So Maggie mentioned Mythbusters in her last post and I wanted to expand on the excellence of the show because if you just get a brief description it sounds kind of lame. I was in Berlin over the past few months and I could only watch shows that I downloaded with my RSS/Bittorrent FauxTiFaux and MythBusters didn’t make the cut. I only have so much bandwith/hard disk space! I did catch an episode on TV in Berlin, but it was all “lectured” in Deutsch, which is a terrible practice I might post about later. Now I’m back in the good old U.S. of A for a two week vacation so I set aside several hours every day for quality time with the real TiFaux, which dutifully recorded MythBusters every week while I was gone. After gorging on 5 episodes in a row I’m a bigger fan than I ever was.
The premise of the show is nice and simple. They test out urban legends and myths. The topics range from stories your dumbass co-worker might forward you to bona fide urban legends like killing people by dropping a penny from the Empire State Building. That one required shooting one of the hosts in the ass with a penny.
And speaking of hosts, are there two more lovable nerds on television than Jamie and Adam? They somehow manage to combine an extreme breadth of knowledge with complete idiocy. Adam (who bears a striking resemblance to Bizarro Jack Bauer)
once cut his lip by bringing it too close to an open vacuum cleaner motor while showing off for the camera. His impressions of walrus-mustached co-host Jamie
are consitently hilarious even though he never gets a laugh out of his target. Jamie is clearly the smarter one, and he’s a hell of a good shot with a paintball gun but without Adam around to make fun of him the show would be all business except for the rare occasion when Jamie whips out a dry one-liner. (Adam: “We only got two inches of penetration from that arrow” Jamie:”Well, I usually prefer a little more than that”)
But the business is not exactly boring. Often the myths they choose are busted within minutes because most of the crap people believe doesn’t hold up to the smallest amount of scrutiny, so rather than end the show early they decide to recreate the effects of the myth, preferably using large amounts of explosives. When they proved that shooting a gun on a plane would not cause explosive decompression (which required a visit to an airplane graveyard and some serious airplane renovations) they figured out what would cause explosive decompression (Answer: EXPLOSIVES).
Anyone who took a few science classes in high school will notice that the show tends to gloss over flaws in their experiments, but lately they’ve been increasing the science content of the show (always preceded by a graphic “Warning: Science Content) which I’ve really appreciated although it sometimes makes their elaborate experiments unnecessary. After spending 30 minutes of the show kicking helium-filled footballs, they told us that f=ma. Oh yeah. If the ball is lighter and you kick it just as hard, it actually goes slower. But if they had started with that we wouldn’t have the pleasure of watching Adam take hits off the helium tank and explain that he usually stops when his lips turn blue.
Watch this show Tifauxites!
As you probably have guessed by my clumsy attempt at a post title, tonight’s Lost flashbacks belong to Juliet. Last week’s episode was strong, though if I never see another television-character participating in a con again I could live in peace for the rest of my days.
And hey, it’s a new Mythbusters! Everybody’s favorite science-and-blowing-stuff-up show takes on the high-speed camera. I wonder how that will lead to blowing something up?