Now What?

So on Tuesday when I made my run down of things to talk about and then managed to make it through it all, it kind of left me in a tight for something to talk about today.  Oh wait, I've got it.  I don't think that I've talked about "The Colony" yet.

So "The Colony" is a show that's been coming on for maybe six or eight weeks on the Discovery Channel.  It's basically a reality show with the premise that a super-flu has broken out and wiped out a tremendous portion of the world's population.  It's kind of like "The Stand" meets "The Real World".  The took 8 people and dropped them off in an abandoned part of New Orleans that was blown out by Katrina and they've been trying to survive on what little provisions they were given to start with and what they've been able to scavenge from the surrounding area.  All along the way, they have experts in different fields run commentary about how the colonists are doing and what's driving the decisions they're making.  They try to simulate different things along the way, mainly in security situations where hostiles will wander in to the camp and try to either steal or talk the colonists out of supplies.

It's been a really cool show.  The biggest thing that they haven't talked about and it's because of obvious safety reasons, is guns.  They deal a lot with security, but all the run-ins with hostiles have been with non-deadly weapons.  Of course, they're not going to actually really hurt anyone on the show, but if the situation were real, everyone left would probably be armed to the teeth with what munitions they could scavenge.  Outside of that though, the group dynamics and social interactions between the colonists are pretty interesting to watch.  It's also interesting to see what kind of things they manage to create out of stuff they find laying around.

They created a windmill and put it on top of the building they're using for a house.  Using bike chains and an alternator from a car, they're able to generate electricity and charge a set of car batteries they scavenged.  They've built a forge and flattened metal into machetes and they've created a reverse trike by hooking a flat trailer to the front of a motorcycle they got running and use the trailer part to haul stuff back to the camp.  The list goes on, and I'm not certain that the producers aren't feeding them ideas about what they can do so that it's more interesting that just watching them forage for food, but it's amazing to see what kind of stuff they've come up with.

The fall TV season is about to get rolling with most shows starting in a week or two.  We're down a few shows this year, but I've seen ads for one new show already that looks pretty cool.  "The Event" looks like it will be right up my alley.  Other than that, we'll have to see.  With DeAnne working we haven't had a lot of time to watch TV.  I guess that's not necessarily a bad thing, but we would like to keep up with the shows we do watch.

Have a good weekend and a big War Eagle!

--Paul