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.
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.
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.
The BBC reports that the British department store Selfridge’s will officially roll out its Christmas shopping season this year on AUGUST 2. But American retail chain Toys R Us has them beat with a “Christmas In July” sale that runs this week. (although, as far as I can tell, that’s just a sale and not [...]
On Friday, I decided to stop having Facebook scrape and post my blog feed. I just don’t feel like blog posts fit the very ephemeral vibe of FB, and, frankly, it irritates the living crap out of me when people post comments about the blog posts on FB instead of posting them here. I am [...]
In my copious spare time, usually whilst sitting in the waiting area at Charlotte’s karate studio, I have been making slow but steady progress toward adding tags to all the posts on this site. As of right now, I have completed tagging all the way back to April 1, 2008. The current archive of this [...]
Just the other day I posted about a young man from Nepal who was trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest man in the world. He’s only 22 inches tall, compared to the 29-inch tall He Pingping of China, who is the current record holder. Well, WAS the current [...]
boobcheese tickle fights child actor suicides Betty White Zombie Farrah Fawcett Canadian pissing habits that milkaholic Lindsay ChatRoulette whatever half-assed thing Google did this week out-of-control Toyotas
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
I recently posted about the use of menhaden in making fish oil dietary supplements and the potential risk that poses to the entire Atlantic Ocean ecosystem. One of the alternatives to using menhaden for omega-3 supplements is algae oil, because algae is the primary diet of the menhaden and is actually the source of all [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
This week Barack Obama committed the United States to at least two more years of war, 30,000 troops in harm’s way for no other reason than saving face, and umpteen billions of dollars wasted FOR NO GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER and we are inundated with: Tiger Woods proving he knows how to put it in the [...]
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.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
