In Season 4 Episode 1, there’s a relief model on the president’s TV. The Netflix series “House of Cards” is a deft user of media (profession) as the slip-n-slide that propels him along his evil path. So I enjoyed seeing a relief model on TV in the first 13 minutes of the season. It appears as a looming blue ball to the news anchor’s left.

The TV screen looks a lot like my website for Nelson Earth Day (http://nelsonearthday.net) that I created in 2010–hey, it looks TOO much like it—except that my website has better design than this fake TV newsdesk which pastes in a funky graph and data feed behind her as she’s talking about comparative ratings of candidates. That graph wouldn’t work.

Kevin Spacey is in focus and the TV is not, so it’s hard to tell exactly what it is. But it appears to be a big relief globe (plastic or digitized) centered on California and the western Pacific Ocean. How interesting that, when the set designers needed instantly-recognizable gravitas for a media image, that they would choose a relief model…

Within the first 13 minutes of Season 4 “House of Cards” appears a relief globe! The TV news anchor has it to her left.