Thank you, Theresa. I just wish I could watch them all now. I did watch the cat, which led on to me watching one of the raw videos, about a child receiving a welcome surprise on seeing his father, who had been serving in the Middle East, a surprise that made the boy cry. Nonetheless, that footage was powerful enough to prompt me to feel so pleased for the kid and his family for the safe return of a loved one, and not feel like I was being manipulated for cynical purposes. Maybe it's because the camera wasn't in the kid's face all the time, because the camera pulled back to show that it was taking place in a classroom with the boy's classmates, one or two of whom seemed near tears too. I don't know, really, but that's how it felt.

At this time of year, when Australian television has moved out of the ratings period for the summer and is inclined to show the dodgier examples of US television production, this is a welcome antidote.

> My first impulse was to wrap this up by saying it’s all very American, [.. snip ...] I think the truth is that it’s all very human.

Bless you. One of my pet peevlets (I feed and groom it regularly, and keep it in a special cage) is reading "it could only happen in America" for quite normal human behaviour.

Even Barack Obama, who I'm still giddily excited about, did it in a speech where he talked about his multiracial background and then tacked an "only in America" onto the end of it. But I'm still glad he was elected.

But enough pre-Christmas grumpiness. Thanks for the vids - I'll watch them at home when I'm not thinking about work stuff (very hard to do just before Christmas!).

And a small Christmas greeting to anyone astronomically inclined: I made Christmas cards this year from the recent conjunction of Jupiter, Venus and the moon, which seemed to be sending an auspicious ascii art message to all:

http://teapot7.com/smiley_small.jpg

These are great! I 'specially love that accent!

Wow - how did you happen to come across our local station's YouTube archives? We love KCCI - it's our favorite news cast. And yes, it's just as much fun to watch live as it is to watch the stories they've posted online. They have a great team, both in front and behind the cameras. It's great to see their hard work get some recognition beyond our meager Iowa borders.

And Michael - what are you talking about "accent"? We don't have any accents in Iowa - it's the rest of the country that talks funny. ;)

I am from the area, and I can certainly attest to the truth of what one interviewee said: "There's not much to really do at the Des Moines airport."

The dude with the accent in the "pigs on the interstate" clip was from Missouri.

I believe I hurt myself laughing at the snake-in-the-pants episode.

Nathaniel: I forget what I was looking at, but I saw "Pigs on the Interstate" in the related videos list and got sucked in.

Those guys don't write and edit like they're putting out a newspaper illustrated with video clips. If you're looking at nighttime footage of a smashed-up semi lit by emergency lights, you don't have to start with a voiceover saying that last night on the interstate there was an MVA involving a semi. One of the standard answers to "Where does the story start?" is "When something irrevocable happens," and that's where they begin, with an on-scene witness saying "That truck jacknifed..."

The multiple descriptions of the accident that follow are like shifting camera angles showing how it developed, and audio moves from one voice to another at the tempo of normal speech. We don't see the aerial shot of the accident scene until we have enough background information to make sense of it, so it acts as a summary rather than a puzzle. Only when the setup is fully established do we get the voice of one of the eyewitnesses saying, "And then I realized what was goin' on, and then I started seein' pigs." Simultaneously, so do we: confused but ambulatory pigs in the foreground, and ominously motionless ones behind them.

The story cycles around through the pigs, then back to the accident, ending with the information that the accident could easily have been a lot worse than it was. The whole thing takes less than a hundred seconds, is entirely told in pictures and eyewitness accounts, and conveys a great deal of information. It's like the difference between a Ken Burns documentary and The History Channel -- Ken Burns gets in three or four times as much information per minute, and the information is more complex, more direct, and more coherent.

The segment about the buzzard is another beaut. The story's summed up in Beth Brown's opening statement: "We want everybody to be happy. We would like this bird to go ... be a vulture." From about 0:45 to 1:24 you get contrapuntal alternating sentences from the reporter, swiftly filling in necessary infobits, and Beth Brown, who gives the pithy color commentary. It's fast, painless, compressed, and memorable, and what more could you ask of language, unless it's that it have internal rhyme? I also appreciate the way they wait until you've been sympathetically watching this bird for a minute and a half before they explain why no one wants to just grab him and take him elsewhere.

I love KCCI's content, but their style gives me the same kind of pleasure I get from the opening minutes of Serenity, or John McPhee's description of geological processes in terms of a fire in a carpet warehouse that eats through the wall into the ice cream factory next door, or the first chapter of the Gospel of John in the KJV where the narrative and the language simultaneously begin in the abstract sublime, and, descending together, become incarnate in the everyday life and speech of this world.

Exposition geek, me.

#8, Teresa -

Thank you for unpacking what was so wonderful about those segments*. I don't normally pay attention to video editing, and in this situation doing it well includes an element of being unobtrusive with it. Even having it called to my attention as noteworthy, all I could see at first was that it wasn't cringeworthy. I'll watch them again tonight with all this in mind.

*Besides the actual content. I did get amusement and warmth for humanity from watching them, no problem.

Teresa, I'm not sure that "gratuitous" is the exact word you want. Sounds like you enjoy these freebies, as I would.

I drank Iowa. Well, I drank the cup labeled Iowa at the election party Josh and I went to. The host made a brownie map of the USA, complete with state capitols marked. It has Alaska and Hawaii, but not the non-state bits. He had fifty cups of varying sizes filled with booze in proportion to the number of electoral votes the states had, and a complicated rotation system for who got to drink which cup. When a state was called, the person whose number it was got the cup. Fortunately, I got Iowa and Maryland, as I am on the small side myself.

Theophylact @ 10: She left a tip (gratuity) in their jar after watching each video.

As a gift, given freely – it's a lovely word, tho' it hops a bit staccato, & doesn't count for damages claims.

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