Interesting Questions, Answers

I watch the history channel on Monday and Tuesday evenings when possible.  There are a number of shows then that I enjoy immensely.  The show Ancient Discoveries is pretty cool.  The other one I like is called Engineering an Empire ranks up there too.  I also like the Josh Bernstein show Digging for the Truth since he jetsets all over the place and asks questions about a variety of archeological and historic things.  You’ve probably astutely noticed that all of these shows have something to do with archeology and anthropology.  I also like to watch shows on geology and paleontology.  There is an interesting intersection for me when I watch these shows and often I walk away after an hour bathed in science, speculation, theory; kinda fired up.  It sometimes also takes me back to almost 15 years of doing archeology and I remember things which happened back then.

People still ask me if I enjoyed doing archeology.  Notice the way its said.  Doing.  Not studying or reading or thinking.  Its doing.  Its a active thing not a passive thing.  When one does archeology, it usually entails an active kind of thing.  One example is this little walk I took from Barstow to Las Vegas once.  If you know the geography, you know its desert all the way.

I also worked a couple of times out northeast of Barstow by this lava field which also had been a World War II base and we found all kinds of historic refuse and military occupation signs.  Prehistorically, the area was pretty interesting and we found all kinds of small sites where wandering and mobile hunter-gatherers stopped, ate, even defecated. 

We used to all joke when sh*t becomes something else.  Its when it becomes part of the archeological record.  Then you can do stuff with it like find out what people ate.

I’m bringing this all up because I wanted to blog about the shows I watch because I think they are very interesting and offer a degree of robust thinking.  Perhaps in this day of everything delivered on the web, robust thinking is not what it used to be.  We get gratuitous everything and we can Tivo it.  I remember when I was out walking in the Sierra Nevada’s at about 7500 feet up around the Eldorado National Forest.  If I had watched a video of it later, I would have been impressed; but only because I had been there first live.  Just watching a video and not being there would not have been so impressive.  Same with walking the distances from Barstow to Las Vegas.  Crossing those last hills (hell, mountains, okay…) were impressive too.  Seeing the crowned city of Sin with all the beer ports open was just too good to be true.  We ate and drank and then ate and drank more; but most of all I enjoyed a bed. 

Next time you get questions perhaps about a thing you once did, its fun to find the intersection points which make it relevant.  For me, its the History Television Channel.  It presents those intersection points for me.