some tv learning

Recently I've discovered that I'm capable (barely) of studying in front of the tv! Naturally I pretty much spent a majority of today studying (mm we'll call it that) to the sights and sounds of history channel and food network. In addition to re-learning geometry, trig, and grammar (I hate sentence correction...), I've learned quite a bit from the tv that's been playing in the background.

I suppose this isn't really that much of a surprise. Since I was a kid, I remember using television as both entertainment and a learning tool (at least that's what I tried to persuade my folks). I was always sucked into shows like Nova and Mythbusters and was a perennial viewer of shark week on discovery channel. These days it seems harder to learn stuff from television. The sometimes mind-numbing shows on tv these days leave much to be desired from the intellect after a half hour episode, yet nevertheless there are little morsels of learning to be gleamed from tv (esp history and food network):

Don't fly bomber planes. In WWII only 1 in 3 B-17 bomber crews survived their first 25 missions.

Giada has a huge head...it doesn't really look proportional to the rest of her body...

History Channel plays ChristianMingle.com ads during every break. Is there a large demographic of single christian history buffs out there that I haven't encountered??

I am officially sucked into this season of Next Food Network Star. These folks are all so raw and rough around the edges right now, and yet one of these guys will have his/her own show in a few weeks. So yes...I will be glued to the food network until this season is over.

Apparently LL Cool J is a history channel narrator. Yea...I too did a double-take when I saw that...economy must be rough these days.

food network pro-tip: apparently if you need to seer a bunch of small stuff in a pan (i.e. shrimp, scallops, beef chunks, etc), instead of taking a long time flipping each of them, you can put then on skewers, and then flip the whole skewer. I tried this today and it works!

I'm sure there's more to learn from tv...maybe after tomorrow's day of studying I'll have more to write about...