Sleepless in Midland

A tv show for skeptics, maybe

There are a lot of misconceptions out there, and when something happens that isn't easily explainable there are people who jump to the conclusion that it must be magic, paranormal, extraterrestrials, big feet or - shudder - GHOSTS! And there are people who make money off of this uncritical thinking. See, for example, Ghost Hunters: Plumbers by day - ghost hunters by night!

One of my favorite podcasts is The Skeptics Guide to the Universe hosted weekly by Steven Novella, M.D., with a regular panel and an occasional guest. The panelists are always well prepared and ready to dump cold water on some pseudoscience that was reported as news. Being a physician, Dr. Novella frequently takes aim at homeopathy, but they cover a broad range of topics. One recent podcast contained a segment in which a panelist provided tips on how to scam the timeshare scammers - go here to get it. They are always educational, entertaining and enlightening.

So here's the good news. There's a tv show in the works: Skeptologists. Their website says that principal photography has been completed for the pilot episode and that they are pitching it to the networks. I sure hope they can sell it. If only I could find a good luck charm to lend to them, you know, one that really works.

"Curb Your Enthusiasm" leaves no sacred cow unskewered

Over the past week or so I've watched seasons two and four of Curb Your Enthusiasm on DVD, and I can't recall laughing so hard at a TV show.

That's the show featuring Larry David as himself living the good life in Los Angeles while trying to remain politically correct the whole time. David had his comedy credentials established in "Seinfeld," but "Curb Your Enthusiasm" really locks them in and suggests that he was probably responsible for the funniest "Seinfeld" jokes.

Larry David is a well know Hollywood liberal, and that serves a good purpose in "Curb." Each episode has a few story lines, and many of them have situations in which David inadvertently offends someone on the subject of race, gender, disability, religion, sexual preference or just about anything else that could offend someone. Some of the situations are a bit contrived, but they all work at some level. Only a well known liberal could get away with some of those jokes. And while Larry is always the butt of the joke, they wouldn't work without the hypersensitivity some people display.

I won't spoil the jokes for you except for this one. In the first episode in season four Larry's wife suggests that they renew their wedding vows on their tenth anniversary. Larry doesn't have a problem with that. So she's composing the vows she plans to recite at the ceremony and reads them aloud to him. The vows say something to the effect that Larry and Cheryl will honor and love each other through eternity. Wait a minute. Eternity? The original marriage vows were til death do they part, but now she's changing the rules. And there goes Larry's hope of being single in the afterlife.

Okay, I'll spoil one more for you. Cheryl agrees to allow Larry to have one affair before their tenth anniversary. (Hey, I told you it was contrived, but it sort of makes sense when a flashback tells us that she made the promise before they got married.) Larry finds a smart, attractive, dynamic woman who agrees to take part in the affair, but during the foreplay he discovers that she is a Republican. Oh no. That ruins it for him. He just can't go through with it. Guilt? Fidelity? Religion? Nope, none of those things matter. It's his liberal politics that keep him from having a good time. What a hoot!

Anyway, it may not be for everyone, but it sure made me laugh.

Black Gold 102

I was a big admirer of the derrick man at the rig on which I worked those long years ago. He was a combination circus acrobat and strong man way up there as he grabbed those three-pipe sections and danced them into a neat vertical stack. He had what it took -- strength, balance and courage, lots of courage. So I was glad that they showed a little bit about that job on the second episode of Black Gold which aired on TNT the other day.

The show seems to be trying to cover many aspects of the job, and it's fun to see all they do. In the latest episode they got the pipe stuck in the hole. And that was a treat to watch as they dropped the hammer trying to jar it loose.

That never happened while I worked on the rig, but the previous shift did twist off a bit one time. They pulled out of the hole, and there was nothing but a twisted piece of metal where there should have been more pipe and a bit. About that time our crew arrived to start our day, so we got to fix the problem they caused, the bums. To a green floor hand hand like me fishing for a bit seemed like an interesting variation in the job, but what a nightmare it was for the company men as all they saw was money going down a hole. To retrieve it we had to screw on a device that would grab the remainder of the pipe and pull it up. It was slow going, but it worked, and the company men were ecstatic.

Other less exiting things happened, like lost circulation. That happens when the drill hits a porous zone that soaks up all of the drilling fluid. I was on the night shift that month, and all night long we carried sacks of stuff to dump into the drilling mud to try to regain circulation. There were sacks of cotton seed hulls which were supposed to stop up the holes, and they were light and easy to carry.  But then there were sacks of the dry powder that when mixed with water makes drilling mud. I don't trust my memory on this, but I think those bags weighed 100 pounds each. Maybe they only weighed 50 pounds, but those suckers were heavy. At the end of the shift we were exhausted, but that didn't stop the smartypants I worked with. One said, "Get some sleep, you might have to WORK tomorrow!" Hardy har har.

Here's a story I heard about fishing for a bit. A rig was drilling a deep hole in another state, and they lost a bit. They fished for a long time and eventually pulled it out. The boss was a big bully, a former college football player, and when things got serious he was no fun to be around. So here they were, cleaning junk off the deck floor immediately after they had spent a day retrieving a lost bit, feeling a combination of joy and exhaustion. But someone left a chain on the rig floor, and the motors were causing the floor to vibrate. They had a video camera aimed at the hole, and my friend was in the dog house or the trailer or wherever they had the monitor. And he said he just happened to glance at the monitor just as that chain slithered like a snake down the hole. My friend had the job of telling the boss, and so started another nightmare day.

Anyway, I don't know if those of us on basic cable will get to see the rest of Black Gold, but I'm optimistic. If it gets enough eyeballs over there on TruTV then maybe we will get the reruns.

In the meantime, check out this comment left by Scotte at my post about the first episode. He had some interesting and insightful things to say about it, and he seems to know what he's talking about.

Previously: Good news for basic cable subscribers - "Black Gold" to be rebroadcast on TNT and
"Black Gold" - it was a want ad for West Texas roughnecks.

"Black Gold" - it was a want ad for West Texas roughnecks

Sure, it looked a little muddy, but it was good clean mud, right?

I liked it, and I was surprised that I liked it. I anticipated another "American Chopper" style family spat-fest. But the "Black Gold" premier was a realistic presentation of get-the-job-done life on a drilling rig.

I don't know how popular the show was, but it sure did touch me. It's confession time: I was a teenage worm. Maybe I was 20, I don't remember. But I worked as a drilling rig roughneck for six months some decades ago. And although the workers get paid a hell of a lot more today, the job hasn't changed a bit. And that's what really surprised me.

The first episode of "Black Gold" made the job look very dirty with mud splashing everywhere. But that was probably exaggerated for effect. While I was working on the rig we would get drenched every once in a while, but it was something we really tried to avoid. And there was a shroud we could put up to deflect the mud if we knew in advance it might spray.

It could be dangerous. There's a lot of powerful equipment on a rig, and a lot of heavy metal hangs, spins, and gyrates above. And a guy could get hurt if he isn't careful. I remember one time we were tripping for a bit, and there was a very loud noise up above. The other, more experienced, floor hand ran for dear life, but I just stood there like an idiot wondering what the heck happened. Fortunately, nothing happened, and the other floor hand sheepishly walked back to his station. But I learned a big lesson from that guy: Hear an unexpected noise from above, run like a madman.

Another time we were putting a new joint in the rat hole, and I took a little spill. The process involves hoisting a length of pipe up to the rig floor and lowering it into a hole which holds the pipe until it's time to add it to the drill stem. The low man on the totem pole -- that would be me -- got to straddle the pipe and grab it as it went from horizontal to to vertical in order to guide it into the rat hole. Well, we had just mopped the deck, and it was still wet. So your humble blogger straddled the pipe and grabbed it to complete the process. And my feet went right out from under me. To break my fall I would have had to let go of the pipe. But if I had done that there could have been a catastrophe, so I held onto that pipe and hit the floor right on my rear. I stood up, got my footing, then placed the pipe in the rat hole. There was no "thank you," no "atta boy," no "good job, kid," I had merely done what was expected of me. Of course, we should have taken into consideration the wet floor, and that's where the job of a experienced driller comes in.

In the "Black Gold" premier one of the drillers was presented as a a thoughtful, experienced individual who tried hard to protect his workers. And they said the workers really liked him and wanted to work for him. I can believe that. I'm not sure how common people like that are, but at a work site like that, that's the kind of driller you want.

I would love to watch the entire series, however nothing but the first episode appeared on the TNT schedule, so I'll just try to catch a rerun sometime.

Updated 6-22-08: There are a couple of local blog reviews of "Black Gold." Jeff writing at Archaeotexture offers insightful criticism about the production aspects of the tv show, the writing, the camera crew, etc., with minimal comment about the accuracy of the content.

Meanwhile, Jimmy at Sticky Doorknobs quotes extensively from a friend who confessed that he/she never actually worked on a drilling rig but who nonetheless attempts to offer details on rig work and worker drinking habits.

Is information from people who have worked as a roughneck that hard to come by? Well, I worked as a roughneck, but surely my work history is not that unique. How about you? Do you work on a drilling rig or have you ever worked on a drilling rig? If so, I would love to hear from you.

Updated: Watched the second episode. See Black Gold 102.

Good news for basic cable subscribers - "Black Gold" to be rebroadcast on TNT

This is great news. Those of us who don't get truTV are in luck! The Black Gold series - real life experiences of West Texas roughnecks on a drilling rig - is scheduled for re-showing on TNT.

The first episode premiers on truTV on 6/18/08 at 9pm Central and is scheduled for re-showing on TNT on 6/19/08 at 9 pm Central. (Via comments by dskolfield at oaoa.com.)

1st Update: Watched the first episode. See "Black Gold" - It was a want ad for West Texas roughnecks.

2nd Update: Watched the second episode. See Black Gold 102.

Firefly, the tv show

There was a quirky futuristic space show called Firefly on Fox a few years ago, but like many good shows, it was canceled too quickly.

Well, Firefly fans are getting another chance.  Scifi channel has scheduled a reshowing of the series on Monday, February 18, 7 am to 6 pm Central.    I've been reluctant to mention it sooner because long range tv schedules are often as reliable as weather forecasts for that same time period.  However, it's just a few days away, and it's still showing up on the schedule, so it might actually happen.

Chris Rock: civic responsibility is for grownups

Comedy Central has been playing and replaying Chris Rock's 2004 show, Never Scared.  And it's got some funny parts.  I like Chris Rock, or more specifically, I like the way he tells a story and gets a laugh.  But being Chris Rock means telling a line that gets a laugh from some but leaves others saying, "Hey wait a minute.  That's downright wrong."

He's got a riff about how to get away with murder.  Simply kill a rapper.  You can watch it at youtube beginning at around 4:17. According to him, the police won't do anything if a rapper gets murdered.  It's funny, but skewed.  Here's the quote:

The government hates rap. That's why they don't arrest anybody that kills rappers! Only the good ones are dead, man! Only the good ones: Biggie dead, Tupac dead, Vanilla Ice still alive! They don't fill out a police report! They don't even have a chalk line when it's a dead rapper; they just [urinate] around the body...

It's all for laughs, but Mr. Rock is blaming the wrong people.  Maybe that's what his audience wants to hear, but it seems more likely the reason no one gets arrested is because no one wants to step up and tell the police what happened.   If they did they would be a bad old snitch.  See 60 Minutes Stop Snitchin':

In most communities, a person who sees a murder and helps the police put the killer behind bars is called a witness. But in many inner-city neighborhoods in this country that person is called a "snitch."

"Stop snitchin'" is a catchy hip-hop slogan that embodies and encourages this attitude. You can find it on everything from rap music videos to clothing. "Stop snitchin" once meant "don’t tell on others if you’re caught committing a crime."

/snip/

Reluctance to talk to police has always been a problem in poor, predominantly African-American communities, but cops and criminologists say in recent years something has changed: fueled by hip-hop music, promoted by major corporations, what was once a backroom code of silence among criminals, is now being marketed like never before.

The message appears in hip-hop videos, on T-shirts, Web sites, album covers and street murals. Well-known rappers talk about it endlessly on DVDs. It is a simple message heard in African-American communities across the country: don't talk to the police.

So he says the whole world's f___d up.  Whatever you say, Mr. Rock, but you seem to be riding on top of it.  Too bad being a good comedian doesn't mean being a good citizen.

Bear Grylls up to his old tricks

Bear Grylls is the guy on Discovery channel's Man vs. Wild series who gets dropped off in the wilderness and has to survive on his own skill and wits.  When we last visited him, he had been accused of fudging a bit by choppering out and sleeping in a motel, among other things.

Well, he's at it again.  In a recent episode he was trekking through the jungle looking for a way down a cliff to get to the river.   He spies what he said the early explorers called a "viper pit."  It was a deep hole in the rock eroded by the water, and he could see water way down at the bottom.  His objective was to shimmy down a vine to the bottom where he could then follow the river.

But something just didn't look right.  If you look at the photos you can barely see the impression of a safety rope inside his shirt.  It distorts his right shirt sleeve and appears to run down to around his waist.  There's nothing wrong with trying to be safe, and the viewers would understand his need to be cautious.  But hiding it from viewers looks like false bravado.  Then again, maybe it just a scheme to keep people like me watching the show, looking for those little tricks.

Kitzmiller v. Dover -- the intelligent design case

It started with a couple of school board members in Dover, PA, who had strong beliefs that a supreme being created human and all other life on earth and who were disturbed at the references to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in the biology text books.

The result was the U.S. District Court case of Kitzmiller v. Dover [PDF].  And last week NOVA broadcast an excellent show titled Judgment Day, Intelligent Design on Trial on PBS which was a Cliff's Notes version of the issue of whether "intelligent design" was a scientific theory or simply a religious argument, specifically,  "creationism" in disguise.

Creationism had already been tossed out of public schools by the Supreme Court in the 1987 case of Edwards v. Aguillard which held that a Louisiana law prohibiting the teaching of evolution unless accompanied by creationism violated the first amendment ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion").  So the issue in Kitzmiller was merely whether or not the school district was attempting to inject creationism into the school curriculum by the requirement that teachers read a prepared statement to the students.

That statement involved Of Pandas and People which was a book proposed as an alternative to evolution, copies of which were given anonymously to the Dover school.  The school board rejected Pandas as a text book, but they reached a compromise by which science teachers were required to read a statement to the ninth grade biology students.   Read the whole statement in the judge's order in Kitzmiller v. Dover [PDF].  The statement basically instructed students that Darwin's theory was not fact, gaps existed in the Darwin's theory, the Intelligent Design theory was an explanation for the origins of life that differed from Darwin's, and Of Pandas and People would be available in the library for interested students.

Darwin's theory is often diagrammed as a tree of life starting with simple life forms at the base evolving into multiple branches representing different life forms.  Of Pandas and People presented the idea that life was created suddenly and at various times for each species.  So instead of a tree, there are straight, vertical, parallel lines.  Furthermore, living beings are so irreducibly complex that they couldn't possibly have evolved from some lower life form according to the ID theory.  Well, it turns out the book had been around awhile, and evidence presented at the Kitzmiller trial showed that previous versions had used the words "creationism" and "creationists," but after Edwards those words were changed to some variation of "intelligent design."  In fact, there was one incident where the word "creationists" was changed to "cdesign proponentsists."

An example of the irreducible complexity given at trial was the bacterial flagellum which has a very unique motor that spins its little tail giving it propulsion.   It's  such a complex little engine and had so many parts that it couldn't operate if any of the parts were not present.  Therefore, it couldn't have evolved from something else, the ID theory goes.

But wait a minute.  There's another tiny little critter called the yersinia pestis which has a thing similar to that engine but lacks some of the parts.  And in that instance the tail serves as an injection device.  So the effort to disprove Darwin's theory failed.

An expert witness provided an amusing example of how some things aren't as irreducibly complex as they might seem.  The ID proponents sometimes use the mousetrap as an example of a device that couldn't function if any of the parts were missing and analogize this to a living creature that couldn't exist without its parts and thus couldn't have evolved.  So the witness came to court one day with a mousetrap as a tie clasp.  Enough parts were missing that it couldn't possibly serve as a mousetrap.  But as the witness said, it worked perfectly, though inelegantly, as a tie clasp.  Score one more for the Darwinists.

But religious dogma is actually quite flexible, albeit slow to adapt.  Originally religions explained gaps in our knowledge of how things worked.  They explained the unexplainable.  For example, the sun, the tide, the stars, etc., were controlled by the gods.   And as scientific explanations became accepted, religion narrowed its focus to those things that still couldn't be explained.  And at this point in time science cannot explain how life originally began.

How did life begin?  Here's what I would tell the Dover ninth graders: We simply aren't smart enough and don't have enough information to know.  And here's a story to go with it.  Each morning I take dog food out of a big bag and place it in a container for the dog to eat.  The dog can see me do that, and in his own mind he may have some explanation for it.  But he doesn't have the brain power or the information to figure out the manufacturing process, the distribution channel, or the retail transaction.  Humans understand this, but the dog may think I'm some sort of god.  So in this regard we are like dogs.  We simply aren't smart enough, and more to the point, we don't yet know enough to explain how life began.  For the creationists it's obvious, God did it.  For the rest of us it's still an unknown.

Darwin's theory has been tested over and over again and provides a logical explanation for natural phenomena.  And creationism?  Well, to believe that you just have to have faith.  And the judge in Kitzmiller wisely decided to let the kiddies learn science first.

Updated 11/20/07:  Joe Hathaway emailed a link to Experts find jawbone of pre-human great ape in Kenya.  Excerpt:

NAIROBI – Researchers unveiled a 10-million-year-old jaw bone on Tuesday they believe belonged to a new species of great ape that could be the last common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees and humans. ...

The species – somewhere between the size of a female gorilla and a female orangutan – may prove to be the 'missing link', the key step that split the evolutionary chains of humans and other primates, Kenyan scientists said.

'Based on this particular discovery, we can comfortably say we are approaching the point at which we can pin down the so-called missing link,' Frederick Manthi, senior research scientist at the National Museums of Kenya, told reporters.

Once life is discovered on Mars or another planet then we will really be in for an educational treat.

Updated 11/21/07:  In a comment, below, Les reminds us of Moreno vs. ECISD which is the ACLU sponsored case in which several Ector County taxpayers are suing the Ector County Independent School District and the district trustees over the decision by the school district trustees to place a Bible course in the school curriculum.  See the original complaint here (PDF).  Something to keep in mind is that, according to the NOVA program,  the Kitzmiller v. Dover plaintiffs' lawyers were awarded a million dollars in fees for which the Dover school district would be liable.

What happened to Fox News Watch?

There's an entertaining weekly tv show that takes a hard and sometimes humorous look at the way the week's news was covered by the usual news sources.  It's Fox News Watch which airs Saturdays at 5:30pm Central on Fox News Channel.

The show is hosted by Eric Burns, and the panel is balanced and fair with a couple of conservatives, Jim Pinkerton and Cal Thomas, and a couple of liberals, Jane Hall and Neal Gabler.  But I've often wondered whether someone off screen is egging Neal Gabler on, because sometimes he comes across as such an extremist that he's almost a parody of that political point of view.

So yesterday's show didn't air at the appointed time.  My tape showed some live show, and my fear was that Fox News Watch had been canceled.  But now it appears possible that just that one episode was taken off the air.  As for why that might have happened, apparently Neal Gabler went just a little too far.  In Does Neal Gabler Want Bill Kristol Killed in Iraq? Newsbusters.org provided a clue.  The answer to the question in Newsbusters' title is probably no, but Mr. Gabler's animus certainly is on display.  Watch 32 seconds of it on youtube and decide for yourself.

So if a show purporting to analyze news coverage makes news itself due to panelist extremism, shouldn't that be a topic for the type of analysis the show provides?

Gotta love those cartoon bad boys

Whether it's Beavis, Bart or Cartman, those bad boys of the toon world have tickled us like no humans could do.  If these were live action characters acted out by real humans they couldn't be nearly as entertaining simply because they would be real humans -- thespians, actors pretending to be someone they aren't.  Actors have feelings  and opinions, and we would be awash in them with personal appearances, celebrity sightings and tabloid photos.  But with the cartoons, what we see is all there is, and we are spared the histrionics.

So when Paris goes to jail, Lindsay gets nabbed, or Owen rides the ambulance, we have to hear about it nonstop.  Forget the whales, save the celebrities!  But with the toons, we know we can expect irreverence with a big dose of humor.  And they know their places:  on their shows and not the news.

Enough editorializing, now to the point.  Trey Parker and Matt Stone have inked a deal with Viacom which will not only produce more Southpark episodes but will provide computer users access to those naughty kids at Southparkstudios.com:

"Three more years of South Park gives us the opportunity to offend that  many more people. And since Trey and I are in charge of the digital side of South Park for the first time, now we can offend people on their cell phones, game consoles, and computers too. It's all very exciting for us."
- Matt  Stone, August 27, 2007

One more thing.  Toons don't outgrow their characters either.

Via Blowing Smoke.

Anchorwoman sinks

I was in a very small demographic the other night as I watched Anchorwoman.  That was the "reality" show featuring a chesty blond who hires on to be a news presenter at a tv station in Tyler, Texas.  The show drew such a tiny audience that it was canceled after only one airing.

There were some good moments though, but It's questionable how real reality shows like this one really are.  You just know that there are people behind the camera counseling the various participants on ways to get more tv face time.  And a good cat fight would surely give the ratings a kick in the pants.

So Lauren shows up for her first day on the job at the tv station, and the other women didn't take too kindly to the possibility of losing their fans to a bombshell beauty.  But that was never said.  The arguments were that she would hurt the integrity and credibility of this tv news show.  Viewers of Anchorwoman were left chuckling at that as we all know that a tv news show in a small community like Tyler -- where an important news story doesn't come along very often -- would need a rather large dose of entertainment to keep the viewers from clicking to another program.  And a likable news presenter is probably the most important asset a station could have.

So they do a news report about potholes.  The really great feature of the show was the peek behind the curtain.  We got to see the staff gather around the desk and toss out ideas about what the viewers would get to see that evening.  But if potholes came out on top then you know there weren't a lot of good ideas.  And we got to see Lauren go out and put together a story about potholes.  Aren't you sorry you missed it?

The story they were trying to sell on Anchorwoman was the interaction among the various players.  And in that aspect, other than the cat fight between Lauren and the woman who had to make room for her, there wasn't much there.

So the Anchorwoman was put out of its misery.  Too bad.  A real show about putting together a tv news program could be very interesting.  And something missing in our local market is reporting about the competitors.  Local tv stations seem to be afraid to say anything about the other local stations.  What, there's no dirt to dish out?  Jeff, are you out there?

But there's hope.  Check out this zinger at Fireant in which Eric lobs a rock in the direction of a collaboration between CBS7 and Mywesttexas.com.  Criticism from the outside probably just makes them circle the wagons, particularly when they are just trying out new ideas.  But we all like a good cat fight.