Thoughts on a Friday

You want frustrating? How about this -- last night at about 8:50 PM, while watching Wednesday’s excellent episode of Top Chef -- excellent not just because of the lovely Ms. Lakshmi -- our TiVo sort of shorted out. It’s happened once before that we know about and immediately started rebooting. Annoying, to be sure – but much, much moreso when we realized that we were losing minutes (minutes!) from the episode of The Office, which was being taped right then.

And then, as we watched it…we realized it was worse than that, because we were going to miss the climatic moment(s) of the episode. Today, I read on two separate websites about how “the scene” with Jan and Michael was amazing, as well as the scene with Dwight and Pam.

Didn’t see them. Missed them entirely. Sigh.

We think the reason the TiVo shorted out was that our power strip for the TV doesn’t seem to have a surge protector, and I do hope that’s the reason. Sort of. Because if – and I stress, this is purely hypothetical – if the TiVo is dead, there’s no reason we wouldn’t replace it with a Series 2. 80 hours instead of 35? (Or…gasp…180 hours? My god.) Scheduling recordings from the web – e.g., work?

Now…ideally, the next box we buy will be a combination DVR with a DVD burner. Naturally, if we had 180 hours, it’s less necessary to have that option since we could just store it – and also, the Series 2 seemingly comes with the ability to “easily transfer shows to your laptop…” which I assume means we could burn it to a DVD from that device.

ANYHOW…Top Chef rules, and it was great to see that it’s been renewed for a third season. No reason for that show not to be a staple – it could get old, but the personalities they keep getting make it compelling stuff. Marcel is a turd, but as Jace at Televisionary pointed out, he certainly does keep his calm. He obviously is completely irritating, but it’s also just as obvious that everyone else on the show responds to him by acting like a five year-old. Completely disappointed with Ilan, who aside from looking disturbingly like Ted from Queer Eye (who again was on the show, and again no one said this on camera) acted juvenile and produced inferior product. At this point, it looks like Sam and Cliff are the only two candidates who can both cook and command enough respect to run a kitchen.

In suprising news, the Raiders fired Art Shell – it’s not suprising because of his record and ability, as Shell’s coaching performance this season is probably a strong candidate for “Worst. Coaching. Ever.” as the comic book guy from the Simpsons would say. But what it really says is that Al Davis still doesn’t get how little talented coaches want to come to Oakland, because working for Davis is a joke. I suspect that the next coach will either be another bad retread or a youngster who otherwise wouldn’t get a job for five-plus years.

It certainly won’t be Bill Cowher, who is now available after resigning from the Steelers. After winning a Super Bowl in 2005, he certainly has the pedigree to go with his reputation as one of the great coaches. I’m of mixed mind about Cowher – anyone who sticks with a guy like Kordell Stewart as long as he did doesn’t get off scot free – but naturally I recognize he’s a great coach. If he comes back to the NFL, I think it will be somewhere where he gets paid gigantic sums of cash and gets to run everything. In any event, Pittsburgh should be interesting next season.

NFL playoffs start this weekend and it should be great. Can’t wait!