There's a great series running about Africa, hosted by Henry Louis Gates from Harvard. It's a travelogue, as he makes his way through Africa looking for Africa's ancient centers of learning and civilization, as well as looking at Africa today as it emerges from colonialism and apartheid. It elevates Africa to a level that we never dreamed it had, with the primitivistic images we've been fed as schoolchildren.

Three staples I never miss are Nova, Nature, and The Smithsonian. I also like Antiques Roadshow which was filming in Hilo recently. I could not find the much-lauded African series in our program guide. When is it aired?

...and Masterpeice Theater...in fact, any BBC production.

I tivoed Nature, I'll mark those other two you mentioned for watching later. Do you have good local PBS programming in Hawaii? How many tv stations and radio stations are there on the Hawaiian Islands?

Did you catch that show on "Nature" Friday night about Antarctica? I wished I'd taped it for the girls, we just finished a unit on the Poles.

It may be on my hard drive out in Cedar Creek, I'll check next time I cruise out there.

John can answer this one better than I, and I will let him tell you how many there are out here. Daytime is pretty poor - 4 AM stations on this side of our 14,000-foot mountains and several FM. Good FM is available through the cable connection. Out TV PBS is one of the best from what I saw in the Los Angeles area. We get the top of the line shows..."Cats" this week, again.

At night I can get all the way to the West Coast and Texas on occasion on AM. Short wave is an whole nuther option not considered in here.

There are nearly 30 radio stations in Honolulu alone and a dozen here on the Big Island, there are also several on Maui and Kaua`i. Honolulu has 6 VHF TV broadcast stations and 2 UHF stations as well as several cable only stations. Marcia puts up with my FM station only because I'm on it (she is basically into classical music). Hilo is the largest city in the U.S. not currently served by National Public Radio. There has just been a large fundraiser here and we are in the process of putting up a repeat r. Portions of the Big Island can pick up Maui's NPR repeater. There are some good local programs with Hawaiian folk music, and Hawaii's #1 TV news anchor, Joe Moore, does a highly-regarded "Mostly Mozart" program on KHPR, Honolulu's public radio station. Moore is an actor and playwright as well as a TV newsman. He is a former wide receiver for the University of Maryland. He writes one-man plays for himself. He has basically three obsessions in life and is a walking encyclopedia on each of them: Wil Rogers, John Wayne, and Mozart. He has taken one-man plays as each on the road. All of them are surprisingly good. He is a big man (6-3 about 220 lbs.) with an ego to match, but is a decent guy. Other than his wife, I don't know if he has any close personal friends. As one of his station co-workers puts it: "Joe is a loner and doesn't hang out with anyone, but he's nice to all of us and we all care about him." As far as PBS goes, we have some good local programming: "Rice and Roses" is an excellent alf-hour historical documentary series, "Spectrum Hawaii" is a very good public affairs interview show, and we've also has some locally produced PBS made-for-TV movies that have gone national. "Damien," a one-man show about Dutch priest Father Damien DeVeuster, who worked with lepers on Moloka`i in the late 19th century (and died there of leprosy himself) won an Emmy both for KHET-TV and the star, English-born actor Terence Knapp. Father Damien is now "Blessed Damien," one step away from sainthood. Ano her KHET production about the house arrest of Hawaii's last queen, Liliu`okalani, has also been broadcast nationally. Local singer Marlene Sai starred as the queen, who reigned when the U.S. illegally overthrew the sovereign Hawaiian monarchy in 1893. Marcia mentioned she could pick up West Coast radio at night. That includes a Los Angeles station I worked for in 1979-80, KFI, 640 AM (I wrote and did voices for Gary Owens' morning show and did weekend mornings). The station I call UH-Hilo Vulcan baske ball and baseball on, KPUA (670 AM in Hilo) can also be picked up in some areas of Los Angeles at night. Some players parents drive to certain vantage points both in Honolulu and in L.A. to listen to the games (our AM is not on the internet, and management has no plans to put it there--we can't put it on full-time as long as we carry Rush Limbaugh).

Thank you John! Again I am impressed with your encyclopedic knowledge of things broadcast. I would hate to loose Rush Limbaugh... and I did not know you worked for KFI...gadzooks, I've been a fan of yours since before I knew you existed. I thought I liked Gary Owens when it was John I was admiring all the while. When the propagation is right I can get skip on the scanner and pick up CHP frequencies, but it has been pretty poor this cycle. Thank you for a most interesting discussion. I had no idea a epeater was in the offing for this side of the Island. About time!!!

Local documentary filmmaker Don Howard doesn't look like the sort of guy to challenge existing stereotypes and subvert accepted knowledge, but then he doesn't look too much like an ex-high school quarterback either, though he is. His documentary Letter From Waco (which aired nationally on PBS in September) took preconceived notions of one of Texas' more notorious cities and peeled them away to reveal something far more interesting and unique than just botched ATF raids and Southern Baptists. As a Waco native who currently lives in Austin, Howard is in the right position to point out the "Wacons" (a term he used in the film to describe the semi-spiritual collisions between things like football, race, religion, and death) in an otherwise fairly prosaic setting. The resulting documentary, slyly humorous without ever stepping over into outright parody, has become a crowd favorite, playing to sold-out audiences at SXSW (where it received "best documentary" honors) and elsewhere. It's hardly surprising given Howard's unique perspective on things. Currently at work on "part one" of a trilogy of half-hour documentaries on football, cheerleading, and weddings (all filmed here in Texas), Howard will be screening a rough version of the football segment, Game Day, (which consists of footage shot in 1982 by Geoff Winningham and re-edited by Howard), as part of the ongoing Texas Documentary Tour at the Alamo Drafthouse on Wednesday, December 10 at 6:30pm. Recently, I spoke with Howard about the art of the Texas documentary, the great Independent Television Service (ITVS), and why local PBS affiliate KLRU dropped the ball when it came to airing Letter From Waco. Austin Chronicle: What sort of film background do you come from? Have you always had an eye toward documentary filmmaking, or is this something that just sort of came about? Don Howard: I came to Austin [from Waco] to study philosophy, but I ended up getting a Masters in Radio-Television-Film instead. I ended up doing a lot of stuff with ACTV [now ACAC] at one point, and I was hoping to make documentaries, and so I did my thesis documentary about a high school marching band, of all things. That's kind of how all this began. AC: Tell me about Game Day, the new football project you're screening. DH: It's kind of an in-progress thing. The plan is to do another version of it which will be one of three parts of a bigger project called Nuclear Family. Basically, I'm going to use the same footage and re-edit it slightly to sort of accentuate some things that are in it now. For it to wind up on PBS -- which is the plan -- it's got to be about two minutes shorter than it is now. For me, the good side effect of showing it now is to watch it with a crowd. It's amazing how that changes your outlook. Something that you think is funny might suddenly not be, or vice versa. So, that's kind of one reason I'm really happy about being able to show it in this setting. AC: I know the film deals with high school football in Texas, but what exactly are you trying to get at here? DH: The finished product will be more of an examination of father-son relationships than it is right now. Right now it's more about the rituals of high school football. AC: And it's all set in Waco? DH: No, not all of it. It was shot by a guy named Geoff Winningham who teaches art at Rice. He did a book on high school football called The Rites of Fall -- one of the best things that's ever been done on the subject. On the strength of that, he got some money together to do a film about high school football, with the idea of examining those rituals you see over and over again -- the Lord's Prayer before the game, the way pep rallies work, the whole thing. He ended up picking a school in each of the divisions and following them around, with the intention of figuring out which team had the best chances and then focusing on them. Unfortunately, he was hurt mid-season and abandoned the project (this was back in 1982). I met him later on and became interested in this 16mm footage because it's just so great. To my mind, nobody will ever capture high school football quite this way -- it's that good. As it ended up, I said, "Will you let me play around with this footage for a while?" He agreed, and I ended up spending all my spare time for about three years making various versions of this film. At first, I just wanted to put it in a context so people could see this footage, really just to save it. As I went further and further, though, through seven or eight versions, it all came together. from http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/vol17/issue14/screens.donhoward.html