QVC is not a place I would send my kids to for basic scientific lessons, but you still would hope that people with the skills to sell you items would at least have a grade school knowledge of basic science facts. However, recently QVC host Jane Treacy and fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi spent a solid chunk of time arguing over whether or not the moon is a planet. Catch the hilarious video, below.
Isaac Mizrahi and Jane Treacy are trying to sell these cherry blossom print cardigans, when Treacy mentions one of the cardigans they are trying to sell looks a bit like the earth from space. But here’s how she words is:
“It almost kinda looks like what the Earth looks like when you are a billion miles away from the planet Moon.”
To Treacy’s credit, the QVC host immediately does try to correct her moon mistake, but she does a botched job of it, asking if the Moon is actually a star. Mizrahi jumps in and tries to convince her that the Moon is actually a planet, obviously. During the conversation the man also admits that he also doesn’t know if the Sun is a star. The whole thing eventually devolves into a long-winded argument where Treacy tries to name all the planets, fails, and Mizrahi eventually muses that the moon is a moon.
It goes on like this for a while, so long in fact that we’ve embedded the full segment, below. The star, moon and planet stuff starts around the 7:25 mark.
For those in the know that the Sun is a star and the Moon is a moon, the whole thing is pretty funny but also pretty terrifying. It’s reasonable to believe that people drop plenty of the knowledge they no longer use from their school years as they move into more specialized fields. But there’s forgetting physics formulas and then there’s forgetting basic facts. These guys will be living this argument down for days. On the bright side, I guess they sold a lot of cardigans.
The cool thing about live TV is that things happen in the moment that would never make it into a final draft of a taped show. This year, we’ve seen videos of drug deals occurring in the background of news shots, of an angry mother chastising at her political analyst sons live on television, of Anderson Cooper taking shots at Piers Morgan, and plenty of other “taped live moments,” including The Price is Right’s George Gray recently falling off of a treadmill. The anything-can-happen aspect is still one of the best things about watching live television, even if the anything happens moment is a goofy argument from two people who should never ever talk about science.
