Big Brother 1660

Are you like me: fascinated by the idea of reality tv but bored by the shabby, false, poorly acted melodrama it's turned out to be? When I first heard about Big Brother, I thought it was an interesting idea. It's just that it's not worth watching.

Now I get my daily dose of "No he did-n't!" from Phil Gyford's wonderful realtime minus 343 years posting of Samuel Pepys' diary. Each entry is heavily annotated, not just with historical explanations but with the same kind of personally invested commentary on "Sam's" daily life that you'd normally find in the letters section of People magazine:

Sure, Pepys was doing some  impression management. But the sheer amount of trivial, unselfconscious detail he presents, the historical setting and the knowledgeable, emotional annotations of what you'd have to call his "fans" create a dense network of story much more interesting and real, even 343 years later, than anything John De Mol has come up with.