When a brand name has been around for 110 years, you sometimes tend to take it for granted, and I must admit with great embarrassment that I’m prone to do that with National Geographic. As a result, I’m always glad to get a kick in the ass from one of their screener DVDs, so I can remember all over again how awesome a lot of the programming on the National Geographic Channel is.

When you think about it, it’s almost a little depressing that a name as recognizable as that of National Geographic doesn’t have the same kind of foothold on cable as, say, the Discovery Channel. Fortunately, Russell Howard, the Senior VP of Communications for the network, has every intention of changing that. He wouldn’t actually go so far as to utter the name of the competition, but when someone else asked if NG’s new “Expedition Week” was their attempt to create their own version of Discovery’s always-anticipated “Shark Week,” Howard replies, “We hope ‘Expedition Week’ will be…a long-running, successful series week like theirs, of course. We’ve been doing this for 120 years, and so it’s time that we emphasized it.”

What is “Expedition Week”? Well, we might as well let Mr. Howard talk it up himself:

“We’ll take you to the moon for never-before-seen images and deep into the Amazon jungle to find lost cities. We explore the mysteries of the Great Pyramid and uncover one of the greatest architectural monuments of the ancient world. We’ll see George Washington’s childhood home. It’s going to be an incredible week, and many of these are ongoing expeditions right now. ”

Fortunately, some of the network’s resident explorers were in a position to come in from the field and sit in on a panel, including Dr. Bob Brier, a mummy expert and renowned Egyptologist who’s participating in a show called “Unlocking the Great Pyramid,” Charles Dean Beeker, who’s heading up the team that has just discovered what they believe to be the shipwreck of Captain Kidd’s Quedagh Merchant ship off the coast of the Dominican Republic, and Kelly Hearn, who’s documenting a the recent discover of a heretofore-lost city deep in the jungles of the Amazon.

Oh, right, and Buzz Aldrin was there, too.

Okay, I’m totally failing at playing it cool about Col. Aldrin being in the house. Second man on the moon…? C’mon, that’s awesome! As soon as the panel concluded, I was in the lobby and shaking that guy’s hand. I don’t know if my daughter will ever be as impressed as I was, but it would be nice to think that, someday, she’ll be at least vaguely bemused by the knowledge that her dad met the Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 11. (Probably won’t happen, though.)

The footage from the moon that’s going to be shown during “Expedition Week” will be the first footage from the moon since our astronauts walked on its surface back in the day. (I was thisclose to writing “many moons ago,” so please applaud my restraint, if you would.) Someone noticed Col. Aldrin staring quite intently at the screen during that portion of the pre-panel footage and asked if he was looking for his footprints. “Well, I was born in 1930, and my eyes aren’t quite that good,” he said, with a laugh. “But the film is just really fantastic in its high definition. And, yeah, I did look for Tranquility Base, but it’s 60, 65 miles away, and my eyes still aren’t quite that good. But I could see the smoothness, and I could see why NASA picked that as our landing site.”

I’m not looking to give the shaft to Col. Aldrin’s fellow panelists, all of whom were very interesting, but I’m gonna share the story with you that impressed me the most, I’ve gotta go with the one he told when the question was thrown out to the entire panel about the most exhilarating discovery of their careers.

“I guess the discovery that really baffled me was on the first night en route to the moon,” began Aldrin. “Beyond the Van Allen Belts, we closed over the windows and turned out the lights, Mike Collins had the headset on to listen to Houston and Neil and I were under the couch, and all of a sudden I saw a flash…and then another flash. And before I could move my eye to see what it was, it was gone. But then there was maybe a streak. And I kept seeing these until I decided I wanted to go to sleep. So we had one day left coming back and I said to the other two guys, I said, ‘You guys see anything funny at night?’ ‘No.’ ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well, look tonight, one more night, see if you see anything funny, like some flashes of light or something.’

“Next morning I get up. ‘Mike, did you see anything?’ ‘No, I didn’t see anything.’ ‘Neil?’ ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, I saw about a hundred of them!’ Well, it was obviously inside the spacecraft, at least it was that much. So we came back and reported that afterward. And to get to the bottom of it, the next flight was briefed, and they went up there and they could see them with their eyes shut. Which means that high Z particles are penetrating the spacecraft, your helmet, everything else and impacting on the retina of your eye. And it’s an example of the kind of particles that are out there en route to human travel, to Mars and so forth that we need to keep track of. Because those are hitting your brain. And when they hit your brain, you just lost a cell or two of memory. So I guess that was one of the most unusual things that we saw.”

At this point, Hearn turned to Beaker and said, to much laughter, “Uh, Charlie, why don’t you follow that one?”

Next on the agenda was NG’s ongoing series, World’s Toughest Fixes, where host Sean Riley takes on such major challenges as repairing ruptured airplanes, broken cruise ships and nuclear power plants, and taking a crack at the Northeast Power Grid. It’s a cool concept, and it’s pretty darned illuminating, too…and, no, that’s not intended to be a Power Grid joke…but would you believe that National Geographic actually found Riley via an ad on Craigslist?

“We didn’t only put an ad out on Craigslist,” clarified producer Rob Kerr. “We had a whole bunch of
different ways of looking for a host, but that was the one that caught him. We wanted somebody who had experience in a whole range of things. We wanted him to be able to SCUBA dive, for example. I mean, what Sean does is not something that everybody would be able to do, so we wanted somebody that was up for that task. And I think actually one of his mates sort of rang and said, ‘I think we found a job for you.’ He looked at it and went, ‘Well, I can do that. I can weld. I can absail. I can skydive, I can SCUBA dive.’ So he rang us up and we — here he is today.”

Riley clarified the situation a bit more. “A fellow rigger who has worked with me for many years brought it to my attention,” he explained. “He said, ‘Hey, there’s this crazy thing. It’s this wacky list of skills, and I think you would be really great for it.’ And I treated it…not very seriously, to be honest. I was, like, ‘We have a whole year’s worth of projects we’ve already got under our belts. We should be down there welding those brackets if you have time to be messing around. We got work to do.’ But I looked at it later, and it was a really odd collection of skill sets, and the more I went through them, I thought, ‘Actually, I do have a lot of these. It might be interesting.’ I was kind of flippant about it, and I sent in a reply, and said, ‘I can do the things you’re talking about. It might be fun.’ And they called back and said, ‘You know, send us your test reel.’ And that’s when I called them and said, ‘Hey, look. Maybe this isn’t right. I’m a rigger. I’m working. I don’t have a test reel. That’s not what I’m all about.’ But the conversation continued from there,
and…it’s a good match.”

Lastly, we had Dogtown – Saving the Michael Vick Dogs, which, given my status as a lifetime native of the Hampton Roads area, certainly caught my eye…and it didn’t hurt that there was actually a cute doggie named Georgia on the panel! Sure, she was a pit bull, but I felt pretty safe around her – and sad for her, too – after they acknowledged that she’d had all of her teeth pulled out at some point in her life. (More on that in a moment.)

Rather than being destroyed, the decision was made to send Vick’s dogs to Dogtown, a sanctuary in Utah that’s one of the largest no-kill facilities in the country. Actually, maybe it’s called the Best Friends Animal Society Sanctuary. I got a little confused about that. Either way, it’s clear that these dogs are now being very well cared for and finding new lives that you’d never think they would’ve been able to have, given their history.

Georgia seemed so sweet that it’s hard to believe she used to be a fighting dog, and the thought of her having her teeth pulled is downright horrifying. Why on earth was it done? “We can’t really say,” said Dix. “We can make guesses. But what we did with her is, we noticed she had no teeth, and there was always a concern that she broke them while fighting or something like that. And so we X-rayed her mouth to see if there were any root fragments left, but what was left looked like perfectly well-extracted teeth done by somebody who has done this professionally. So it was purposefully done to her. Why that is, we can only really make conjecture about why.”

Don’t worry, though: even though she’s toothless, she’s not going hungry. “Dogs…and cats, actually, for that matter…can eat quite well without teeth,” Dix assures us. “They just kind of gum it and shove it down, so, actually, she eats fine. There’s really no problem with that.”

When Mr. Mike Dix, the medical director of Best Friends, was asked if Michael Vick got what he deserved, he hesitated for a moment. “That’s a tough question to answer,” he admitted, “because we definitely think anybody that participates in dogfighting should be prosecuted to the extent of the law. And the harsher those penalties, in our opinion, the better. And so Michael Vick getting what he received was the extent that was possible by the law. And so now, what we’re focusing on more is just on getting the dogs better. We try and put Michael Vick behind us and just concentrate on his dogs.”