I Should Be Taking Notes

If I'm not watching sports then I'm most likely watching some type of survival show. I love the shows which show you what you should be doing in the event you somehow get trapped on top of an Arctic glacier for the night or get lost while hiking through an Amazonian jungle. (I think I love these shows because those are the exact scenarios I find myself constantly worrying about.) My favorites of these shows used to be "Survivorman", where they would stick one guy out in the woods by himself and come back in a week to see how he did. But since that is no longer in production I've latched on to the newest show, "Duel Survival".

The show takes two mismatched nature guides (one a hippy who never wears shoes and the other a former Army Specialist) and sticks them in various survival situations. The hippy doesn't want to disturb Mother Earth unless he has to, while the retired Army sniper spends the entire episode trying to kill an animal for food and poking at cobras he finds in the bushes. (That's not an exaggeration, either. One episode he kept poking at this cobra while saying that one bite could kill 10 men. Then leave it the hell alone, you idiot.) It comes across as a mix between "Survivorman" and "The Odd Couple", which I'm sure is what they were going for.

It's pretty entertaining and while they admit that several of the situations are staged for TV, it doesn't always come across that way. The big exception is for the final rescue at the end of the show. Most episodes ends when the pair appears to 'stumble' upon people who can bring them back to civilization. They always make a comment about how lucky they were to find these rescuers, who are usually natives and not in on the concept of TV production and therefore often have a look on their faces that say, "Wait, didn't you tell us to meet you guys here on Thursday at 4 o'clock? Are we early or something?"

Now, because I enjoy these shows and watch so many of them, you may start to think I have picked a few tips up just through osmosis. Sadly, that is not anywhere near the truth. Much like my golf game is too filled with swing thoughts because I'm trying to do every tip I've ever heard at the same time, my survival instincts are pulled in 15 different directions because I have seen so many of these shows and they all tell you to do different things first. As such, you end up doing none of them correctly.

I was thinking about this last weekend was I was down on rainy Cape Cod, shivering the night away because I didn't check the weather report and brought neither a sweatshirt or long pants. Honestly, if I can't handle two nights in Wareham with running water and electricity, what chance do I have against trying to cross an Arabian desert? I wasn't planning to take that trip anytime soon, but if I was I would seriously have to consider calling my travel agent and cancelling.