Export watchdog to CSV
Rather than "waste time" with modules, I'll spend a little time looking at how a module like https://www.drupal.org/project/views_watchdog handles something I want to do.  Turns out it's like so...

function views_watchdog_format_message($message, $variables) {
  return $variables === 'N;' ? $message : t($message, unserialize($variables));
}