Okay, so say you're at a welcome home party and the guest of honour is a man who's spent over four years alone on a tropical island talking to a blood-smeared volleyball.

    Now, is it just me, or would you make sure all through the party that you were facing this man and that you were aware at all times of where the exits out of the room might be?

    Believe me, *I* would, even if he WAS Tom Hanks.

    And that, in a nutshell, is why I simply hated the last twenty minutes or so of the movie Cast Away.

    Because, see, the movie pretended that you could go through being utterly alone on an island for years, basically go a little crazy, but when you returned to civilization you'd miraculously pull it together in a heartbeat. They threw the old Hollywood Happy Ending Machine into overdrive for the end of that movie.

    Poop on that I say. Double poop on that.

    The rest of the movie was great, a wonderful study of how hard it would be for we modern folks to survive in a world where nothing plugs in, everything has to be fashioned by hand, and your biggest resource is your mind and spirit.

    I would be toast in a situation such as that in, oh, 46 hours, 10 minutes and 42 seconds.

    Approximately.

    Take away my microwave and the food situation gets dire fast, eh.

    Fortunately, I'm married to a throwback to another time, a time when people understood how to make what you need with your hands. Believe me, I get cast away anywhere and I'm making darned sure I have the spousal unit with me.

    Which brings me to a TV show Paul and I've come to adore, a British TV show called Junkyard Wars that runs on The Learning Channel.

    As the review I've sent you to explains:

Where else can you see ordinary folks turning junk into amphibious vehicles, cannons, power pullers, land yachts, and other seemingly impossible machines?

Junkyard Wars (known in the U.K. as Scrapheap) is a British show that puts two teams of tinkerers in a junkyard, and pits them against the clock and each other to build some sort of vehicle from the scrap at hand.

It�s Mr. Wizard meets Mad Max as the teams scramble to find the pieces they need to put together an operating machine by nightfall. The whole deal is presided over by a nutcase of a host who plays spy, gadfly and cheerleader, sometimes all at once.

    Before I watched the movie Cast Away, I felt kind of guilty watching Junkyard Wars. Now I know I've been storing up valuable life experience in case I'm ever shipwrecked on an island. No chatting to a blood-smeared volleyball for this woman, nosireebob!

    Of course, if the island doesn't have an extensive junkyard and every tool known to man, I'm in deep doo doo, eh.

    We'll cross that bridge when we get to it.