I'm currently watching a TV show that has painstaking applied colour to documentary footage of the first world war - in an effort to let us know what it was really like and to bring the events to life for our media saturdated world.
I'm watching it on my B&W TV.
Which reminds me of my experience of the Solar Eclipse which could be seen in Northern Europe in mid 1999. But, I hear you say, you weren't in Europe in 1999 - you were in Thailand!
I listened to it on BBC long wave radio.
Actually it was a hoot. The announcer announced, "We're all here and it is quite q bright day for this part of the country", then, "I think it is getting a little darker, yes definately darker now", followed by, "It is definately darker now - people around me are quieting, just as people have done for centuries" and, climatically, "It is now quite dark, people are quiet except for cameras and I am fairly sure that the birds have stopped singing-hush-this is quite a moment".
But it couldn't stop there, us LW listeners where talked through the whole, "it is getting ligher now ..." all the way back to daylight. In the end the effect was incredibly effective, perhaps because the absurdity was palpable. Remember it was coupled with the intrigue of listening to long wave radio at all (which is mostly evangelical christian stations broadcasting into China and Burma).
And you've just read about it online ;)
As I recall I was staying in a wooden house outside Chiang Mai living with a Loatian guy who had been a monk, but had left the temple after falling in love with a Canadian women who had, traumatically for him, left - but he didn't want to go.
A link with the Media quirks you ask? Well I stayed about a month but hot-footed it out of there after finding a note book with his writing in it which contained odd bits of prose which referred to things in my life of which I had never spoken with him. I was fairly freaked out.
In the light of day I now suspect that I was talking in my sleep and that he had been jotting things down - but who knows for sure!
Posted by james at July 23, 2003 05:15 PM | TrackBack