I do like this show, it’s devoid of much besides caves and cavernous bunkers. The Viet Nam one was facinating and so was the one about the US WWIII bunker that still had all the stuff in it.
You mean I missed one??? :eek:
Yeah, I didn’t really put that too well, it was a super bunker under some country club where the government could flee and continue to run the country in the event of a nuke being dropped on Washington.
And just what the fuck do crystal skulls have to do with driving big rigs through the Arctic circle or cutting down giant redwood trues? C’mon HISTORY CHANNEL, remember your purpose!
This channel has become such a joke. Always had moments of it, but I pinpoint the initial sacking of the city to the days post 9-11 when Nostradamus hit the bestseller lists and they dusted off every damned special ever aired on him, and then the final razing of the temples and citadels came when Da Vinci Code became a bestseller and they essentially became the Nostradamus & the Templars Variety Hour! (“I’m a Little Bit Bullshit!” “and I’m a little bit Pandering Oldies!”). With Ice Road Truckers they officially announced “yeah, we’re now about as interested in historically interesting and accurate programming as B.C. is about accurately portraying Neanderthal life and material culture”.
The only shows at all worth watching anymore are Wild West Tech (which I don’t think is even in new production anymore) and Cities of the Underworld (which can be so interesting and informative you wonder how in the hell it got by their censors). I used to like Digging for the Truth, but only for the tight pants worn by Josh Bernstein, and then he left; one of the most memorable episodes of that show was when they wanted to test the validity of the Da Vinci Code (of course) by testing the DNA of a Dark Ages Merovingian queen whose bones were in a Paris museum against known semitic DNA. Okay, stay with me here…
The queen in question was a wife of one of the sons of Clovis, the Merovingian dynasty’s founder. Okay, got that? She married into the family… So in other words, this would be about like testing a theory that Abraham Lincoln was half-Chinese by testing the remains of Mary Todd Lincoln. And they acted like they’d proven something when they said “Nope, no match”. (I think the Da Vinci code and the theory it’s based on is baloney of course, but this proved about as much as testing my dog’s blood type against the stains on the Shroud of Turin.)
Anyway, c’est la cable. By far the best history documentaries I’ve found recently, and they’re few and far between, are on National Geographic Channel usually sandwiched between Cesar Milan’s The Dog Whisperer Goes Hawaiian and Flip this Refugee Camp.
Greenbrier Hotel (ridiculous admission prices)
I was able to watch maybe two seconds of the Crystal Skulls show before I had to change it. As someone with basic common sense, I found it annoying; as a former archaeologist, it was infuriating.
That’s the place. I wonder if they have a rate for renting out that bunker.
Another irritating History Channel show is that Naked Archaeologist guy. I gave it a shot, because an objective look at ancient Bible-event history sounded interesting. Unfortunately, I started :dubious:-ing a few minutes into it, wondering about the guy’s point of view, and by halfway through it became obvious he was seeking evidence for predetermined conclusions and I was wasting my time. Too bad, because it should have been a valuable lay science program, instead of a stealth missionary piece.
They do rent it for meetings and receptions, but I think you’d have to be from a family with Oprah Money (or at least Judge Judy Money) to use it for a wedding or a Fortune 500 company of the sort that pays ex presidents $500,000 for keynotes to use it for a corporate function. It’s $30 per head just to tour it and the Greenbrier is already one of the most expensive hotels in the nation, so I’m guessing 5 figures just to start talking about rentals.
I’m just waiting for the ultimate History channel show, the one that unites into one grand conspiracy theory:
Jesus
9-11
Roswell/UFOs
Nostradamus
Hitler
Atlantis
Bigfoot/Cryptids
the Bible
Da Vinci
the Knights Templar
and the Illuminati.
Obviously some of these have already been linked but I don’t think they’ve yet managed the overarching mega-theory that will unite them all.
Well shit. Want to go halvesies then?
Did you see the Indiana Jones and the Ultimate Quest special? I was curious about what real archaeologists thought of the statement by a couple of under 40 real archaeologists that “pretty much all of us were inspired to enter the profession by Indiana Jones”. And of course they took what could have been a good 2 hours on “real archaeology v. movies” and turn it into a commercial for the CRYSTAL SKULL movie that happens to be on history channel but could have been on VH1 for all it mattered.
They also had docs on the real Ark of the Covenant during the afternoon that as much as the subject interests me I couldn’t watch. It was all of the usual “was it really a battery” and “it’s really in this place in Ethiopia where the priests won’t allow it to be photographed or allow visitors or anybody else to see it and only parade it once a year when it’s in a box and can’t be seen… but I’m pretty sure they’re telling the truth” critical thinking standards.
I’m an under 40 real archaeologist and I freely admit that I, as well as many of my co-workers, was inspired by the intrepid Dr. Jones. While the realities of the profession are, perhaps, not quite as glamorous as the movies would lead you to believe, there are moments of true wonder and awe (but these are typically over artifacts which would mean pretty much nothing to a non-archaeologist).Every once in a while you can find a full on show-stopper but those moments are very, very rare.
Nostradamus was an immortal Templar belonging to the Council of the Illuminati, who secretly battled Adolph Hitler using the beam weapon from Atlantis that used as a focus a crystal Skull previously having belonged to Jesus who used it for healing. Although Hitler did die from a thrust from the Holy Spear of Longinus, his half human/weissfrau love child was subsequently recruited by the CIA and housed in Area 51 during their secret battle with the Soviet Union who had captured a grey alien’s particle beam weapon when their ship crashed at Tungusku. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Leonardo Davinci, the secret puppet master of Stalin and his subsequent heirs was left unemployed. He began a proxy battle with Nicola Tesla using Osama Bin Laden as a cats-paw. Hitlers Love child and Tesla in their epic battle with DaVinci over New York City inadvertantly crashed a cloaked space craft into the twin towers of the World Trade Center caausing their distruction.
Now well have to kill you
fnord
Obviously you haven’t read the proposal for my next book.
You’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. You missed
John Kennedy’s (fake) assassination
Bobbie Kennedy’s (fake) assassination
Castro’s covered-up assassination
The Freemasons
The Stuckmasons
AIDS
Bird Flu
The alien rectal probes
John Edward
Vince Foster
and of course Cecil Adams, the Mastermind.
One of my pet peeves as a librarian is people who refer to anyone who works in a library (or student workers who refer to themselves as) librarians. When Josh Bernstein was hosting Digging For the Truth he was consistently referred to as an archaeologist in magazines, interview shows, etc., even though he himself would always correct the interviewer with an “I’m not an archaeologist- I have degrees in anthropology and psychology and a Hebrew scholar but mostly I’m a nature guide and survival expert”, usually followed by Larry King or whoever asking in the next breath “so as an archaeologist, how has your survival training come into use?”
On one show after he left the show (which was the highest rated show on the network) he said that one reason he departed was they wanted him to wear a fedora and leather jacket like Indiana. I’ve no idea whether he was serious, but wouldn’t be surprised either way. (I think mainly he left because his contract was up and they weren’t willing to pay his new salary demand.)
While the Indiana Jones movies certainly made archaeology more attractive, I actually wanted to be an archaeologist long before I ever saw one. I used to dig in my grandmother’s flower pots looking for bones from the moment I understood what an archaeologist was. (It took me a while longer to realize that I probably wouldn’t find dinosaur bones in potting soil.)
And a while longer to realize that archaeologists don’t do dinosaurs? 
Wait…you forgot pyramids. It goes without saying that since early civilizations all over the world built pyramids, they must have had contact, presumably through alien intervention.
(Or just maybe a pyramid is easier to engineer than a vertical wall, so it’s natural that early monuments would tend to be pyramid shaped. I don’t know…)