Taurino Beer, imported from El Salvador (”Taurino Beer” is Spainish for “Airwolf”), sells for $10 per 18 pack at Fresh and Easy. Good fucking God it is bad. The upside is that if you should overdo it, you’ll already be acclimated to the taste of vomit. I mean, it seriously tastes vaguely of puke. Hold on a second while I open another one.

Oh right, I promised I would get back to other 80s copter shows. As the middle of this season of “Airwolf” is generally pretty shitty, I’ll see if I can distract you with the intro to “Riptide.” Hey! Look at this! It’s the intro to “Riptide!”

Yowzah. So that’s Donald P. Bellisario 1, Stephen J. Cannell 0 in the game of helicopter shows. Fun fact about Bellisario: He served alongside Lee Harvey Oswald during his stint in the Marines. Fun fact about Cannell: His teenage son was tragically suffocated by a giant sand castle.

Episode 10: Once a Hero

Sting and Archangel meet up with some unsavory Asians in a dodgy bar and trade money for what’s in the briefcase: pictures that place St. John in the prison camp of a Laotian warlord, whereupon String returns home and begins to hatch a plan to recover his brother which involves selling one of his many Louvre-quality paintings to finance the mission and rounding up his ‘Nam pals, one of whom is the front runner in the California senate race and the other of whom is a professional dirt bike racer, to man the mission. There are times when “Airwolf” stretches credibility. They go on the mission, the senator guy goes nutsy-koo-koo and… I won’t ruin the episode for you buy revealing if they find St. John or not. You have to admire them all. Most people go to SE Asia to fuck kids. Right?

Best Borgnine Line: Hey! This guy’s hotter than a two dollar pistol on a Saturday night!

Episode 11: Random Target

Another substandard mid-season episode, but at least we can always rely on String’s fly sense of style, even though this cap is probably from another episode. This one contains the line, “looks like some kind of big gathering of people for some reason.” I mean, overly expository dialog should at least provide some information. “We’re going to find the creator of the robot. Maybe he knows how to destroy it!” Not, “let’s go find some guy for some reason.” A guy who has another air company that the String and Borgs work with sometimes is killed after they do some filming in the desert for him. Then the lab where the film was developed is torched. Then it’s discovered that a lady and her jeep were blown up in the same area where the filming took place. Then Santini Air is torched. The police don’t see any connection. Airwolf must intervene. Though nonsensical, this is an impressively violent episode with a double digit corpse count. I can’t think of another network show nearly as violent as “Airwolf.” Like, dead bodies turn up on all of those dumb cop shows, but you never see people blossoming into their glorious becoming of death.

BBL: When they’re flying over the desert they see some chicks in bikinis and Borgnine zooms in and with a bunch of exclamations like “oooooh look at that!” I don’t know if the producers didn’t realize how creepy the image of a salivating Ernest Brognine secretly filming girls from a helicopter would be, or if they did realize how hilarious it would be.

Episode 12: The Condemned

The Rusians have engineered a horrifying bio-weapon that makes people believe that Tina Fey is funny. We’ve acquired the agent, but everyone on the Island of Research, where scienticians have gone to find an antidote with minimal risk of creating an epidemic if something should go wrong, has turned up dead. This sounds like a mission for… not Airwolf. Probably some kind of elite hazmat team that has spent years training on how to deal with bio-weapons. But they send Airwolf. A sub full of Ruskies turns up for reasons that are pretty unclear, especially since they are on U.S. territory. The story becomes a stirring cold war allegory as everyone becomes infected and the Airwolf team (it’s just String and the chick because Ernest Borgnine was having life-saving awesomeness-reduction surgery) and the Russians walk the precarious path between their national interests and prejudices and mutually assured destruction. There’s actually a very clever twist because everyone on the island seems to go insane and kill each other due to the contagion, but as it turns out, several hours of extreme paranoia is a side effect of the life saving antidote. Is the message that Reaganism was indeed the path to cold war victory and, ultimately, peace? Eventually, everyone gets smashed on vodka and does that Russian dancing that is extremely gay, even by the standards of dancing. String and Caitlin come away with the antidote and a great anecdote!

Best Borgnine Line: Look, I’m trying to move my bowels. Don’t I have enough problems as it is without people screaming at me while I’m trying to move my bowels!?

Episode 13: The American Dream

String and Dom are attending a wedding in one of California’s Central Valley Vietnamese communities. As a vet of ‘Nam String has formed many bonds with the Vietnamese people, as is bound to happen when you drop napalm on someone’s children. This is one of the innumerable similarities between me and an 80s action hero. Having worked in the gaming industry, I too have befriended this gentle and annoying people. Yet another vaguely Shakespearean smoked ham plays the criminal mastermind who threatens this small community with a booming voice coupled with an understated and cordial demeanor that scarcely cloaks his deadly intentions. This ultimately leads to a confrontation between Airwolf and a couple of crop-dusters in the worst mismatch since Charles Barkley last grappled with the written word. Finally, the Vietnamese warlord guy swoops in with a fighter jet, but Airwolf shoots him down, forcing him to parachute to the fields. The leader of the farmers proclaims “This is America! Citizens arrest!” Cut to a soaring bald eagle (really). I enjoyed this episode. Just to reiterate how much deathier “Aiwolf” is than other such shows, the bad guys kill people by spraying them with gasoline from a crop duster, then burning them alive.

BBL: (proposing a cabbage cutting race) “I’ll tell ya what! The first one down to the uh… down to that uh… ditch, down there is the winner! Let’s go! Haha!”

Episode 14: In at the End of the Road

More half-assed mid-season drek. Bank Robbers or some other kind of robbers storm into a little town and try to kill everyone by stuffing them in a meat locker with no oxygen. Airwolf intervenes. String and Dom have this big conversation about which kind of disability you’d most want a hot girl to have so that you could get away with raping her because she’d be unable to report it. String was like, whatever makes it impossible for her to report me, but leaves her body most in tact. So his ideal would be a fresh vegetable, I suppose. But Dom felt it was very important that she’d know what was happening, just not be able to report it. That was the main thing that he found erotic about the scenario–he wouldn’t even care that much if she was disfigured, so long as she was conscious of what was happening but powerless to ever tell anyone.  He concedes that he’d probably even do it to a guy if those criteria were met.

“BBL: Hey, look! Look at that family of bears!”

There was also “Airwolf’s” closer cousin, “Blue Thunder,” with Dana Carvey, NFL stars Dick Butkus and Bubba Smith and in the leading role… some guy who wasn’t famous and never would be. In “Blue Thunder” the super chopper is manned by an elite LAPD unit. As far as I can tell from the intro, the crew use Blue Thunder to travel quickly between schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District so that they can give presentations to assemblies of students in which they promote their message of Holocaust denial, another theme “Blue Thunder” shares with “Airwolf.” I don’t want to get too far off track, so I’ll continue this digression at some point in the future. Let’s get back to “Airwolf!”

Episode 5: Sins of the Past

Borgnine’s estranged daughter turns up dead of an overdose. As the story unfolds we learn that Borgnine’s wife is totally psychotic, even for a woman. She absconded with his daughter when she was seven (the daughter, not the wife- it’s Borgnine, not Mohammed) and he sees his girl for the first time since childhood, kneeling before her open casket, only to have the psycho bitch walk up behind him. He doesn’t know how to react. It’s pretty heavy. Seriously, “Airwolf” is tearing me apart inside. In turns out that the town is being run by some crook who is turning it into a marginally legal gambling destination and putting the squeeze on the locals. Airwolf intervenes. I don’t think that most of the people on this show shit their pants sufficiently when String or Dom get involved in some local zoning dispute and then show up in a gun ship. Like, imagine if that actually happened. Two guys are arguing and then,  one of them shows up in the parking lot with a sock full of nickles and you turn to your friend and say, “dis shit ’bout ta get REAL!” Then the other dude shows up with a billion dollar attack helicopter. On the show, the guy with the sock full of nickles might be thrown off somewhat, but he will generally try to attack Airwolf with the sock, rather than literally voiding his bowels and fainting, which I think is the normal reaction. Generally, even the police wind up being like, “well, thanks for the help fellas. We couldn’t have done it without you.” Not “Someone in a fucking military helicopter is blowing up half the fucking city!”

Best Melancholy Borgnine Line: I suppose I should have some kind of feeling for the place that I was born. But I don’t.

Episode 6: Fallen Angel

Weird-eye-patch-but-not-as-as-much-of-a-tool-as-Tom-Wolf guy is kindernapped in East Germany. I fall asleep.

Episode 7: HX-1

Right off the bat, underrated 80s cutey, PJ Soles, the chick who played Riff Randall in Rock n Roll High School, is listed as a guest star and like 20 people are killed in the first scene, so I’m optimistic. The HX-1 is the new helicopter that is arguably better than Airwolf and is stolen by mercenaries. That means the government has developed two, unique, cutting edge helicopters and immediately had both of them stolen from under their noses.  They’ve also gone from the name ‘Airwolf’ to the name ‘HX-1.’ That would never happen on my watch. The M.O. of the mercs is the same as JMV used with his crew back in The Shit, so he wonders if his MIA brother might be involved in the theft and therefore, most likely still alive. As awesome as Michael’s evil twin was in “Knight Rider,” I was hoping for this to be the case. Lamentably, “Airwolf” takes the high road yet again and the mastermind of the attacks turns out to be a different member of the ‘Nam crew. String’s twin remains MIA, which is unfortunate, but on the upside, he is named Sinjin Hawke. Would it be worth it to spend most of your life in a Vietnamese prison camp to be named Sinjin Hawke? I think that’s one of those questions where the answer depends on your own value system. (editor’s note: Erich apparently isn’t familiar with the whole “Saint John” being pronounced as “Sinjin” thing. I can’t say I blame him, since it’s retarded.)

Best non-Borgnine line: I could have used a man like your brother.

This line is given by some toothy Brit who plays the mercenary leader and is addressed to JMV. As written, it is hackneyed at best. The delivery is great though. We could have used a man. Like, your brother. Ouch! Kudos to you, English guy whose name IMDB will not reveal.

Episode 8: Flight #091 is Missing

This one sort of reminded me of a Margaret Atwood short story, “A Travel Piece.” The premise is basically the same: people trapped at sea after an airline crash with no hope of rescue. This version is better because Airwolf intervenes, in one of the stronger episodes of the season. Hijackers land a plane on the water and let it sink, but the way the plane is designed, the water doesn’t leak in. Why doesn’t it float then? You sure ask a lot of questions. The point is that the hijackers have the passengers trapped under water, undetectable, completely at their mercy and with a deadline that cannot be negotiated: the amount of time it will take for the passengers to run out of oxygen. Caitlin is on board, but I think that is largely to make the scenes in the plane more interesting and that Airwolf would have intervened in this situation regardless of who the passengers were, as this is another mission under the direction of The FIRM. Another brutal moment by the standards of network TV comes when the guys who actually hijack and sink the plane emerge from the ocean in scuba gear, see their partners and start celebrating.”We did it!” “Huzzah!”  Their partners whip out the machine guns, open up on their pals and cut them out of the deal.

Things that negotiate with terrorists: East coast, Jewish, cosmopolitan experts.

Things that don’t negotiate with terrorists: Airwolf.

Best Borgnine line: Oh, what the heck? Hooray!

Episode 9: Once A Hero

This episode is one of the worst. I assume they dump all the turds into the middle of the season, so I made note of the Best Borgnine Line (BBL) and googled “Airwolf fan fiction” which led to http://www.fanfiction.net/tv/Airwolf/

A few postcards from the abyss:
Sleeping Beauties» by bookworm

On their first mission since Cait’s death, Dominic and Hawke go undercover to bust a drug ring and take a dangerous drug off the street nicknamed Sleeping Beauty.

Jingle Bell Hawke by Maria Thorne

BBL: Are you kidding? At these prices, I’ll pop for the sweaters!

Hello! It is time to watch a lot of “Airwolf” and drink some beer. Let’s start with some fun “Airwolf” facts:

• Airwolf is a kinda-sorta “Magnum P.I.” spin off, in that “Magnum” had helicopters in it and the creator of both shows, Donald P. Bellisario, thought, “we should do a show that has even more helicopters in it” and, for this, was paid millions of dollars. True story.

• Jan-Michael Vincent was the highest paid actor on television, or “TV,” pulling down $200,000 an episode. Even though “…wolf” wasn’t a major hit and wasn’t a JMV star vehicle, this salary was justified because he was so hot.

• The primary reason I’ll be watching “Airwolf” with a few cheap beers instead of with some “Knight Rider” grade vodka is this video.

• The real helicopter used for Airwolf was a Bell 222. After “Airwolf,” it was used as a medical helicopter in Germany, until it crashed and everyone on board died.

• Reid Rondell, Jan-Michael Vincent’s stunt double, was killed during filming when his helicopter crashed.

• Bellisario often gives his characters the same birthday he has!

For starters, I’ll be putting away a couple of bottles of Steel Reserve, which claims to be a “high gravity lager” or something, but is actually malt liquor. While I do enjoy finer beers, I need to save money to buy more rat traps and all of the beers below the dog piss line are pretty much interchangeable. Yeah, Bud tastes better than Steel City, but I don’t actually enjoy the taste of either product, so I look at it like toothpaste. All toothpaste tastes bad, so I buy the one that gets my teeth clean for the least amount of money.

Episode 1: Sweet Britches

Although all of “Airwolf” is readily available online, I skipped season one and will be starting with the second season. Lest you think that I take copping a buzz and watching “Airwolf” lightly, I’ll have you know that I did some preliminary research. Quoth Wikipidia:

To increase ratings the studio wanted to add a female character which happened at the start of the second season in the form of feisty Caitlin O’Shannessy (Jean Bruce Scott) and for the series to move away from its quite dark and moody tales of international espionage into a more domestic and straight action-oriented affair. Airwolf became more streamlined, domestic, and self-contained. The moves by CBS ultimately proved unsuccessful, however, and production cost over-runs remained high.

That sounds pretty damn enticing. And I’ve paused the first episode literally eight seconds in because my decision has already been vindicated. In the first eight seconds of “Airwolf,” season 2 I’ve seen: 1)Airwolf 2) A crooked Southern sheriff 3) A LION and 4) a sniper. Yes, yes, it’s one of those 80s TV preview segments meant to keep you tuned in for the whole show and thus is something of a highlight reel. This does nothing to mitigate the fact that a crooked Southern sheriff and a lion are in the same episode of a show about a deadly helicopter. The intro isn’t even over yet and “Airwolf” has already mopped the floor with its approximate equivalents on contemporary TV, like “CSI.” Or I guess, “JAG.” I’ve only seen “JAG” one time and don’t remember it very well. The story of how I came to actually watch an episode of “Jag” is a fascinating one, deserving of it’s own episode of “Airwolf,” but too personal to share.

So, the hick minions of the corrupt Southern Sheriff try to shoot down Airwolf with a shotgun and, when that fails, conclude that it’s a UFO. “It wuz al-li-ens sherrriff!” And yes, I’m still in the preview section. On to the opening credits.

Episode one is still pretty great at the 15 minute mark. String’s buddy has busted out of the evil Southern sheriff’s jail and summoned String for help. Like any good friend would, String takes his combat helicopter down to Texas, with his partner. In case you’ve forgotten, his partner is Dominic Santini, played by fucking Ernest Borgnine. There’s a scene of some cowboys on an African safari which is totally out of place with everything else so far, but I have a hunch that this is where the Lion comes in.

Best Evil Southern Sheriff line (spoken to a highway patrolwoman): Meter maid, you go sticking your butt in where it’s not wanted and it’ll get kicked, no matter how cute it is.

It’s better for the delivery, which stretches the sentence over about fifteen seconds of screen time. Also, now that I’m seeing it again, the Texan who thinks helicopters are UFOs is played by Tackleberry from Police Academy.

As it turns out, the cowboys are not on Safari in Africa, but on some private hunting preserve in Texas where you get $15,000 for shooting an ocelot. It’s never totally clear who is paying a fortune to illegally import large animals from Africa, then paying other people to shoot them, but Borgnine unwittingly parks Airwolf on the preserve, suddenly finds himself surround by lions, then interacts with them in a humorous fashion.

One thing that is quickly becoming apparent is that “Airwolf” is far darker than its contemporaries. For example a pair of scenes runs like so. The evil sheriff has captured the sassy highway patrol lady and decides to have some of his cronies over to the police station to gang rape her. It’s implied in such a way that a child wouldn’t catch it, but it’s very clear to anybody old enough to know that a group of men taking turns with a woman doesn’t mean they are beating her up.

Sheriff: Bring the boys over, they’ll take that feistiness out of her.

Deputy: Do… you have to do that sheriff?

Sheriff: When you got a pack of hounds, you gotta throw them some meat once in a while.

So true. Subsequently, the guy who runs the hunting ground is chasing JMV with some rube who’s on a hunting trip and Borgnine flies past and flips over their jeep. The tourist breaks his neck and the safari guy gets eaten by a lion. In case you don’t know where the story is going, the Sheriff is firing on the military gunship with his rifle, which prompts String to pause for a minute and mutter, “don’t make me do this sheriff” because he is a good guy and reluctant to kill anybody. But seeing as how the Sheriff is… posing no threat to him whatsoever, what choice does he have? String fires about 1,200 rounds of heavy machine gun fire into the police station in like four seconds and then blows the whole thing up with a rocket.

Episode 2: Firestorm

This one is comparatively low key. Another hapless bumpkin mistakes military aircraft for a UFO (this show is part of the cover up!) although this time, it is Borgnine’s friend, who is a war scarred alcoholic living alone in the desert. It turns out that, as is so often the case in the world of 80’s TV Action, some kook has set up a private army within the borders of the United States for no particular reason and without anybody really noticing. In this case, the kook is a deranged, discharged general who prances around with a riding crop. The crazy army tries to start WWIII by launching a small nuke, at Russia I suppose, while the general spouts about a “first strike,” though he obviously doesn’t grasp the concept (it requires more than one missile [/comic book guy]). The drunk calls attention to the private army because he thinks the helicopters that they fly around the desert for no reason are UFOs. He then helps JMV blow up the nuke and kill everyone in the army. Contrary to expectations, preventing nuclear holocaust does not cure the alcoholic and Borgnine finally gives up on trying to rescue his friend, leaving him to drink himself to death in the dessert. Yikes.

The best Borgnine line comes when he wants to do some maintenance flights with Airwolf because he misses it.

JMV: What the hell do you do with a man who falls in love with a machine?

Borgnine: (widens eyes and laughs maniacally for ten full seconds)

Episode 3: Moffett’s Ghost

Our boys are using Airwolf to ferry some sort of peacemaking guy to secret meetings with Russian scientists and this is somehow slowing down the arms race. This is the first mission of the season to take place under the direction of the FIRM, so it also marks the first appearance of Archangel, that mustachioed weirdo who has the eye patch glasses, the white suit and hat, and the cane. Like Tom Wolfe, but not as much of a tool. If “Airwolf” was a bigger hit and had its rightful place among our cultural furniture, that would be a nice Halloween costume. His assistant looks eerily like a young, female Condi Rice, and is a similar character, except she is working for peace. There’s another super villain, this time of the quasi-Nazi variety, who is trying to get all up in Airwolf from beyond the grave. He is is Moffett, the man who created Airwolf and he is angry about being dead. More people die.

Apart from the darker themes (and remember, I chose season two because it was supposed to be lighter and more mainstream than season one) it’s becoming clear that the basic filmmaking of “Airwolf” is a cut above “The A-Team” or “Knight Rider.” I won’t actually make an argument for this, because it would be fucking boring. Also, the acting is superior–JMV is unquestionably a splendid piece of man ass, but he he is a pretty good actor too, and Borgnine has been voted the greatest man of his generation in every credible poll–and you can see that the vision for the show was a more sophisticated and adult 80’s Action TV program. The creators foolishly bet on the intelligence of the American audience, which explains why the show never caught on to the extent that the others did. I’m not saying “Airwolf” is “The Wire,” of course. I’m just saying it’s not as thoroughly witless as “The Dukes of Hazard,” and so we rejected it. Also, Caitlin wasn’t as hot as Daisy, though looking back, Daisy wasn’t actually hot, so much as sluttily dressed. I know what you are thinking, but I’ve already patented the rights to “Airslut.” Also “Airbeowulf.”

Best Borgnine Line: I feel better with a thumb and four fingers on the stick.

Episode 4: The Truth About Holly

The Texas cop chick (Jean Bruce Scott) is awkwardly reintroduced as the permanent Airwolf chick, Caitlin. Basically, she just shows up and says how hard it was to track String down, as though this were perfectly normal and she just hangs around until Borgnine hires her part-time for Santini Air which leads to her piloting a super-top secret military helicopter on a regular basis. JMV is almost killed “rescuing” Borgnine’s niece, an Argentinean skank who’s grown tired of sucking off some Mexican drug lord she deliberately ran off with and who now wants to go home. The Mexican drug lord’s last name is Aarons. Everyone gets to be helicopto-stuntmen in a movie and JMV dresses up like Indiana Jones! Hawt!

Best Borgnine line: Hey! Sure, a good number of Jews died in the war. A lot of people died in the war. But there weren’t much more than six million Jews living in Europe at the time, let alone killed in so-called concentration camps. The so-called Holocaust is a fabrication of the Jewish media/banking complex.

Planet Earth – Nature filmmaking was redefined by this blockbuster, the result of naturalists and zoologists being given unprecedented funding and time to capture film of the world’s last remaining wild places. As a supreme ode to the beauty of this lonely planet, it is unparalleled. As a vehicle for dramatic stories about what animals must do to survive in the unforgiving natural world, it is genuinely moving. And as the largest canvas for the most beautiful cinematography ever filmed, it is flawless. Though the hype surrounding the project was deafening, and the merchandising inescapable, it pays to return to Planet Earth with fresh eyes to consider just how much work went into the shots that made it onscreen. David Attenborough performs the narration and unifies the work with the larger view that our planet is very much taken for granted. A much-overused phrase to be sure, but at a time when human capacity to change the world is unsurpassed, we scarcely understand the long-term effects of our current policies and activities. That industry places all of the visually stunning vistas on display here in jeopardy is beyond question. What the series forces the viewer to ask is, what else is placed at risk? Society has difficulty weathering a relatively small stock market crash; what would occur if the natural resources we depend upon are pushed beyond their ability to withstand us? There has been no better series for considering our place in the world, and the crossroads that we have reached.

Atom - Another bit of brilliant storytelling as Professor Jim Al Khalili approaches the baffling subject of the atomic and subatomic world from a historical perspective. As he reviews the development of atomic theory from traditionalists like Einstein to the mind-boggling theories of Heisenberg and Bohr, the documentary is peppered with choice anecdotes. For example, Boltzman conceived of atoms to develop equations to explain the behavior of steam, an experimental afterthought resulted in the proof that atoms are almost entirely empty space, and that Erwin Schroedinger was inspired to theorize that a particle was a wave after he spent a week wearing out some Austrian whore. Khalili has a gift for expressing atomic and subatomic theory in a way that is accessible to those unused to thinking in terms of mathematical equations. This task is nothing to sniff at since Heisenberg noted that it is impossible and intellectually dishonest to even attempt to form a visual picture of an atom or its fundamental particles. In fact, it was Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle that conceptualized the view that pure math is the only way to understand the subatomic world. And so this would hold true for the intergalactic world as well. Sit back and enjoy as you learn about how solid objects do not actually exist as we think of them, and that we are a cloud of particles defined not by position or speed, but by probability and equations.

Blue Planet: Seas of Life – There will be a lot of David Attenborough on this list, it would seem. For good reason, since his efforts have yielded the best shot and most thoughtful considerations of the natural world. In Blue Planet, the vast ecosystems of the ocean are examined by system; the sterile open ocean, the largely unknown deep, the rich coral seas, the variable and adaptive tidal seas. Though individual species take center stage, the systematic approach avoids the pitfall so common to nature films: having too narrow a view. All exist within a system, and one that is carefully balanced. The Deep chapter in particular is edifying in its look at a habitat that has been explored less than the moon, with new species discovered on each dive. Deep ocean vents shooting water as hot as molten lead (but still liquid due to the pressure) are encrusted by a riot of organisms, all living in total independence of the energy of the sun. A glimpse of early Earth, perhaps. There is so much content in this series that its rewatchability is absurdly high.

Earth: The Biography – Watching Professor Iain Stewart wax poetic about the forces that shaped the Earth is akin to a Euro discussing the greatest sport in the world – you would have to lack a pulse to avoid being caught up in his joy for the subject. Covering topics as vast and complex as air (atmosphere), water (oceans), fire (volcanism), and ice is no mean feat, but Dr. Stewart burns through these with great speed in a way that ties the systems together. The visuals are remarkable, and more than justify investing in a hi-definition player. Most of all, this is a pure educational experience, and one that bears rewatching. The deft explanation for how the ocean currents and the deep ocean conveyor work together to cycle oxygen to the deep and nutrients to the surface to make those oceans highly productive is not to be missed. Indeed, the chapter on water connects solidly with climate change literature to suggest that the deep ocean conveyor can be shut off rather easily, and once this happens the oceans will become incapable of sustaining life in large amounts. Considering this is where the human species gets much of its food and half of its oxygen, that is an arresting conclusion.

Ocean Odyssey – Using both actual footage and computer animation, the life cycle of the elusive Sperm Whale is examined in this well-executed work by the team from Walking With Dinosaurs. The incorporation of CGI is seamless, and essential for never-photographed details like a battle with a giant squid, or the whale’s use of a sonar unit powerful enough to knock a diver unconscious. The documentary covers the birth and development of the young whale, how it learns to hunt, the way they breed and communicate, their transglobal migration, and eventual death. There are details provided about how humans have impacted their habitat with overfishing and whaling, but fortunately these are not terminal tangents that would rob the feature of its focus. It suggests an optimistic future for this and the other great whales for their adaptability, perhaps in a way that will take advantage of global warming in ways other animals cannot.

Life in Cold Blood – Unlike his series about the oceans or Mammals, Attenborough’s Life in Cold Blood has a difficult task to be accomplished without the help of photogenic animals. The cold-blooded animal groups of amphibians, snakes, toads, and crocodiles are viewed with a distinct lack of romance by our species. That we reserve the term ‘reptilian’ for the most detestable among us says it all. Nonetheless, the film crew manages to capture moments that are nothing less than spectacular, and dispels the many general myths people hold about cold-blooded animals. Mammals and birds consume more than 90% of their intake to maintain their body temperature, so reptiles and amphibians are far more efficient. Their behavior is complex, their adaptability surprising, and their ability to survive may be far greater than their warm-blooded cousins.  Snakes that fly, crocodiles that carefully nurture their young, and a lizard that mourns its fallen mate will change the way you think about these animal groups. They are in no way primitive; indeed their very existence suggests their equality with us on the evolutionary scale.

The Story of Maths – Though a ponderous subject, if you are not of a mathematical bent, the theory behind maths can be fascinating when explained by a master of the form. This series looks at the history of mathematical systems and how they evolved through history, driven by practical need and intellectual curiosity. Professor Marcus du Sautoy covers the history of how systems of math are developed, and his passion for the subject is infectious. The ancient Egyptians needed to come up with a way to predict the Nile floods for farming purposes, as well as to measure land and calculate taxation. The number system borne of this need was used to create fractions, a binary system that predated computers by 3000 years, geometric series, and the use of pi. The Babylonians developed a number system based on 60, as it was easy to divide, and recognized the use of place values. Pythagoras developed a theorem (the name of which escapes me) and was a part of developing the system of mathematical and geometric proofs that is still used today. Most importantly, he proposed (inspired by the work of blacksmiths striking anvils) the harmonic series to understand music, and that the universe itself was subject to mathematical laws. This was a stepping stone to theoretical physics whereby math has been used to predict the existence of exoplanets, the existence of certain fundamental particles, and the presence of supermassive black holes. And so forth. Never has math been presented in such a clear and relevant way.

Nature’s Most Amazing Events – The focus here is not on a particular animal or ecosystem, but on a remarkable event that occurs at the intersection between opportune weather, available resources, and the massive migrations of animals that move to take advantage of same. Though there is some educational value in how these tremendous events occur, really this is an excuse to show off your hi-definition player. The sound is powerful, the visuals are unmatched by anything outside of the Planet Earth documentary, and the drama is worthy of a master storyteller. The two most impressive chapters focus upon the unique world where the desert becomes a swamp teeming with life in the Okavango Delta, and the rare but intense Sardine Run off the coast of South Africa. The Okavango Delta becomes a haven for animals that will cross miles of inhospitable desert to take advantage of the brief bonanza that gathers; for a herd of elephants, their survival depends upon it during this dramatic passage. The Sardine Run culminates in a cloud of sardines visible from a mile in the air, attacked from every quarter by the largest army of predators on the planet. More accomplished visual poetry that this does not exist.

Besieged Fortress – Disaster movies get this resounding answer from the nature film genre as a seemingly unstoppable phalanx of driver ants descend upon a termite mound in Burkina Faso. Though the termite mound has a defense, they are hopelessly outmatched and their queen is helplessly immobile. Though one is not predisposed to caring about the survival of an insect, the drama that is set up by this efficiently paced and cleverly plotted tour de force will grab hold of you nonetheless. It is possible that some of the shots were tampered with by the filmmaker, but considering how well this story is told, who gives a shit?

Life After People – One of the more engaging thought experiments of the decade; if people disappeared, what would happen to the Earth and to the things we have left behind? How quickly would entropy claim our tremendous successes? Quite quickly, as it turns out. This well done and exhaustively researched work (based in part on Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us) speaks volumes toward our species-centric view of our world, and our relative insignificance. Though humankind wreaks havoc upon the biosphere and the future of virtually any species living in the wild, the Earth itself and any flora or fauna that manage to survive our last throes would get along swimmingly without our presence, and scrupulously remove any trace of our existence within 100,000 years. A cough in the history of our planet. Try to guess what actually might survive. This was presented both as a single film and a series.

Meerkat Manor – This became a cultural phenomenon in 2005, much to everyone’s surprise. It turns out that suricates have a family dynamic as involving as a soap opera, and for the Whiskers clan, the danger afforded by the Kalahari provided a tense atmosphere in which the tale unfolded. Unlike in fiction, none of these characters are protected by an author, and the predators that watch carefully from the scrub are indifferent to the narrative. This brought an unnerving unpredictability to what would otherwise be saturated by anthropomorphizing bullshit. There is some educational value to this, but its strongest asset is its ability to suck you in to the daily bustle of a group of animals with remarkably complex behavior. What is most shocking is how emotionally involving it can be – and if you watched this all the way through and did not shed a tear or two along the way, you are made of stone.

The Universe – There is no larger subject that could be tackled, but the impressive array of planetary scientists, astronomers, and physicists are game enough. The Universe makes it cool to be a geek again with an overpowering series that injects immense amounts of Whoa into every single episode. Detailed and intricate, yet accessible to a layman, this series addresses subjects of more than a purely intellectual interest. The first season dealt largely with the solar system, bristling with fun facts like how Earth’s magnetic field is the only reason we still have an atmosphere (unlike Mars), Jupiter has a core of solid Hydrogen metal, and that Neptune’s distance from the sun is what allows it to have 1,000 mph winds. The subsequent seasons leapt even further off the map, considering Dark Energy, the ways in which the Earth can be destroyed, the life cycle of a star and the odd phenomenon of the neutron star. Even if you feel the subject matter is alien to you, the elation of the scientists who provide intuitive models for understanding rather strange concepts will rub off on you. Another fun fact: if you fell on a neutron star, you would be converted to a pure lump of neutrons. Awesome.

Winged Migration – One of the most visually arresting films ever made, Winged Migration departs from the standard model of nature films by having relatively little narration, and providing information with images when possible. This is to its credit, as this is a feature to be appreciated in silence. The vast clouds of birds swooping with the wind currents, the storm of gannets dive bombing into the water, and the impossibly distant migrations of geese create unforgettable images. Another fascinating aspect that made Winged Migration unique was the filmmaker’s direct involvement in the film and resulting manipulation of the action. In order to capture some of the images, the crew filmed a group of geese that were being trained to locate their nesting grounds with an ultralight aircraft. The birds were shot from a distance of mere feet, allowing shots that will likely never be made again. This has been a source of criticism, but again the goal was not perfect realism, but achievement of ideal cinema. Once a subject is photographed, one cannot claim it was untouched in the process.

Charles Darwin and The Tree of Life – In a way, this is reflective of not only the life and impact of Charles Darwin and his unifying theories of biology and evolution, but also reflective of the presenter, whose name is synonymous with the nature film. David Attenborough reviews the history of how Darwin came to realize the connection between all living things going back to one remote ancestor. Visuals are interspersed with footage of Attenborough discussing some zoological item of interest from thirty years prior. Subtly, this gives shading to the importance of the theory over the last 200 years. After all, without this quantum leap, there would have been no understanding of the relationship between animals, plants, bacteria, and whatever the current planetary population may yet evolve into. Nature films tend to be static despite themselves, as a snapshot in time. The Tree of Life makes clear that we are on a continuously moving arrow through time, and our actions have powerful impacts upon this tree’s branches. It is a fitting tribute to one of the most extraordinary minds in science, and the difficulty he faced amidst ignorance and superstition in bringing this knowledge to humankind.

March of the Penguins – Its popularity resulted in some backlash, thanks in no small part to a contempt for the opinions of the herd, for Oscar, and for that stupid anthropomorphizing voice over by Morgan Freeman. Like any nature film or documentary not presented by someone who is an expert in the field, it is best to turn the volume off and play something else in the background. For the visuals alone this film deserves to be considered with the best of the decade. The extraordinary difficulty of shooting footage during winter in Antarctica (where gasoline itself becomes a jelly and exposed human flesh freezes in seconds) by itself brushes aside any objections to this masterful examination of the survival instinct. Luc Jacquet edits the footage to create a story about what a species must do to simply exist from one year to the next, the meager rewards, and the impossible risks that are taken. Anyone who felt this movie was about cute penguins and their cuddly offspring read way too much Nietzsche.

If We Had No Moon – An intriguing intellectual exercise whereby eminent astronomers consider what would happen if Earth had no moon; indeed, the foremost question is why such an unusual event occurred. It is suspected that Earth evolved simple life even before the Cambrian period, with a deep global ocean that drowned the land as the early solar system began to settle. Earth’s smaller cousin Orpheus also evolved life, but their orbits were too close, and they smashed into one another, eradicating life and creating a molten ball of fractured mantle and gas. The Earth settled, and the debris around it coalesced into the Moon, and so the only planet in the solar system with a relatively large moon came to be. As it turns out humans owe their existence to the moon. If not for Orpheus, the Earth would still be a vast ocean devoid of terrestrial life. The Moon itself stabilizes Earth’s orbit, seasons, and temperature. The chaotic orbit and tilt that Earth would have without its moon would make the development of intelligent life difficult to impossible as we imagine it. Overall an engaging documentary that brings into sharp relief just how precarious our existence truly is.

Hate nature?  Check out Matt’s best docs of the decade.

Hate everything?  Check out Matt’s worst docs of the decade.

This journal will chronicle drunken observations and insights as I make my way through my the Knight Rider, season one DVD set — my Walden if you will. Although I’m sure that by the time I’m finished, you will regard Walden as Thoreau’s Knight Rider.

1. Ever since childhood, the hair of David Hasslehoff as Michael Knight has reminded me of meatballs. After watching most of Disc 1, I am consumed by a desire to consume meatballs and only refrain from making a run to Togo’s, in pursuit of a half way decent but not particularly good Hasslehoff Head Sandwich because A) it is 2:00 am and Togo’s is closed as fuck and B) my blood alcohol level hovers at about four times the legal driving limit. Actually, I don’t really car about “B” that much. I just wish Togo’s was open. Also, this is especially true when Hasslehoff’s back is to the camera. It’s just a human body with a meatball where the head should be. You can’t look at such an image and think of anything other than Ichabod Crane coming home covered in tomato paste.

2. Seeing Patricia Macpherson in her little white jumpsuit for the first time in well over a decade stirred hibernating memories of barely comprehended childhood lust, and I realized that she must have been responsible for my first, thumb sized erections. No wonder I would plead so desperately to delay bed time for a few minutes on Friday Knights. Yoda PJ’s leave little room to hide embarrassing protrusions, even when you’re eight.

3. Maybe it’s a plastic surgery issue, but whenever I watch a show that aired before about 1988, I can’t believe how old all the actors look. In the pilot, I’m pretty sure that the femme fatale who serves as Michael’s nemesis is played by Gloria Swanson. Call me superficial, but if face-lifts and lippo are what it takes to insure that actresses cast in the roll of “sexpot # 1 ” are completely jowl free, then God bless you, Dr. Baumblatt.

4. Is Michael Knight a hero, a hetero, a homo or a pedo? Answer: all of the above. Upon meeting hot single mothers and older sisters, who invariably have ten year old boys in tow, Knight’s first course of action is always to take the boy “for a ride in my car.” Cut to a steamy breeze blowing through curtains, and fade to black. Seriously, none of these women have the mildest qualm about sending little boys off with a stranger from out of town who asks to be left alone with the kid within 90 seconds of first meeting him. The ease with which Knight is able to get young boys alone is like something out of Pedhouse Forum

“Hi, my name is Michael Knight, and what’s you’re name pretty lady?”

“Angela, and this is my son Billy.”

“Hey sport! What do you say I take you for a ride out to the warehouse district! See ya later Andrea.”

“Bye Michael, nice meeting you. Have fun Billy!”

On many an occasion, these women throw themselves at Mike with that delicious, single mom desperation and, when better choices exist, he deflects their moist attentions as readily as KITT deflects howitzer shells. One can only assume that he hits the tang only upon discovering that Jr. doesn’t like to party like that. But this ain’t a George Lucas character. When his options are limited, Knight hits option “b” with enthusiasm. It might be his second choice, but he still loves it and he is perfectly content to wipe the blood from his sword and fence his way to a silver medal.

5. The second episode of the series was directed by Paul Stanley. Was it that Paul Stanley? Nobody knows for certain, because the possibility is too delicious to risk debunking through investigation. “You know, I really needed to take a break from the relentless gravitas of Kiss…”

6. The five best television shows to watch while heavily intoxicated are:

1. Perfect Hair Forever

2. Aqua Teen Hunger Force

3. Knight Rider

4. Family Guy

5.Municipal Roundtable

Note that two of the top three star anthropomorphic meatballs.

7. The five best shows to watch while sober are:

I have no idea. Probably West Wing, or some bullshit like that, which only goes to demonstrate that temperance is no virtue.

In all seriousness, let’s have a hand for the design team on this show. 23 years later, KITT still looks totally rad. Even his high tech interior still looks pretty cool, with the lone exception of when he is tracking people and the display on his monitor looks like Berserker.

Roughly a year ago, a friend pointed out that it would be really funny if their were “little people” whose proportions where opposite those of actual midgets. People with normal sized arms and legs, but with really small torsos and heads. I’ve been sporadically laughing out loud about it ever since.

I’ve hit the roughest patch of Knight Rider so far. The impossibly bad episode called “White Bird.” David Hasslehoff is called on to shed tears on no less than three separate occasions, one of which comes as we see him driving through the desert as a montage of photographs of his ex-fiance drifts over the screen as we hear watery echos her saying, “I love you Michael. Don’t ever leave me Michael.” This continues for a good two minutes. I also like the slyly expository scene where Michael explains the case involving his ex to Bonnie, beginning with, “In my other life before the Foundation, when I had a different face, and a different identity…when I was, Michael Long…” Cue bad funk.

Michael Knight has the worst taste in music ever. I don’t remember this at all, and granted, there wasn’t much to chose from in 1983… but Christ. All he listens to is this terrible, late 70’s easy listening country rock. Bands who were inspired by the Eagles. Inspired to make music — not to murder children. So wrong.

One of the interesting things about America is that it can still have subcultural movements that become enormous without anybody else noticing until way after they generate more money per year than Central America. Sometimes this is a racial thing. My mom has no idea who Tyler Perry, the world’s richest man, is. Maybe you remember when the movie, The Original Kings of Comedy came out, and every review began with something like, “apparently, the highest grossing comedy tour in history happened last year and it was headlined by such African American stars as Bernie The Entertainer. What makes this even more incredible is that black people won’t even cough up money to eat at restaurants with waiters or go to basketball games–but this thing packed those same arenas to the rafters.” This also happens with stuff for kids. Somehow every child and parent in America finds out about a musician who never performs in mainstream media, and one day you read an article about how some guy named Race Car Steve made $86 Million last year. It’s pretty impressive that these social networks  can function at least somewhat independently and build something that huge. Similar social networks exist among many groups, including people who are actually retarded. Occasionally, you’ll learn about some guy who you have never seen or heard of, like the late, unlamented Danny Gans, who has a $20 million a year contract in Vegas to do impersonations of Jack Nicholson, Elvis and Richard Nixon. Most of these people eventually break through to the mainstream by sheer volume. But someone like Dr. Laura was already well known in the retarded community and mega-rich before she really showed up on the radar of sentient beings.

The horrible reality of Jeff Dunham hit me when I learned from Dan, an Armenian degenerate, that Dunham’s new show was Comedy Central’s biggest debut ever, carrying the channel to ratings victory over all other cable channels.  Unfortunately, I decided to look for some of his act on youtube. It is possibly the worst act I’ve ever seen. Also, Dunham has really odd, fake hair. Let me couch that by saying I’m not a big fan of stand up in general and therefore, not the least bit snobby about it. While it is a legitimate craft, and very difficult to do well, I hate comics who think they are serious business and get all upset about Dane Cook being more popular than Brian Regan. I don’t give a shit. To me, Dane Cook is just kind of a generic, mildly amusing comedian who (apparently) possesses a lot of charisma. I found Caliendo’s Madden and Barkley impersonations to be kind of funny, the first few hundred times. Bill Hicks, allegedly on the other end of the spectrum, was also pretty funny but I don’t think he was a genius just because I agreed with some of his political views and he got cancer. So my standards for stand up are about on par with a Night Ranger roadie’s standards for one night stands. And it is from this perspective that I say, “The Jeff Dunham Show” is an abortion sandwich.

I’ve seen two of his puppets in action. I watched the old man puppet, Walter, again on youtube and it was just agonizing. Like, I have literally never seen anything less funny on TV. Dunham enters a massive tie with a bunch of other things that were not funny at all, like the “Dateline” report on Matel having union organizers murdered in it’s Malaysian factories, and the Bears’ losing the Super Bowl, but behind things that were just the slightest bit funny, like the Geico Cave Man Sitcom. For example, the old man puppet–get this–complains about his wife!! While watching this video, I was honestly taken aback and, almost confused, as the audience laughed hysterically at jokes that were barely jokes and certainly not at all funny.

Walter: I could get a real job.

Jeff: Yeah, what would you do?

Walter: I could be a greeter at Wal-Mart.

Get it? Because he’s old. Dunham actually had to stop for laughter, then delay resuming the bit  as a second wave of laughter swept over the audience. I was dumbstruck. People find this hilarious. Apparently the way to revive ventriloquism was to somehow come up with cornier, more worn-out and boring material than the guys used during the seeming death farts of the genre. Not, “how can I do something creative with this old approach,” but “how can I come up with something lamer than the dummy calling the ventriloquist a dummy.”

The other Dunham puppet I’ve seen, both on youtube and in a clip from the new show–more than enough self-sacrifice to qualify for writing a review–is of Achmed The Dead Terrorist. This routine is vaguely right wing, but not as much as you would think. It’s too bland for that. What Dunham has done here is discover the territory that people who are actually retarded believe to be edgy. Achmed is a dead terrorist, which is vaguely un-PC in itself. The puppet tells a couple of jokes about Jews and Catholics, and a joke about Michael Jackson being a pedophile. Runs something like this. Two Jews would fight over a penny. Two priests would fight over a little boy. But they’d have to fight over the little boy with Michael Jackson, who also likes little boys. All of this is doubly hilarious because foreigners have funny accents, and therefore, so does Achmed. But don’t tell the PC police! I bet they would be outraged!

Nothing this guy does even brings a hint of a smile. If I just saw the act without the audience reaction, I would actually feel horrible for the guy, imagining him to be bombing in historical fashion after putting so much work into making those puppets. But this is a major crossover hit, breaking Dunham free of the retarded subculture once and for all. So now I hate Dunham and hope the swine flu kills everybody on earth. If you think I’m exaggerating, watch this youtube clip of Dunham’s act.  Note that this clip is closing in on 100 million views.

Actually, I couldn’t bring myself to link to the Dunham clip because it really is that terrible. Hope you enjoyed that one.

The Ultimate Fighter is the UFC’s answer to reality TV and, given how the UFC is martial arts’ answer to cockfighting, you can imagine the grace and sensitivity with which they’ve risen to the occasion.

For its ninth season, TUF pitched a team of UK fighters against counterparts from the US. The program was broadcast on both sides of the Atlantic, but the producers lacked the cultural sensitivity to bother taking out the subtitles under the British fighters when it arrived over here, buried on Virgin1, with each episode playing several days after it had been broadcast in America. Also, if you’re watching Virgin1 at 11pm on a Sunday night there’s a good chance you can’t read, so it was doubly offensive.

Not as offensive as Team America, though. Making fun of Americans is easy, lazy, racist, and ignorant, but that’s no reason not to do it when they really deserve it.  The American team excelled at chanting USA! USA! and, well, not much else, it turned out. Holed up in a Big Brother-style house with their opponents, when they weren’t praying, crying, talking obsessively about themselves or blandly about nothing in particular, the cracks soon started to emerge and the in-fighting promptly began. The resident black sheep was Jason Pierce, who took issue with his teammates’ occasional beer-drinking and revelry as well as their inability to be pious, humorless pricks like him. I mean, just look at him:

By the quarterfinal stage, this band of foster brothers were lining up to kick each others’ asses, rather than those of their enemies from across the sea. Which is just as well, really, as the best fighters on (shudder) Team UK mopped the floor with them every time they were asked to do so. Pierce withdrew due to a mystery injury, asked to be re-instated in time to fight, had his request denied. Skip forward a few more cut scenes of 30 grown men sitting around dressed like retarded gangbangers and he’s feeding his teammates’ British opponents notes on how the Americans plan to fight. Brilliantly, he denied this to camera, despite being filmed cutting his bros’ balls off earlier that day. The levels of idiocy and anti-climax were then jacked up as Team USA leader, UFC ‘legend’ (it says here) Dan Henderson, failed to react or stamp any kind of authority on the situation. Instead, he continued to walk and talk like Robocop on a diazepam bender, as he had done for the whole series.

Team UK, in contrast, seemed like a riot. Ignoring the terrible name and half-arsed attempt at getting their own chant going, this was a bunch of guys from a variety of cultural and class backgrounds, from regions of the country that are a world away from each other, who simply turned up and got on with it, having a good time and making some new friends in the process. All the things that Team USA should’ve done, if they’d bothered to learn their own ideology and, well, the tournament rulebook. The only arsehole in the UK pack was their leader, TUF 3 winner and now established UFC fighter Michael Bisping, and he was more of a good-natured maniac, truth be told.

Brilliantly, all the best aspects of British culture unfurled themselves before Team USA’s nonplussed eyes. They had accents that didn’t sound like a Hugh Grant or a Guy Ritchie film, they ran riot around their side of the house partying on their nights off, and for their final meal they dressed up nicely with a range of shirts that seem to span Moss Bross to Burtons, sat down for a meal together and had Bisping give them a 30-second speech at the end of it about how proud of them all he was, delivered with the mumbling grace of a emotionally-repressed tough guy. A real man, in other words. Then one of them threw a teammate into the swimming pool and got dragged in and then coated in flour for his troubles.

To be fair, not all the Americans were wankers. Californian army kid Frank Lester was allowed the only credible breakdown on their team, when he subbed for arch-bottler Pierce, won his second chance bout and then fell at the last hurdle for qualifying to fight in the finale. Seeing a twenty-five year-old man with a kid to support learn that he is not quite good enough to do something for a living that he’s worked harder for than most people will ever work for anything was stirring stuff and, mercifully, the producers didn’t milk it. Lester’s admission in the final episode to one of Team UK that the only reason he didn’t like him at first was because his teammate lost to him was typical of his likable, candid honesty, too, and handily emphasized the problem with most of the arrogant tossers with whom he shared a camp. Likewise, Alaskan rube Richie Whitson stayed on good terms with eventual Lightweight champion Ross Pearson, even after Pearson had accidentally spread Whitson’s nose across his face with a late blow in their bout.

The only American to make the pay-per-view finale was DaMarques Johnson who, when he wasn’t wearing his baseball cap at a ridiculous angle and talking about what a badass he was and how the strength of his faith inspired him, got a squirt of water up his nose from Bisping’s water bottle for being such a prize dickhead. When Bisping went to apologise 30 seconds later, Johnson was too busy brooding in the car park and rushing to find a camera to tell that he’d kick Bisping’s ass, given half the chance. He also had a king-sized bug up his arse about the other Welterweight finalist, James Wilks, presumably because Wilks had the temerity to be well-spoken, polite and really quite good. Johnson earned his spot in the final with some impressive bouts but was promptly found out at the PPV and ended up tapping out in the first round, with implicit recommendation that he not let the octagon’s door hit him on the arse on the way out.

Next up is TUF 10 which, for the sake of diversity will feature only heavyweight fighters. It will definitely lack the peculiarities of 9 that gave it great moments of unintentional comedy and cod sociology, so we’ll just have to go back to enjoying watching half-naked men beating the crap out of each other, which is where we came in…

With a timeline in the billions of years and a choice of vistas from the highest mountain peak to the deepest ocean trench, Nature is the greatest of cinematographers. Even the most routine of moments possesses tremendous beauty and commands our attention  as a crucial component to an elegant system. With the changing of the seasons, key elements converge to create massive spectacles that stagger the imagination. For six of our planet’s most impressive events, David Attenborough is there to highlight not only the exquisite artistry, but also the fragile constitution of the system that makes these events possible. As always, the spectre of human intervention hangs heavily over the proceedings, as climate change, consumption of habitat for farm and industrial land, and outright extermination of species threatens these and other events across the globe. If you appreciate visual pageantry, or if you want to give your Blu-ray system a serious workout, this is the documentary series that will do the trick.

Two episodes in particular are standouts, and both take place on the African continent. ‘The Great Tide’ refers to The Sardine Run, taking place every few years off the coast of South Africa, where a shoal of sardines numbering in the hundreds of millions is lured from the cool ocean depths to the African coast where the world’s largest army of predators has gathered to ambush them. The sardine groups are drawn into cold water, as warm water tends to exist along shallows and coastal areas where their numbers cannot protect them from predators. As the cold Agulhas current pushes up along the coast during the winter months, it pushes back against currents coming from the north; this creates an abnormally frigid coastal artery that attracts and then traps the sardines.

The documentary spends ample time developing the characters of this mighty clash. Cape Gannets, remarkable in their stark beauty and their aerial dexterity, breed off the coast in enormous numbers, but the chance of survival for an individual chick is slim. Once they are strong enough to fly, their parents abandon them, and they have ten days to learn to fly or starve; if they successfully achieve flight, there is a chance they will falter in the breakers (hundreds are battered to death in the waves) or be killed by a seal. One gannet, thoroughly beaten by the relentless waves and rocks, hauls itself upon land and dies, the moment containing all the gravity of Shakespearean tragedy. If they survive, the gannets will form an integral part of the Sardine Run spectacle. They are joined by common Dolphin, who expertly hunt down and round up the sardines into small ‘bait balls’ that allows for easier hunting of individual fish. Various sharks, from Ragged-Tooth to Great Whites, take advantage of the dolphins’ work. Lastly the Bryde’s (pronounced Broo-duhs) Whale dives in to take ten thousand sardines in a single gulp. Once the predators find the shoal, the attack begins and is sustained with impossible intensity. The roiling sardines, expertly moving dolphins, and the divebombing gannets form a stunning visual poetry that transcends wildlife filmmaking and drifts into the realm of ageless elegance.

The other episode is less visually intense, but documents the violent and rather abrupt change that occurs in the Okavango Delta after intense rains fall upon the Angolan highlands and spill into a river that terminates not into a lake or ocean, but into the driest desert on earth. The Kalahari is almost devoid of plant life during its dry season, but the camera crew finds a herd of elephants struggling their way through this lethal setting. The matriarch is there for a reason, however, as she knows that the rains will fall, and the parched sands will come alive. Still, the tension created by this narrative is quite real, and most involving as you follow them into an uncertain future. When the precious water finds its way through dry river beds into the sands, the entire vista is transformed into a lake. As elephants, lions, cape buffalo, and various other savanna animals enter the fresh waters, we notice that the land itself seems to have come alive; fish explode from a distant marsh, and many species of frog actually live permanently in this desert, using the brief presence of water to exit hibernation, eat, breed, and reenter hibernation in an endless cycle.

Despite the triumphant moments the animals share, there is no guarantee that the life-providing cycle will continue. As the climate changes, water supplies dwindle, and the natural habitat that the flora and fauna require to replenish their numbers continues to be destroyed, these remarkable events may cease abruptly. Very little is understood about how these and most wildlife ecosystems really work. And therein lies the black-box warning: unless research into the intricacies of the planet’s ecosystems accelerates and serious effort is made to properly fuse the habitat of the human with the rest of its fellow species, disaster is guaranteed.

Nature films represent a body of work very much under threat in a society that has come to see intellectual pursuits with utter contempt, if not outright vilification. March of the Penguins was adopted by the Christian right in the US, its anthropomorphizing of the yearly journey of emperor penguins in the Antarctica played for an ‘aww shucks’ effect with Morgan Freeman’s softly-softly voiceover and practically no violence shown between the animals, paternalistically and puritanically omitting anything that might offend a conservative family audience. After all, the truth occasionally hurts.

Still, amongst the ‘documentaries’ that feature nothing more than repetitive subjects, uninspired photography and a voiceover from an ignorant celebrity or some asshole prattling about the “ex-treeeeeme predators!”, there is some golden wheat in all the chaff. David Attenborough’s work continues to stun, Walking With Dinosaurs is impressive, as is the oddly affecting Meerkat Manor.

Still, all nature programs remain important for the same reason: no matter what the intellectual exercise that one is embarking upon, the destination invariably involves learning something about ourselves, our intellectual limits, and our species as a whole.

This is particularly true of evolutionary theory. Overly-sensitive religious types would rather sacrifice their first born to their local sky god than subscribe to it, the one thing they all have in common being their desire to discourage a questioning mind. Evolution is a purely intellectual exercise, as it doesn’t have a product to market. It simply asks where we came from and where we are going. Darwin supplied some suggestions about the former. The Future is Wild examines the latter.

The Future is Wild was the brainchild of a team of animators, wildlife photographers, and scientists to construct what the world will look like 5 million, 100 million, and 200 million years from now. The first step was to consult geologists to predict how continents will continue to move based upon how landmasses have moved in the past. Next, climatologists built the plants and ecosystems onto the future maps. Biologists completed the picture by pairing flora with the fauna based on how species have evolved in the past to world changes. The result is disorienting, surprising, and occasionally disturbing. Rule one was that the human species is extinct. Five million years seems far enough to assume this is the case. People are rapidly losing their adaptive skills thanks to a combination of overpopulation beyond resources and increasingly rigid social systems. Herein lies the fascinating part: what happens once humans are out of the picture?

Five million years from now, the advancing ice age has decimated the rain forests. The animals resemble what inhabits the world today, with some adaptations. Mammals still dominate the surface, though predatory birds have taken over the savannah. Volcanic eruptions become common, and the planet warms up.

One hundred million years from now, the planet is steamy, and the air is packed with carbon dioxide and oxygen. The animals have become huge compared to their modern day equivalents; insects are measured in meters. The atmosphere is volatile, and the Earth’s lava core even more so. At the end of this period, massive pan-global volcanic activity fills the skies with ash and carbon dioxide for a couple of decades. This is a relatively brief period, but enough to kill the phytoplankton in the oceans and decimate the land plants, which in turn causes mass extinctions of virtually anything large and/or unable to survive on minimal food intake until the sunlight returns and the plants and plankton rebound in numbers. Life is challenged periodically by these catastrophic events to come up with a solution rather quickly, and some lifeforms can adapt to survive a lack of food, sunlight, or drastic changes in the weather. After these events, such as the meteorite strike that killed the dinosaurs, or the massive land devastation caused by human industry, the organisms that remain proliferate, and continue to adapt to the new circumstances.

Two hundred million years from now, nearly all life has been wiped out, and the survivors evolve into increasingly bizarre creatures like terrestrial squid the size of elephants, and sharks equipped with neon directional signals for hunting purposes.

To be honest, the animated effects are somewhat dated, inferior to what we see on Hollywood movies, but TFIW compensates by not featuring any Transformers or scantily-clad Spartans. Its dazzle is in the ideas behind the effects, and how they came to be.

TFIW performs best when it comes to these ideas, the challenge put to living beings to survive, and their response. The socially awkward scientists in bow ties who invented these strange conditions and creatures look like excited children as they explore the possibilities, creating empathy for anyone else wandering ‘what if?’ The apocalypse is its staring point, looking forward to what might be, and testing the limits of our ability to understand the fluid life form that is the planetary ecosystem.

This is more than cerebral wanking – this is an unadorned picture about the relentless struggle for survival, every species affecting a careful balance between their resources and their niche rivals. Each snapshot places you in the center of predator-versus-prey relationships that have been ongoing for millennia, and as such hold a unique tension. The action is raw, and proceeds without a shred of sentiment. Giant airborne insects armed with razor sharp forelegs spear birds in flight, monkeys fall prey to giant meat-eating birds, and massive intelligent squid are torn to ribbons by swift moving sharks. All species are doomed to extinction, and perhaps the process of life itself is doomed. They – we – only exist for a brief period. Perhaps one species will have an adaptation that will allow it to be one of the few to survive a cataclysm, and life is allowed to exist for another millennia.

One episode in particular struck a nerve, taking place 100 million years from now. Spiders work to weave giant webs that span an entire canyon, the purpose of which is to collect… seeds. Strange. The spiders amass hills of seeds in their cavernous nests, but spiders are carnivores. Out of the shadows emerges a small rodent. Whilst surrounded by carnivorous spiders, these mice-like creatures eat the seeds, occasionally being killed and eaten by the spiders. The mice are being farmed, you see. The rodent presented here is the last mammal on earth, reduced to hiding in a cave, livestock for a spider colony. Having slowly lost the competition for resources to birds, reptiles, and insects, the mammal is to be the first major group to vanish. This seems sensible, as mammals are one of the fastest-disappearing groups anyway, occupying most of the spots on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s endangered species listing. Currently, the pace of extinctions of plants, amphibians, and mammals are at their greatest since the Cretaceous period, all due to human action.

I am quite used to the idea of humans going extinct. We seem incapable of making intelligent decisions, despite intelligence being our only advantage (cue Clarence Darrow monologue). It gave me a chill, however, to think that any animal that even resembles us would be wiped off the face of the earth. This affords a unique chance to come to terms with one’s own morality in the grandest existential way.

Every form of life has a desire to preserve and perpetuate, and the human race is no exception. This, however, is the uncompromising world, and nature is presented as the stern, ruthless cunt that she is. Among its many strengths, it’s this calmly combative reality check that The Future Is Wild does best of all.

The Travel Channel’s Man v. Food just might be the cure for what ails us. At a time when jobs are being lost by the thousands, Wall Street is in the shitter, and the housing market is dripping along with all the confidence of an exposed Ponzi scheme, what better way to feel that last twinge of pride than by watching a young man inhale ridiculously gluttonous piles of food, all for the sheer thrill of eating? His name is Adam Richman, and unlike other culinary aficionados whose personalities tend to range from suffocatingly pretentious to blindingly arrogant (Mr. Bourdain, I’m looking at you), this New York kiddo actually understands that the best way to ensure a loyal audience is to make sure people don’t want you to choke to death during the pilot episode. Richman’s more than likeable; his attitude is positively winning, with a careful blend of charm, wit, and silliness that avoids the expected smug sense of superiority. While you dash about the globe sampling caviar and the latest overpriced wine, he’s in the corner with the world’s hottest curry, or a plate of hot wings designed to bring on advanced coronary artery disease. But with a smile, of course.

Sure, there’s a gimmick – Adam tackles a few hot spots of a city’s local cuisine, as well as accepting a challenge (the hottest, the biggest, the greasiest, what have you) – but it’s a race you’d actually like to see him finish, unlike other food/travel programs that tend to work hand-in-dull-hand with the Chamber of Commerce. Adam is blue collar without the aw-shucks idiocy; he won’t use a napkin and isn’t above a high five from the crowd, but when he actually sits down to a meal, he’s smart as a whip and all business. He’s like a crude, masticating hardhat at the egghead’s buffet. And it’s standing room only. Though not a professional eater, he has held jobs at all levels of the restaurant business, a simple fact that means little, but might set the more high-brow at ease. But fuck ‘em. This is a low-brow, no-account, pigs-in-the-trough shitfest, and no one’s apologizing for the stained t-shirts. Remember when eating used to be fun? You know, before the calorie counters and protectionist scumbags interfered with a guilt-free bloodbath? Adam has resurrected the entertainment value of digging in face first, and there isn’t a low fat menu in sight. If it can’t possibly send you to the emergency room, it’s best left in the freezer.

So far, Adam’s been to
Amarillo, TX, where – expectedly – he tackled the 72-ounce Big Texan at the Big Texan Steak Ranch. Can he finish the massive slab of meat, complete with baked potato and salad, all in an hour’s time? As always, it’s less about the destination than the slobbering journey. Who hasn’t wanted to race against the clock and quite possibly vomit all over a few strangers to boot? To make matters worse, you’re set above and apart from the rest of the patrons, with all eyes on your disgusting, unholy self. When everyone’s a hero and merely showing up a cause for a party, thank fuck we’ve found a justifiable means by which to spotlight the gods in our midst. You thank the local fireman or cop on the beat; I’m shaking hands with anyone who can finish this fucking steak. And then there’s Memphis, TN, home to some of the best BBQ on planet earth, where the Sasquatch Hamburger awaits at the Big Foot Lodge. Jesus Christ, this 7 ½ pound burger just about breaks the table, and it’s one of TV’s greatest moments when it’s brought out from the kitchen. We anticipate the damn thing the whole show, and when it finally arrives, it’s like Harry Lime smirking from the shadows. Is it sick when people are starving? Damn right it is. And fuck
Africa.

Adam also visits Pittsburgh, PA for a Primanti Brothers sandwich (and those hellish hot wings, served up at a Quaker Steak & Lube, to ensure maximum trashiness); Columbus, OH for a 2 ½ pound Dagwood sandwich; Austin, TX for the infamous Don Juan El Taco Grande Challenge; the Windy City to partake of dipped beef sandwiches at Al’s Beef; and Atlanta, GA for chicken n’ waffles (with Gladys Knight), as well as the insane Carnivore Pizza Challenge, which proves to be poor Adam’s Waterloo. Between meals, he shows us a snapshot of the cities in question, all in the name of celebration. We rule the roost not because we lead the world in eating disorders or diet fads, but because we alone perfected adding bacon to everything not nailed down. Or extra cheese. Or stuffing with chili, deep-frying, and coating with whipped cream. We’re all-you-can-eat with a bottomless stomach; always open, licking our fingers, and rounding it off with a sweat-inducing dump. Adam’s too classy to end his adventures with a trip to the john, but understanding our hoo-ya lust for sports metaphors and allusions, he closes the book on each challenge with a “press conference,” where he responds to dippy questions from the crowd with earnest jocularity. A rousing finish for a grin-worthy event. Food, fat, and the need to have one’s name immortalized on the wall of some seedy rib joint. America, more than ever.