As a Canadian tax-payer who helped fund this public television & government subsidied piece of excrescence, I unreservedly apologize for foisting its buffoonery on the world. It has remarkably little to do with actual history, other than a loose plot-line and a few characters named after historical figures; certainly none of the characters are much like their namesakes, and even the costuming is not particularly accurate.

I was really looking forward to it too, but what a piece of crud. The other half of the production was some Irish tv station; the Irish have little reason to love the English generally and the Tudors particularly, and I took this cartoonishly bad series as yet another f-you to the Brits.

Sorry, it IS a soap opera, pure and simple, a costumed bodice ripper with all the subtlety of a mack truck and historical accuracy you would expect of a novel with bare-chested long-haired man embracing a fainting beauty on the cover.

Be warned.

Not that this is strictly relevant, but you maybe misapprend Alberta a little bit. As an Albertan, let me assure you it ain't Kansas anymore. You have as much money sloshing around for long enough, like we do, things change pretty fast.

In fact, it might indeed skew the data, but maybe not in the direction you might anticipate. The workforce in Alberta tends to be be younger than the rest of the country, imported from the rest of the country (and world, over a quarter of Calgarians, for example, weren't born in Canada), and has a far higher birthrate than their opposite numbers from the rest of the country. It might not be geographically Vancouver or Toronto, but demographically it is; I would bet a significant chunk of the legal profession hereabouts is from one or the other.

Your typical lawyer in Calgary or Edmonton would be younger, probably from elsewhere, and likely engaged in reproduction. Though perhaps more likely to be a single woman maybe, we have a bit of a gender imbalance in 25 - 35 year olds going on, as all the guys are up in Fort MacMurray mining for oil.

The whole thing takes little account of the difference between "serious" academic history (very boring) and popular history (which ranges from poor to actually pretty excellent). The distinction is actually relatively modern.

Similarly with the novel, we now have a very wide gulf between the "serious" or "literary" and popular (often "genre") novel. This is also something of a modern phenomena. What has been particularly striking, in both history and fiction, has been the near death of the middle-brow work, at least outside of some kinds of genre fiction like sci-fi and crime/espionage.

There is another point-- history can be portrayed in a variety of ways-- a lot of people get their historical knowledge from historical fiction. Which ranges in quality from wretched (bodice rippers, conspiracy crap like Da Vinci Code) to pretty excellent actually (I Claudius, Hornblower).

And history books per se range from dry as dust academic histories to ripping popular narratives, and both of these range in quality from the excellent to the wretched.

Once you take into account all the subdivisions, what are the gender splits of the audience and writers then? Probably not all that meaningful I would expect.

So it is a rather complex picture, about which great sweeping generalizations are being made. ("There are two kinds of people: those for whom there are only two kinds of people, and those for whom there are not.")

The difference is, that Obama has backers who say things that are often arguably true, in incendiary and/or clunky ways: Wright is a preacher and black community activist, McPeak is an actual soldier; neither is a politician, nor a candidate.

Clinton backers, and notably she herself with that lovely stand-up for Obama's Christianity, are silky, smooth, and making claims based on materials taken out of context, that are untrue. Which one is more McCarthyesque?

I started out as being pretty comfortable with either one of them, with a slight edge to Clinton. As the campaign has gone on, I have swung more and more to Obama as Clinton gets more desperate and lower and lower. Right now, it's clear that she isn't going to win, and while continuing to campaign on might serve to whip up Dem interest and passion, this kind of campaign is doing nothing by damage and helping McCain.

Plus it's probably a good business move for most major web sites to start playing the multimedia game. Web sites without multimedia content risk being left behind.

Yeah, Salon wouldn't want to lose the illiterate demographic (and the groovy pron music aficionados like myself), too bad the deaf guys have to get stuffed.

It all kind of reminds me of a cargo cult or the madness of the dot.com bubble: just add this cool new fetish you don't really understand or need to your website and coolness and cash will be yours through some magic unexplainable process.

Well, it's a little harder to cut and paste distortions, stupidity, and blind partisanship, when it is in video format, which is why it is a favourite of ranters and character assassins you see on the right. You want to use it right, Ms. Walsh, you shouldn't simply repeat what you have already written: not only is that pointless, you lose the whole value of the tool.

"I'd like to nominate this Friday as National Ugly Face Day. No makeup. No smiles, except for garish ones. Gargoyle faces only. Let’s just see if that doesn't cheer up a lot of people. Especially women."

Um, for some of us married guys, every morning is NUF Day. Just sayin.

(Oh, as always, CNN keeps convincingly making the case that they are a bunch of idiots.)