It was an okay start to the weekend.  It was cold and there was a call for some snow.  But by the time Both of We were in the same house, about 2 inches of that snow had fallen and the other 3 or 4 that was coming was coming quickly.  It seemed, even though there were more than a few destinations to where we could have headed, the sofa and a television would do just fine for this weekend.

When we turned on the set one of the first sights we saw was a commercial for one of the satellite TV programmers’ DVR that can record up to 2,000 hours without losing a single digit out of all those digital files.  Shortly after that was a commercial for another satellite provider’s DVR package that allows you to record up to 5 programs at the same time.  Clearly those guys have more to pick from that the 1,100 channels we had at our remote fingertips.

It’s the time between the Academy Award nominations and the Academy Award recognitions so every channel that had anything among its offerings remotely movie-like would be running Oscar Month specials.  We saw promos for the best movie ever coming to a TV near you before this year’s glittery statuettes are awarded.  Unfortunately it’s hard to get the programmers from American Movie Classics, Turner Classic Movies, Arts and Entertainment, TruTV, Disney, History, BET, Comedy Central, and the Golf Channel to agree on the best movie ever.

We did watch one network’s offering of its idea of the best movie ever (we disagreed) and sometime during the weekend we also watched a couple hockey games, some cooking shows on PBS and on commercial television, WipeOut, lots of syndicatedtwenty-year old situation comedies, a horrible horror film offered at midnight, news, the Puppy Bowl, another movie, and very unusual presentation of an early 1950’s recording of a full orchestra performing all Strauss, all the time.  No Super Bowl but we did watch the commercials on the Internet.

Neither of us has the requisite satellite provider to be able to record up to 2,000 hours of what we watched this weekend.  Fortunately we rarely watch 2,000 hours of television in one sitting.  (Does anybody realize that 2,000 hours of television at 4 hours of television watching per day every day is almost 11 months of TV?)  We tried to figure out what 5 shows we’d record all at the same time and decided we couldn’t find 5 shows that were playing all weekend that were on our “we can’t miss these at any cost” list. The only hour and the only show we might have considered wanting to record was maybe the Johann Strauss concert or possibly one of the cooking shows that had an interesting recipe for pizza dough that neither of us had seen before.  But then on further consideration we decided Strauss had too schizophrenic a style for us and we already have two favorite pizza shops that do it for us.

So it seems that the programmers, both computer and marketing, have managed to violate the Number One Rule of Inventions.  Just because you can, doesn’t mean that you should.   

Now, that’s what we think.  Really.  How ‘bout you?