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Well, one of the myths early on that I think is one of the funnier things we've done is airline toilet seats. That one was about a large woman that sat down on a seat in an airline and flushed the toilet and got stuck on it.
When I'm problem-solving with something, I have, effectively, a CAD program in my head that's like a room that has specific qualities to it that I go to some deal of effort to populate. Textures and smells, something like that.
There are a lot of times when we can just time something and say "busted" or "confirmed" or whatever, instead of building a robot or some gadget to make it happen more elaborately. In those cases, we're simply enjoying ourselves.
I love Tim Curry as the Devil in 'Legend;' the prosthetics that are on him are so over the top sensually evil, and Tim takes full advantage, is just oozing with the role. The makeup and prosthetics, and his character are seamless.
I think it's probably safe to say that continuing our onscreen relationship in front of the camera is probably not happening. I expect Adam may well pursue things in front of the camera, but I'm most likely not. It's not who I am.
We've found that the biggest thing as far as the danger is simply pressure.When we work with explosives, we've got bomb technicians there, bomb-squad guys who go into unknown situations all the time, and they've dealt with it safely.
If you ever decide to build a boat out of wet newspaper, it's important to remember to lay down the sheets like shingles on a house: One issue at a time, starting at the bow and moving aft, so water flows over the layers, not under them.
Duct tape is like that. It's a building block. You can make a rope out of it, you can make a cloth out of it. And because it sticks to stuff it's even more powerful. It's like an uber-material because of the versatility of a sticky fiber.
I went to the library - and this was before the Internet - and I searched for a career that was creative, would not fall into a routine, involved problem solving and making things. It also had to be dynamic. I came up with special effects.
I never dreamed we would be on television at all, much less for such a long time and with so much praise for keeping a thought provoking show on the air. And best of all, we were able to do what we do and still have all our fingers and toes.
I found that cardiovascular exercise boosts my mental performance. If I have a problem to solve, like an engineering one, and I get on a treadmill, then time disappears; all I know is an hour later I'm all sweaty and the problem has been solved.
We don't have formal training, that makes what we're experiencing a little bit more accessible to the viewers. If we actually knew what we were doing ahead of time, it would just be like talking at you, instead of experiencing the situation with you.
Actually I'm pretty adamant about, you know, the whole God thing and it seems that skeptics are by and large atheists or something approaching that, which I strongly identify with. So it turned out to be a good thing and I have become enthusiastically part of it.
From our point of view, we're just curious, we're poking around and having fun. If it's science, if it's accurate, if it's not accurate, we did the best we can to keep things clean and understandable, but we're just having fun, so sue us if we got something wrong.
I have to say for both of us [ with Adam Savage], this experience that we've been having here has changed us dramatically, and we've evolved since we've come on the scene with Mythbusters, because of what we've learned, and that, I think, is the biggest reward for us.
As it turns out, one of the biggest choices we have doing the show is deciding the tangents we are allowed to take, the stuff that we see along the way. We're allowed to explore the world at large on these things; the urban-legend aspect of it is just kind of an excuse.
Is there some situation where square wheels would be better than round wheels? Sure! A round wheel has a pressure point directly under the tire. A square wheel's corners are going to bite and propel you forward. The square wheel could be superior on snow or mud or sand.
All of the experiments are really cool. Probably one of the better ones is "Running in the Rain." It depends on circumstances: how fast are you running, if there's wind, or any of the other things involved with the circumstances of running in the rain. That's a favorite, I suppose.
We're these guys that are very tech-savvy, so people tend to expect us to say our favorite gadgets are thing like the latest iPhone or the latest app or something like that. Adam is pretty much like that. As far as myself, I'm the kind of guy that tends to go for the absolute simplest things.
There are a lot of scientists or other people who can be very skeptical or rational within their field, but they may well not do that in other aspects of their lives, when it comes to things like religion, or what have you. People have this amazing gift for being selective with their curiosity and skepticism.
We've done a zombie episode - only one - and the way we look at it as is we understand that there probably aren't zombies out there for real, but there's a lot of interesting stuff we can test about them. We've tested how bodies of zombies pressing against a gate, would they push it through and things like that.
I pretty much learned not to fight with it a long time ago and let it do what it likes to do. Otherwise, my shaving techniques are pretty mundane. I tend to do it in the shower because it makes the bristles soft and keeps the razor from building up the hairs inside it, and the mustache is dealt with with scissors.
When I figured that I could do anything if I was simply methodical about it. I went to the library - and this was before the Internet - and I searched for a career that was creative, would not fall into a routine, involved problem solving and making things. It also had to be dynamic. I came up with special effects.
If it turns out that we're doing proper science from time to time, it just happens to be that that's the most efficient way of doing it. We go into each of these stories with an open mind, and one of the great things about how the show works is that we're not approaching it from a doctoral point of view, we're just trying to see what happens.
I think LEGOs are one of the best toys ever developed. While LEGOs are sold in kits in order to build specific things, there [are] very few people who leave their LEGOs in those kits. It very rapidly becomes an open system where you can build whatever you want. That's the one thing that signifies my entire life and my career. I learned at an early age that I could make the things that I wanted. That's a very powerful thing to realize as a kid. LEGOs were a key part of that.
One of the things I'm likely to start building in my shop is a vehicle wherein each wheel has basically a flight-simulator base as its suspension. It's known as a hexapod; it's basically a tripod but each leg is two pistons. So you have six axes of freedom on it. This will be something that can not only do what lowriders do, but shorten or extend its wheelbase and jump forwards, backwards, or from one side to the other. In an off-road situation it could be rolling at speed toward a ravine and then leap across it.