We don't have a TV at our house, much less cable, for the Very Good Reason that we would end up watching things like Star Trek or Bewitched, which were fine shows the first three or five times.
Anyway, one night I amused myself by watching cable television science shows. What I learned:
- civilizations tend to coalesce along the Earth's fault lines, where natural resources are made easily accessible by earthquakes and volcanoes,
- scientist hosts are now expected to rock climb or play the violin while they expound scientific hypotheses,
- producers think tidal waves and The Big Bang are scarier when the film is played at random speeds and directions, and
- all that playing the film backward-and-forward stuff can inflate a 10 minute lecture to a full 60 minutes (90 with commercials).
I've since been welcomed by my writer friends to the World of High Definition Documentaries, Where We Slow Down Tidal Waves of Lava and Zoom In On Them Not Because It's Cool Or Educational, But Because We Can.
High definition camera work still doesn't explain the paranormal investigator shows, though. I'm sure there's a metaphor in there.
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