Ubiquitous
2015-06-24 15:12:11 UTC
by Sarah D. Bunting
N...eat? The In Search Of Marathon Diary visits Atlantis, Egypt, and
California.
Bigfoot, the Big One, and bees take us on a long strange trip in this week's
In Search Of... Marathon Diary, through Egypt, the San Andreas fault, and yet
more chapters in Nimoy's Big Book Of Turtlenecks. Let's see what's worth a
look, shall we?
"Bigfoot"
The minute "Bigfoot" came up on the DVD menu, I punted commentary
responsibilities to Dirk Birthworthy: actor, husband, semipro Bigfootologist.
Listen in the player below, or download the audio file.
http://traffic.libsyn.com/previouslytv/ptv-in-search-of-bigfoot-dirk.mp3
Dirk notes that part of Bigfoot's continuing appeal to believers is the sense
that he's "gotten away with" going off the grid, maintaining his legend at a
safe distance from civilization or the rat race or what have you. I think
there's something to that, as Leonard Nimoy's voice-over makes its second
rueful mention of the "concrete and steel" world in which '70s intellectual
seekers found themselves confined.
Said voice-over also seems somewhat estranged from having a point, to wit:
The "Sir Or Madam, I'm Afraid You're Full Of Shit" Moment "Many people do not
believe in Bigfoot. But a lot of people do." Well, thank you for telling me
that.
The "Bigfoot" ep won't convince you of anything, but the flagrant, pathetic
insufficiency of the "evidence" and amateurishness of the reenactments make it
amusing.
Loading Image...
Also the cars.
"Killer Bees"
I vaguely recall killer bees as a preoccupation of the late seventies -- that,
by the time I reached adulthood in the faraway nineties, we'd all be wearing
outfits made of screen doors and going to jail for eating Honeycomb cereal. It
seems silly now; in fact, it seems like a utopian alternate timeline, under
the colony-collapse circumstances in which we now find ourselves.
Nimoy's voice-over is rather obnoxious, implying as it does that, until the
mid-seventies, the bee was an equal partner in a honey-consumption economy
that really only benefited humans. "The once-happy partnership between man and
bee" is, despite Nimoy's authoritative intonation, a figment. That said, it's
an informative half hour. Did you know beehives have dedicated mortician bees?
All they do is remove the dead bees.
The "Sir Or Madam, I'm Afraid You're Full Of Shit" Moment Dr. Norman Gary,
having literally poked a beehive as a "test of their aggressiveness," burbles,
"I sure wasn't prepared for this one" when a couple of enterprising bees get
inside his beekeeping veil and start fucking his shit up. Bees gonna bee, bro.
"Earthquakes"
The explanation of plate tectonics is both melodramatic and old news for
anyone born after, like, 1971. The episode is worth watching for the found
footage of a WC Fields movie that was filming during a huge quake in 1933; for
state-of-the-art graphics like this;
Loading Image...
and for the terrified Bartok-y synthesizer that accompanies...
The "Sir Or Madam, I'm Afraid You're Full Of Shit" Moment The assertion --
attributed to "scientists" who, if they exist, declined to be named -- that
solar flares will cause earthquakes and changes in the Northern Lights. Hey,
maybe a butterfly-flaps-its-wings link to seismic activity along the San
Andreas was in fact established in the intervening years, but the vague
attribution here isn't convincing.
"The Mummy's Curse"
The curse itself is horseshit, naturally, though I hope to see a later episode
exploring this, the Hope Diamond, and Santeria/black magic under one voodoo-
death topic umbrella.
The history of the mummy -- Tut's tomb; Lord Carnarvon's quest, and death from
an infected mosquito bite; the ancient war between priest factions and the
missing tomb of Tut's father-in-law -- is good shit, however, shot in fine
Civilization style and with nice lingering close-ups of the mummies
themselves.
The "Sir Or Madam, I'm Afraid You're Full Of Shit" Moment Myriad, but let's
call it a tie between "Susie the fox terrier croaked at the exact same moment
her master Lord Carnarvon did" and "the mummy killed robber baron Jay Gould."
"Martians"
This Martian geologist's space-bachelor attire notwithstanding, "Martians"
hasn't aged well. A world in which the Voyager spacecraft hadn't launched yet
doesn't have much tell us about the Martian canals, and for whatever reason,
Mars exploration doesn't really grab me.
Weirdly, it's the third episode in this week's Diary that ties into current
properties and projects -- "Earthquakes" to San Andreas; the mummies and
Spike's Tut; now this one and a New Yorker piece on mission training for the
trip to Mars that's primarily designed to keep people from losing their minds.
The "Sir Or Madam, I'm Afraid You're Full Of Shit" Moment Mars is one
planetary-development stage ahead of Earth, despite 1) being farther from the
sun and 2) leaving no visible evidence of any edifices or systems behind.
"Atlantis"
The heavy reliance on Edgar Casey, The Sleeping Prophet as a source for
information on what might have become of the lost civilization of Atlantis is
unfortunate; likewise, the writers of the Atlantisode take too much as gospel
the writings of Plato on the topic. But some of the show's best episodes are
the ones that inspire further research. What exactly is the Bimini Wall? What
strange confluence of forces leads two shipwrecks to end up stacked on top of
each other, 4000 years apart? Is there any relationship between the massive
statuary of Easter Island and Tiwanaku and a vanished society that seemed to
have made primitive computers?
Probably not, but an In Search Of that sends me down an Amazon wormhole is a
good In Search Of.
The "Sir Or Madam, I'm Afraid You're Full Of Shit" Moment "The memory of
Atlantis is no myth. It is history," Nimoy intones. I'd call bullshit on that
if I knew what it meant.
"Psychic Detectives"
Bevy Jaegars isn't just a psychic detective. She put together a whole ESP
"rescue squad," complete with different specialty "departments," in St. Louis
back in the day. They got such reliable results that they were given a PI
license. That is awesome, and needs to become a scripted show. I mean, I guess
it already has (i.e., Medium), but I would watch the hell out of a period-
piece verzh. Well, most of it.
Loading Image...
_That_ ensemble comes onscreen, I'm going to the kitchen for more seltzer and
staying there until it's 1981 in the show's timeline.
The episode overall is a liiiiittle draggy, a little too much telling versus
the showing they can't really do with this phenomenon -- but the sequence in
the state park is shot claustrophobically, with a tinkling of dread despite
the sunshine. The lens flares seemed to have something hidden behind them,
just out of sight.
The "Sir Or Madam, I'm Afraid You're Full Of Shit" Moment The Ocean's 11-y
freeze-frames on each member of Jaegars's team.
N...eat? The In Search Of Marathon Diary visits Atlantis, Egypt, and
California.
Bigfoot, the Big One, and bees take us on a long strange trip in this week's
In Search Of... Marathon Diary, through Egypt, the San Andreas fault, and yet
more chapters in Nimoy's Big Book Of Turtlenecks. Let's see what's worth a
look, shall we?
"Bigfoot"
The minute "Bigfoot" came up on the DVD menu, I punted commentary
responsibilities to Dirk Birthworthy: actor, husband, semipro Bigfootologist.
Listen in the player below, or download the audio file.
http://traffic.libsyn.com/previouslytv/ptv-in-search-of-bigfoot-dirk.mp3
Dirk notes that part of Bigfoot's continuing appeal to believers is the sense
that he's "gotten away with" going off the grid, maintaining his legend at a
safe distance from civilization or the rat race or what have you. I think
there's something to that, as Leonard Nimoy's voice-over makes its second
rueful mention of the "concrete and steel" world in which '70s intellectual
seekers found themselves confined.
Said voice-over also seems somewhat estranged from having a point, to wit:
The "Sir Or Madam, I'm Afraid You're Full Of Shit" Moment "Many people do not
believe in Bigfoot. But a lot of people do." Well, thank you for telling me
that.
The "Bigfoot" ep won't convince you of anything, but the flagrant, pathetic
insufficiency of the "evidence" and amateurishness of the reenactments make it
amusing.
Loading Image...
Also the cars.
"Killer Bees"
I vaguely recall killer bees as a preoccupation of the late seventies -- that,
by the time I reached adulthood in the faraway nineties, we'd all be wearing
outfits made of screen doors and going to jail for eating Honeycomb cereal. It
seems silly now; in fact, it seems like a utopian alternate timeline, under
the colony-collapse circumstances in which we now find ourselves.
Nimoy's voice-over is rather obnoxious, implying as it does that, until the
mid-seventies, the bee was an equal partner in a honey-consumption economy
that really only benefited humans. "The once-happy partnership between man and
bee" is, despite Nimoy's authoritative intonation, a figment. That said, it's
an informative half hour. Did you know beehives have dedicated mortician bees?
All they do is remove the dead bees.
The "Sir Or Madam, I'm Afraid You're Full Of Shit" Moment Dr. Norman Gary,
having literally poked a beehive as a "test of their aggressiveness," burbles,
"I sure wasn't prepared for this one" when a couple of enterprising bees get
inside his beekeeping veil and start fucking his shit up. Bees gonna bee, bro.
"Earthquakes"
The explanation of plate tectonics is both melodramatic and old news for
anyone born after, like, 1971. The episode is worth watching for the found
footage of a WC Fields movie that was filming during a huge quake in 1933; for
state-of-the-art graphics like this;
Loading Image...
and for the terrified Bartok-y synthesizer that accompanies...
The "Sir Or Madam, I'm Afraid You're Full Of Shit" Moment The assertion --
attributed to "scientists" who, if they exist, declined to be named -- that
solar flares will cause earthquakes and changes in the Northern Lights. Hey,
maybe a butterfly-flaps-its-wings link to seismic activity along the San
Andreas was in fact established in the intervening years, but the vague
attribution here isn't convincing.
"The Mummy's Curse"
The curse itself is horseshit, naturally, though I hope to see a later episode
exploring this, the Hope Diamond, and Santeria/black magic under one voodoo-
death topic umbrella.
The history of the mummy -- Tut's tomb; Lord Carnarvon's quest, and death from
an infected mosquito bite; the ancient war between priest factions and the
missing tomb of Tut's father-in-law -- is good shit, however, shot in fine
Civilization style and with nice lingering close-ups of the mummies
themselves.
The "Sir Or Madam, I'm Afraid You're Full Of Shit" Moment Myriad, but let's
call it a tie between "Susie the fox terrier croaked at the exact same moment
her master Lord Carnarvon did" and "the mummy killed robber baron Jay Gould."
"Martians"
This Martian geologist's space-bachelor attire notwithstanding, "Martians"
hasn't aged well. A world in which the Voyager spacecraft hadn't launched yet
doesn't have much tell us about the Martian canals, and for whatever reason,
Mars exploration doesn't really grab me.
Weirdly, it's the third episode in this week's Diary that ties into current
properties and projects -- "Earthquakes" to San Andreas; the mummies and
Spike's Tut; now this one and a New Yorker piece on mission training for the
trip to Mars that's primarily designed to keep people from losing their minds.
The "Sir Or Madam, I'm Afraid You're Full Of Shit" Moment Mars is one
planetary-development stage ahead of Earth, despite 1) being farther from the
sun and 2) leaving no visible evidence of any edifices or systems behind.
"Atlantis"
The heavy reliance on Edgar Casey, The Sleeping Prophet as a source for
information on what might have become of the lost civilization of Atlantis is
unfortunate; likewise, the writers of the Atlantisode take too much as gospel
the writings of Plato on the topic. But some of the show's best episodes are
the ones that inspire further research. What exactly is the Bimini Wall? What
strange confluence of forces leads two shipwrecks to end up stacked on top of
each other, 4000 years apart? Is there any relationship between the massive
statuary of Easter Island and Tiwanaku and a vanished society that seemed to
have made primitive computers?
Probably not, but an In Search Of that sends me down an Amazon wormhole is a
good In Search Of.
The "Sir Or Madam, I'm Afraid You're Full Of Shit" Moment "The memory of
Atlantis is no myth. It is history," Nimoy intones. I'd call bullshit on that
if I knew what it meant.
"Psychic Detectives"
Bevy Jaegars isn't just a psychic detective. She put together a whole ESP
"rescue squad," complete with different specialty "departments," in St. Louis
back in the day. They got such reliable results that they were given a PI
license. That is awesome, and needs to become a scripted show. I mean, I guess
it already has (i.e., Medium), but I would watch the hell out of a period-
piece verzh. Well, most of it.
Loading Image...
_That_ ensemble comes onscreen, I'm going to the kitchen for more seltzer and
staying there until it's 1981 in the show's timeline.
The episode overall is a liiiiittle draggy, a little too much telling versus
the showing they can't really do with this phenomenon -- but the sequence in
the state park is shot claustrophobically, with a tinkling of dread despite
the sunshine. The lens flares seemed to have something hidden behind them,
just out of sight.
The "Sir Or Madam, I'm Afraid You're Full Of Shit" Moment The Ocean's 11-y
freeze-frames on each member of Jaegars's team.
--
So to recap:
Iraq is imploding
Islam is spreading
Russia is expanding
The US is being invaded
Vets are dying
IRS is lying
And Obama is politicizing a shooting in South Carolina
So to recap:
Iraq is imploding
Islam is spreading
Russia is expanding
The US is being invaded
Vets are dying
IRS is lying
And Obama is politicizing a shooting in South Carolina