all in the name of liberty

Oddly enough, after having a discussion the other night with Brett about Ted “The Nuge” Nugent, I was unlucky enough to stumble across a show of his on OLN, which is the Outdoor Life Network for those of you without it. Anyways, this show is called “Wanted: Ted or Alive”, which in itself is humourous. However, my laughing soon ceased once I began to watch the show. Uncle Ted gets five people to come out to the wilderness with him, where he intends to reward them with money if the succeed in completing various “wilderness and hunting” related feats. Such feats include wearing nothing but buffalo skins; learning how to wield a crossbow in order to hunt; and killing and skinning a chicken for food. This is not so unusual because Nugent is in fact an avid and outspoken hunter and unapologetic “patriotic” American, which he believes gives him the right to slur and attack women and “foreigners”. Because he is such a blowharding jackass, it’s possible to find him humourous, although we are laughing at him, not with him. As we discussed the other night, Uncle Ted is like the more disturbing, less charming version of David “Diamond Dave” Lee Roth of Van Halen. While Dave always has a funny quip ready, Nuge would just as soon accuse you of being a pansy left-wing liberal Jew lover as he skins an animal alive. I have a wild fantasy where Ted actually contracts cat scratch fever and goes feral and runs off to live in the wild where he is promptly attacked and feasted on by a roaming pack of American Buffalo.

Still on the topic of OLN, let’s discuss another show entitled “Mantracker”. It actually is exactly what it sounds like. Two people are dropped off in the wilderness and given a certain amount of time to make it on foot to the finish line. That in itself is not so strange. What is strange is that chasing them the entire way is a rather gruff and angry looking man on horseback. He is the “mantracker” and it is his job to find his prey and catch them before they make it to the end. Mantracker seems to take his job very personally, and he gets offended if his prey disrepect him. His cold, steely blue eyes scan from ontop his mount for his victims, and God help you ladies and gentlemen if you piss mantracker off. However, mantracker is ultimately a eunuch. If he does find his prey, he doesn’t do anything remotely dangerous or deadly to him. In my version of this show at the very least he would chase them down and rope them like a wild bull. Perhaps he could even shoot them with buckshot or something, not kill them but give them a little incentive to be more cunning and wary while in the woods.

Just on the basis of these two shows, I’ll dare say the outdoor life is not for me.