Man Forfeits To Wild

Every so often I tune in to Man Vs. Wild on the Discovery Channel.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of the show, it’s essentially a guide to survival in the event you should find yourself lost in a hostile environment.
Toward that end, a man with the unlikely-sounding name of Bear Grylls, who served with the British Special Forces, is deposited in the middle of nowhere, usually with only a knife and a water bottle, and sometimes only a water bottle, and then has to find his way back to civilization.
Admittedly, he does have a camera crew following him, but they are expressly forbidden to do anything other than simply document his efforts (except in the case of an absolute life or death emergency). How well they adhere to that is anyone’s guess. I’m inclined to believe that they don’t help him – if only to make the show more entertaining – but feel free to be as suspicious as you like.
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter, as the point of the show is to provide you with information that could help you in the event you’re lost in the jungle without the benefit of a camera crew, and as long as the information he’s providing is useful and accurate, it makes no difference to me if he’s hanging out with the crew eating caviar and drinking champagne when the cameras are off.
In any case, I watched multiple episodes last night, with Bear making his way out of a rainforest, down from the Rocky Mountains, across the African Savannah, and down from the Sierra Nevada mountains.
In watching the efforts he made to survive, I came to realize something about myself. If I were to find myself in similar circumstances, I’d rather die.
Seriously, if surviving means biting the heads off of snakes and then eating their still writhing bodies, eating hunks of raw meat cut off the carcass of a recently-killed and fed upon Zebra, or sucking the moisture out of elephant dung, that’s going to be a big “Thanks, but no thanks” to what the natural world is offering me in the way of assistance.
Okay, sure, that makes me a quitter, and I mean no disrespect to all of those hardy souls out there who have gone to great lengths and terrible depths to survive and whose amazing stories inspire us all, but seriously, drinking the moisture from a pile of elephant shit? Dying has to be preferable.
I mean, in a circumstance in which that is your only recourse, you should devote your energy to finding a quick and painless way to kill yourself.
Of course, in my opinion, the best course of action is to avoid any activity that could lead you to be stranded and relying on sucking moisture out of elephant shit in the first place.
I should get my own survival tips show on the Discovery Channel.
I could call it Jon’s Stay at Home Guide To Survival.
Just a thought.
Speaking of things I could do for the Discovery Channel, the other night there was an episode of Mythbusters on. It was one of the episodes in which they were dealing with various myths related to vodka.
This particular myth suggest that if you run bottom-shelf, rotgut vodka through a water filtration system six times, it will become indistinguishable from top-shelf vodka.
They proved this untrue, but I could suggest another method by which this transformation can occur: become a desperate alcoholic.
The advantage is that this method works for all other alcoholic beverages in addition to vodka.
Because today is a holiday I’m not going anywhere, so I’ve basically had two Sundays in a row, filled with little to no activity (though I did shower and shave today).
Yesterday I watched a few episodes of Justice League and Monty Pyhon’s The Meaning of Life.
I may watch some more Justice League or Justice League Unlimited episodes today, but I can’t even guarantee that I’ll do that much.