Ignominy down the memory hole

So last night, my cable box went to Refurbished Chinese Crap Heaven, and took with it the DVR recording of my appearance on the now-cancelled Merv Griffin’s Crosswords. I had just shown the episode to someone the other night, and had, mentally anyway, decided to renew my efforts to back it up on my computer and DVD. Sadly, Murphy’s Law beat me to the content. I know that it’s still hiding on the box’s hard drive in digital form, and that someone with a little savvy probably could rescue it, but my cable company has no interest whatsoever in learning how to do that – it would mean taking responsibility for it whenever it happens; and given the poor state of the boxes they give us, that could get expensive.

I found out that the show airs in re-runs 10 times a week on an obscure Jesus-centric cable channel that I don’t get. They only ever made about 200 episodes, so odds are it wouldn’t take long for my face to come up in the rotation. I suppose if I wanted to make a quest out of this I could go find someone living in Monrovia or San Diego and offer them some incentive to comb through the episodes until mine surfaces. But – like that student-made slasher film I starred in during my Study Abroad semester in the UK – it’s one of those video artifacts whose pursuit asks more than my resources and free time want to contribute at the moment.

What the hell – I got robbed on the show anyway, and I needed a haircut.

I did, however, finally rip my Jeopardy! episode off the first-gen TiVo box that’s been gathering dust in my closet for about four years now. So that will be fun to play with.