Tag Mike Rowe

I’ll Take Potpourri For $200, Alex

By Brian Filed in Atheism/Religion, Links, Misc Tagged with 1931, 2011, Buddy Christ, CharityNavigator.org, Dirty Jobs, Friendly Atheist, Henry Ford, Mike Rowe, New York Times, Roman Catholic Church, Salvation Army, the future, toilet habits, toilet paper, wheredoiputthepaper.com December 20th, 2010 @ 11:49 am

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.

A (Maple) Tree Grows In Brooklyn

By Brian Filed in Food, Links Tagged with Brooklyn, Dirty Jobs, maple syrup, maple trees, Mike Rowe, weather February 1st, 2010 @ 11:30 am

Tomorrow is Groundhog Day, which marks the half-way point of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. The days are already noticeably longer, but the cold weather has been hanging on with unusual tenacity this year, and so all eyes turn to Punxsutawney Phil to tell us if the weather will cut us a break or if we are destined to grind on with the bitter winds and biting temperatures. Because it’s still so cold, the maple syrup producers in New England are undoubtedly hoping Phil will not see his shadow — they are usually getting geared up in February for their production season in March, but when the weather stays cold, the sap doesn’t flow much.

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.

Anagnoresis And Peripeteia

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc Tagged with Dirty Jobs, Mike Rowe, TED Talks, YouTube March 25th, 2009 @ 2:17 pm

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.

A Very Dirty Boy

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with Dirty Jobs, Discovery Channel, Mike Rowe August 9th, 2007 @ 11:55 am

The Discovery Channel show “Dirty Jobs” is presently my absolute favorite show on television, and may rate right up there among my all-time favorite shows next to “Star Trek”, “St. Elsewhere” and “Green Acres”.

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.

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I’ll Take Potpourri For $200, Alex

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