Swimming Upstream

I can think of a dozen name brands I gotten hooked on for years, only to see them suddenly disappear from the shelves, never to return. Breakfast cereals. Hair spray. Cars. And what do we do when this happens? Simply find another brand and get used to it – easy-peasy. But when your streaming television service drops an essential channel, you can’t just jump to the next provider. Try that and you’ll hit your head on the cage they have you securely locked into.

Even if you’re not a sports fan, you’re probably tuned into my topic today.  YouTube TV – which provides me the five channels of streaming television I care about (and 95 forgettable others), dropped ESPN from its lineup.  It wasn’t like they warned us months ago they were renegotiating with Disney (ESPN’s parent), and that these talks weren’t going so well.  Instead they alerted us last Thursday just before midnight – with an email coyly titled “An update on our partnership with Disney”.  Then, the following morning, ESPN was gone.  On Halloween.  How fitting.

Without going into the weeds on why ESPN was dropped, let’s just call it the proverbial contract dispute.  Disney wants one number.  YouTube TV wants another.  A stalemate akin to what we’re seeing in Washington right now.  Yes, what D.C. is blocking is so much more important than a television sports channel.  But when you’re a die-hard college football fan you can relate to losing an “essential service”.

Getting my ESPN back is not like choosing another breakfast cereal.  If only it were that easy.  Instead, we have to shift to an entirely different grocery aisle.  Make that an entirely different supermarket.  As soon as YouTube TV dropped ESPN, Disney was only too happy to promote its own streaming service.  Sign up for Disney+, including ESPN and Hulu!!!  Only $29.95 per month – a savings of $5/month!!!  Only twelve months of subscription required!!!

All those exclamation points are a ruse, as if this is a service I can’t live without.  Disney Channel?  Not my thing.  Hulu?  I’m already getting enough entertainment on Netflix.  I just want ESPN please.  And apparently I should be happy to pay a minimum of $360 for it, in addition to my monthly $80 for YouTube TV.

Bless our tech-savvy children.  We turn to them for all things electronic.  I checked in with one of my sons – who is every bit the college football fanatic I am – and he came to my rescue.  Fubo – a streaming service looking like a twin to YouTube TV – offers a free one-week trial that includes ESPN.  It’s kind of like Congress signing a stopgap spending bill to keep the government open.  Now I have another seven days to figure out what to do.

YouTube TV promises a credit if the lack of negotiations with Disney continues long enough (sorry, the same does not apply to our government).  But I can’t necessarily wait for that credit.  In one week I’ve got to decide if I’m a YouTube TV guy or a Fubo one.  Can’t have both (at least, according to my budget).

Of course, it feels almost inevitable that Fubo will run into a contract dispute with Disney as well.  So even if I go that route I could lose ESPN again.  Maybe I’m getting forced into a Disney+ subscription after all?  But another $360/year?  No way.  I’d sooner get on a plane and go watch my college football games in person.  Er, assuming the FAA doesn’t cancel my flights.  Swimming upstream indeed.  Sigh…

—————-

LEGO Trevi Fountain – Update #3

(Read about the start of this build in Brick Wall Waterfall)

We resumed our fountain build this week with more confidence than the last, accompanied by the merriment of Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 1.  Bags 6 and 7 – of 15 bags of pieces – were filled with tiny, tiny finger-numbing LEGOs, and at times I wondered just what the heck I was putting together.  Didn’t look like the makings of a fountain to me.

Tiny, tiny!

According to LEGO, water is white and blue.  I suppose the white is meant to be rushing water (as in “waterfall”) while the blue is calm water (as in “pool”).  We shall see.  But check out the look of the fountain in the final photo.  Anyone else see a monster’s mouth with white teeth?

Strange creations

Since this is my fifth LEGO model, it’s high time I make the following proclamation:  LEGO never leaves out a piece.  Never.  I still have moments where I’m searching through a pile of pieces in vain for the one I need.  I almost get to the feeling of “it’s not here”.  But suddenly there the little guy is, staring up at me as if to say, “What took you so long?”  Some day I’d love to see how LEGO pulls this off.  Thousands of pieces in every box, not a single one of them left out.  That’s some logistical magic going on there.

I’m proud to say I made zero mistakes on the build this time around, a dramatic improvement from a week ago.  Okay, that’s not entirely accurate.  I left a piece off the back of the fountain, but immediately discovered my error when I added a section and realized there was nothing to support it.  Fixed in a jiffy, but the merry instruments on Paganini’s violin concerto sounded even more gleeful as they saw my confidence take a hit.

Running build time: 2 hrs. 27 min.

Total leftover pieces: 13

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Author: Dave

Five hundred posts would suggest I have something to say… This blog was born from a desire to elevate the English language, highlighting eloquent words from days gone by. The stories I share are snippets of life itself, and each comes with a bonus: a dusted-off word I hope you’ll go on to use more often. Read “Deutschland-ish Improvements” to learn about my backyard European wish list. Try “Slush Fun” for the throwback years of the 7-Eleven convenience store. Or drink in "Iced Coffee" to discover the plight of the rural French cafe. On the lighter side, read "Late Night Racquet Sports" for my adventures with our latest moth invasion. As Walt Whitman said, “That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Here then, my verse. Welcome to Life In A Word.

22 thoughts on “Swimming Upstream”

  1. That fountain is coming along. I just read the news, the FAA is cutting back on the number of flights due to the shutdown. You’re going to need another back up plan for the back up plan.

    This happens a lot with these streaming providers. At some point one side figures out how much they have to lose, comes to their senses and makes a deal. YouTube loves to do this. Years ago they pulled their channel from my Roku devices. A few months later they quietly put it back on Roku — after they saw a drop in viewership and a lot of negative comments on social media.

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    1. I think I’ll be patient enough to see ESPN come back to YouTube. If not, it’ll be another streaming service. Makes me miss the old days when it was whatever your antenna could find or nothing else.

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  2. All of life is a Negotiation. High risk, high reward. A game of who blinks first. If you are not on the back row of the chessboard, you are just a pawn. Your outrage is a commodity to be managed and/or sacrificed. I also delegate our tech issues to our oldest son. At least we can trust him even when we don’t like some of his moves!

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  3. It is amazing that LEGO always gives you all the pieces! In my Sunflower build, I thought there was a missing piece, but when I went back about 3 steps I realized I had made a mistake. When I fixed that, the ‘missing’ piece was not missing anymore!

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    1. I really would love to see the LEGO factory machines, conveyor belts, sorting and so on that create perfect and complete boxed sets time after time. They’ve clearly got it down to a science.

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  4. The fountain looks great! Lego must have great quality control to never forget a piece. It’s like jigsaw puzzles there’s never one missing, even though you later find it on the floor. I wasn’t even familiar with Youtube TV but when I googled it is not available in Canada. I get my sports channel Sportsnet through my Cogeco very basic cable TV subscription package, which I bundle with my internet. I know most people stream now, but I like to watch the local and National news shows. Disney seems to be greedy these days….

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    1. Honestly, cable sounds like a relatively stable option these days. There was a time when I thought streaming would save me good money but now I think I’m paying pretty much the same. The providers are sneaky with the way they increase their subscription fees, often changing the lineup of channels (or charging to remove advertisements).

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      1. The market is so fragmented….there are maybe a few shows I’d like to watch on each one, the rest are just mediocre filler. I also like Acorn and Brit Box from Britain as I like PBS, but not enough to pay for it. I liked Season One of Only Murders in the Building, with Steve Martin and Martin Short and Selena Gomez, when it was my cable provider Cogeco last year. but not enough to pay for the Disney prescription to get the rest of the seasons. Cogeco my cable provider increases the fees once in awhile hoping people won’t notice, but then I call their loyalty department and they give me a better rate than what I initially had??? It’s all such a game…

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  5. Dave, I hate when products disappear at the grocery store – for years I’ve used Benecol plant-based spread as it’s good for you, now my grocery store no longer carries it. They kept raising the price for a little tub to over $6.00, so likely too few people bought it, so they dropped it. I now use Philly Whipped Chives instead, but may switch to Kerrygold butter since you raved about it. In perusing the choices for a new butter or buttery spread, I saw Kerrygold has a cinnamon, brown sugar and nutmeg butter which I may try and you may like. I can remember my mom putting this on my toast as a treat when I was a kid. 🙂 I don’t have a TV, … well, one that is newer than the early 90s with the bulbous-style back on it. I do have Amazon Prime, so I watch some movies there and I just read yesterday that the once commercial-free shows and movies that members enjoyed, then went to ads a year or so ago, are now going to have even more ads. You can opt out of ads, but it’ll cost you an extra $2.99 a month to do so. I get the Peacock Channel with my internet provider, with ads and it’s got some sports on it. That takes patience for the Lego project, but you get experience with each one you build. Patience is a virtue for sure when dealing with all those tiny pieces.

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    1. We moved on from Kerrygold because it’s just too expensive for our budget. Costco’s Kirkland brand has a similar butter brick for about two-thirds of the price. Not sure I’d know the difference in a taste test. Yes, the streamers find little ways to get their money. They know you get accustomed to ad-free programming, so it’s hard to give it up even if you have to pay for it. Watching live network television has become very difficult because I’ve lost all of my patience for the persistent commercials!

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      1. That’s good to know – there are no Costco stores near me though. I had not seen commercials in years as I used to tape most of the shows I watched on network TV and back when I did have basic cable. The network shows I just zapped through the commercials. Yes, the commercials are in abundance and repetitive as well. I don’t even like the Super Bowl commercials anymore. I always watched them the day after the Big Game on the “Ad Age” site or on YouTube – I don’t even bother anymore, although I’ll make an exception if it is a year with Budweiser’s Clydesdales.

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  6. I was so excited to watch the Kelly & Mark Halloween episode and poof gone! Violet and I like to watch that when we eat lunch. I am grandfathered into a good bundle with disney+ so have ESPN but not live tv with ABC. Such a pain! They almost did that with NBC during the Ryder Cup.

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    1. I’m between a rock and hard place Lyssy, because my free trial of Fubo expires today. I’m not ready to pay full-boat for Fubo but who knows when ESPN will be back on YouTube. As Geoff says above, let’s see how long it takes me before I “blink”. For now, I’ll just go without ESPN. Sigh…

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      2. Actually I’m spoiled! Yes, the Irish home games are on NBC but even our away games are televised on other networks so I get to watch the whole season. Hence the need for ESPN last weekend (victory over BC). I may need it again next weekend for the Pitt game.

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  7. YouTube TV seemed like a great deal when we signed up, at $39.99/mo, as I recall. Then $49.99, then $59.99. I just looked and it is now $82.99/mo. Sigh. And now that my wife has six lifetimes of shows recorded on the platform’s DVR thing, we are probably stuck for the rest of our two lifetimes.

    And yes, I hate it when something that has become a regular part of my life goes away.

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    1. They will never offer what I really want JP – five to ten channels of my choosing. Seriously, they could charge 80% of what they’re charging now for just those channels and I’d still pay it.

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  8. I hope they come to an agreement soon and you get ESPN back. We are paying for so many streaming services and somehow every time I am looking for something to watch, it happens to be on a channel I don’t have.

    The fountain is coming out great! I can’t wait to see more.

    Blessings!

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    1. Absolutely true: the show you’re looking for is anywhere but on the streamers you’re subscribed to! Makes me miss the days when everyone was forced to feed from the same line-up (and adjust their antennas!)

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