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David Pogue annoys me
Wednesday, February 2 2011
Sleet was falling when I got up this morning, and it had accumulated several inches. That's a lot for sleet, as it's much denser than snow. I could tell after it stopped falling and I began to shovel it out of the driveway. A shovelful could weigh thirty or forty pounds. The only thing that would have been worse had it stuck to shovel. But no, it was cold and dry. Still, unlike all the other storms this season, I was unable to shovel out the entire driveway in one go. It took me three or four. I'd get exhausted and sweaty and have to go inside to do something else for awhile, something like Skyping with a guy in Hungary about a game played on a Dutch social network to be released by a company based in New York that had hired me to be the "network engineer."
This evening I ended up watching a lot of television, including an episode of Nova in the "Making Stuff" series. I'm finding the series almost unwatchable, what with the off-putting hijinks (and there is no other way to describe them) of our host, New York Times writer David Pogue. The person I want to punch in the nose the most is probably Dick Cheney, immediately followed by David Pogue. He tries to be funny as he relates pop-science to the masses, but the cornball humor ends up stepping on the facts and he never gets around to asking the questions I want answered. Don't get me wrong; I think humor has a valuable role to place in science and other (ever-dwindling) magisteria. But there are huge realms of humor that just get in the way with their groan-inducing awfulness. Drew Carey's entire career for example. Humor has gotten so much better in the last five years; there's no reason Nova couldn't have found a more contemporary jokester. Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't ideal, but he's 200 times better than David Pogue. The problem with Neil is that he's already overcommitted to Nova with his hosting of Nova: Science Now.
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