Don’t just stand there, bust a myth

I recently stood in the kitchen, holding the refrigerator door open with my knee, staring mournfully at the items therein while contemplating the paradox of our times: the fridge is full but there’s nothing to eat.

Even so, I like to consider myself a survivor. Come dinner time, even when we haven’t been grocery shopping in weeks, I can almost always scrounge a meal together as long as I can find something from one of the four main non-perishable food groups: peanut butter, popcorn, Bavarian pretzels or Lucky Charms.

Bear Grylls, my new hero, wouldn’t need any of these things to survive. For those who haven’t seen him, Bear is the star of the Discovery Channel show “Man vs. Wild,” a series that stacks the odds in favor of “Man” by bringing a Mt. Everest-climbing British Special Forces commander to the fight. This hardly seems fair, as “Wild” would have a much better chance of winning against your average clean-fingernailed humor columnist. In each episode, Bear skydives into a different remote location and has to survive, carrying only a canteen and a knife, until he can find his way back to civilization or Wal-Mart, whichever comes first.

What’s striking about the show is how quickly man must remember to act like an animal when he’s no longer in the vicinity of his TiVo. Bear climbs up to birds’ nests so that he can steal the eggs and eat them raw. He catches fish with his bare hands and kills them with his teeth, eating a very graphic sushi lunch that my wife Kara and I could only watch through our fingers.

Bear also goes the extra mile, flinging himself into quicksand pits and icy lakes on purpose, just to show you what to do if you should ever find yourself in a similar situation, like when you can’t find your car in the mall parking lot.

Tough as he may be, I still suspect that if he ever accidentally skydives through the skylight into our house, Bear will probably starve to death.

In any case, it’s tough to find Bear on TV lately because the Discovery Channel plays “MythBusters” twenty-three hours a day. MythBusters is a show that carefully and methodically attempts to shatter the myth that tough guys shouldn’t wear berets, continuing Rerun’s ground-breaking work from “What’s Happening!!”

Actually, the MythBusters do perform some interesting experiments. In the most recent episode, they proved, by building a gelatin mold of an average-sized human male and welding coat hangers to a SCUBA tank on its back, that Achilles’s heel was actually his crotch. They have also proven that Zeus did not throw thunderbolts, because there’s no such thing as a bolt of thunder. Those guys know how to bust a myth.

Also, if you were just puttering along like I was, wondering how Howie Mandel got back on TV again, you may not have noticed that they changed the rules about punctuating the possessive form of words that end with the letter S. When I was a kid, we learned about Achilles’ heel. Now it’s Achilles’s heel. I didn’t know that grammar was allowed to change, and it’s frankly a little unsettling. The second comma in a list of three items has also met its demise. I think that one is the fault of the British woman who wrote a book about panda bears called “Eats, shoots and leaves.”

You don’t see physicists running around changing the laws of thermodynamics on us. “Okay, everybody, we changed our minds. Energy can be destroyed now.” That just wouldn’t be fair. It’s tough enough to learn things once. If you learn it in second grade, it should be true forever. Also, it would be cool if ice cream cones were still be thirty-five cents.

You can start a fire using only birch bark, Mike Todd and a lighter online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

[Note: Apparently, there's still some disagreement about the apostrophe thing, so there's no need to rap my knuckles with your APA handbook. Some sources say it's okay to say it like Achilles's, while others suggest that I'm a complete tool for even bringing it up.]