Friday, December 31, 2010

Fool Me Once, Shame On Petey and Hank-Bob



Okay, I assembled a panel of experts with unimpeachable-like credentials -- Hank-Bob and Petey (hank-bob's coon hound), Ed, and Rufus (who promised to put down they's beers during the session wherein we's t'do all our analyzin', speculatin', and labratoryizin'. We had to explain to Petey that "laboratory" has nothing to do with retrieving)). What we came up with was this:

The actual fakes in the video:

Running on water. Not too hard to google up the article in popular science that points out that, given the principles of displacement vs. surface tension -- there's no way the dude's running on water, no matter WHAT kind of shoes he's wearing. In fact, if we're talking surface tension, them shoes'd have to be a mile long to support the average guy. Okay, since this guy is taking the serious time out of his life to make a video to prove that he could run on water, it could be argued that he's not "average", but still...

And if we're talking displacement, he'd still need him some pretty serious foot-canoes to stay atop the water utilizing the archimedes principle (don't go looking for your old Archimedes and Jugheadamedes comix. This was a different guy)



Conclusion: there's a dock submerged just under the surface and some wise guys with a camera decided to take advantage of some unusually high water levels to pull off a spoof.

Cheerleader through the hoop. B-ball hoops are 18" in diameter. Not at all impossible for a smallish cheerleader (provided you could find such a thing) to fit through one -- but not in the manner of the video. Not after being launched into the air and falling back to earth at the speed of gravity.


As with most of the short vids comprising the main video, what explains them is what you don't see -- the numerous out-takes/misses/etc. But, jumping through a basketball rim would take exceeding amounts of practice. Our panel doubts that such practice occurred. And call us skeptical, but if such practice DID occur, we on the panel think that we'd be watching a severely bandaged and damaged cheerleader in the final video. Not to put too fine a point to the speculatin', but catch that cheerleader's chin on the rim on her way down just once and, well, they's many a cowboy tale with a similar ending.


Basketball long shots. All the basketball long shots are okay. But they represent the one success in one thousand shots attempted. Still, we suppose that the video serves as an ode to illustrate the admirable value of persistance. And the valuable creativity that results from the marriage of college-age men to beer.

2 comments:

  1. You have to keep reminding yourself that they only show the survivors.Happy New Year.

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  2. Happy New Year back atcha, Dennis!

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