>>I don't want to charge you any attention - I was just taking a chance to repeat the mantra popular over here.
>>
>>Um... when you were here, you actually heard NEWS? I thought there's only space for a few soundbites to keep things interesting between the ads.
>That's why we've started watching BBC News America

I'm more and more fascinated with this looking into the former masters. Amazing. The cultural world as seen from here consists of domestic production and whatever the Brits make, plus some French/Italian/German icing on the cake. The rest of the world is a flicker of a candle, if we happen to have a birthday - doesn't make sense to have it more than once a year.

At first I thought BBC was so much different from what's sold as news here, but it's only form. Substance is the same.

So, let's see, from a point of view of a local consumer here. News on TV: there's a choice of the major networks, BBC, and, maybe Univision if you speak Spanish - but that's also domestic, although somewhat more newslike. Nobody else in the world knows how to make news.

Rock music (limiting myself here, because I'm no connoisseur (what's wrong with 'knower'?) of other genres (what's wrong with 'clans'?): there's US rok, then there are the UK bands. Two or three guys from the rest of the world. Honorable exception of Japanese rock... which I know only through my kids; never heard or seen on the waves.

Fantastic zoology/botany: everyone knows elves, orcs, gremlins, golems, dragons. How about manticores? Ember-bird? Unforging grass? Wrong lore, nobody heard of them, never existed. Because all the fantasy is a retelling of Lord of the Rings, which is a retelling of Beowulf. All the fantasy? Well, what is published here. All about the same magicians, dragons... same circle. Jorge Luis Borges has a far richer compendium of fantastic zoology, and maybe less than one tenth of it is in use here. And he was, too, pulling from mostly Western sources. But no, it has to be British or American.

TV serials. You wouldn't believe, but other nations also produce them. Even the English speaking ones. I remember seeing "Birds die singing" (in reverse translation, I don't know the name of the original... that was by the time I learned that nothing ever begins on time, so came later to skip the commercials, and so never saw the opening credits, or just don't remember). That was Australian, BTW, in the 80s. We even saw Polish, Swedish... Pipi Longstocking? We saw the original.

Folk music: if you call it folk, then it's the anglosaxon folk. If it's anything else, it's ethno.

SF: I blogged that already, won't repeat.