The San Francisco Chronicle had this profile of “Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe recently. Nothing new or revelatory, but interesting if you’re a fan of the show. We are big Dirty Jobs fans around here, but I have to admit that even I was pretty close to tuning out during the episode with the forensic entomologists.

From the Unclear On The Concept files: Friendly Atheist’s Hemant Mehta made me chuckle with this video clip of a Catholic priest on FOX News saying “If you have an imaginary friend, there’s something wrong with you.”

Anyone travelling the globe will instantly recognize the complete necessity of this website: Where Do I Put The Paper.com Let’s just say that I was more than a little surprised about the custom in several countries I would have ordinarily assumed to be “flush” cultures.

After reading this Prose Before Hos post, you might want to reconsider putting a buck in the Salvation Army buckets. CharityNavigator.org is a useful online guide to finding more suitable outlets for your giving.

A blog from a South Carolina law firm that ordinarily focuses on product liability issues recently offered up a post that looks at a New York Times article from 1931 soliciting opinions of the Future World of 2011 from such luminaries of the day as Henry Ford, Dr. William J. Mayo, Nobel-winning physicist Arthur Compton, and anthropologist Arthur Keith. As usual with any look back at these “predicting the future” articles from the past, there are plenty of things laughably wrong as well as presciently correct, though mainly in the “not so much” category. No mention of tinfoil suits, flying cars, or food in pill-form, so bonus points to them for that.

I guess conditions are a bit milder in the New York City area, because here’s a first-hand account in the NYT from a woman who got to help out with a small sugaring operation right in the heart of Brooklyn. And by “small operation” I mean one sugar maple in some guy’s backyard, but they still do the whole thing with the taps and plastic tubing and buckets just like the farmers in Maine and Vermont. She got two gallons of sap for her efforts and then set up her own evaporator station in her kitchen to boil it down into Grade A syrup. You need 10 gallons of sap for 1 quart of syrup, so she didn’t get much finished product, but the very idea of boiling your own maple syrup on your stove seems like it would be a kick.

Here’s a clip from my favorite TV show, Dirty Jobs, where Mike Rowe, the host, helps a maple syrup farmer tap his trees, to help you get a sense of what the job is like. You can do it in your own backyard, too, if you have a sugar maple tree. This webpage has a video that tells you how to distinguish a sugar maple from other maple trees (which do not produce edible sap), since sugar maples are not as common in settled urban areas as Norway maples.

You may or may not have heard of the TED Talks. I run across links to them all the time on a fair number of the more intelligent blogs I follow, but I don’t know if they’re well-known in a wider context. Anyway, it’s basically an invitational series of lectures by various Silicon Valley mover-and-shaker types and other assorted smart people, attended by their fellow Silicon Valley mover-and-shaker types and other assorted smart people. It’s been going on for 25 years, so it’s not just some “hey, let’s have a conference, dudes!” like SXSW, it actually offers quite a lot of top-name speakers spouting Very Important Stuff.

So why the heck is Mike Rowe giving a TED Talk? Turns out that Mike is actually a very smart guy; he plays a smirking everyman on his show, but if you pay attention to him you’ll eventually discover that he’s a nerd like the rest of us. It’s easy to see where the entertainment value of having Mike Rowe at your conference would come from: show a few clips of the various forms of shit he has had to handle, tell some cute anecdotes, entertain the crowd in between the “we’re all doomed” lecture from Al Gore and the “how to make a million dollars” lecture from some VC shark.

But that’s selling Mike short. In this talk, he does indeed do the anecdote about the episode where he had to castrate baby lambs by biting off their testicles, but instead of going for the big laughs, he turns the topic around and discusses how that particular job made him have a bit of an epiphany about the value of labor. He whips out the classical rhetorical terms anagnoresis and peripeteia to explain how he came to this realization, and I will leave him to define those terms for you in the video clip.

I don’t think he does a particularly good job of really explaining what his moment of anagnoresis was, but I think what he wanted to get across to the people in the audience is that as a society, we are going to have to re-evaluate our relationship to work, just as we are going to have to re-evaluate a lot of the basic elements of our life over the next couple of generations. Much of the material presented at the TED Talks is about the amazing world of the future, and what he is doing is giving them a very gentle nudge to let them know that the pie-in-the-sky visions of tomorrow are going to collide very hard with reality soon, and that even the high-falutin’ CEOs and wizards of Silicon Valley might need to reconsider the possibilities the world will present them with.

It’s a long video (about 20 minutes), but take the time to watch it if you can.

TV watching is a “feast-or-famine” situation for me. I only regularly watch about half a dozen shows, all of which have either limited runs or produce new episodes in small batches. That means that some of the shows I like are only on a couple of times a year, and others I get to watch in six-week clumps then ignore for three months while they repeat over and over. It doesn’t help that a good number of the shows are on the Discovery Channel, which has never met a series it couldn’t run into the ground by airing it four times a day, five days a week.

For those of you just dying to know about my television watching habits, these are the shows I watch regularly: (after the jump)

• Dirty Jobs — almost certainly my most favorite show for the last couple of years. I just never get tired of Mike Rowe, even if the jobs aren’t always all that interesting (or even dirty). And you can never have too much poo on cable television.
• MythBusters — yes, it’s completely arguable that these guys have jumped the shark and lately spend way too much time playing with that hellacious car-mounted mini-gun, but it’s still fun to see them bust urban legends, movie physics, and other improbable pseudo-scientific notions. Plus, Kari Byron. (Oh, yeah. I would dump Valerie Bertinelli like yesterday’s oatmeal for Kari Byron)
• The Amazing Race — see, this is exactly what I mean. It’s on only once or twice per season, with lots of nothing in between. Yes, there was one season where they had FOUR races and almost killed the show, but they learned their lesson. Frankly, even *I* was tired of TAR
• Dancing With The Stars — Just shut up. When you can get away with dressing like Edyta Sliwinska or shaking your moneymaker like Karina Smirnoff, THEN you can make fun of me. And, for what it’s worth, I think Tom Bergeron is the best ad-libber working in live television.
• Deadliest Catch — Another show that only produces a limited run, although Discovery Channel flogs the living daylights out of it.

I wanted to talk about “Deadliest Catch” for a moment because last night was the premiere episode of Season Four, and this morning Slate had an article about the show and some of the other “manly man” reality shows like it. The writer, Robert Weintraub, coins a rather ungainly phrase to sum up all of these shows: “Jungereality”. His premise is that “Deadliest Catch” is the direct descendant of the immensely popular film “The Perfect Storm” and its original book by Sebastian Junger. Weintraub says that Junger originally thought he’d write a series of books about these manly-men jobs, but his follow-up book to “Perfect Storm”, “Fire”, is a collection of magazine articles about war zones like Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, and his most recent book, “A Death In Belmont”, is about the Boston Strangler murder case. So, while I agree that the producers of “Deadliest Catch” do indeed owe a great debt of gratitude to Junger (along with George Clooney and the scariest special effects shot of a wave EVAR), I’m not so sure I buy the idea that there’s a whole genre that can be credited to him.

Indeed, I would counter-argue that all of the other shows Weintraub mentions in his article are the in-bred brainchildren of the suits at the Discovery Channel who seem to operate from the standpoint that “more is better”. Got a successful show? Make sure it’s scheduled for every single daypart of the week! Got a REALLY successful show? Shamelessly rip it off by making two or three copycat versions and use the hit show as a tentpole to program the other ones around. The particular shows that Weintraub works into his article — “Ax Men”, “Ice Road” and “America’s Port” — are all recent Discovery Channel entries and all produced by the same guy who came up with “Deadliest Catch”. In fact, this producer, Thom Beers, might as well BE the Discovery Channel given how many shows he’s produced for them. So maybe the more appropriate name for this genre should be “Beers-o-vision” (which I think is Homer Simpson’s favorite network, by the way). I would also point out, no offense to Thom Beers, that while some of the shows he develops are nothing short of fucking brilliant, for the most part the copycat shows are weak sauce. After “Deadliest Catch” was such a big hit in its first season, Discovery Channel ran a Beers-produced series about lobster fishermen on Cape Cod called “Lobster Wars”. After watching the deckhands on the Alaskan crab boats working in sub-zero weather and sailing in blizzard conditions, risking their lives to haul in traps crammed full of huge crabs, the lobstermen looked like a bunch of pussies taking day-trips on a pleasure boat.

Not all the copy-cat shows come from Original Productions (Beers’ company); This season Discovery Channel has ripped off “MythBusters” with a show called “Smash Lab” that does away with the pretense of trying to dispel common myths and just gets down to the business of blowing things up and driving cars into walls and shit. It sucks, right down to the token female cast-member, who isn’t the least bit hot. Plus they take themselves waaay too seriously. Kids — no one is really going to try to stop a car chase with a fire extinguisher, get over yourselves.

“Deadliest Catch” has been hugely successful for everyone involved, including the fishermen. I’ve posted before about some of Sig Hansen’s schemes and dreams. In fact, Cap’n Sig is even an executive producer of “Deadliest Catch”, so you know he’s getting his share. Many of the boats featured in the show have their own websites. And, of course, they all sell swag. The brothers who run the F/V Time Bandit have just published a book about their lives, and one of the crewmen aboard the F/V Rollo published a book of original photographs taken aboard the ship during crab season a couple of years ago. I can’t say as I blame any of these guys for cashing in; I’m sure I would do the same thing in the same situation. Hell, it’s got to beat crab fishing in the Bering Sea.

In general, reality shows hinge on the unpredictability of the situation, and these “Jungereality” or “Beers-o-vision” shows are no different in that regard from “Dancing With The Stars” or “The Bachelor”. It was inevitable that series producers like Thom Beers would hit on “manly-man” concepts as “reality” caught on as a concept and began cannibalizing every conceivable idea for a television show ever imagined. I don’t know that they tap into anything except a hot demographic, and, let’s face it, so did the home remodeling shows five years ago and the chef competition shows two years ago and so on.

For the moment, I am happy because April is the month where all my favorite Discovery Channel shows roll out new episodes AND “DWTS” is in full-swing at the same time. I got my DVR working overtime to keep up with it all, and just as some of these shows are petering out at the end of May, a new “TAR” should be starting up. It’s good to be me right now.

What’s that you say? You don’t really want to play a video game about Alaskan crab fishermen?

Well, maybe you’ll appreciate this: a forthcoming video game for the Nintendo Wii and DS based on Iron Chef America!

Unlike yesterday’s video game mention, this one is 100% for real and on the way to an electronics store near you. There’s not a ton of information in this brief game site news piece, but my guess is that the game is heavily based on the very popular “Cooking Mama” series for Wii and DS, where you have to chop, slice, grate, fry, and get your dish on the plate before time runs out. Except it will feature Mario (Batali, not THAT Mario), Bobby, Morimoto, and the voice of Alton Brown.

We have “Cooking Mama” for both the Wii and the DS, and it’s a great concept for the Wii. It’s a little less challenging on the DS, because the motion is pretty much always the same. Charlotte likes to play the game, and the TV tie-in is very smart (although I personally would prefer a game based on the original Japanese show), so this one is likely to find its way to our house, too.

Now, somebody needs to come up with a “MythBusters” game (explosives sold separately) and a “Dirty Jobs” game and all my TV show game needs would be complete. (On second thought, the “Dirty Jobs” game would probably involve something very gross, so maybe ixnay on that one)

Last week I posted about the predilection of the members of my household to vomit in our master bedroom. And also, not so long ago, I posted about my current favroite TV show, “Dirty Jobs”.

Bridget and I were talking about the vomit-inducing qualities of our bedroom just as last week’s episode came on. It was about a place called….(wait for it)…Vomit Island. The whole episode was about a bird sanctuary in Lake Huron and the volunteers who monitor the birds who live there and how the birds barf and crap as defense mechanisms whenever they feel threatened by the presence of visitors. Needless to say, good ol’ Mike Rowe spent the entire episode getting thoroughly soiled. I guess he’d feel right at home with us.

I was reminded to tell you this story because of this New York Times article today about the cormorants in New York Harbor. The cormorants are rather unpopular with the locals because they are prodigious vomiters. At my house, we probably wouldn’t know the difference.

The appeal of the show isn’t so much the myriad variations of shoveling shit as it is the ability of the host, Mike Rowe, to turn each one into a memorable and often hilarious experience. This show would be close to unwatchable with almost any other host, I think. The folks at Discovery Channel (and their various related networks) have an uncanny ability to keep going back to the well and coming up with brilliant choices for program hosts, as well as a willingness to dump any host that doesn’t instantly catch fire with the audience. This has let them turn a handful of BBC copycat shows and other uninspired high-concept programs into sure-fire hits. “Dirty Jobs”, though, may be the pinnacle. Having done his time in all sorts of lame TV presenter jobs, Rowe knows how to do the basic job flawlessly, but he’s clearly 100 times smarter than the average blow-dried TV host and knows how to keep his sense of comic disbelief at the EXACT perfect level under the surface while playing right along with whatever impossibly disgusting task he’s expected to perform.

Yesterday, one of the bloggers at Wired posted a first-rate interview with Mike Rowe that does a fine job of capturing the guy’s essence (something that most media puff piece interviews never do). From the lead-in to the interview, I gather that Wired is putting together some video programming of their own (though it isn’t clear if the videos will be web-only or shown on some cable network), but they’re going to be hard-pressed to duplicate the package that “Dirty Jobs” brings to the screen.

Oh, and in the off chance that you haven’t seen them yet, here are some Mike Rowe video clips from his stint on a home shopping channel in the early 90s, trying to make his overnight graveyard shift a little less dull with some opera karaoke.