November 18, 2006

Thanksgiving on the History Channel

From SouthFlorida.com, 11/18/06:

Charting the pilgrims' progressThanksgiving travel can take a lot of the joy out of the holiday. But the worst airport hassles or nightmare interstate traffic jams are nothing compared to the original spirit-sapping journey, which is documented in Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower. The History Channel special effectively melds dramatic re-creations and well-credentialed talking heads, fortified by mood-setting location shooting.

Desperate Crossings is enlightening, entertaining and inarguably timely. However, it wouldn't have suffered from judicious editing to reduce its bloated three-hour length. A little less would have been more--just like Thanksgiving dinner.

2 comments:

Rob said...

Unfortunately, the Leonardo theory is still dubious. See the following pages for details:

http://www.shroud.com/scavone.htm

The Leonardo connection loses virtually its entire scientific underpinning, however, when one notices that the labs are thus only about 5% certain of the extended time span and only 2.5% certain the Shroud could be as late as 1500. They are, after all, 95% certain it was made 1260-1390.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin

It should be noted that Picknett and Prince's theories, appealing as they are to the imagination, are not taken seriously by most academic scholars. They are based upon many suppositions.

Rob said...

For every successful challenge to the status quo you can come up with, I can come up with several unsuccessful challenges to the status quo. For instance, what became of the Mormons' "Indians are a lost tribe of Israel" theory or Erich Van Daniken's "ancient astronauts" theory? Nothing, because there was little or no evidence to support them.