Current TV visits a machine gun shootout

This "pod" from Current TV, which aired last night, is basically a mini-documentary about a machine gun shootout in Kentucky that attracts thousands of people every year. So yeah, thousands of people shooting everything from military-quality machine guns to 50-caliber sniper rifles (so hardcore they're apparently illegal to use in warfare) to freaking cannons. Um, wow. I kind of can't believe these weapons are legal. Even in Kentucky. Watch, and be disturbed. (I mean, can you imagine using any of these weapons on a living thing? I know that's not the point, but it's awful to think about.)

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Planet Earth: Our Planet ROCKS!

Has anyone else been watching Planet Earth, the not-so-mini-series on the Discovery Channel? It's basically an amped-up version of Wild Kingdom, with absolutely incredible cinematography and a fancy-pants celebrity narrator. Each hour-long episode is focused on one aspect of our fabulous planet. I watched "Caves" last night, and here is but a small sampling of what I learned:

• There's a cave somewhere in a country I will now probably never visit that contains a 300-foot pile of bat crap, completely covered in cockroaches.
• Bird's nest soup is made from the nest of the cave swiftlet, a bird which roosts in the walls of caves in nests it makes with its own saliva. Yeah.
• Cave glow worms glow in order to lure insects into sticky threads dangling from their bodies, so they can reel in their prey just like fishermen.

Cool, right? You too can learn to amuse, fascinate, and disgust your friends with facts like those by watching Planet Earth on Sundays at 8 on the Discovery Channel.

The weird thing, though, is that I can't help but see it as a record of our planet before we reach the point of no return with the environmental destruction and global warming and whatnot. And that as soon as twenty-five years from now, someone will be watching it on holo-DVD or whatever and be all, "Wow, there used to be orangutans in the wild? And look, amphibians! Those were great, before we killed them all with pesticides and stuff. And oooh, polar bears, back when they had a natural habitat. And the oceans actually have fish in them!"

I guess we can at least be grateful Planet Earth is such a beautiful, interesting record of the amazing planet we're ruining. But still, let's eat less meat and ride our bicycles more, okay, people? Happy Earth Day!

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