Netflix – Life In A Word

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…

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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.

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?

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

Her Majesty’s Persistent Presence

America is a vast melting pot, her contents stirred for generations in a dogged effort to blend peoples and cultures into a cohesive whole. It’s the classic chemistry experiment, where the glass beaker is filled with all manner of substances and then shaken, only to watch the inevitable separation back to individual weights and colors. The shake-up brings moments of drama though; the storm before the calm if you will. It’s also an apt description of the British Monarchy.

Despite my best efforts to filter my newsfeed, I still got the announcement about Oprah Winfrey’s televised interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle last week. I don’t know much about either former royal (or Oprah, for that matter) so I dismissed the headline and moved on. But I was alerted to the interview again the following day. And again the next day. Finally, in a move that can only be described as can’t-help-myself, I got out of my chair, grabbed the remote, and programmed the DVR to record. Something deep-rooted was telling me Sunday night’s interview was must-watch TV.

No it wasn’t. The questions and answers were predictable. The topics just begged for a response from Buckingham Palace (mission accomplished). After two hours of back-and-forth (and too much time in a chicken coop) my take on this couple hadn’t changed. Meghan shouldn’t have dabbled in the royals in the first place. Meghan eventually orchestrated her way out of the palace (and the country). Harry followed. Now they’re barely surviving… in an 18,000 square foot house in Montecito, California worth $14 million. Oprah is their neighbor.

Waste of two hours? There’s no denying it. Still, I chose to watch.

Americans don’t have royals, but we have a lot of movies about royals.

Why do I care about Harry and Meghan? I don’t, yet somehow I do. Maybe I should blame The Crown, the excellent Netflix series about the British monarchy. By total coincidence, my wife and I started watching Season Four this week, which is all about Harry’s mother Diana. Then my newsfeed tells me the Duke of Edinburgh (Prince Philip) suffered a heart condition last week, rough enough to land him in the hospital. Add to that regular photos of Queen Elizabeth looking ever-regal at the ripe old age of 94 and the royals are all over the place. They make themselves kind of hard to ignore.

The episodes of The Crown are a revelation, especially for those of us in “New England”. Each show kind of ungilds the lily of America’s perception of British royalty. There’s more drama, politics, and in-fighting than we Yanks would’ve ever believed of fair princes and princesses. Yet through it all stands the queen – at the epicenter of the shaken beaker – somehow maintaining poise and presence. All of the events in The Crown take place within Elizabeth’s lifetime, yet it feels like we’re going several generations back.

Despite The Crown and my newfound respect for Elizabeth, there’s no question it was the late Diana, Princess of Wales who first piqued my interest in the British royals. Who could blame me, right? Lady Di was beautiful and supremely innocent, a veritable Disney princess in the flesh. She was born just a few months before I was. Her wedding to Prince Charles in 1981 – the grandest of ceremonies watched by hundreds of millions of people across the world – was the stuff of fairy tales (Charles himself, not so much). Diana embodied all that was good and somehow magical about life as a royal.

But then we have Diana’s shocking death not sixteen years after her marriage. Talk about shaking the beaker. My wife and I were at a party in California at the time and returned to our hotel late, staying up hours past midnight to watch the funeral on television. Like the Oprah interview this week, I can’t explain why I gave up half a night’s sleep to watch. I just felt compelled to.

Thanks to The Crown, the royals aren’t looking quite as regal as they used to. Diana effectively sacrificed her life to be a royal. The agendas of Elizabeth and her several prime ministers were in constant conflict. Season Four has a poignant episode where Elizabeth arranges an individual lunch with each of her four children. She needs a valet to prepare a brief of information on each child so she can have meaningful discussions with them. Elizabeth may be “Queen Mother” but the title rates a distant second to “Queen”.

Harry and Meghan seem determined to move on from the monarchy. They’ll never achieve “normal”, and whether their marriage is the real deal is TBD, but good on them for making a show of it. Me, I’m moving on too. The next season of The Crown isn’t until next year so it looks like I finally get a break from the royals. Er, unless William and Kate are up to anything interesting. Are they up to anything interesting? Hm. I’d better go check.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Sign Me Up!

I have stubbornly maintained a subscription to Sports Illustrated (SI) – the U.S. weekly (now bi-weekly) magazine about the sporting world – for longer than I can remember. If I assume my SI subscription started in college (the first time I could afford such luxuries), I’ve been receiving SI in my mailbox every week for the better part of forty years. That’s a lot of magazines. More importantly, that’s quite a commitment to a subscription.

Subscriptions are exploding. A purchasing mechanism once limited to newspapers and magazines has penetrated nearly every aspect of today’s spending opportunities. Without checking my credit card statements, I can list ten subscriptions I’ve picked up over the last several years: Amazon Prime (package delivery and more), Life Time Fitness (gym membership), Dish Network (satellite television), AT&T (wireless phones), the Wall Street Journal (electronic newspaper), Microsoft 365 (MS Office software), LifeLock (identity theft protection), Harry’s (shaving products), Isagenix (vitamins), and Chewy (pet products).

I’m sure I could come up with another ten subscriptions I’m paying for, but not keenly aware I’m paying for (Costco comes to mind). But that’s life in what the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) calls our “subscription economy”. We’re happy to sign up and pay the weekly/monthly/annual fee. But how much do we use the given product or service? Businesses don’t care about “use”. In fact, many of them bank on “no use” or their business model doesn’t work. Example: my monthly subscription to my gym seems modest in return for a first-class facility that often seems empty.

With the explosion of technology, subscriptions can be listed in several “…as a service” categories. Software as a service (SaaS): Microsoft 365, Dropbox, and Google Apps. Hardware as a service (HaaS): Ring doorbells, Nest security cameras, and the vehicle you drive. Content as a service: Netflix, Spotify, and most of today’s magazines and newspapers. No matter how you classify these products and services, they’re still subscriptions. Often they lure you in with free short-term trials, which more often lead to longer-term subscriptions when a) you can’t live without the product or service, or b) you simply forget about the free trial, after which you’re automatically upgraded to a paid subscription.

My SI subscription is not actually my longest. I opened a bank account in grade school; an account I maintain to this day. Do I pay a monthly fee for this account? No, but the bank invests the money I store in its accounts (until I need it) – for a profit. Sounds like a subscription, doesn’t it? They’re making money off me whether or not I use their services.

A July 2018 report states the average American pays $237/month for subscriptions (which means I am “above average”). The same report claims eighty-four percent of Americans underestimate how much they spend on subscriptions. Finally, with the Millennial generation resistant to ownership of any kind, subscriptions have broad appeal – no real commitment to the product or service; just a fee for the subscription. In other words, take a dip in the pool or stay out of the water altogether. The company doesn’t really care.

Is there a conclusion to be made here? Not really; just observations. The WSJ article says all of us should engage in “subscription spring-cleaning” every year – a thrifty idea. Weed out the ones you don’t really use and hang on to those you do. I like to get exactly what I pay for, but I must concede subscriptions still make sense. They function quietly in the background to make sure products and services are always available, when and where you need them. And assuming you do need them enough, they are cheaper when calculated per-use.

With that in mind, I’m off to the mailbox. The next issue of my Sports Illustrated subscription should be waiting for me… whether I choose to read it or not.

Some content sourced from the 5/8/19 Wall Street Journal article, “Stop Wasting Money on Unnecessary Monthly Subscriptions”.