MojoHD: British Girl Bands, Flame Throwers, Free Divers

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time watching MojoHD lately. Yeah.  I know.  I’m a  GIRL!  But some of this stuff is really entertaining.

The other day I found my Gen-Y daughter and her best friend fastened to Mojo.  When I tried to ask what they were watching, they cut me off mid-sentence with a definitive chorus of SHHHHHHHHHHHHH!  It was a spectacular IMAX documentary about champion free divers titled Ocean Men: Extreme Dive. (World record: 531 ft.) This 45-minute gem is not to be missed.  Here’s the sched. for your DVR convenience: Saturday September 15, 8:00AM | ET; Sunday September 16,  6:00AM | ET;  Friday September 21, 7:00AM | ET and 1:00PM | ET

Mojo, the Comcast-owned HD channel, is targeted to men - supposedly.  But the channel isn’t as muscular as Versus.  Sometimes programming is a little soft, like a pot belly, maybe targeted to the thinking/feeling guy - as opposed to Versus (also Comcast-owned) which is a come hither for guys who like to kill and maim stuff, like deer or opponents in cages.

Mojo’s Geared Up ("toys for big boys") is targeted toward that sub-demo.  One episode featured a "bad ass" ATV (with some sort of new rear suspension) and a portable super-flame thrower - a 14,000 BTU gadget not good for much except transforming the owner into "a full blown neighborhood menace." 

Still Mojo is a lot smarter/less brutish than Versus.

I’ve stumbled across the occasional bad choice on Mojo, like a pretentious Native American short - a Koyaaniskatsi knockoff/dream sequence about the horrors of the industrial/post industrial age.

Still, Mojo seems to acknoweldge through their variety of programming that guys are lot more multifaceted than television (and Versus) often gives the gender credit for.

A fun series is Uncorked with Billy Merritt.  Merritt is billed as a beer-drinking, red-meat eating guy who decided to expand his horizons and his palate, and the audience gets to tag along as Merritt samples the good life.  Merritt takes the snobbery out of wine; he’s the John Goodman of viticulture.

To learn how wine is made, he romps through Napa. First, he soaks in a copper bubble bath at the Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa, than lounges on the patio in his bathrobe.  "Richard" introduces him to artisanal cheeses and just the right chardonnay.

Next he’s off to one of my favorite Napa spots - the Niebaum/[Francis Ford] Coppola Rubicon Estate.  Here he asks questions throughout the tour by shooting his hand in the air like a school kid and, at one point, declares a wine to be "verbose but witty."

Merritt’s not quite the unsophisticate Mojo bills him to be. He was familiar with the term "thieving" (a bit of an obscure wine term) and he certainly knew all about the Coppola vineyard.

The screen popups were informative and brief, explaining words like fermentation and blending in simple terms.

Finally, Merritt ends his tour at COPIA (the multimillion dollar homage to all things cuisine) where he first heads to the jelly bean wine bar.  He samples the "dirt" bean with predictable results before stopping at the kitchen for petrale sole.  The cooking demo is splashy and quick. A popup recommends a wine (Markham) then directs users to Mojo.com for the sole recipe. (Yep - they suckered me.  I went to the website.)

Merritt wipes his hands on his shirt in front of the chef and keeps raising his hand like a school kid….

No Mojo discussion would be complete without an assessment of Dr. Bob Arnot’s Dr. Danger. It’s tempting to dismiss Arnot as a Sanjay Gupta wannabe. CNN likes to call Gupta the "Surgeon General to the World" - a bit of hyperbole that would be off-putting if it weren’t so absurdly laughable. 

I came close to writing a negative review of Dr. Danger.  It was awhile ago, so I hope my memory serves here but I seem to recall Arnot grinning happily as he climbed into a vehicle full of machine gun weilding mercenaries.  He was, like, so execited to come into contact with the scent of gun oil. Arnot’s machismo is awkward.  He’s almost little- boy-delighted when he gets to handle a gun, as if perhaps, he was excluded from cops&robbers as a kid.

Nevertheless, there are redeeming moments in Dr. Danger, mostly when Arnot is being his real journalist self. It depends on the episode but his visits to some Darfur refugee camps and the International Medical Corps clinic were touching.

He heads to one clinic in a USAID four wheeler.  "I like the t-shirt!" he says to the clinic director, for lack of a better intro.  I’m surprised the editors left it in.  Most correspondents are fortunate to have their awkward moments deleted. (And we all have those.)

Yet, the episode was touching and instructive.

Arnot REALLY earned my respect when he spoke to the refugees in Arabic? Zaghawa? (His bio doesn’t list the languages he speaks.)  But he was quite fluent in the local language.  He sat with some refugee children and chatted with them about their art, sadly full of war images.  Arnot ranslated their responses for the camera.  (FYI - the war art of Darfur’s children is now being used in the International Criminal Court to document war crimes.) 

How many journalists actually bother to learn the languages?  Not so many anymore, as Ted Koppel complained bitterly. 

The thing about Dr. Danger is…so far I haven’t seen a lot of danger - oddly, one of the show’s redeeming values.  The producers don’t appear to be fabricating scenes.

and finally (because I’m running out room here)

My husband recommends Wall Street Warriors.

Best reason to crank up the home theatre system - British girl bands!!  The Sugababes and Girls Aloud on Mojo’s London Live!  (Girls Aloud "Sexy No No No" hit #5 on the Brit charts this week.)