Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Since the Steelers missed the playoffs, I haven’t been too interested in the NFL playoffs outside of hoping that teams or players who I don’t like lose. So far, though, the final scores have been anything but helpful.

In the wild-card round, only one of four games went the way I wanted — the Giants lost. In the next round, two of the four — the Eagles and Seahawks lost. In the conference championship round just one of two — the Saints lost. Overall, four out of ten. This either means that I dislike good teams, or I just have bad luck.

Either way, for the Super Bowl, I’m hoping for the following:

1. Whoever makes guacamole know what he is doing.
2. The commercials aren’t bad. (If a product that has a bad commercial, I’ll try to boycott them for the next month.)
3. Peyton Manning loses.

I can’t quite explain it, but for some reason I don’t like Manning. I think it’s because the announcers love him and, in their eyes, he can never do wrong. And you know how much I hate stupid announcers and their brain cell killing observations: “If they didn’t tackle him, he would have scored a touchdown.”

So rooting against Manning, in a way, is like rooting against the bad announcers. Go Bears!

Like I said yesterday, I spent most of last week in the Bay Area on business. And I discovered a another potential downside with travelling: I have a backlog of TV to watch on my Tivo (really, I have a Windows Media Center PC, but no one outside of Microsoft knows what that is, so I call it a Tivo).

Even though it’s really just 5 or 6 hours of missed TV, it feels like a lot more and it gets to be more of a chore than a pleasure. I really don’t want to sit and watch all of it. While I don’t want be confused by next week’s shows, it’s not worth wasting the time sitting on the couch watching it.

So I discovered a great way to deal with the problem: watch the shows as fast as possible. So if the show is Prison Break, I just skip over the subplots that bore me. Or if it’s Beauty and the Greek, you can just skip over all the unnecessary pauses used to heighten the dramatic effect and repetitive parts. I already fast forwarded a little bit. But a few nights ago, I did it really aggressively and must have covered almost 5 hours of TV in about an hour. And I think I got the same value (which says something about the quality of those shows).

I’ll probably do this as much as possible from now. :-)

I continue to find actors in new and completely different roles very distracting in movies. In Superman Returns (a movie with already plenty of distracting problems), Kal Penn of (Harold and Kumar fame) was a evil henchman. Whenever he was on the screen I was expecting him to do something stupid or make a dirty joke. But, all he did in the movie was hide and later get crushed by a hexagonal pillar. And why wasn’t was Harold with him? Aren’t they supposed to be in Amsterdam?