This American Life - 244: MacGyver

Broadcast on: 15 Aug 2003

I came to the home a giver thing kind of late. I never saw the TV show. In fact, I heard him a giver because he kept showing up in rap lyrics. MacGyver of course is the guy who fought bad guys but never used a gun. He used his scientific knowledge, used sheer inventiveness to get himself out of scraped. It shows been off the year for years but he still shows up in dozens of songs. MacGyver would turn a hot water bottle into a tear gas dispenser or roll up a map to turn it into an impromptu dart gun or mix an antidote to poison from common ingredients founded as local shopping mall or escape from evil doers using only a bobby pin or a piece of gum notoriously or the wrapper from the gum in some diabolically clever way. In real life, most of us never get to be that clever. In real life, even when there's a situation like, for instance, the largest power outage in US history, it's the professionals who have to jury rig new wiring routes to figure out how to keep hospitals and emergency services going. It's the professionals who have to be brilliantly ingenious. Let's see, ingenuity. I am chewing gum right now just in case I might need to use it on something. When I reached our contributing editor Sarah Val in black dot New York this Thursday night, she was reading by candlelight. She'd managed to boil water on the gas stove but that was about all the MacGyver like ingenuity her situation seemed to call for. Yeah, I mean I have the gum and I have the situation and so far everything's fine. Well, no, let's just think for a second. There must be something you can do with that gum. Well, I guess if there was some kind of windstorm, I could lash one of the candles down with it. I'm trying to wrench any little ounce of drama out of this for you that I can but... But there is no drama. I wish I could tell you something and then you could put that mission impossible. Music underneath me and it would sound really super exciting but... No, well good, hold on, I'll put that music under you right now. Just saying anything, it doesn't sound really exciting. You can take a bath later? I am going to take a bath and light a candle. Yeah, and then I might go to bed early. I would ask lying sounds really good with the mission impossible. Music underneath me. I might even take a bed at drill. In Genius Problem Solving Adventures, we almost never get them in our daily lives. And so today on our radio program, we have searched and we have found not one, not two, not three, but four real life situations, real life McGyver solutions, cases cracked by ordinary people like you and me. You know this is completely wrong music but let's hold on for a second. There we go. In the Giver theme. One story takes place in prison. One involves a very low budget movie. One solves a problem that most of us have had at one time or another in love. And one, our first act, is the true story of a potential personal crisis averted in an instant.

It is this American life from Public Radio International in W.B. E. C. Chicago. I'm out of class. Stay with us. At one, boat of lightning, pro and con. What Chuck Kosterman was 20 years old, a junior at the University of North Dakota when he had his very first girlfriend, she was 29. An adult, he was very young and Valentine's Day arrived the day that he came up with a McGyver like solution in an instant in a flash. Here was the situation. Somehow, I was not aware that adults gave presents at Valentine's Day. Like I only thought children did that. Like they gave cards to each other, you know? Right, in elementary school, there's like swapping cards. Yeah, it didn't, it didn't seem possible to me that like adult people gave presents at Valentine's Day. I'm not sure how I managed to get to be 20 and be unaware of this, but that was sort of the situation. And we went to the movie Groundhog's Day on Valentine's Day and then we, and I was still living in a dormitory. So we went back to my dorm room. Okay. And we're hanging out there and all of a sudden, she gives me all these presents. She gives me like a solo asylum album and like a copy of the book Go Dog Go, which I must have mentioned was like my favorite book when I was five or something. Wow. There were all these sort of like, like really kind of thoughtful gifts and a whole bunch of them. And she'd obviously put a great deal of effort into the thought behind giving me these things. And as you're feeling of, of, of the news sort of slowly tightening around your neck,

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