Horribly behind...
Sorry I haven't updated in a while. I'll get to it very shortly.
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Sorry I haven't updated in a while. I'll get to it very shortly.
I was watching Jon Stewart last night on "The Daily Show," which has pretty much become a ritual for me at this point, and I had a vision.
The vision takes place 10, maybe 20 years in the future. A grayed, weary Jon Stewart sits alone in a bombed-out, crumbling television studio. There is no audience, there is no crew. There is just Jon, staring into a lone, barely functioning camera. The humour is gone, but the look of dread and exasperation lingers as Jon, wondering if he's the only person left in the world who cares, mutters something into the camera about trying to put on a public affairs programme.
The vision came to me as Stewart was interviewing a grayed, weary Tom Fenton, a very, very serious former CBS News reporter whose new book Bad News laments the decline of news gathering. It's not that Fenton was an exceptional interviewee, nor is it that he was saying anything particularly new or interesting. It's just that once or twice a week, Stewart (or his talent booker) seems to be trying to feed viewers somebody with a very serious point of view on the decline of television news.
OK, not necessarily surprising when you consider that his show is a parody of television news. I get that. Despite the claims last fall that Stewart "jumped the shark" right about the time he called Tucker Carlson a "dick" on CNN, I think Stewart has plenty of upside left. It's been well reported that an absurd percentage of college-age kids use his programme as their primary source of news.
But what shows through on every broadcast is that he does care about what's going on, and despite the laughs, he takes it all rather seriously. And if his programme were to evolve into something more serious than it is, I don't think I would be terribly surprised.
For those of you who live in Europe and don't get to watch his show, you can download it daily via BitTorrent. Check out http://www.btefnet.net, and you sbould find the torrent files there.
Got back yesterday from a week in Serre Chevalier, near Briançon France, on the Italian border. Before I comment on the resort itself, however, I'd like to pose a question to the weather gods:
Did you have a good laugh?
February saw record cold temperatures and snowfalls throughout the Alps, along with something like 10 days of consecutive snowfall in Paris and London: two cities whose average combined annual snowfall generally is thinner than the layer of dust on top of my refrigerator.
Yet, from 23 January to 3 March, not a flake of new snow fell on Serre-Chevalier. 100cm of new snow fell practically everywhere else in the Alps the week before we arrived.
I would love to rave about Serre-Chevalier, which is actually a really nice resort. It boasts incredibly long runs and varied ski terrain. There are lovely alpine villages on and at the foot of the mountain. It wasn't overly crowded. If I had one issue, other than the lack of snow, it's that the resort's lifts seem to be trapped in the late 1980s -- no high-speed chairs and far too many J-bar type tow lifts.
In the end, it finally snowed on Wednesday. Just a couple inches, but more than enough to put a skiable surface on top of the ice and rock. The last couple of days were quite nice, and I'd love to go back and visit Serre-Chevalier when they've had a heavy snow season.