Discovery Channel: Visual Cocaine

There is a drug out there just as addicting as crack, though you can’t snort or smoke it. If I could somehow figure a way to bottle this and sell it on the black market, I’d make a fortune. What is it? Well, it’s the Discovery Channel.

There is just something about that channel that captures me, and that I’m not the only one that this happens to, and forces me to continue watching. Take last night for instance. I was going to bed, it was around 11:30 and I was exhausted. The news had just ended so I thought I’d see what was on Discovery before I went to sleep. They were doing a show on how Boston is moving all of its highways underground. They call it the Big Dig. Well, needless to say the show took me in and I couldn’t force myself to go to sleep, I had to watch the show. Like all programs on Discovery, the Big Dig show was fascinating. They, Bostonian engineers, did all kinds of really crazy cool things to get this highway underground including FREEZING the soil so that they could easily dig and not upset the topsoil.

But back to my point. Whether its special programs like this one or their series’ like Monster Garage and the spin-off, Monster House, Discovery has some sort of addictive chemical mixed into the horizontal scan lines that force you to keep watching. And their commercials don’t help.

Ok, so Shark Week is coming up next week and they’ve been advertising it on their various shows for what seems like months now. But the kicker is that this year, their headlining program is “Antimony of a Shark Bite” which kicks off the week and airs this Sunday night from nine to eleven. What’s it about? Basically one of the Discovery Channel documentary film makers, Dr. Erich Ritter, was bit by a shark while filming and the whole program is him analyzing the attack and explaining it and whatnot. Now how cool is that! Seriously, I’ve been waiting for this for weeks now and come Sunday evening, you know where to find me.

Let me wrap this uncompensated advertisement for the Discovery Channel up by saying that yes, Discovery is entertainment for your brain, and probably then some.