Wednesday, October 19, 2011

MythBusters, rockets, and "urn-ale" climbing

Standing on a long dock/boardwalk over a small lake, watching Jamie and Adam from MythBusters shooting some sort of handheld rocket launchers (the rockets launched whereby being somewhat light and unthreatening). At first, it is more like a filmed scene -- indeed, I watch the two of them launch rockets in reverse -- the rockets find their way back to the launchers, and then the vertical smoke trail finds its way back to the rockets. Then I see them do it again. Adam's little rocket lands in the water behind him, just off the side of the dock. Jamie's lands very close to his own feet. Adam quips that this may be the first episode where they experiment on their own blood.

Seems filming has stopped now, we've walked off a little to the right, and Adam is talking to me and a friend about the background to that episode. Jamie had the idea of setting up a small monorail along the dock to which the rocket launchers would have been attached. One of Adam's assistants (not from the real show) mentioned how it would have been difficult to set up the monorail without buckling the dock because of the shape of the planks. Adam said they had actually worked out a solution to that, by fitting mounts below the railing that were the same size as the planks. In any case, the monorail idea had been scrapped. Adam also mentioned offhand that the show's photographers took way too many pictures, that there were so many photos from the show that would never see the light of day.

Then we headed off further down the dock towards land. Hopping. I hopped down the slope of the dock onto land, then started hopping towards our destination, over a pile of junk or two, and slowly uphill, with my friend (and possibly the MythBusters crew) following behind me. For some reason, the song "Civilization" by the Andrews Sisters and Danny Kaye (featured in Fallout 3) was running through my head. Possibly because of the line "They hurry like savages to get aboard an iron train" -- thinking of the monorail idea.

The ground was grassy and was pretty wet. As we got further up the hill, the wet ground changed to snowy ground. Then we reached a part of the slope that was too steep to hop (or walk) up. My friend (I think a girl, but not particularly feminine, just sort of a pal) and I started grabbing tufts of snow-covered grass with our bare hands and slowly lifting ourselves up the slope, bit by bit. We were laughing and having a grand time. I was surprised every time I grabbed the grass and it managed to support my weight and not break in my hand. My friend said this was great "urn-ale" climbing. I told her this was the first "urn-ale" mountain I'd ever climbed. We continued to climb and grin and laugh.

In the background now, the music had changed to something Celtic-sounding: It was fast-paced, 6/4 time. Every beat had a high-octave major chord on piano keeping time, and there was a pennywhistle which started on a major third, and every half measure it flourished to a different note.

No comments:

Post a Comment