How low can you go?

Back in the day there was a time when I was known to pull off some pretty low moves when I had a lot of free time to myself? Eat mac n cheese for breakfast out of the pot, wearing boxers, sitting on the couch? Check. Stay up all night playing Grand Theft Auto and go to work the next day? Check. Spend an entire day in a movie theater, watching back to back to back movies? Check. Last night, however, was a new low. M was out of town for a bachelorette party. I had tried to play golf earlier in the day and got kicked off the course because it was raining too much (I got a rain check). Wet and bored, I went up to visit brother M and his wife M and baby A. The in-laws were visiting and I was more of an intruder, but it was good to see everyone. Mainly I was trying to kill some time before 8:30, which was the kickoff of the USC/Ohio State game. I like the pro game a little more, but it’s a narrow gap. The energy of the college game is better and the better athletes stand out more, so you see more exciting plays. This was supposed to be a big one. On my way home, I listened to the thrilling Michigan/Notre Dame finish. Once home, I burst through the door, made myself a decent dinner (no mac n cheese in a pot) and headed upstairs to settle in. I started flipping through the channels and started to get a little nervous. No pre-game shows, no recaps of the days games. There was plenty of crap though. Simpsons reruns, Jeopardy, Access Hollywood and The Insider. Ok, maybe it’s on at 8, I thought. 8 came and went and the shows changed, but not for the better. Now I had ‘Law and Order: SVU’ (law and order is still on?), COPS (normally this would be fine, but I’d been waiting to see this game all day), Women’s Tennis (this turned out to be pretty exciting, as I just found out) and Nascar. I’m not going to go on a Nascar tirade here. I sort of like Nascar, It’s somewhere between hockey and basketball but below football, MMA and baseball in my decision tree of ‘will I watch this random sporting event?’. However, on this occasion, it filled me more or less with rage. Golf and Nascar have seasons that are WAAAAY too long, stretching from February-November, ending with interminable and mind boggling points/playoff/shootout (i.e. we can’t have a tournament, so we invented this to artificially generate excitement and try to have a champion of sorts). So this time of year is filled with pseudo-important events that everyone knows don’t mean anything, except to the sponsors who got duped into paying huge amounts of money on the premise that if you tell someone this is important, they will believe it (sorry that was sort of a rant). So there was a race on instead. That would only mean that the football game was on ESPN (the race was on ABC, parent of ESPN – if it weren’t on ESPN, then NBC and CBS should be fired for ignoring this game). This posed a problem – I don’t have cable. No worries, I’ll see if it’s online. It was on something called ESPN 360 – all I had to do was plug in some information about my ISP and we’d be good to go. Except my world-loser cable/isp company doesn’t get along ESPN. So no dice there. I tried telling ESPN 360 that I had a different ISP – no luck. It ws almost 8:30, I could see updates from the game as they were happening online. This was definitely not good. Then I remembered that we sort of get VH-1. I knew my TV had some tuning capabilities, so I looked up what channel ESPN was and went there – static. But I started playing with the tuner and I sort of got a signal I could see the score at the bottom, I could see players when the camera went close up, but the screen was really washed out and the sound was unbearable. Brent Musberger’s dulcet tones were scrambled like he’s been smoking Pall Malls for the last 60 years. Then things got really dark. No, literally. I turned off the lights. Maybe if it were darker, the contrast of the scrambled static with the dark room would make things stand out more. Sitting in a dark room, by myself, watching a static filled screen and believing I was seeing things… I think they made a movie about this. The irony and patheticness of the situation was not lost on me. Hey, at least I had clothes on. There was a time when I figured out that if you flipped back and forth fast enough between certain channels on the cable box, you could get the box to freeze for a few minutes and you’d get a salacious, albeit muted and somewhat shaky piece of cinematography that was particularly interesting to the teenage male, but I digress. Sitting watching static was not a noble end to a day that had thus far been relatively disappointing. I hadn’t really explored the online solution to this adequately. I know that you really can get anything you want online, provided you know where to look. It only took me a few minutes but sure enough, by 8:50, I was watching an ESPN HD broadcast from the LA area on my laptop, wirelessly, lounging on my couch. EPIC EPIC EPIC WIN. So much winsauce I was bouncing like a kid on Christmas. There I sat, until midnight, hoping the stream didn’t go down. I saw all the big plays, all the highlights. I love the internet. Last night, in my mind, the full potential of the internet was realized. Thank you DARPA nerds, thank you Al Gore, thank you anarchist hacker/freedom fight , whoever you are. And yes, it’s 10:50 and I’ve been watching ESPN’s Sunday football broadcast for an hour already. Life is good.