Just forget the words and sing along

Saturday, July 02, 2005

So here I am, home alone, and it's really late on Saturday night.

Naturally, I watched Heavy Metal on TV.

Note to self: When home alone and it's really late at night, never ever watch fucked up movies.


So, I've been enraptured by this new documentary that they're showing on the Travel Channel. It's called Canada's Greatest Ride.

(I'll pause for a moment while you make a joke about your prowess in bed.)

Canada's Greatest Ride is about going cross-country by train. It's centerpiece is the fact that they bolted a camera to the roof of a Via locomotive, so you get to see exactly what the engineer sees at the front of the train. There are whole hours of nothing but this "front of the train" footage.

Sounds kind of cool, right?

But it's not. In fact, it's making me laugh my ass off.

For example, day one. Vancouver to Kamloops, BC. Now, I'm sure that, like me, you're assuming this must be a pretty spectacular sight. Going through all those mountains, crossing babbling mountain streams, and going through tunnel after tunnel. Oh, it must be beautiful!

Too bad the Via runs this route at night.

So, for a solid half-hour, I was watching nothing but "going through tunnels at night." My God. Talk about your boring television.

And then, to add insult to injury, we came to day 2. Jasper to Edmonton. Now here's what I was looking forward to. I wanted to see some cool footage of what it's like to ride the rails through Entwistle. Give my home town it's props!

But...as the narrator explained. They had technical difficulties. As they left the Japser park gates, the camera winked out. No more footage. And they couldn't get out to fix the camera until they stopped in Edmonton. So, from the Jasper border to Edmonton, they had absolutly no footage.

Well, that's not true. They had lots of footage of the technical crew running around the train like chickens with their heads cut off trying to fix it.

Canada's Greatest Ride. Great concept. Hilariously bad execution.

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