Twenty-two minutes worth your time

I found this 1965 profile of Peter Jennings that originally aired on CBC (Canadian) Television. The profile presents a day in the life of Peter Jennings six months after he was first hired by ABC and moved from Canada to the US, and gives an interesting behind-the-scenes at network news in 1965, and, I don't know, I found it pretty riveting and definitely worth the 22 minutes it takes to watch it.

I don't know exactly why I've found myself marginally obsessed with reading about Jennings since he died. I think it's the suddenness of what happened to him. He found out he had lung cancer in April, and four months later he was gone. And he surely had every resource at his disposal, I'm sure everything that could have been done was done, and still it wasn't enough.

I feel like, honestly, I'm a lot less interested in the world than a lot of my peers. On any given day, there are lots of stories in the newspaper that I'm not particularly motivated to read. Even the war in Iraq -- and it's so wrong to say this, I know, and I genuinely feel stupid for not being more engaged in what's going on than I am. I mean, I know there's scary stuff happening, and I should care about it, and I should at least know enough for intelligent cocktail party conversation, but I don't really. I know enough to fake it, but not to really talk intelligently about what's going on.

Yet the Peter Jennings thing grabs me and I'll spend two hours reading literally everything I can find. Columbine did the same thing, back in 1999. I found it fascinating. I read the 940-page report, or however long it was, with the schematic diagrams and the timeline of how everything happened, and went to the websites of the victims, and just found that really hit me in the part of the brain that makes me want to know everything about it. I had a pretty positive high school experience. I did well, I had a bunch of friends, I don't think I know anyone who wanted to blow up the school, or anything close. But that we live in a world where these things can happen, I don't know. It was really scary but grabbed me in such a way that I wanted to know more.

I don't know where this post was supposed to go. I just wanted to flag the video clip. There's so much stuff out there. I don't know what people did before the Internet.