In Praise of History
I admit it, I'm a history fanatic. Give me a well-researched, well-written account of even the most obscure event in world history and I'm happy. Because of this, I'm a huge fan of the History Channel. While their programming is certainly not perfect (too many programs on the history of the Howitzer and such), it's still nevertheless television that never fails to teach me something I didn't know.

One of my favorite of their shows is Battlefield Detectives, a fascinating program that takes some battle (tonight, for instance, there were back-to-back episodes examining the Civil War battles of Antietem and Gettysburg) and explores issues such as how geography, soil conditions, and crowd behavior could have affected the outcome.

There's really no point to this, except to say that it's a good show that definitely deserves a bigger audience than American Idol.