Some days you wake up and say

[james_davis_nicoll]

"Today I am going to rent one of the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple movies."

On another note, is TV crap this year or what? Thank goodness for Time Team and the hilarity provided by homeopathy of archaeology, geophys.

Comments

[feorag.livejournal.com]

Are you suggesting homeopathy is based on sound scientific principles?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The geophys guy on Time Team has a particular genius for producing mottled gray maps whose relevence to the finds the team makes seems dubious at best; I'd love to see if tossing darts at a map of the dig site produced better or worse results. Plus it seems there's an amazing number of things that will keep geophys from working.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I think rain has foiled the geophys guy. He's doing field work in Britain for the most part, where the numbers of days with 1 mm or more of rain ranges from 130 to 180 days a year.

I seem to recall "too many things in the soil" can also be a problem.

[xinef.livejournal.com]

LOL. We love to watch Time Team, so I really understand your comments.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I've taken to shouting "maybe it's LUPUS!" whenever the geophys guy shows up.

[casaubon.livejournal.com]

Not this year. we'd love a bit of rain at the moment.

I don't watch Time Team, but I imagine lots of rain might mess up electroresistivity surveys and possible GPR. Mag/gravity surveys ought to be okay, but they probably don't have time for that.

Disclaimer: the type of geophysics I did involved looking at stuff kilometres down, not this namby-pamby few metres stuff.

The thing to remember about geophysics is that it doesn't usually produce a unique solution. Hence the guesswork until you dig up the ground or drill a well.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Hence the guesswork until you dig up the ground or drill a well.

Which on Time Team is absolutely hilarious. "I think this mottled patch indistinguishable from all the other mottled patches is a ROMAN VILLA!" And then they dig it up and it turns out to be NOT A ROMAN VILLA! AGAIN! Madame Contrivio the Mystic Psychic Lady could probably provide equally useful pointers on where to dig and she could do it on a rainy day.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

My favourite episode was the one where they found NOTHING AT ALL. I don't think that episode could have been made in a US series.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Didn't Geraldo make it?

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Ah, true. But that one only went to air because it was live; TT knew what they had and still broadcast it.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

For a while, the US series "Ghost Hunters" was like that. Every episode they'd stake out a house at night, see something move or float or whatever, film it, then take it back to their shed and say "That's just dust." It was hilarious and amazingly entertaining.

At the end of the first season they started fabricating results to prove hauntings. The SciFi forums started deleting people (like me, of course) who were using screen captures to point out the hinky stuff. One week something like 25 of us got banned.

After typing all that out, I think the "Ghost Hunters" stuff actually proves what you said is true.

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I'm surprised it got a season before they started fabricating :-/

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

I record the series Meterorite Men and then watch these two grownup guys get all ooky over finding tiny bits of old meteors.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I watch Mayday for the episodes where the crew manages to land the plane safely. Sadly, last night's episode had the crew do a spectacular job of dealing with losing all of their landing gear and one engine in a collison just after reaching the speed at which the plane was moving too fast to abort the take-off, only to be brought down by foreign object damage to the remaining engine.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

Having been in a light airplane crash (in 1976) I still cant watch things like that... any landing you survive is a good landing..

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I watch MAYDAY as a means of managing an unreasonable phobia of flying. I've never been involved in an incident on a plane but I've been run over by a car and various bicyclists (not all at once), been in a car wreck, and was in a train that hit a car and I'm perfectly reasonable about all of those vehicles.

Maybe what I need to be in a survivable plane wreck....

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

falling from the sky might be a bit different for the brain to deal with, or as I like to phrase it, its not the fall, its the abrupt stop. I have a real intense fear of stopping.

[coalboy.livejournal.com]

No! No! Christie _hated_ the Rutherford movies!

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I watch them as films about a character who happens to share a name with Christie's character. More on this later.