Mythbusters
One memory from my travels that sticks in my mind is one particular evening when I was in a rather unusual hostel on a backstreet of New York, somewhere around 55th and 8th. I was sat on a couch that looked like it had been saved from extinction by an enterprising tramp and subsequently abandoned once more, only to be picked up by this place and made useable with the addition of a throw-over, which was, as is traditional, bunched up around the corners of the sofa and not covering much of the sitting space at all.
I was watching a huge TV screen, which also looked like it had been abandoned and rescued and abandoned again. There was no natural light. Despite the fact that a garden was just around a few corners, the whole place felt underground because you had to go down some stairs and through a rather low door to obtain access. I was drinking some extremely bad but also extremely free Lipton’s tea out of a plastic cup, lamenting the lack of good tea outside dear old Blighty, and watching Mythbusters. Now, Mythbusters is easily one of the best things about America. The deal is, two beret-sporting guys get set out to prove or disprove exciting myths while finding excuses to use their rather well-equipped workshop and as many explosives as possible. On this particular occasion I believe they were trying to prove that hurricane winds can force raw spaghetti to penetrate palm trees. It turns out, you see, that palm trees have an unusual structure that does indeed make this possible. Naturally they set out to prove this using high power fans, home-made air cannons, and, you’ve guessed it, explosives. On another episode I saw later on in my journey, they proved that a swift punch on the nose does indeed deter a hungry shark.
What’s fantastic about Mythbusters is that they do all the things you’ve seen in the movies but never had the facilities to try, and that seems to awaken the small excited child in everyone. They also, in my opinion, provide a valuable public service: in an episode I saw over here in Australia they attempted to prove a theory about Kennedy’s murder by making a series of bullets which would dissolve in the body and thus be undetectable. Unsurprisingly this also showed up in a recent action movie. The theory goes, you freeze water into bullet shapes using liquid nitrogen and it melts inside the victim’s body. Nice idea, but it didn’t work out. Not ones to give up, the Mythbuster team moved on to meat bullets and jelly bullets. They tested them by firing each one from a sniper rifle at a particularly worrying jelly mould of a human. Eventually they became bored of that myth and on a whim produced an umbrella that could fire such bullets instead. Genius.
As I sat and felt my brain dribble out of my ears, a group of people were gathered around a computer, talking loudly in a language I couldn’t understand. One of them gave up and came and sat with me, and we talked for a while. It turned out that they were a Swiss band who had just dropped their management after a string of unsuccessful and poorly attended gigs, so they were trying to get home. The problem was that they were set to leave from Florida, which, as you may have gathered somewhere along your education, is a fair old way from New York. They were trying to work out the best way to get there and were not exactly thrilled at the idea of a 3 day trek on the Greyhound. Frequent readers will know my views on Greyhound and suffice to say, I understood their pain. He spoke very little English so our conversation was largely limited to listing our favourite bands, which turned out to be reasonably similar. I wrote down the address of their MySpace page and promised to look them up. Unfortunately, I wrote it in my old diary, which is now safe and sound in England, so I have not had the chance, but I will. They left shortly after to get some sleep before they got on the dreaded Hellhound and I continued to watch the television. A film came on that I remember almost nothing of, not because of the time that has past between now and then, but because it was utterly unremarkable. The only thing that sparked my imagination was a scene which featured a truly gigantic ice cream, and I thought: “Yes, that is what America is all about”.
I never did find an ice cream of a comparable size. The American dream is a lie.