Mythbusters is an awesome show, as we’re already well aware. The problem though, is that it airs later than I should be staying up to watch it but it still manages to suck me in every time.

Of course I want to know if cockroaches will really survive a nuclear holocaust. Of course I need to stay up an extra hour to see two fully loaded transport trucks collide head-on. I really do need to know if vodka makes a decent mouthwash.

The problem is made that much worse by the fact that the show is very repetitive. After every commercial break we’re told what the myth is, how they’re going to bust it, what they’ve done so far, and what they’re going to do next. On top of that, they tell us again before every break. That’s great if I’m just flipping through channels and I’ve missed the first forty minutes, but when I’m there from the start and all I want to see is the answer, it gets kind of annoying.

They could probably do the show quite well in half an hour, without cutting out anything but the redundant narrations and the “coming up next” bits. Sure, I know these myths might be expensive and time consuming, but I need to work in the morning. I think lots of scientists are familiar with that mild disappointment when months of work are distilled into a single number or sentence in the conclusion of a short paper, with all those dead ends and hours of refining technique swept under the rug. You’ll get used to it.

I still love the Discovery Channel, though. Boom de ah da, boom de yada.

I’ve been watching TLC’s Miami Ink a fair bit recently. It’s a good show, but there’s a serious problem with it: It really makes you want to get a tattoo, but also shows you that your reason for getting one isn’t good enough.

The first time I saw it was probably about two years ago, when there was a marathon playing. Though I knew the show existed, it had never occurred to me to watch it because, seriously, who wants to watch a show about a tattoo parlor? But my sister claimed it was good, at the same time warning me about what she had noticed, which is the first part of the problem I already mentioned. It kind of makes you want to get a tattoo. All these other people are getting tattoos. The tattoo artists talk about how great tattoos are. And they often just look cool.

The other part of the problem comes from the narratives that the customers tell about why they’re getting the tattoos. A large proportion of them are getting memorial tattoos, commemorating a lost family member or best friend. Some of them are recovering from drug addiction and want to mark a new phase of their life. Parents get tattoos of their kids’ names. Stuff like that.

And here I am thinking I want to get a tattoo just because I saw it on TV. Why do you have to torment me like that, Miami Ink? I suppose it is just as well, though, since if I were to get a tattoo I’d want my reason to be at least because I actually want one rather than TV told me to. Considering I start to crave a Big Mac every time a MacDonald’s commercial comes on the air, I think I need to stay far away from television before making a decision about anything more permanent than lunch.

I had just finished my least favourite exercise at the gym tonight when a woman got my attention to say that the exercise wasn’t a good one to be done alone, and was worried I could hurt my back. The reason I dislike this particular exercise ran along those lines already, but I did it because that’s the workout we did when I was doing it as part of winter training with a workout buddy.

Of course, I’m always willing to improve myself and my workout (otherwise I wouldn’t be at the gym in the first place), so I asked this woman what I should do to fix the problem. First she said, “You should try using this machine instead,” pointing to a second piece of the same equipment. Huh? I asked for clarification, and she mentioned some other ways of using the same equipment but work totally different muscle groups. Now this woman had credentials of sorts, so I was inclined to take her advice, but even I know that arms and legs are different muscles.

The conversation was going nowhere fast. I started getting a defensive vibe from her, which made me think I was making her think I didn’t believe her or wasn’t interested. So, we quickly dropped it and went our separate ways. It kept bugging me though. I’m more than happy to switch this exercise for another, but what was she talking about? What exactly had her criticism been? What could I do to avoid the problem? What was going on?

I caught up with her later to ask a few questions and see what advice she might have, trying very hard to seem open to the conversation and willing to fix what she saw as something bad in my routine. I don’t think she took it well. I was trying to strike up a friendly conversation—something I rarely do with strangers!—and even had conversation to make, but she still came off as highly defensive, as if I was attacking her opinion. She was actually a bit of a bitch about it.

I had a philosophy professor who used to say that in order to say something is wrong, you have to be able both to point out what exactly is wrong and how to fix it. I never really agreed that you needed the second part, but it certainly would have been nice in this case. Now I’m left at the mercy of the internet, googling for new exercises to replace what I’ll be too self-conscious to do again, instead of getting… well, advice from a random stranger. I guess I’m no worse off.

I have the ideas, I just haven’t been writing them down. In the meantime, I give you this:

Me: “What’s for supper?”
Mom: “Um… a chicken thing.”
Me: “What kind of chicken?”
Mom: “A chicken… recipe.”

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How many rowers are in this boat?

The answer is below the fold.

When I’m not listening to CBC during the drive to and from work, it’s a mix CD my mom made. It is her car after all. There are a handful of songs I like, but most I just skip over.

There was one that I was sure was a Madonna song, which I wouldn’t have expected from my mom but she does have varied tastes. For weeks I just skipped it after the first three seconds or so, but then one day I was distracted by something (possibly keeping my eye on the road) and let the song play. After about 10 or 20 seconds, what I was sure was a Madonna song turned into what I know is an ABBA song. I don’t know which ABBA song, but I recognized part of the music from an ABBA mashup techno megamix thing I had once. A melody of glissandos. I’d sing it for you but you can’t type that.

So then I stopped skipping the song. I didn’t want to have anything to do with Madonna, but an ABBA song is fine by me. If it came out today, I thought, it would probably do well. It could easily fit in with the pop charts of the day, as far as I knew. I got into the habit of listening to it on my way to the gym, as it was a good kind of song to get a person pumped up and bouncy.

I figured I should get a copy for myself and maybe add it to my erg playlist—something which requires lots of pumping up. The only problem was that at the very beginning the vocals say, with the beat, “Time goes by… so slowly… time goes by…. so slowly” which is the last thing someone wants to hear at any point during, say, a ninety minute steady state.

Nonetheless I figured I could edit that part out and the rest would be good, so I asked my mom what the name of that ABBA song on her CD was.

“ABBA song? What ABBA song?”

“You know, the one that goes like (me singing melodic glissandos)”

“Oh, that’s by Madonna.”

Damn.

Damn you Battlestar Galactica and your mid-season finale!

Here I was, sure that since it was only ten episodes into the final season, BSG would last me through the summer, building up to its grand series finale. Then, they had to go start airing a promo on Space saying “THE LAST EPISODE UNTIL 2009!”

Spoilers below!
(more…)

Trying to blog after a bike ride is like trying to tell people about that awesome dream you just had.

It’s a side effect of letting your mind wander, I think. That’s all dreaming is—your brain finding something to entertain itself with while you sleep. There’s not much to do while biking around the neighbourhood for an hour, so thoughts and ideas pop up and fade away without the concentration to remember them.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. Yesterday there was lots to do while biking around the neighbourhood.

And by that I mean there was one thing. A speed trap to play with.

The local police have this robo-cop gizmo that sits by the road telling you how fast you’re going, armed, presumably, with a camera to record speeders. This one was set up on a little stretch of road between my house and my old elementary school, halfway down a little hill. I think that road gets about four cars a day, but if that’s where the cops want to fight crime then so be it…

The fun part was biking over the crest of the hill, seeing the display wake up, and finding out how fast I was going. If I were in a car I might have slowed down, but I was on a bike and so my goal was to see how fast I could go. I only planned to go down that road once but altered my route slightly to give it a few tries. My actual speed going down the hill topped off at about 35 km/h, but I found that leaning my head forward suddenly bumped what the robocop recorded as high as 59 km/h. Since the speed limit there is 50 km/h, I’m hoping it recorded pictures of me speeding down the hill at a breakneck pace. The police will think they’ve caught some dastardly criminal and will be all set to trace a license plate number to send the ticket when—BAM!—there I am, faster than a speeding… well, a speeding car.

The most intelligent “reality show” is back on the air.

I love ABC’s The Mole because the premise creates a mystery for the audience as well as the players to solve—Who is the mole? It’s not quite as good without Anderson Cooper as host, but I’m hoping it will live up to previous seasons.

I suspect if we were aware of who the mole was right from the start, the show would lose a lot of its charm. One of the best parts of watching this show is arguing for who you think the mole is, based on people’s behaviour and things that might be clues. Previous clues have included messages in code (e.g., a telephone number from which the mole supposedly sent a message to the other players could be translated into a sentence using a phone’s keypad as a guide) that the players themselves were privy to, but also clues directed solely to the television audience.

Monday night, in the season premiere, for example, when the introductory voice over posed the question “Who is the mole?” for the first time, what had been a sequence of shots of all the players stopped on a closeup of one player for the briefest of moments at the word “mole”. That’s probably a bit too obvious, though.

I noticed at the very end of the episode, during a sequence of seemingly innocent shots to set the atmosphere, they focused a lot on images of the Virgin Mary. Does this mean the mole is a virgin? Does it mean the mole is a woman? Maybe a Virgo? Clues have shown up in these types of shots before.

For the record, my first suspect, based on very little thinking, is Paul. But I already don’t believe that. If I knew if any players were a Virgo, I’d have a much better answer already. I’m looking forward to the rest of the season.