When I do have a second to watch television.

HBO's new news documentary show called Vice that comes on Friday nights is increasingly becoming one of my favorite things on television.  Tonight they covered the poverty in Mumbai, the boys who are increasingly ostracized from the FLDS in Colorado City, Utah and then this small country in the Sahara that has an obesity problem in the midst of a famine because the women force feed themselves to be fat so they can get husbands because if you are fat, it means you are well taken care of... but this growing obesity is causing rising health problems.
Such an interesting mix of journalism, very open, not polished, real... I like it.

I also re-watched the documentary Manhunt which covers the entire time the CIA started looking for Bin Laden, going back to 1995... the entire story is interesting, but what was crazy was the office of female analysts (no joke they were like all females) who tracked Bin Laden down and continually warned that he was about to hit in 2001.  Such a crazy documentary and the work of these analysts is really interesting.


But... I still have one more paper to finish before the end of the semester, a pretty detailed review of In Search of the Racial Frontier by Quintard Taylor.  The book looks at the African American experience in the West from the 16th century to the present... yea... there were a few Africans in the West in the 1500s... crazy.  The book is pretty interesting, I have read up to the Civil War pretty much and the struggles with the states and territories in regards to slavery or the introduction to Anglo-Americans to areas initially inhabited by the Spanish and later the Mexicans and how a lot of the racial identifiers came with the Anglos, along with an erosion of any social status or rights they had prior to that arrival.  The transformation of Texas into an antebellum slave system was really interesting, but also interesting was Utah and its approach to slave laws as opposed to the South.  It is a pretty interesting book actually... just want to get the semester over so I can take a break and read the tons of books I've ordered for the summer.