TiFaux

TiVo is a fantastic invention, a vast improvement of the VCR in execution and upkeep. We wanted to get one for a while to complement our DirecTV coverage. Because of my commute and Your Sister’s workload, we can’t guarantee we’ll be at home to see our favorite shows. After considering it for a while and shopping at options at Best Buy, I looked online at DirecTV.com and found their best offer: $50 after mail-in rebate. Fiddy bucks for a DVR was the best deal I found, and I called and asked after the offer. I was promptly by the operator that she could do me one better: Free. Utterly free. Hey-hey, you win, DirectLady. Within three days, we had the new receiver installed and were playing with the remote. It’s [Arnold voice]fuhnTAHZtic. [/Arnold voice] Because this isn’t really TiVo, we call it TiFaux. Before long, we had a regular schedule of shows we could not miss, and they is as follows:

Monday
Pardon the Interruption – ESPNews
Two guys argue over sports matters in timed debates. It’s simple and great fun. The show started doing something nasty a few months back: Instead of running from 5:30 to 6 as it had originally on ESPN, PTI would stop at 6 so SportsCenter could begin, and then PTI would air their last five minutes in the middle of that show, around 6:15. Rude. So, I tape the 6:30 repeat on the other channel; it includes the runover bits.

Good Eats – Food TV
Alton Brown, a Georgia chef, employs scientific formulas to explain why foods work together. It’s a half-hour of simple recipes and a smart host who’s not trying to sell a catchphrase.

Jeopardy – Local ABC affiliate
It never gets old. If Your Sister and I melded our minds, no one could ever beat us.

Iron Chef– Food TV
A 1990s Japanese game show where house chefs (French, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese) defend their pride against challengers. The host provides a secret ingredient, and the chefs have an hour to make the best dishes featuring the ingredient. The challenger can pick the chef he wants to compete with, and the fun is when an Italian chef goes up against someone cooking in Japanese styles. They use a lot of seafood, which is usually alive when they get their hands on it and for a few minutes after they are filleted or boiled. Hypnotic and a little disgusting.

Mad About You – local UPN affiliate
The only sitcom Your Sister seeks out. Bonus material: A half-hour of hilarious late-night sex phoneline ads. We have about 55 recorded episodes that we have yet to watch.

Tuesday
Pardon the Interruption
Good Eats
Jeopardy

Nova – PBS
Still a solid science show. The recent episode on Newton’s alchemist pursuits was fascinating.

House – FOX
This recently replaced “Sex and the City,” when TBS finished running that entire series.

Iron Chef
Mad About You

Wednesday
Pardon the Interruption
Good Eats
Jeopardy

Lost – ABC
Possibly the most mainstream sci-fi show ever on TV. Put beautiful people on an island, throw in plenty of mysteries, and have them stew in their distrust and angst.

Mythbusters – Discover Channel
Two special-effects guys judge the scientific feasibility of urban legends. Could Franklin survive holding a kite string hit by lighting? Could a cherry picker catapult a mechanic? Can a shipment of pingpong balls raise a sunken boat? Great, great geeky fun TV.

Iron Chef
Mad About You

Thursday
Pardon the Interruption
Good Eats
Jeopardy
Iron Chef
Mad About You

Impact Wrestling – SpikeTV
A new offshoot of the legendary National Wrestling Alliance tries to compete with the vaunted WWE for TV time and industry presence. Not bad at all.

Friday
Pardon the Interruption
Good Eats
Jeopardy
Mythbusters
Iron Chef
Mad About You

Saturday
Lucha Libre – Galavision
Mexican wrestling, all in Spanish. It’s madness.
Iron Chef
Mad About You

Sunday
Survivorman – The Science Channel
A Canadian man spends a week in remote wilderness living off the land and filming his dehydration. He carries around three cameras to document it. If the experiment is too easy, he’ll pretend to break his arm to make it fair.

What might one notice from the list? There’s only two shows we TiFaux from the four major networks: “Lost.” The only thing they get us to watch is sports. There are things we watch without recording, like the Monday night wrestling show or the gabillion reruns of “Law & Order: SVU,” and I didn’t mention the random films recorded off of IFC or TMC.

Special mention goes out to “The Ask This Old House Hour” which gives us so much. Your Sister gets her Boston-accent fix. We learn new methods of fixing up the home. But, most important, there’s the epic comedy when the hosts make house calls and get the homeowners involved in the repair. Can they keep their cool when the clueless folks ask which end of the hammer to hold? How long will they let them work a power tool before snatching it away to do the job eight times quicker? And, of course, does the scene turn into a middle-age porn scenario (“So you’ve got fluid in your basement? Should I install this extra-large sump pump? Let me show you how to hold the jackhammer, miss.”). The show keeps on giving.

Picture of the Day
A rare color picture of Lincoln

In the news
The proposed action by the Bush administration to solve illegal immigration boils down to these:

1. Beef up border patrols with more men and fancy technology including cameras and spy drones. In the meantime, use the National Guard. Maybe for a year.

2. Make a temporary work program so folks can make some money and go back home.

3. Press employers to demand legal ID from workers.

4. Without using the word “amnesty,” offer amnesty to illegals already here.

5. Reform immigration laws and tone down the rhetoric.

The first one is the more troubling as we saw with Katrina just how efficiently federal support can move. The apocryphal story lingers of trailers meant for hurricane victims sitting in Arkansas because the government won’t put them in a flood zone. I would not be surprised to see the states forced to pony up for the new technology after a small period of federal funding. This is, after all, how No Child Left Behind is handled.

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The Tony nominations are out. Best musical includes a jukebox musical (Jersey Boys), the Oprah-produced Color Purple, and the stage version of The Wedding Singer. Because Jersey Boys uses songs by Frankie Vallie and the Four Seasons, it can’t be up for best original score, and that allows the recent Andrew Lloyd Webber effort The Woman in White to get its only nod. Best play votes will be split between Shining City and The History Boys, a standout production from Britain. Sweeney Todd is virtually a lock to win Best Revival. Ralph Fiennes and Harry Connick, Jr. are up for acting awards, as is Ian McDiarmid (the Emperor from Star Wars). The mainstream news is making much hay out of the absence of a nomination for Julia Roberts in her first theatre gig. That’s a little cruel. The awards are handed out June 11.