Quick one today folks mainly because it actually hurts to type.  I mainly wanted to relay a revelation I had today.  First a confession, I am a Chicago Bears fan.  Before jumping to conclusions, I am NOT a fan of the Chicago Cubs and yes, I thoroughly enjoyed sitting in Wrigley Friday afternoon seeing my Cardinals put a spanking on.  Unfortunately, being a football fan means I am potentially subject to about 3 hours in front of the TV once a week.  Unfortunately, I had to split firewood today and really did not have the time to waste.  Remembering that I had acquired a TV capture card from a friend (who I am sure will comment on the Cubs clinching the playoff spot) so I ran up and set the recorder in hopes of catching the game later tonight.  For the next 6 hours I worked on the woodpile until my fingers were too sore to pick up another piece of wood.  When things settled down a bit I decided to go watch the game being careful not to see any highlights or score tickers as I was heading to the viewing area.

I fired up the components and sat back to enjoy the game. I think I’ll hold off on explaining the components involved in playing the game back due to some required modifications on one of the items I stream the feed through.  Although I was upset at the final score, I was pleasantly surprised when I stood up and noticed only 35 minutes had passed since starting the feed.  I had basically crunched a 3 hour game into a very satisfying 35 or so minutes by skipping all commercials, injury timeouts, team line changes, game timeouts (team and TV), the half time show and all reviewed plays – all with a simple click of a predefined duration skip button on the remote.  Not only did I not miss a play, I didn’t have to listen to ex-NFL players ramble as if I actually cared about their analysis or opinion of a given play (especially Dierdorff).  Clearly this is the best way to watch a game if you are already maxing the available hours in a week.  There are some disadvantages of course, one having to be cautious you don’t ruin the element of surprise by seeing the score ahead of time and you have to do a little bit of planning to get the capture setup…. but this seems a small price to pay for the convenience this affords.  Now with the assumptions there are 14 or so weeks in the football year, quick math gives me about 35 new hours in the year.

Note, I’ve always done this for my weekly shows since a 30 minute sitcom really only has about 16-20 minutes of real content.  And for those brainwashed commercial zealots out there complaining about loss of revenue and stealing the shows funded by commercials… spare me the drama, I’m paying a subscription fee and if that isn’t enough to cover it… then consider raising my fee (of course, I’ll just cancel it and then we all lose … actually not me since I will have even more time to spend doing more constructive things.

Now Mr. Smith … what are you going to do about those stupid penalties?