Why The Science Channel is Funny, Yet Also Sucks

Okay, so my husband has this annoying habit of constantly watching The Science Channel. Last night, for instance, I was subjected to an hour of Volvo Crash Tests And Space Age Improvements, or some such shit. Not that I don't appreciate that Volvo is tring to make a safer automobile riding experience for all, but come on... an hour of watching perfectly good Volvos being destroyed just to see how badly we can fuck up crash test dummies is a little much.

Any way, it was apparently marathon Science Channel watching night for Ibrahim, and the Crash Test Extravaganza was preceeded by this really dramatic, very silly exploration of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Apocryphal Gospels and some bullshit theory about Jesus and Mary Magdalene being husband and wife and how some wack job (from France no less) was claiming to be a decescendent of Jesus/Mary copulation.

The guy was totally serious, too, and what's more, the program took him seriously, in this very reverential, awe-inspiring tone.

I'm not saying Jesus didn't have sex, or wasn't married, or whatever, because hey, I didn't live with the guy, okay? All I'm saying is that it's a well known fact that Mary Magdalene was not the prostitute that washed Jesus's feet with her hair and all that, and I don't remember anything much sexy happening her way, but then again, I forgot it was Easter this weekend, so I may not be the best source for these sorts of judgments.

Any way, as my husband was glazed-eyed, completely absorbed in this shit, I was over in the corner snickering, wishing my friend Katy was here to witness this utter tripe, just so we could be snotty intellectuals pointing out the inconsistencies and outright fallacious theorizing spun as "truth" (she's a real intellectual, getting a proper PhD, actually, while Im just a poser who can't remember major holidays I studied in graduate school.)

Of course, to other normal folks, we'd sound like Trekkies quibbling over the real canonical dialects of Klingon, or something, but seriously, I hate to burst the producer's enthusiastic bubble, but uh, the Dead Sea Scrolls aren't exactly groundbreaking, newsflash type news. Like try 1947, when they were discovered, people.

And then there was this advertisement for The Gospel of Judas. Lions, and tigers and bears, oh my!

Frankly, I know I'm being a snotty prat about this stuff, because, yes, it's interesting when you sensationalize religious historical mysteries in progams designed for people who read the Davinci Code or watch "National Treasure" and think "Wow! Cool!" but real academic work is actually comprised of very very tedious and dull scholarly work that spans decades of one's career in one small, esoteric area of much larger compendium of issues. It takes dedication, and a good antidepressant/supply of methamphetamine to continue with scholarly work past master's level, I'm convinced.

Thankfully, there are only a handful of people who get all hot and bothered over tasks like indexing, footnoting footnotes (I did, once! It was fun!), spending thousands of hours writing sniping commentary in scholarly journals over academic minituae (while the rest of the world is making millions off of worthless tripe like American Idol Meets Survivor spin offs).

But I feel sorry for the intellectual types, because then all their hard work gets distilled into some godawful half-hour badly-reenacted Spanish channel drama quality "documentary" about "discoveries" the intellectual community has known about for half a century or more. I would feel very, very indignant about my life's work being so summarily misused.

But then, I'd also have to laugh, because seriously, a Frenchman claiming to be the distant, dsitant progeny of Jesus and Mary Magdalene hooking up? Like, how do you prove a claim like that? And was this guy committed to a psych ward at the time of the interview?

(I once had a psych patient who claimed she knew the secret to the end of the world, and had special knowledge of the mysterious language of the documents that revealed when and how these supposed events were to occur. She was a bipolar, paranoid schizophrenic who had her first psychotic break in medical school and everyone had lost count of how many times she had tried to off herself, including one interesting attempt during her most recent ward admission involving dismantling the clock from her cell wall, breaking the face of the clock, and attempting to slit her wrists with the broken shards. But who the fuck knows. Maybe she really does know the secret of the end of the universe, and we're all fucked and only she knows it. After all, everybody thought Jesus was a wack-job, too, and look how his career took off posthumously.)

If you've never watched the Science Channel, I recommend it. It's great for shits and giggles. (Like the one special they did on the Coliseum, in a manner that suggested no one in the history of humanity had ever noticed or studied the Coliseum before.)