Somewhat better this week, at least in terms of making it an actual challenge.
It was sort of weird though - I thought their scale demonstration with the jet engine would work to put out a fire that size (although I know something was up when the intake was facing the fire - I wondered maybe it was supposed to suck out all the oxygen or something), but it didn’t make much sense that they could use jet engines to put out the largest wildfire in wyoming’s history 30 of them. So at that point was I judging whether the demonstration would work, or if the backstory actually happened? Sort of ambiguous and kind of a cheat with how you had to guess before seeing the results of the demonstration unlike all of the other ones.
It was obvious to me when they pointed the front of the engine at the trees.
No, strike that. It was really obvious to me when they had it mounted on that flatbed. If they had fired up that baby in real life that truck would have been gone.
There was some strange stuff going on in the 2nd episode.
The match lighting by the wing walker looked fake. The whole length of the matches quickly were engulfed in flame. And since they were held an an angle to the wind, how the flame got down the matchsticks that fast can only be explained by the use of flammable fuel soaked into the sticks.
So I thought that was the lie.
But then, the protective “wallpaper” thing was puzzling. In one camera angle of destroying the wall without the covering, the dust came off the wall obscuring the blocks as they started to blow out. In another angle, the blocks raced ahead of the dust. In fact, the way the blocks moved definitely looked like cheap animation.
Since that was without the covering, would it have counted as the lie?
Then they came to the jet engine. Oh, boy. Fake from start to finish. Yeah, right putting out Wyoming wildfires with jet engines. Sure.
I think they were pulling several things over on the viewer in this episode.
(Note that using fans to fight fires is done. But in enclosed spaces to air things out in order to reduce temperatures and air-born flammable gases. You don’t use these out of doors.)
The show is on twice on Wednesday nights, with the new episode of Mythbusters in between. I changed the channel to watch Mythbusters and caught the last minute of Tell a Lie, so I knew what the lie was. Then I watched the whole show after Mythbusters
I liked it much better this way.
That’s exactly the problem with this show. Penn and Teller are magicians. Their whole career and mindset is about taking simple things, like pulling a cigarette out of your pocket, and lying about it in some way. They make you think you’ve seen something you haven’t. And for simple things, that’s great. But the seven topics they present on this show are all interesting in their own right. When I knew what the lie was, I could see things like the indestructible wallpaper and think “that’s pretty cool”. If you watch the show the way it’s intended, you’re asking yourself whether you should be interested or whether it’s the lie. That’s much less entertaining to me.
I missed the episode on Wednesday, but I caught the rerun today. I spotted the jet engine story as fake as soon as Penn said the capital of Wyoming is Laramie. That clued me in right away.
Yeah, I don’t like the little sort of red herring clues like that (similar to the lion statue last week) - we should be asked to figure things out based on our evaluation of the plausibility of the claim, not little easter eggs letting us know something is wrong.
I also think the hour-long format is too long, and asks us to keep track of too much. Cut it in half, with only 2 or 3 real myths and the one fake one.
I guess I’m the only one who figured out the first episode’s tiger video was fake this way: I grew up in New Mexico, and so I know that there aren’t any zoos outside of Albuquerque that would have tigers. For that matter, the only zoos I’m even aware of in New Mexico are the Rio Grande in ABQ and Ghost Ranch by Abiquiu (which has been closed for a while now). So, hearing that this happened at the “Regina Zoo in Regina, New Mexico”, I knew it was fake from the outset, and just looked for the additional clues.
Such as: didja notice that the tiger went straight for something that the guy was holding in his hand? When the tiger jumped up, it didn’t go for his throat, it went after his right hand for the treat the guy was obviously holding.
As a big fan of Bullshit!, I found the new show a huge disappointment. It’s basically just a ripoff of Mythbusters. Well, there already is a Mythbusters.
My level of interest in Mythbusters is pretty minimal; once in a while I’ll checkout an article online that briefly describes what myths they’ve tested to see if any item interests me. I’m interested in seeing bullshit like creationism and new age idiocy and political correctness et al challenged; I don’t care about things like “could you really kill a shark like they did in the movie Jaws?” Yawn…
I miss Bullshit because there are a lot of topics ripe for skewering that they either never touched or didn’t explore far enough. In the last few seasons however the show seemed to lose it’s edge; there were several really lame episodes (e.g. cheerleaders). They also had several episodes in the last few seasons which consisted of too much juvenile, locker room humor. I’m not offended by that sort of humor mind you, I’m just bored by it, and there was way too much of it in the last season or two.
Well, tonight was the fourth I think, and they fooled the voting audience for the first time and they fooled me for the first time. I thought the man v. horse was the lie.
I’ve missed it the last couple of weeks. The last episode I saw was the jet engine blowing out the forest fire lie–I figured that one out but not for the reasons they gave. My thought was using wind (from a jet engine or any other source) would simply blow embers and the fire would get bigger. You see that in news stories all the time, when firefighters wait for the winds to die down.
Overall, I haven’t been very impressed. It’s sort of like entry-level critical thinking, which can be useful of course. Or, it’s like what Paul Newman said many years ago on the David Letterman show about the then IRL: "We don’t like the management, but we’ll take their money. "
Ugh, I can’t believe this is the dreck we get instead of Bullshit. Makes me sad. A crappy episode of bullshit is miles better than most shows, I will miss it.
There was something odd this week. During the first segment, with the tommy gun vs the AR-15, they were talking about how Kalashnikov thought that most soldiers wouldn’t even aim in combat, so he designed a weapon for spraying. And then they show someone shooting a from the hip with the label of “AK47 Machine Gun”
But the odd thing was… the guy was obviously bump firing. It’s a technique to rapidly fire a semi-automatic gun to simulate faster fire using the recoil of the weapon, but it’s definitely not full auto. The rifle selector switch was all the way down, in semi-auto, and it doesn’t even have a groove to fit a full auto position, which means it’s one of the americanized semi auto only AK type rifles.
Which I thought was odd, because there has to be a gazillion hours of stock footage of people shooting real AK type rifles on full auto, so why insert footage of someone simulating full auto fire on a semi-auto weapon?
I know they like to drop little clues, but then I realized - who besides me and like 17 other people on the planet would ever notice that? And obviously the claim - that you can be more effective on semi-auto than with a gun like a tommy gun - is of course true.
Just thought it was an odd choice.
But then “the most abundant element in the known universe, helium” came along and it was easy.
Anyway, yeah, show is fairly lame. I do like Penn & Teller and probably one story a week is interesting enough to be worth watching but eh.
Yeah, I noticed the bump firing, too. I just figured they did it because they were having their expert do the shooting or something.
With the helium thing, I thought maybe they’d made an actual mistake, not that it was part of the lie build up, until they mentioned it :smack: .
I don’t think it’s a lame show, so much as geared to a younger audience. It’s one that the 9 year old in the house can watch, whereas BS was not. I just think of it as BS-light.
At first I liked it, but the more I watch the less I like. Penn is a giant flaming jackass, and it detracts from my ability to enjoy the story. Stupid comments poking fun at every little gaff and giggle is assinine and juvenile.
The claim wasn’t by one hair, it was by all the hair from one person. Which they did.
It’s completely true. She keeps her distance by the placement of her feet and by pressing against the guy’s arms. If he steps forward, he just pushes her away.
Try it yourself. Try to pick up a 50lb bad of dogfood, first at arms’ length, then right next to your feet. Hell, you can see in the video of actually picking her up, they shift her closer to them as they lift and step underneath her. In the other attempts, look at her arm placement on theirs. She’s pushing away.
This is the one where I beat myself up. I should have known right away. I even specifically commented to myself, “Why do they keep showing the engine intake?” Somehow I missed they orientation of the jet to the fire. Yeah, that one I earned myself a dozen head slaps.
The latest one, though, they cheated. Specifically,
When they did the man vs horse, I thought plausible, but then they showed a graphic with Penn saying how horses were better than humans in all the following fields, and then listed a couple and then “mountain climbing, economic management, international diplomacy”. Right there I took that as the clue that this was the fake story, so totally didn’t even hear the remark about helium being the lightest and most abundant element on the planet.
I mean, how am I supposed to judge the lie when you can’t tell their “clues” from their “random snarky jokes”?
I did find the episode with the piranha fascinating.
Something I noticed on this week’s episode…after the balloon burst, the onboard camera showed a brief shot of more or less the whole United States spinning below the pizza box gondola. You can’t get a panorama like that from 100,000 feet.
It made me think that was the lie until the remark about helium being “the lightest and most abundant” element, in the floating desert segment.
It isn’t a great show … yet somehow I am still watching it. And worse, posting comments about it! Sort of a morbid fascination thing I guess.
Yeah, I thought the balloon thing was fake at first. No way did it seem they could get that high up. One huge problem is that the balloon really, really expands as it goes up. It has to have a lot of loose material to start with and the one they showed didn’t seem to be sufficiently roomy/stretchy. Oh, well.
The floating dessert thing seemed plausible. Missed the line about Helium being most abundant. It’s those sort of lines that had stuck out before. Oh, well[sup]2[/sup].
Once the leaves finish falling, it will be time to check out my local woods for some Penn and Teller dolls. (Hey, somebody’s got to find them.)
