BeigeJournal

Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe is back for another season on the Discovery Channel. Really, they could call it Mike Rowe: Poop Expert. If something/someone shits it out, Mike cleans it up. It’s not all poop: there was demolition, which by his standards would be a fun job, but mostly, it’s poop.

OLN has given Bob Roll a bigger role in their coverage of the Tour de France this year. I have to say that I like the guy and enjoy hearing him more. He can’t exactly fill the shoes of Paul Sherwin and Phil Liggett (what cyclist hasn’t imagined Phil shouting “he’s dancing on the pedals” while grinding slowly up a hill?), but he is fun.

Also, the Specialized commercials with Levi Leipheimer are funny.

I turned on my TV and what did I see? People racing snowmobiles in the summer on grass, in an organized, televised event. Why are they doing this? I don’t know, but I assume that when they were younger, they tried running the family snowmobile on grass and their dads yelled at them for doing such a stupid thing, and now that they are grownups, by golly, they are going to race on grass. Maybe these are the same people who race motorcycles on ice.

I spent a good part of May 30 watching automobiles go round and round very fast, first the Formula 1 Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, then much of the Indianapolis 500, then the last half of the Coca-Cola 600.

I’ve become quite a formula 1 fan this year, and have seen all the races on the Speed Channel. By comparison, I think the oval track racing, both Indycar and NASCAR, is pretty dull. They just go round and round and round, all very fast left turns. I really think the road courses are much more interesting to watch, with the sharp, low-speed corners, the chicanes, the passing at different parts of the course. I also think the Speed Channel coverage is better. They seem to, for one thing, realize that there are other things to put on TV and other things for us to watch, and they start about 20 minutes before the race with some pre-race commentary, with a timer counting down to the race so we know when the real action starts, the race itself, then maybe a half hour after the race with some replays of highlights and the English language part, or part thereof, of the interviews with the podium finishers. Then they are done. They do not turn a ninety-minute race into a six-hour TV extravaganza. They also seem to do a much better job of displaying the relative positions of the racers than the broadcast networks do, with much clearer graphics.

I’m oddly fascinated by Gold Fever on the Outdoor Channel. Host Tom Massie spends a lot of time exploring, with camera crew, places that, as he constantly reminds us, are not really safe to explore, such as abandoned mines. He spends a lot of time in Alaska, as well, showing off the GPAA Alaska Expedition. I find it a bit more interesting than Prospecting America, which is mostly about more ordinary people engaged in recreational gold mining in less exotic locales.

There is certainly a bit of infomercial in both shows (a bit less so in Gold Fever), but they are far more interesting than a normal infomercial. The viewer can learn a lot about recreational mining from the shows. The first thing I learned, for example, is that there is such a thing as recreational mining.

One could say that stylistically there is a bit of C-SPAN in them, with the less exciting (that is, boring) bits left in rather than edited out. It is nice to see some TV where they will take the time to show what is actually happening rather than editing everything down to an incoherent minute-and-a-half plus car chase and explosion. They keep enough conversation going that even people shoveling dirt seems interesting, and, in their hands, gold panning is positively interesting. Though informal in style and, one imagines, low in budget, the technical quality is fine, with shots in focus, the camera stable, and clear audio. It isn’t home video,

The whole concept of recreational gold mining fascinates me. Now that technological progress has transformed work (for some of us) into an indoorsy thing, with lots of sitting and mouse-clicking, what was once backbreaking labor has become an outdoor recreational activity. It may seem odd, but since I think a sixty kilometer bike ride, a swim in chilly Lake Michigan, and then another sixty kilometer ride back home is fun, shoveling dirt into a sluice box really isn’t any stranger. It actually does sound like fun, kind-of. Maybe.

There is an ad running on television currently for Crown Royal Whiskey in which a man walks into a bar and says something slightly garbled that sounds like, “Bumroll, on the rocks.” The bartender pours him a drink, and the olives in other people’s drinks all turn like little eyes to look longingly at the whiskey. Since it’s an ad for Crown Royal he presumably must actually be asking for a “Crown Royal on the rocks,” rather than a bumroll (a word with more than one definition), but somehow you’d think that after however many takes they shot they could have picked one in which the actor pronounced the name of the product clearly.

Don’t the Orange County Choppers people, or for that matter, the Boyd Coddington folks, ever embark on a project with enough time to easily finish it before the deadline? I suppose a frantic race to meet a near-impossible deadline makes better TV. That way everyone is sure to get stressed out and yell constantly, though I suppose Pauls Sr. and Jr. will argue in any event.

I do side with Paul Sr. on neatness. That shop is a mess. It is odd, though, how he always waits until everyone is maximally stressed to rant and rave about it.

Do they really argue that much, or do we get every argument in a three week period edited together for each hour-minus-commercials episode?

Back when I was a lad, in the nineteen-eighties, TV listings would be marked (R) in those cases when the show was a rerun. Nowadays, to save ink, I suppose, rather than marking reruns, new episodes are marked (N). My impression is that this is less a matter of a lack of new programs than a much faster growth in the number of channels (around 10 back in my youth, but well over 100 now) than in the amount of programming to fill them.

The Discovery Channel group comes to mind. It used to be just the Discovery Channel and TLC. Now it seems they have Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet, Health, Travel, Times, Kids, BBC America, Science, Home and Leisure, Wings, Español, HD theater, and FitTV. With fourteen channels, there’s gonna be some reruns. I suppose it is useful to have specialized channels. If they had only one channel, there would probably almost always be something new on, but not necessarily something you want to see. With fourteen channels, if you are in the mood for an aviation rerun, well, they have a channel for that. How about some more specialized channels?

• Cute Fuzzy Animal Planet
• Big Sharp Teeth Animal Planet
• Discovery Bull Crap Channel (for Atlantis “documentaries” and the like)
• Discovery Naked Rainforest Tribe Documentaries
• Discovery Naked-but-with-digital-fuzz Rainforest Tribe Documentaries
• Discovery Motorcycles
• Discovery Building Wacky Machines Out Of Junk Channel

There were many commercials on TV last night. I understand that occasionally they were interrupted by football. According to the NFL, they own all rights to everything about the game, including descriptions of the game. They don’t claim to own descriptions of the advertising, however. My favorite was the AOL TopSpeed commercial with the people of Orange County Choppers that Discovery Channel viewers know so well as the family that puts the fun in dysfunctional on American Chopper. They build a bike with AOL TopSpeed technology, then Mikey jumps it over a bunch of ready-mix trucks. It turns out TopSpeed is for the Internet, not for motorcycles, which would have been good to know in the first place.

The Shards O’ Glass anti-smoking ad was a delight, also. Do check out the web site, shardsoglass.com.

The last Mythbusters, in which an electric car motor was attached to washing machine parts in order to spin a crash test dummy up to high speed, was one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen. That was fantastic. The dog-pee collection was fairly hilarious, too. It does go to show just how much effort is required to make a myth that lame (and implausible) interesting, but Adam and Jamie are up to it.

You can search BeigeJournal for more Mythbusters entries.