I don't want any hair getting in my rum: an appreciation of Ax Men

Last night, while fellow Barrelhouse blogger TMC and I enjoyed a non-erotic sleepover, we caught pretty much the greatest reality show ever: Ax Men.

For those of you who don't watch much of The History Channel, or have "better things to do" on a Thursday night, Ax Men is, in essence, the World's Deadliest Catch of logging.

You might not think logging is complicated or interesting enough to warrant its own reality show, but you would be wrong. The piece of equipment at left, for instance, is what industry insiders call a "yarder," used to pick up heavy felled trees. It's also the source of many, many headaches and frustrations. On last night's show alone, at least two hardhats and a wrench were thrown violently to the ground while one logger or another cursed the gosh-darned uncooperative yarder.

I'm still working on getting all the lingo down: your climbers, your back-cutters, your barber-chairs and kerf-dutchmen (you might think I'm making this last one up, but it's an actual term, for a particular style of tree cutting that, if utilized properly, can make the tree literally jump right off the stump).

And if you don't think logging is dangerous, you haven't seen The History Channel's helpful cartoon reenactments of all the things that could go wrong (all of which basically involve trees falling onto people, though for all sorts of complicated reasons your average "greenhorn" could never imagine).

There's also what folks in the reality-show biz call "interpersonal drama," like the father who, if business doesn't improve, might have to fire his two sons (though, as TMC and I gathered later in the episode, he might also choose to fire his sons because they're ineffective managers and irrational hotheads prone to throwing tantrums and giving up on jobs). Or there's the other father teaching his son to climb trees. Or the son who refuses to work for his father. Or the son who gives his father a "haircut" by dragging clippers through his hair while dad takes swigs from a rum bottle.

Okay, so basically all the interpersonal drama stems from father-son relationships. But this is a logging show, people. What do you expect? Hot tub hookups?