media I love the Discovery Channel.

Posted July 25, 2007 • Comments Off on I love the Discovery Channel.

Today I did some laundry, took a bath, played with the cat, did some work, played Wii baseball, vacuumed the upstairs hall, cleaned the whole litterbox area, and took the trash out. This means it’s OKAY for me to talk about television for the next nine paragraphs.

Lately I find that when I look at what’s recorded on my DVR, it’s Dirty Jobs, MythBusters, and the other nonfiction stuff I snap up first.

This is for when I actually want to watch something. “Filler TV” is different. I record Friends and The Price Is Right and Home Improvement and NewsRadio every day, because I don’t like the stony silence of having nothing on, and because since my job involves words I find it hard to pay attention to what I’m working on while listening to iTunes (which is mostly NPR podcasts—listening to music feels like I’m not accomplishing anything).

But if there’s one time I love the Discovery Channel more than other times, it’s the end of July. Because it’s the start of Shark Week.

Allow me to share with you what I’m seeing as I page through the onscreen program guide for this weekend.

Saturday is a Deadliest Catch marathon. I’m recording the last show of the opilio season, which I somehow missed, and a behind-the-scenes show.

Sunday, the madness begins at nine o’clock in the goddamn morning and goes for twelve hours:

  • Paradise for Predators: Sharks of Palau
  • Future Shark
  • Summer of the Shark
  • Dive to Shark Volcano (I have to record this just because of the title)
  • Sharks in a Desert Sea (ditto)
  • Perfect Shark
  • Robo Shark
  • Anatomy of a Shark Bite (very glad I watched this 3–4 years ago and never have to see it again, because oh my god that dude’s leg)
  • Jaws of the Pacific (breaking the streak, this title does not include the word shark)
  • 10 Deadliest Sharks (I don’t have to watch this, because the onscreen description reads, in its entirety: “Tiger; horn; white; lemon; blue; gray reef; oceanic whitetip; hammerhead; mako; bull.”)
  • Air Jaws: Sharks of South Africa

Is that not awesome? I think that’s awesome.

We arrive, then, at nine in the evening, which is the “official” start of Shark Week, with OCEANS OF FEAR: THE WORST SHARK ATTACK EVER. This is, of course, about the sinking of the Indianapolis, which you can read about on Wikipedia, and which has fascinated me ever since I first looked it up during about my fifth viewing of the scene in Jaws where Quint talks about floating in the sea for three days. I honestly can’t wait to watch this show.

Anyway, that’s two hours, and then the madness continues at eleven, with American Shark, followed by repeats of Air Jaws and Oceans of Fear. At three in the morning they go back to paid programming.

I love the Discovery Channel.

(The only thing I don’t love about the Discovery Channel is their continued insistence on telling me to put a “forward slash” in web addresses. I HAVE BEEN TYPING IN WEB ADDRESSES FOR ELEVEN YEARS. I KNOW NOT TO USE A BACKSLASH.)

(I suppose it could be worse. Today, today I tell you, in this day and age, I heard a radio commercial telling me to put a backslash in a web address. What’s wrong with people? What’s wrong with the word SLASH?)