Mythbusters

A full week off to celebrate the Lunar New Year, and I am deeeep into my holiday gluttony of parking myself in the living room armchair and glaring absent-mindedly at the glowing screen for hours. I've stumbled upon a show called "Mythbusters," and fear that I am fast becoming a Mythbusters groupie.

The show primarily looks at Hollywood stunts and tries to recreate them to see if they do in fact produce the same results. For example, in the "Pirate" episode, they buried a guy neck-deep in sand to see if he is able to claw himself out. As motivation, and this is the best part, they gingerly placed three live crabs near the guy's head. I don't remember which movie this is from, but apparently this was supposed to be a surefire way of slowly killing the poor victim. Unfortunately, the myth was busted as the guy crept his way out an hour later. Experiment number two had the same concept, bury a guy (a different guy) in sand, but this time they've added water to the sand to simulate waves washing over the sand. Now THIS could kill, as the added pressure of the water in the sand made it hard to breathe, and near impossible to climb out of the human sandpit.

There's another set of experiments in this episode where they aim a cannon loaded with forks, nails, a bottle of wine, steak knives, and a peg leg at a pig carcass dresssed in a red-and-white striped shirt, but that's another story.

While utterly pointless, I have to give them credit for making science and engineering fun, at times hilarious, and incredibly entertaining.