Friday photo

My place, October 2009

Since fall is drawing to a close and winter is about to arrive, I thought I'd offer up one last peek at autumn beauty. The groundskeepers at my apartment complex usually don't allow the leaves to remain on the sidewalk, but it had been raining for several days and the leaves were to heavy to remove with leaf blowers. For just a few days, I could enjoy God's gift of scuffable leaves.

More on irony

I've made a couple comments on irony before, here and here. I'm especially amused at that phenomenon where the irony is as thick as the aroma on a pig farm, but - like a pig farmer - the people at the center of it all can no longer detect it.

Case in point: a man in Fort Wayne, Indiana, complains to a reporter that President Obama "isn’t governing, he’s still campaigning." He says this while taking a vacation day from work to stand in line at a Meier store and admire the woman who quit her governing job to go on book tours fulltime.

Friday photo

Sand Dune, Stovepipe Wells, Death Valley National Park. April, 2002.

The well-engaged couch potato

An interesting article by Kent Anderson at The Scholarly Kitchen argues that DVR's allow viewers to pay more attention to their tv-watching - including the ads.
The main point: DVR's give people control over their viewing, so they're more active about what they watch. Passive viewing generally means paying less attention to what's on the screen.

To escape ads before, people would use the time to use the bathroom, make a sandwich, make a phone call, or check email (more recently). In fact, there was once an urban legend about plumbing problems being cause during commercial breaks during the Super Bowl. Running at normal speed, commercials allowed for 2-3 minutes of activity away from the television. Sped up using a DVR, people don’t leave the room.

Viewers have to watch the ads to use a DVR effectively. You have to know when the ads stop and the show resumes, which means watching the ads as they go by. Even at a high speed, the ads register. And people do watch carefully. As Hammock puts it so nicely, “Often, the person with the control is being judged by a second party for their finesse in stopping the fast-forwarding at the precise time it needs to stop, so, therefore a second party is also engaged in looking at the sped up commercials.”

Anderson is certainly right that few people were really watching all those ads anyway. Most of us are multitasking like mad when the tv's on. It's a rare program that has my undivided attention.

As an aside, I don't have a DVR, but I have found that I pay far more attention to a Netflix program streaming to my computer than I do to a DVD playing on the television. This seems to have more to do with the size of the screen than to any other factor. To watch on the computer, I pretty much have to keep the laptop on the lap, and I can't really surf the net or browse a book at the same time. I do like being able to carry it into the bathroom with me, though.

Our team? Who are they?

It's a sad fact of life that, outside of Tennessee, most college sports fans wouldn't recognize the players from the women's basketball team. But how obscure do you have to be before your own cheerleaders lead the other team onto the floor before the game?