Am I jus too geeky?

In Greek today - a class that just becomes 'more favorite' every day to me - a classmate of mine lamented that we're five weeks into the semester and he apparently hasn't learned anything yet. It was amusing and ran as something of a joke through class, which was amusing as my tutor seemed even more...exuberant than he normally is. I adore the man; he's just a neverending ball of almost-comical energy.

Anyway. I pondered this later, as I rode my bike down to the bank and then the plaza. Nothing like the wind in your hair and deep philosophical quandries, such as: What determines the value of something? Obviously, school ought to be a learning experience, if only because we're all paying eight bajillion dollars a week for the privilage of studying (key word, there) at a microscopic school which offers no electives and the vast majority of the world has never heard of us. Ahem, anyway, beyond school: What ought one take away from an experience? It's easy to say that there's an either/or situation at work here: either you enjoy something - whatever pleasure is, you somehow derive some form of pleasure from it - or, you learn something from it.

Alas, though, life is not that simple, as I find learning things enjoyable. Geeky I may be, but I'm an inherently curious person, and generally am not satisfied without at least attempting to find answers to my questions. Obviously, I don't always succeed - I still can't tell you what much of anything in the Old Testament is about, though I do have theories (hint: control of the masses through fear), but I've made an attempt to understand. I abhor ignorance and it's pretty much a given that I won't just casually wonder about something and then entirely forget about it. I find the process of learning things, figuring things out, inately satisfying and therefore, enjoyable.

This all brings me to the Obligatory Link of the Undefined and Varying Time Period, which is this BBC blurb announcing that Good Morning America will be broadcast a couple live episodes from Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and Holyroodhouse. Apparently, the queen (alternatingly, I suppose) lives at the first two, and the third is...not actually explained in the article, which I find vaguely un-BBC-like. My thoughts in order of importance:

1. The picture midway down the page of the Big Honkin' Palace - with the velvet rope strung up in front? That's just bizarre. Wouldn't most places go for, say, big concrete barriers to keep someone from driving a U-Haul packed with nitro into it?
2. For some reason, 'holyroodhouse' makes me giggle. It looks like an overwhelmingly fake name and is very silly.
3. Why is GMA doing this? To boost British tourism, okay, but the article implies that the show asked permission to do it, which raises the question of what Good Morning America's investment in British tourism is. That sort of makes my head hurt.
4. What's the audience going to get out of it?

On that last item, I grant that I have absolutely no idea what's on the average morning show as A) I don't watch TV pretty much ever and B) if I did want to watch TV, I wouldn't be watching stuff like this, I'd be flipping between CNN, C-Span, and Sci-Fi (ye gods I'm lame), and C) If I did want to watch a show like GMA, I'd be asleep during it anyway. But, still: Is there a big interest in the "throne room" and "white drawing room" of Buckingham Palace? Or in what the Duke of York has to say about tourism? (Random guess: "Come to Britain, it's quite pretty and we swear our beef won't kill you anymore! Also, we have good soccer, which is cool, and cricket, which is impossibly lame but quaintly British!" Um, maybe not that last bit.)

Anyway, I don't get it. If the viewers do learn things, I'm guessing it's going to be something like the net value of the imported silk curtains of the throne room. That may come in handy the next time you're at a cocktail party with the British aristocracy, but I don't think that the average GMA viewer does that often. It's not useful knowledge, but it is still knowledge - but granted, I'm assuming that it's going to be more than panning the camera around and going "Oooh pretties", which might be giving American TV a bit too much credit.

I don't know. We all inhabit a strange world.