Worth watching There has been lots of press lately about Current TV, mainly because Al Gore is involved with it. As far as that goes, he's said it's not gonna be political or ideological, and it's not. At least, I haven't seen any evidence of it in the hour or so of it that I have watched today.

Anyway, I'll give it my tentative recommendation. Current TV has some potential. I read somewhere that they call their different segments "pods" and that makes sense. They play these 2,5,7, maybe 15 minute units worth of material at a time. I have watched it in exactly those kinds of increments, and that works. You don't feel stuck to the idiot box, more like you're getting random injections of interesting and provocative thought material. Also, the website (as linked above, current.tv) is really cool. Right from the main page you can find out what "pod" is playing now and what is going to be playing over the course of the next hour or so (many different pods, for sure). They break the longer stories/profiles/whatever into multiple pods. At various points tonight I watched a series on the artist who does those Obey stickers that you see all over the city (kind of interesting dude, though his idea that "people pay taxes for public property, so anybody should be able to draw/paint/put a sticker on it" is kinda weak).

At first I thought it was somewhat sex-less and slightly academic, but I think that was just because one of the first pods I saw touched on some human rights issues. The topics, while certainly aimed at young(er) people, are pretty diverse and might even be interesting enough to give the network some legs. In any case, Current is worth watching.

(I just saw an article that says they're having some problems with the website because of the opening day demand.)  ¶ 9:12 PM