Bird had 52 and Matt Bingaman of Placerville finished third with 38.īird is an information technology specialist for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office. “It had a very good edge and cut beautifully.”Ĭhad Kennedy of Wichita Falls, Texas, won the “Summer Forging Games” with 84 points. “Gary’s blade was not the prettiest, but it did exactly what we asked it to do,” said show judge David Baker, an expert on ancient weapons. Bird opted for the Kachin Dao, a hunting sword used by the Kachin tribe in ancient Burma. In the final challenge, each competitor chose one of four historic weapons to construct. I pushed myself harder than I ever have before,” he said on the show. “I can’t believe I won the final challenge, but overall I am pleased. But he won the last challenge to vault into second place. One competitor was eliminated in the first week, and Bird trailed significantly among the three remaining bladesmiths going into the last two challenges on the Aug. The competition began with four bladesmiths who were challenged to make knives or historic weapons from raw steel. And as techies keep pushing for a future where our machines will do more of the work for us, there are hard questions to be answered about what will become of all those industrial, blue-collar jobs that still remain.Gary Bird ’91 (Marketing) was pleased with his runner-up finish in the History Channel reality show “Forged in Fire.” Bird competed in the show’s special two-episode “Summer Forging Games” competition. Whether you choose to ascribe that as the reason for Trump or not, there's no doubt that de-industrialization and a widening wage gap have left many people behind in the name of the global economy and cheaper crap. (This may or may not happen to me a lot.)īut really, it feels more like an appeal to the former, an embodiment of Frank Sobotka's "we used to make shit in this country" speech in Season Two of "The Wire." It's a callback to our country's height as an industrial powerhouse, when red-blooded American men could make a good living using their hands, and so much of what we bought proudly said "Made in the U.S.A." The decline of all this is the "economic anxiety" mindset that pundits have wrongly said led us to "Make America Great Again." (Says Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College, in a widely cited study, ".the evidence from the 2016 election is very clear that attitudes about blacks, immigrants, and Muslims were a key component of Trump's appeal.")
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And the hour-long episodes, often stacked in consecutive blocks late at night, are easily digestible, meaning you'll look up after knocking out a few and realize it's 1 a.m. The quick cut in the midst of a tense moment suddenly makes the viewer care enough to sit through a break to find out if a guy will be able to finish the handle on his bowie knife with only 10 minutes left on the clock.
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#Forged in fire series
The "Assassin's Creed" series seems like a popular example.Īs with so many other contest-based reality shows, "Forged in Fire" sets the easy-and easy to fall for-traps of cutting to commercials just as the drama is heightening. To get through to the kids, Willis will also cite a video game a weapon is used in when applicable. A common gripe with History Channel is that the programming lacks, well, history, but this is remedied in the final challenge, when the two remaining smiths are tasked with returning to their home forges to recreate a centuries-old battle weapon, the history and design of which Willis describes.