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Not about electricity

16th January 2015

By: Terry Mackenzie-hoy

  

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Look, I know this is off topic, but, for years, I have wondered and observed TV series with an engineering eye. These are my two favourite ‘TV thoughts’.

In Star Trek, none of the women wears slacks. All of them wear very short mini skirts that hide nothing. They have extensive jewellery and are, by and large, very pretty. They do not do much except exclaim: “Captain, the rector temperature is rising!” and then fall to the floor when there is a muffled explosion and sudden jolt. When they fall, the mini skirt flies briefly upwards.

Given that the mission statement of the starship is to ‘go boldly where no man has gone before’ (yes, it does say ‘man’ in the earlier series), one wonders about the women. Why are they on the ship? Super cargo? Given that the mission of the Starship Enterprise is five years long, is this is what Captain Kirk, Spock, Scotty and Mr Chekov signed up for?

Unlike the women, the men dress soberly: captains wear mud-brown crew neck cardigans, senior crew blue and engineers and other underlings red. All wear pants and lace-up boots of a style of a security company. No part of the uniform has pockets, presumably so they cannot drop a bolt into the starship’s turbines. Clearly, they know what time it is by telepathy, since nobody wears a watch. Nobody wears seatbelts and so, when the 90 000 t starship whacks into a 90 000 t asteroid, some are thrown forward and others jiggled about in their seats (save the women, who are thrown to the floor, as above).

Thus, a pupil pilot in a Cessna 150 has more seat restraint than the crew of a megaton starship. Acoustically, there are many loud explosions from outer ship, which are heard in the control room, thus presupposing that space has an atmosphere which transmits sound. Captain Kirk seems to talk into a Motorola flip phone for standard communications. One guesses that he cannot use a smartphone, since Spock will never be able to use a Bluetooth headset on account of his very strange ear configuration. In every episode, the thing to watch is the automatic sliding door – it opens very rapidly and closes like a pair of sprung guillotine shears. Sooner or later, Captain Kirk is going to stride out and get caught like a watermelon in a gin trap. Ouch. But it is okay.

What is not really okay is the TV programme Chopped. Chefs are give a basket full of ingredients by way of example, sunflower seeds, flying ants, youngberry jam and chewing tobacco and have 30 to 60 minutes to cook them into a meal. Our judges are Jenny Morris (aka The Giggling Gourmet), Siba Mtongana (who has a cooking show) and David van Staden, group executive chef for Tsogso Sun. I think Van Staden must be doing it for love . . . but anyway.

Where the puzzle comes in is this: there are, say, three chefs in the competition. The camera shows them cook and slice and braise and steam and, finally, the host says they have “60 seconds left” and we see a flurry of arrangements of food on the plates until . . . “ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . etc, etc . . . STOP! Chefs, your time is up.”

And they all finish within one second of the final moment. Then they troop off to the little room off from the kitchen and sigh and stretch . . . until the first one is called out to present a cooked dish. Huh? In the time before finishing and showing it to the judges, the dish must have become cold – unless it is kept under a grill, in which case it must have become warm. The delay is even longer for the next two chefs. Even worse, how do the judges deal with three entrees, three mains and three puddings? All cold or warm? But the worst of all, when we watch the chefs cook, we see that much of the plating is done bare-handed, dropping lettuce onto the plate, pushing potatoes into position. Grief. Can’t they wear latex gloves? Puts me right off all restaurants, really.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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