Thursday, November 16, 2006

Just a heads up, this post is going to have some movies embedded, so good luck with your load times...and here we go.

What I love about YouTube is not the viral videos (funny though they are), or the attractive young women dancing in their underwear(though I watch a lot of them, and I DON'T have a problem!). It's the fact that so much TV gets posted. It's great to be able to see shows I missed. What's even better is to be able to introduce others to shows they might not be able to catch. With that in mind, I'd like to say a few words about two of my favorite shows, and urge you to watch them. To help you discover the wonder of great TV, I'm adding some of the better clips.

The first show I can't not watch is the Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs. In this show, a former singer for the Baltimore Opera (no joke) travels around the world, looking for...well, the dirtiest jobs in the land. He asks a few questions of those who do the jobs, then dives right in and does them himself. He never belittles anyone, even when standing waist deep in unspeakable filth. He does it all, from hot tar roofing, to reaching humerus-deep into a horse rectum, and he does it all to let you know what goes on to keep the world you know turning.

That's not to say, though, that the show isn't without humor. I believe his stint on an ostrich farm speaks for itself.



Cooking with the naked chef, while probably not safe for work, is worth checking out for his discomfort alone. On YouTube, just look for "Mike Rowe cooks!"

I'd like to take a few moments now to talk about another show that will suck me in worse than the Black Hole of Des Moines: Mythbusters. Basically, two former special effects artists use what appear to be limitless resources to prove or disprove all kinds of myths and urban legends. Remember the Darwin Award given to the man who strapped a rocket engine to his car? They did it. Could Jaws really have pulled those barrels underwater like in the movie? Turns out that a shark COULD do it, but they wouldn't stay there very long.

And so on. The magic of the show comes from how much FUN these guys have. If they disprove a myth, they go to extremes to find out what WOULD be possible. For instance, they tested one myth that said you could clean dried cement out of a cement truck with dynamite. Well, it didn't work, so they loaded it up with several hundred pounds of explosive. Here's what happened:



The other reason I watch Mythbusters: Kari Byron.



'Nuff Said.

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