by ELMORE TERADONOVICH, Alternate Reality News Service Film and Television Writer
There is a reason reasonable people - and golf enthusiasts - are afraid to go into forests: they're full of...trees, man! And trees can give you...splinters! In their evolved form, trees can give you...paper cuts! And...and...and...
Okay, in and of themselves, trees aren't that scary; most of us can get splinters and paper cuts dining out at His Majesty's Fiesta - before we've even eaten anything at the medieval Mexican restaurant and ritual sacrifice reenactment, from the menu alone! Trees aren't even scary when they roam in large numbers in...stationary packs - or even stationery packs - except for one issue: if there are enough of the bastards, things can lurk within them.
Things. Like bears. Rhinoceroses. Golf enthusiasts. Golf enthusiasts! Roaming freely among trees! There's a thought that can make even the strongest man blanch! (Or if he is gay, Blanche. We don't judge - we've always relied on the kindness of strangers, too.)
I...may be overthinking the popularity of camping videos on YahooTube.
Campers pitch tents. Campers build fires. Campers build fires too close to their tents and have to be taken to the burn ward of a nearby hospital when other campers find them unconscious and badly singed the next morning. Okay, that last example doesn't happen often, but a journalist can dream, can't he?
Some people have suggested that camping videos are instructional. I suppose there is a lot that can be learned from them. Putting your supplies high in a tree (there are those pesky trees, again, but at least they're doing something helpful!) to keep bears from getting at them when you walk away from the camp to do your business. Knowing how far to walk away from the camp to do your business. Not building fires so close to your tent that you have to be taken to the burn ward of a nearby hospital when other campers find your unconscious and badly singed body the next morning.
Still, the video "Geddy Glee's Awesome Camping Getaway" has over seven million views. That's either half a dozen people who need to watch a video a lot of times before its lessons sink in, or that's millions of people, most of whom will always be better at pitching woo than pitching a tent (and, considering how many letters Amritsar gets in a week, they aren't all that good at that) and therefore are watching the videos for a different reason.
Somebody (Bill Somebody in shipping) has suggested that camping videos are the fireplace videos of the 2020s. People didn't watch those videos to learn anything about how logs and kindling (and the occasional letter incriminating the maker of the fire in a series of gruesome murders) go up in flames. No, for them images of toasty fireplaces were video Valium (not quite a Blue Peter song, but nice try), a gentle escape from the trials and tribulations and trefoils of the day.
Perhaps.
Still, I would be much happier if I could see a video of a man making a video of hiking through the woods when he comes across a camera somebody has dropped in the middle of a clearing. When he plays the video in the camera, he sees a video of a man hiking through the woods when he comes across a camera that has been abandoned on the surface of an iced over lake. When the second person plays the video in this camera, it shows a man hiking through the forest who comes upon an iced over lake, tries to walk over it and falls in. As the second man watches the video, he falls into the lake, too. How does his camera end up back in the woods for the first person to find? That's part of the mystery, isn't it?
It would be like The Blair Witch Project, but with 37 per cent more stupidity!
But as a wise guy once said, you have to go with the video that you find on YahooTube, not the video you wish, fervently, wish with all your heart, was on YahooTube. And you can find thousands of them on the Internet. Is the phenomenon of camping videos something that we're going to have to live with for the rest of our lives?
Ask a disappointed fireplace.