Not So Super Sunday

In India the Super Bowl apparently gets broadcast on a station called the "Asian Sports Network". Unfortunately, this isn't one of 8 sports stationed offered by my satellite provider, Tata Sky. Tata is a little of like the GE of India; they own everything from Tata Motors to one of the larger BPO consultancies to my cable provider to the Himalayan bottled water that I prefer (I like it because they pronounce it "him-AH-lee-yen" rather than "him-a-LAY-en"). Tata owns all of this, yet my basic package didn't show one of the most watched annual sporting events in the world. Sorry, Roger Goodell, I guess it goes to show exactly how much American football means outside the 50 states. Or it's entirely possible that I just have a cheap satellite package.

Regardless, I knew this going in and had planned to record the game on Slingbox and watch it on about a two hour delay on Monday morning. Unfortunately, the video decided to stop working in Slingbox. It's very odd, I'm still able to hear the audio and see the cable system interface to record and select shows, I'm not able to see any of the shows when selected. Since my trusty troubleshooter (aka, Dad) who hosts the Slingbox is busy skiing in Colorado, I'm pretty much out of luck until the problem either fixes itself or he gets back from skiing. Knowing that it wouldn't be possible to steer clear of the internet or people that would update me on the game's conclusion (our friend and fellow expat Kristin is a big enough Packers fan that she actually exhausted her annual home leave to go home and host a Super Bowl party; something tells me she probably would have let me know who won), I decided to listen live to the audio of the fourth quarter through the Slingbox. I'm not much a fan of Joe Buck. And that's when I have a picture to accompany his obvious observations. It's much, much worse when you're listening to him and staring into a black screen.

From all accounts, it was a close and entertaining game. If I was a big enough fan of one team or the other to change my profile pic to a player from a team, I would have been hugely disappointed and this blog post would have been a sharply worded open letter to the fine people at Slingbox. As it turns out, I simply ended up being one of the billions that didn't watch the game.