Funny how the colors of the real world only seem real when you viddy them on a screen...

And so, after about four hours work by a very nice young gentleman in the employ of Dish Network, we have now joined the ranks of those with bigass TVs in their living rooms; those people whom you can see what they're watching as you drive by. As bigass TVs go, ours isn't all that bigass; it's a 40", but in a 15' x 15' room, it's plenty bigass.

Our living room has pretty much served as a giant entry foyer and cat lounge for the past ten years. For some reason, perhaps because we have a sizable basement, half of which is finished (if you can call cheap 1970's paneling with no insulation behind it and a Celotex ceiling with some tiles held up with duct tape after last spring's Great Squirrel Adventure "finished"), we decided when we moved in that the basement family room would be our primary TV location. The problem with this has been that because there's no insulation behind the cheapass paneling, you could cure bacon down there in the wintertime (which may make it the perfect yoga studio for middle-aged women, but hardly a cozy TV-watching room). So it means that we have been doing too much sitting on the bed watching TV in the evening, leaving the living room, with it's lovely Pottery Barn Malabar rattan sofa and chairs (never mind the red carpet that's still there from the previous owners; with a little work we've been able to achieve a kind of somewhat zany Moroccan paradise look), pretty much to the cats.

All that has changed now that we have the BATV in the living room, with the same hundreds of channels of nothing to watch that we had before, with some added hi-definition channels from VOOM TV that have opened up entirely new vistas of wasting time. Aside from making Mr. Brilliant's watching the Giants beat Tampa Bay today that much more pleasant, hi-def means that you'll watch just about anything with pretty colors, nice beaches, or interesting movement, which is how I, someone for whom spectator sports consists exclusively of baseball, figure skating, and maybe an occasional tennis match, found myself this evening unable to tear myself away from watching four French guys and two Brits doing parkour across Singapore. But now I'd better go to sleep, because I have to go to work tomorrow and a program on the culture and music of Mali is coming up on the Equator channel.