Thursday, December 22, 2005

I reject your reality and substitute my own

Alright, it's time for my little bit of psycho-nerd for the week. Nothing much happening last night so I got to watch one of MY favorite shows, Mythbusters. It was a rerun, as is everything right now but this was the episode where they are trying to clean dried concrete out of a cement truck with explosives. The most common form of the myth is a stick of dynamite. The crew got an old beat up cement truck and while trying to keep it running long enough to get a good coating of cement around the drum it was accidentally filled over half full. This wasn't discovered until after it had dried leaving them no choice but to get a second beat to death cement truck and try again. The myth was deemed plausible when a stick and a half dislodged a good portion of the dried slag. Of course this left them with the first truck that was half filled, so they decided to get a hold of the FBI and see what they could do. The answer is fill it with 850 pounds of commercial grade high explosives and detonate it in a rock quarry. The crew was over a mile away from the blast and got hit with tiny pieces of cement truck. The aftermath was unbelievable. A couple of frame rails and what used to be part of the engine block was all that was left and that was nowhere near the original location of the truck. I really like this show. I only wish it wasn't a closed studio since it's filmed in San Francisco, and I just happen to be going there in about two weeks. End psycho-nerd rant.

8 comments:

Buttercup said...

I am going to have to agree with you on the myth busters it is a wonderful show. the one I remember the most is trying to get the smell of a rotting corpse out of a car interior. they used a pig corpse and did end up selling the car. It was really gross

Ain't Right said...

I remember that one, and you're right that was really gross. That ranks right up there as one of the most disgusting things they've ever done. And they've done some really disgusting things.

Kern said...

The one I remember is the one where they were trying to dispel the myth that if you are falling from a great height, in this instance a bridge, that throwing something in first would break the surface tension of the water enough that you would not pancake on impact. I think the original myth had to do with workers throwing tools into the water if they fell while first building the Golden Gate Bridge.

Turns out it probably doesn't matter what you throw in. Unless yr extremely lucky, you're toast. And by lucky I mean you'd end up a quadrapalegic instead of dead.

Sheriff Officer Greg the Bunny said...

BC stole my thunder on the car/pig episode. I remember they had to seal the car in a shipping container for something like 3 months and then when they opened it they rang the dinner bell!

b.o.

Ain't Right said...

And then as if one episode with pig corpses wasn't bad enough they used them again to test ground sonar for the Jimmy Hoffa search. Except this time they buried them in concrete.

And you're right Kern they dropped a hammer into the water right before the dummy struck. If I remember right the the dummy was badly damaged in that one. Like his arms and legs were ripped from his body on impact.

Kern said...

Yeah, it was pretty harsh. They also did a test to see if Coca cola could clean metals. If I recall it did work on copper...

Ain't Right said...

Just recently they did Vodka myths. Evidently you can get rid of foot odor and bad breath with vodka, but hopefully not the same batch.

Kern said...

Hmm...that reminds me of rugby players who drink beer out each others cleats. I won't tell you where it touches before it makes its way into the shoe...