So I finally got cable. A couple weeks ago I made the call, and now for $35 each month I have all the TV I can handle. If you recall, until recently, I was without TV completely. Living where I do, electromagnetic waves have a profoundly difficult time reaching me from the Greater Los Angeles Area™. Actually I did get one channel… sort of.
But now we’ve got all kinds of TV. It’s just always on – even when we’re not really watching it. For some reason I don’t find this unusual or unpleasant. All during my childhood, television was the soundtrack of my life. Half the time, I wasn’t even watching anything, but the television was on anyway – staging dramas for no one in particular, and periodically attempting to sell products to the wall 30 seconds at a time. I have to say, in all that time, I’m disappointed that my cockatiels never learned to sing the Oscar Mayer Weiner song. Though they did manage to order some stuff from an infomercial once. They were pretty smart.
Before now, I was without television for well over a year. So it was sort of exciting when the cable guy bestowed upon us the gift of passive entertainment. But it didn’t take long to realize there is still mostly nothing but crap on TV. So, because of this, and because I am a complete nerd, most of the time we end up watching the educational channels. We have entire channels dedicated to food, gardening, home improvement, interior decorating, animals, and science. Chances are, at any given moment, I’m watching the Emeril channel, the Crocodile channel, or the Hitler channel.
So today, we watched a show on Animal Planet (the Crocodile channel). The more I watch this channel, the more I wonder how on earth humans managed to survive on this planet long enough to become what we are today. It seems like every other animal has some way of biting, scratching, stinging, poisoning, or eating other animals. On a level playing field, human beings have almost no chance against scary animals.
As handy as we are, humans have no claws. We do have some pretty sharp teeth though. Unfortunately, our jaws effect a pathetic bite of only about 150 pounds per square inch (PSI) of pressure. A tiny rat can manage 7000 PSI without really trying. Luckily, we can outrun rats with our average running speed of 12 miles per hour, but a determined hippopotamus could outpace us. Since male hippos grow teeth over a foot long, we’d better have something sharp in hand when they catch up. If you’re ever toe to toe with a hippo, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to be holding some kind of pointy stick.
The pointy stick is the great equalizer. The pointy stick is why I can sit in a temperature-controlled environment and watch nature happen from thousands of miles away.
Speaking of pointy sticks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is on TV right now. I’m not watching it though.
Bye for now.
Yeah… Humans would lose if left without nice guns and sharp knives