A week back from Sunday, I tuned into an awesome show about the wildlife around the world. It truly rocked my socks. I would recommend what I saw that time to anyone.
Unfortunately, yesterday's edition of Planet Earth was lacking. I liked all the filming of animals and all of that, but it is hard to get immersed in the environments when it is interrupted every ten minutes with the same Volvo commercial. To make matters worse, the new Volvos included features I'm not sure I am excited about existing.
One of the new safety features that were pushed was how if you aren't paying attention and are about to run into someone in front of you, a red light flashes and beeps to alert you. I wouldn't mind this because then people might tailgate less.
The other feature that was presented was that if someone was in your blind spot, a little red light on the side mirrors came on to let you know. But, the thing is that the last thing you are supposed to do before you change lanes is glance over your shoulder to look at the blind spot. Does this mean that people will stop checking because the car will do it for them? What if people become too needy or reliant on these features? I know that a year from now I don't want to be traveling down the road in the blind spot of someone who used to drive a Volvo. I am worried about people saying "it's not my fault, the car didn't tell me you were there!"
People who used to own cars that chime when you left your lights on, but now have a car that doesn't have this feature, have trouble remembering to turn the lights off on their own. All I'm saying is, "okay, I understand a car turning into a portable bounce house in the event of a crash, but this idea that a car is supposed to take care of you while driving, instead of vice-versa, really gets me off track when I'm trying to enjoy the Penguins!"
Yes! I brought it back! The show yesterday had battling Ibexes (ram-like animals) and Arctic birds, and locusts and it wasn't bad... just not as good as the first round of episodes that aired. The first round of episodes did not have as many commerical breaks too.
Now, viewers or makers of the show might think that I am against the show this time because it talked about Global Warming, but I haven't even mentioned the show's mention of Global Warming until this point. I can see how some people would be put off by it because anytime someone starts with something that appears to be completely non-challenging and segues (seg-ways) into something even a teensy bit challenging, you see reactions of people thinking "How dare you! I thought this was just your own thoughts, but you're one of them!"
Just like if I were to, say, randomly start talking about Christianity right here... I'm not going to, but look! I know that some readers may have started the thought process of, "Oh, another religious mouth, I thought this was just a plain long review of TV show with a seeming unrelated tangent on Volvos! That coniving little blogger!"
Even the challenge of the last paragraph may have been enough for someone to stop reading, but if you didn't leave and you are reading this, I commend you for it. That's some serious open-mindedness in this day and age. Then again, you may have left because what this post wasn't going where you thought it would go, because of off-topic-ness or something else, and it had nothing to do with the fact that it was a sort-of challenging statement. It is for a similar reason that I didn't like the second episode of Planet Earth (there's a method to my tangent-to-topic madness)
In conclusion, the first episodes of Planet Earth that I saw featured lots of landscapes, views of predator chasing prey from a bird's eye-view, (speaking of birds...) wild and kooky-looking rain forest birds, monkeys who live on rock walls, and I would recommend that to anyone. This week's show had too many commercials and just didn't really compare.
UPDATE: April 9, 2007: Third Round of 'Planet Earth' was very good and had less commercials, Link to blog post
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