The Week In Review

I love the show How It’s Made. That show can make the manufacture of anything totally interesting. Even my five year old will stop to watch, temporarily able to overcome the sugar coursing through his veins. And better yet, it generates questions of the non-Spongebob variety. The fact that I don’t know how to answer these questions is incidental. “What is metal extrusion? Ummm… Well… Look! Shiny metal things!”

But have you ever tuned in during the middle of the manufacture of an item, yet you don’t know what it is? That’s totally disorienting. You think that the process will give you a hint, but instead you’re watching a seemingly random series of extremely complicated steps that make no sense at all.

“After polishing the ball bearings with sausage casing, they plunge down a chute into a chamber where they are shouted at by bees for 25 minutes. This process ensures that the wax coating is able to withstand the heat of reentry yet remain delicious.” What? The? Fuck? And who the fuck thinks these steps up? Our civilization has not been around long enough for people to have gradually realized that electroplating hockey skates before soaking them in grizzly blood is the thing to do, so somebody had to have thought that shit up. I’m guessing pot was involved.

If you allow the Grizzly bear to take the skates from you before you can obtain its blood, well, then you're just fucked. Everybody knows that.

I was also surprised to note that the audience for How It’s Made takes the narration extremely seriously. Apparently the narrator changed at one point, and it threw the core audience into a collective fit. They have a forum where they discuss how much donkey dick the new guy sucks (a lot), and even a petition you can sign to bring back the old narrator, even though he’s doing 25 to life in Leavenworth for molesting a sea turtle (lawyer’s note: not true).

All of which is fine and good, but the only really interesting How It’s Made topic for me right now is beer, and I already know how that’s made: Really fucking well.

Ok, on to the week you missed while you were obsessing over business cards:

• On Monday, we learned who isn’t going to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (Rush), who might be, and who shouldn’t be in there but somehow already is (the fucking Turtles).
• On Tuesday, we learned about the sexual proclivities of people in the parking lot.
• On Wednesday we said hello to our favorite uncle, Uncle Doyd.
• On Thursday, I harassed the Embassy of Luxembourg.
• Also on Thursday, we said a sad farewell to the computer genius of our time, Steve Jobs.
• And finally, on Friday we learned that just because your product’s name is insane, there’s nothing holding you back from making a commercial even more batshit loonball crazy than the name.

As you were, people.