History Channel

The companies with the most positive buzz last year include retail brands such as Target, automakers such as Ford and tech giants such as Apple. YouGov BrandIndex rated the companies by asking survey respondents throughout the year whether they had heard anything about the brands recently through advertising, news or word of mouth. The most in-the-now businesses, in order: 1.    Subway 2.    Amazon 3.    History Channel 4.    Google 5.    Cheerios 6.    Lowe's 7.    Ford 8.    Discovery Channel 9.    Target 10.    Apple Top-ranked Subway was the only dining establishment to crack the top 10, with its increasing emphasis on fresh and healthy ingredients and sodium reduction while maintaining its reputation for budget meals . Amazon landed high because of its Kindle Fire launch and dominance of online retailing.

The scene had the feel of a slapstick British comedy: Wildly successful television executive trades her big job in London for a post in Los Angeles and frantically tries to put her company on the map while navigating the city's maddening roads and culture. "Coming out here, I would say that I was a highly functioning madwoman," said Jane Tranter, head of BBC Worldwide Productions. "Suddenly I had to spend an awful lot of my day in cars: driving on the wrong side of the road, not knowing where I was going and getting lost.

Here's your unlikeliest feel-good story for Christmas week: Las Vegas' newest rising celebrities are four local guys who have been quietly running a family-owned pawnshop downtown for years. This summer, the History Channel launched the reality show "Pawn Stars" to focus on their Gold & Silver Pawn Shop and its boutique-museum hodgepodge of items people have pawned. There are Rolexes and motorcycles (of course), but also two-century-old rifles, a centuries-old samurai sword, a 1920s surgical chair, a Super Bowl ring, Olympic medals and an 1830 gold-gilded Ormolu clock known as "The Death Clock," because gilders handled deadly mercury to craft it. "It's 'Antiques Roadshow' with cash," says Corey Harrison, the youngest of the family.

Here's the instruction book for the newest/oldest/oddest sport you'll hear-ye, hear-ye about today: First, you dress like a Buick. Next, you mount a horse. (I know what you're thinking — nothing out of the ordinary so far.) Third, you charge at full gallop toward your opponent, then attempt to bosom him off his horse with an 11-foot lance. You get 10 points if you "de-horse" him (my new favorite verb). Five points if you shatter your lance against the opposing tin man. If you woke up this morning thinking that life no longer excites you, that Wednesday is the same as Thursday, that there's nothing to hold your attention now that football season has expired, meet full metal jousting, a renaissance of the Renaissance.

History channel President Nancy Dubuc knows what she's up against running a cable television network devoted to events from long ago in an age of real-time tweets and quirky videos that go viral instantaneously. "History, people automatically say, is black and white and fuddy-duddy," she said matter-of-factly. But not according to Dubuc. Since taking over History three years ago, the young executive has sought to recast the network in Technicolor. To do so, she's undertaken a provocative strategy: severing the cable channel's tether to the past.

The xx : Its name and austere design aesthetic give the impression of spartan-minded hardcore punks, but instead this English indie pop group's debut album, "XX," is one of the coolest slabs of minimalist electro-soul this side of Portishead. Built on the dreamy vocals of Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim and achingly spare guitars nicked from the Cure, this album is rated for all audiences. 'Thirst' : We expected some dark scares from this South Korean import, but this film offered further evidence that the best ideas in vampire movies are coming from the other side of the world.

The Kennedys have no one left serving on Capitol Hill, but the family may still have enough clout to prevent a miniseries about the dynasty from airing in the United States. In a statement Friday, the History Channel said it had decided not to air "The Kennedys," an eight-part miniseries that stars Greg Kinnear as President Kennedy, Katie Holmes as his wife, Jacqueline, and Barry Pepper as Robert F. Kennedy. "While the film is produced and acted with the highest quality, after viewing the final product in its totality, we have concluded this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand," the network said in a statement.

One day, in the possibly not so far future, anything that you can do that I can do better, or that I can do that you can do better, or anyone can do better than somebody else, will have been made into a television show. Every profession, any pursuit — all you'll have to do is add "Top" or "Project" to it and you'll have created another reality competition: "Top Undertaker," "Project Unicycle," I could sit here all day making up these things. (Indeed, I believe that people do.) In some ways it's better than actually watching television.

The History Channel apologized Friday for presenting a program last November that suggested former President Lyndon B. Johnson was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate his predecessor, John F. Kennedy.

Did you know that ancient Egyptians wrote with pictures called hieroglyphics? Hieroglyphics were drawn on the walls of temples, tombs and monuments. Most are simple pictures of animals or objects that ancient Egyptians saw or used every day. Some of the pictures stand for sounds, just like letters in our alphabet. For example, the hieroglyphic of an owl stands for the sound made by the letter M.

The companies with the most positive buzz last year include retail brands such as Target, automakers such as Ford and tech giants such as Apple. YouGov BrandIndex rated the companies by asking survey respondents throughout the year whether they had heard anything about the brands recently through advertising, news or word of mouth. The most in-the-now businesses, in order: 1.    Subway 2.    Amazon 3.    History Channel 4.    Google 5.    Cheerios 6.    Lowe's 7.    Ford 8.    Discovery Channel 9.    Target 10.    Apple Top-ranked Subway was the only dining establishment to crack the top 10, with its increasing emphasis on fresh and healthy ingredients and sodium reduction while maintaining its reputation for budget meals . Amazon landed high because of its Kindle Fire launch and dominance of online retailing.

"Vietnam in HD" is History's three-night follow-up to "WWII in HD," which ran, also in commemoration of Veterans Day, two years ago. While it goes out of its way to cast these soldiers as the heroic equals, if not betters, of their "Greatest Generation" counterparts, the series does not have the same impact — mainly because these images, though at times awful and upsetting, are also much more familiar. Unlike World War II, Vietnam was documented in living color, first by journalists covering it and then by filmmakers attempting to make sense of it. Never before had a war been so well chronicled by so many, flooding the living rooms of Americans day after day, year after year, with sweaty, grim-faced men fighting their way through the jungle, the barrage of artillery, the fiery vomit of flamethrowers and the endless pitiful streams of refugees.

UNDERRATED 'Secrets From a Stylist' on HGTV : If the many cooking shows on TV constitute food porn, think of this as home decorating porn. Starring the preternaturally perky Emily Henderson, this show reliably offers budget-minded inspiration for elevating a room beyond blank white walls and whatever Swedish-designed furnishings were on sale. Plus, with the show based in L.A., it offers an intoxicating hope that TV people could come over to do these things for us. Poly Styrene : If you've listened to Sleater-Kinney, Hole or even — though it's a further sort of stretch — pop-punk's Paramore, you owe a debt to this big-voiced singer for the '70s punk band X-Ray Spex, born Marianne Joan Elliot-Said.

The night before he started filming "The Kennedys" last summer in Toronto, Greg Kinnear got his first inkling that the project might be headed for trouble. Kinnear, tapped to play John F. Kennedy in the sprawling miniseries about America's premier political dynasty, was told that some of the family's high-profile defenders were pressuring the network over a show they were convinced would be a hatchet job. "I didn't ask a lot of questions about it," Kinnear said recently, referring to his dinner that night with Nancy Dubuc, president of the cable network History, "because I had bigger problems on my hands, which was how the hell was I gonna play Jack Kennedy.

The Kennedys have no one left serving on Capitol Hill, but the family may still have enough clout to prevent a miniseries about the dynasty from airing in the United States. In a statement Friday, the History Channel said it had decided not to air "The Kennedys," an eight-part miniseries that stars Greg Kinnear as President Kennedy, Katie Holmes as his wife, Jacqueline, and Barry Pepper as Robert F. Kennedy. "While the film is produced and acted with the highest quality, after viewing the final product in its totality, we have concluded this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand," the network said in a statement.

Television producer Joel Surnow defies tradition. The creator of the long-running Fox show "24" flouted prime-time conventions with an adrenaline-fueled series that played out in "real time" — and remained on network television for eight seasons. As the producer enters production on his latest TV project, the History Channel miniseries "The Kennedys," Surnow is once again breaking rules. He set up what he's calling a "virtual studio" — an independent production company in the mold of Aaron Spelling Productions and Carsey/Warner — to sell scripted television shows to broadcast and cable networks, without relying on network financing.

One day, in the possibly not so far future, anything that you can do that I can do better, or that I can do that you can do better, or anyone can do better than somebody else, will have been made into a television show. Every profession, any pursuit — all you'll have to do is add "Top" or "Project" to it and you'll have created another reality competition: "Top Undertaker," "Project Unicycle," I could sit here all day making up these things. (Indeed, I believe that people do.) In some ways it's better than actually watching television.