Oops!

As I was wandering through a dungeon in a video game last night, the TV was on. I watched a show and realized I had left a huge category of shows off my list.

The infotainment show.

This is a show where you can actually learn things. On Saturday nights there is a girl who travels the world. She has been in Africa recently. They send her footage back to Japan and then the professional studio audience watches it. You can learn many things from these shows, even when you don`t speak Japanese.

Last night, I watched two guys go up in one of those planes that goes really high and then comes down creating a near-zero gravity environment. The first time they did it, it was for the experience. Pretty damn funny watching two professional idiots (comedians of a sort) floating above their chairs in near panic. The second time they did it, they dropped dry ice in a tank of water. What happened was really cool. As you may recall, when you drop dry ice in water, it starts to bubble. Now imagine what happens if there is no gravity, you get a kind of explosion in the water. The bubbles no longer feel like they just have to rise being less dense than air, instead the expanding air forced the water up into the plane in a huge blob. That was really cool. Third time was a working fan. The fan propelled itself, and spun a little too, through the plane. They had a physics professor explain why it did what it did. They did a couple more experiments that did not work so well.

Also on the show last night was the grafting of different fruits and vegetables to each other. It was cool. One watermelon graft did not work at all. Another graft created a star shaped water melon. The tomato-cucumber was extremely phallic looking.

They also dispelled the notion that ninja`s used to swim deep under water with air tubes to the surface. They can do a little, about 3 or so feet, but any deeper and the pressure will make the tubes unusable. Fascinating. And a little scary; one guy was down at least 3m (almost 10 feet) and the breathing tube became a vacuum and he had trouble pulling it out of his mouth.

And yes, before each of these segments, they showed a hand-drawn picture on a large card whereas in the states we would have used a computer. The artists and card makers must have a union. Recently, I saw, during a news show, a woman use a hand drawn card to explain some incidents that have happened with kids and treadmills. She even used a small, red, wooden arrow as a pointer. I`m really curious as to why they don`t use computers for these things...