.”

It really is a sad tale. And a true one. I have to give Showtime credit for making history come alive in this instance. I am sure there are lots of inaccuracies but history is full of those. I give them credit for trying.

Isn’t it ironic that these two produced one of the great rulers of all time in Queen Elizabeth I.

Here is some more information about Ann Boleyn and her life.

http://englishhistory.net/tudor/monarchs/boleyn.html

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Do you enjoy history when it is brought to television? Are there any shows that you feel have been particularly well done?

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