It's Robot Fightin' Time!

Dog week is over! The Friday night fights are back. It's ROBOT FIGHTIN' TIME!

The new season of BattleBots premieres tonight on Discovery, and I am amped. Sixty-seven teams will be sending robots to do battle in the arena, but only one can win the prestigious Giant Nut. People of all ages from more than 150 countries will be following the season. It's the World Cup for geeks.

If you haven't seen it, I recommend it. I don't care if you're not a geek or dork, if you hate robots, hate sports, whatever; it's rock-'em, sock-'em entertainment.

The robots are built with a few commonsense restrictions -- no explosives, no bullets, things like that -- and are sent into the area to beat the mechanical snot out of each other. It completely satisfies the gladitorial desire to see someone get mauled for our amusement, but no one gets hurt. Well, maybe their feelings. And their wallets (to buy parts). The robots fight with various types of weapons, like hammers, spinning blades, drum spinners, flamethrowers, flippers, spikes, anything that can hurt each other without posing a risk to the spectators. Some break into smaller robots; some use drones as air support; some try crazy stuff you could only dream about when you imagined science fair being fun. All of them have awesome names, like Tombstone and Minotaur and Scorpion and Battle Royale with Cheese.

Eventually the field is narrowed down to a bracket, and the competition is on to eliminate the others and become the champion. As far as I know, no one wins any money; this is all done for the awesomeness of it.

Each match lasts three minutes, and if there is no knockout, Evil Otto comes into the arena to destroy everyone.

No, no, there are three judges on hand to score the fights and determine a winner if there's no knockout. But knockouts -- when a robot loses the ability to move or fight -- happen quite a lot. 

So I'll be planted in front of the tube tonight, because It. Is. On. And Saturday I'll be tinkering with a Roomba, seeing if I can make a monstrous hybrid with my circular saw.....