All of These Things Are Not Like The Others

We have a tendency to hibernate during New England winters. We don't do it the way bears do, eating a lot of raw fish and berries and maybe the odd tourist before retreating to a cave to sleep for six months. It's not that civilized.

I've been logging a lot of time on the couch, which The Idiots enjoy because I've got the blankets out and have ample time to scratch their ears. My house is falling further and further into disarray-- hey, that's what spring cleaning is for-- and I've knitted miles of wooly goodness.

And I've watched a lot of TV. If there's a such thing as too much TV, I hit that point about three weeks ago.

The good news is that I'm not wasting my years of higher education watching stuff like Jerseylicious (Suz and NayNay, I'm looking in your direction with my judgy judgment). I've been having a How It's Made renaissance.

How It's Made airs on the Science Channel. When The Kiwi lived here it was part of our routine. Roommate bonding included opening a bottle of red and listening to the soothing narrator talk about how "they" make all kinds of stuff.

We fell out of the habit when the show started using a different, less soothing narrator, and the scripts changed from using "they" to more direct phrasing-- which is ironic because The Kiwi is an editor and I'm, well, whatever the hell it is I'm doing now, but either way, we should approve of phrasing that doesn't involve use of pronouns with vague antecedents.

But I digress.

A few weeks ago I found the Science Channel running a marathon of episodes, and it appeared that they had returned to the original narrator and use of "they." Or I was catching early episodes, but either way it made me happy.

The key of this show's appeal is the random assembly of items that appear on any given show. I don't mean "random" in the sense that we used to use the word in college to refer to people or things that are unfamiliar. I mean random in the true sense: a given episode How It's Made generally features an assortment of items that have nothing in common whatsoever.

For example: Dial Thermometers, Hummus, Fuel Containers, and Sombreros.

Of course, TiVo has picked up on this trend and has started recording episodes of How It's Made: Remix, which puts together items that are actually related to one another by theme, like Sporting Goods and Kitchen Appliances. What's the point of that?