April and I are Discovery Channel junkies (especially Mythbusters). So when we saw that the leadoff episode of their new miniseries on "Perfect Disasters" involved a mock scenario (with CGI) of a super-tornado destroying Dallas, we Tivo'd with glee.

I have never seen such a terrible docu-drama-fable-comedy on television. I will confess that the CGI was cool and looked like an update on an early documentary on a similar topic.

But what little science there was consisted of a meteorologist popping in between scenes to explain that phenomenon x was extraordinarily rare, but that in conjunction with super-rare phenomenon y, and really unusual phenomenon z -- there was a 1% chance of a city-swallowing super-tornado.

Literally, this guy was explaining that things were rare much in the same way that I might say: "Monkeys rarely fly out of my butt. And I rarely sprout wings and fly, and even more rarely fly to the Himalayas. But, if I were to sprout wings and fly to the Himalayas and drop ten monkeys, and it was a particularly hot day, the monkey sweat might melt glaciers."

The show was slightly redeemed by its so-bad-its-good plot and acting. It revolved around an Office of Emergency Management worker on the day of the Super Tornado. He has to drop his kid off at boy scouts on the way to work, because Mom is in an airplane being tossed around by a supercell. On the way, a wind blows up and fish start raining from the sky onto the man's truck -- nowhere else; just on his truck.

The scientist interjects to explain a rare phenomenon in which a supercell wind could pick a bunch of fish out of a body of water and dump them elsewhere, even miles away.

Now after marvelling at the dead, bloody fish around his truck, our hero never speaks of it again. Not to pause before dropping his kid at his cancelled Scout meeting. Not when he walks into work -- "Hey, darndest thing happened on the way here." Not when his boss challenges him for some real damn data that something is amiss that should cause the evacuation of the whole metro-mess.

I unfortunately fell asleep before the third act, but from the promos I know that all those glass buildings downtown don't fare too well.

Except, strangely, for the aquarium.

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