Greatest Invention Ever

I’d like to nominate as the greatest invention ever...the DVR.

Yep, the DVR. Yeah, I know, it’s a guy thing, but think about it. Even you women love it. For those of you as old as I am, think back to when we didn’t have these wonderful toys. We had the big, bad VCR’s, the huge tape machines that set on top of our console televisions. They weighed about as much as an eight-year old and you could only tape four hours at a time. Remember? Sometimes the timer worked and sometimes it didn’t. Remember? The tape quality sucked…a lot. Remember?

Now we can tape about twenty-seven shows at the same time. Amazing! Some of us have shows from six months ago we still haven’t watched. Some of us haven’t watched a commercial in years.

Nothing has made the DVR more popular or more important than sports. It is very common for me during football season to tape a game, even though we are home. Lana and I will go and see a movie or work in the yard or do some chores, or…play cards, yeah, that’s what we do. When things are done, I go to the game and start the game, skip through the commercials, and ta da! the three hour game turns into less than an hour and a half. I don’t even have to watch the half time show to listen to them talk about what I just watched either.

As I write this, the Olympics are going on. This has got to be the greatest advertisement for the DVR ever. We love the Olympics, but we don’t watch all the sports. I’m sure we are no different from all of you. We all have our favorite sports to watch. Person to person they vary. Each evening we tape the 8p.m. show, which lasts until midnight. This has taken some real strategy to get through.

Here has been our dilemma. First, we have been taping a few other shows during the week like we normally do. What to watch? During the first week of the Olympics in our house, we watched the Olympics and let the others stack up because it was primarily swimming and gymnastics. Here is how we did it. I get up very early so I go to bed fairly early, like 10:30. So, when I get home and we eat, we watch the news and try to watch one recorded regular show. Then we watch the rest of the Olympics from the night before, usually it amounts to the last half of it. That gets us to about 8:30 or 8:45 real time. Then we start the Olympics of that night and go until I go to bed and stop. We repeated the process each night the first week.

It's different now. We’re getting into different sports. We like track and field too, but we don’t care for ALL of them so we can zip through some of them, as well as some of the other sports they are covering. I mean, we marvel at the ability of all the athletes, but I don’t want to watch someone run for 10,000 meters or race-walk for any distance. Not riveting.

I mean, really, race-walking? I heard that started with three husbands in a mall in Topeka. Apparently they didn’t know each other and were sitting on a bench next to a Penny’s store while their wives were shopping. Two of the guys had to use the restroom. The third guy, bored, had an idea. He suggested they all three walk, not run, as fast as they could to the restroom in the Sears store at the opposite end of the mall. Race-walking was born. I don’t know if that was true.

We might as well have speed shoe tying as a sport or crotch scratching. As a matter of fact, I know a couple guys that could contend for the gold medal in that. “Tomorrow night, don’t miss it, just after the 200 fly, the first ever men’s team crotch scratching, then the men’s all-around scratching. Don’t forget on Friday, we have mixed crotch scratching. This all brought to you by Desenex.”

I’ve already got my DVR set for that one. Greatest invention ever.