Needle Drop. The build team gets this assignment to see if several suggested methods of keeping the needles on a live tree (or at least, a formerly live tree) will work. Let’s face it – the primary reason that fake trees have taken off is that we all hate cleaning up all the needles that end up on the ground during the time that the tree is up! So without further ado, the team splits up to make it happen.
Kari is given the task of building Needle Catchers. These are simple wooden structures that will collect the needles as they fall from the trees, so that they can be compared to see which methods work and which ones don’t. After she builds the first, she says, quite clearly, “one down, nine to go”. Remember that. It will be useful. Meanwhile, Grant and Tory head to the tree farm, where after taking out the sign to the entrance, they load up eight trees in the truck. That’s right – they have eight trees, there are eight tests, but either Kari has been mistakenly told she needs to build ten catchers, or she simply can’t count to eight. You figure it out. Either way, something is amiss.
In any case, the eight trees are set up with their catchers below them and they are given one of the mixes to see which works best. One tree is set up as a control, and over the six week test period, it will simply be given water. The next tree gets fertilizer, while another gets a mixture of bleach, one gets lemon-lime soda, one crushed pain reliever, one the little blue pill, called “Santa’s Little Helper”, one is coated with hair spray and the final tree a full coat of urethane.
After two weeks, the control actually seems to have done the best, while the urethane tree looked the worst. After six weeks, the tree with fertilizer lost the most amount of needles and was very discolored. The tree that received bleach, and the one with nitric oxide (that’s the one with “Santa’s Little Helper”) lost the least amount of needles, but both looked really bad. The one with bleach had a “funky color” and the one with nitric oxide “looked sickly”. So going for the tree that had the best overall appearance, considering both needles and appearance, the tree coated with hairspray was declared the winner. Of course, a dead tree means dry needles. That’s already a fire hazard. Coating it with hairspray may not be the best idea. Thanks, Grant, for being a voice of reason.
Turkey Drop. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you dropped that frozen turkey just as you were taking it out of the freezer? Have no fear, the Mythbusters are here! While Grant assembles a machine to drop the frozen turkey, Kari makes some feet from ballistics gel (complete with bones inside – she used the mold Adam built for the Steel Cap Amputation segment, shown in Steel Toe-Cap Amputation) and Tory makes some hands that will be fitted to the machine and “hold” the turkey. Unfortunately, after the test drop, the arms come back together and completely destroy the hands – one of the fingers even hits Kari, who was nowhere near the machine when they slammed back together. Whoops. Looks like some adjustments are needed.
Once those are made, some tests are done with a force plate, and it seems that a falling turkey will create hundreds of pounds of force. Putting Kari’s fake foot into position and dropping the turkey onto it confirms that you don’t want to do it. The foot ends up cut in two. Literally. The entire foot is completely severed, right across the middle where the turkey hit – it registered in the neighborhood of seven hundred pounds of force. Confirmed.
Kari seems to have been possessed by some sort of ballistics gel spirit, because she takes some canine skeletons that she whips up, and coats them with the gel, then affixes some strange eyes to them, making these really scary looking zombie dogs. Worse yet, she gets attached to them, and then suggests that they drop the turkeys on the zombie dogs to see what would happen should a pet be underneath the falling turkey. While at regular speed, it seems that Zombie Fido might be okay, the high-speed camera shows that this isn’t the case. A visit to the vet confirms that even after lengthy surgery, it wouldn’t be likely that your zombie dog (or even a real one) would survive. Plausible, because they aren’t going to test on a live animal.
Christmas Roast: Microwave Cooking. The final myth checks to see alternate ways of cooking your Christmas bird. The first is to check out if a turkey can be cooked by the microwave radiation coming from a broadcast antenna. Unfortunately, no one wants to let the Mythbusters anywhere near theirs, so they have to make do with a broadcast truck. After an hour on top of the unit, the temperature has gone up, but it’s probably just because of the sun. Busted.
Christmas Roast: Radar Cooking. Since the microwave didn’t work out well, the next stop is to see how radar does. Strapping a different bird (I assumed it is a different one, it may have been the same one) to the spinning radar on a ship, then activating it for an hour, they check to see if the temperature has gone up. This one actually had the effect of cooling the bird. That doesn’t seem right. Busted.
Christmas Roast: The Big Finale. This doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere, so Tory prepares his special recipe, and stuffs the turkey into a standard microwave, which is fitted into the blast trailer. Everyone steps back and just a few short seconds later, the whole thing explodes spectacularly. Dinner is done!
Holiday Rube Goldberg Machine. A Rube Goldeberg machine is something that does nothing, but it does a whole lot of it, one step after another. If you are old enough, you may recall the board game Mouse Trap, which is a classic example. You build one thing, and then another, and slowly you have quite a contraption that hopefully will work when you kick off the first item.
Both Adam and Jamie have experience building these machines, and it is decided that as a gift to the viewers that they will put together a Rube Goldberg machine that starts with Mentos and Soda (actually, it uses it throughout) and ends with Buster taking a dive into the floor. The only problem is that they can’t get it to work. At least, not on the first try. Or the second. Or the third. You get the picture. But finally, on what appears to be the tenth attempt, they get it to go off without a hitch.
At least for the time being, you can see the whole thing online at the Discovery Channel Website.
