Alex, the super-smart parrot featured on PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers and the Nature episode “Parrots: Look Who’s Talking,” died last week at age 31. Alex–who could identify objects, colors and shapes–was known for his verbal interactions with Alan Alda on Scientific American (see video).

Responding to viewer criticism about the latest American at a Crossroads doc–Robert Kaplan’s “Inside America’s Empire”–PBS ombudsman Michael Gelter says the programs need more introductory context. The problem for viewers, he says, is “the concept of what this Crossroads series is supposed to be.”

In response to Ken Burns’ The War, creators of the comic strip Baldo will introduce a Latino WWII vet character on Sept. 17, reports Editor & Publisher. Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, a University of Texas-Austin professor who has advocated against The War, helped creators Hector Cantu and Carlos Castellanos develop content for the new character.

The USDA gave six rural public TV stations a total of $4.95 million to build out their digital infrastructure in advance of the February 2009 analog TV shut-off. Pubcasters in Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota and Tennessee received rural development grants ranging from $1.86 million down to $25,510.

“As a reading lesson, Super Why! is brilliantly clever,” says a New York Times review today. “As a lesson in literary interpretation, it fails miserably,” writes Susan Stewart, who contends that the new PBS children’s series neutralizes the power of dark but enduring fairy tales.

Tomorrow afternoon ATC will announce the winner of a contest to write lyrics for the show’s enduring theme. Nina Totenberg can be heard on NPR.org warbling the four finalists culled from nearly 1,000 entries. Listeners’ voting to pick the winner closed last night. A Californian named Bruce Dick is the finalist with the shortest entry, which nevertheless emphasizes quite a big claim for the show: “Not just many things considered / Not just most things / In fact, all.” Now we can’t get that out of our minds.

On NPR’s Talk of the Nation yesterday, Neal Conan talked with filmmaker Almudena Carracedo about her film Made in L.A., which debuted Tuesday on the PBS series P.O.V.

“[Ken] Burns sometimes gets dinged for being too heartland; a critic for this paper chided his ‘pure Hallmark’ moments. But the whole point here is the contrast, the Hallmark against the horrors,” writes Paul Lieberman in a Los Angeles Times feature about Burns and his upcoming film The War. “He’s not producing a textbook but ‘an epic poem,’ and he’s tried to distinguish his from the other WWII films by focusing on the interplay of home front and war front, using Sacramento, Luverne, Minn., Mobile and Waterbury.”

WAMU’s announcement that it will drop bluegrass music from its weekend schedule later this month and upgrade its HD Radio service prompted nearly three dozen listeners to post comments yesterday on DCist. A handful of listeners applauded the change: “I just don’t ‘get’ Bluegrass music. Waaay too twangy and countrified for me,” wrote one. But many others found reasons to object. The new Sunday afternoon news/talk line-up is “extraordinarily lame AND lazy,” wrote one listener. “This sucks. Bluegrass makes hangovers go away!” commented another. “I always liked WAMU weekends for the very reason that it wasn’t just like WAMU on the weekdays,” writes a fan of the Dick Spottswood Show and American Routes, Americana music programs to be dropped from WAMU’s flagship service.

The film Made in L.A., which runs tonight on PBS as part of the P.O.V. series, is an “excellent documentary,” according to a New York Times review. The doc follows the labor activism of three Latino women in L.A.’s garment manufacturing industry. Writes the Times’ Andy Webster: “Congress may not be able to decide how to process the nation’s illegal immigrants, but the film understands that they’re simply here, an integral component of the economy.”

The new PBS kids’ show WordGirl “doesn’t just teach, it also entertains with humorous situations that should appeal to children and their parents,” writes Pittsburgh Post-Gazette TV critic Rob Owen. The new Super Why!, however, is a “sugary-sweet show that may entertain its target audience of 3-to-6-year-olds, but may repulse parents the same way Barney does.”

“WordGirl takes the [superhero] conceit back to an earlier era, with a sensibility that could only have been conceived by creators who may have watched too many Rocky and Bullwinkle shows,” writes Elizabeth Jensen in a New York Times article about the new PBS children’s series.

Jody Foster’s latest heroic movie role — in Neil Jordan’s thriller The Brave One — is a public radio personality who becomes a vigilante when her fiancé is killed and the justice system fails to do justice. NPR’s Bob Mondello says he hears talk the Warner Bros. film may be an award-winner. See the trailer on Fandango.