Quite the account, Tom. Going through this, I was reminded of the Jack Kerouac technique for ‘emasculating’ commercial television advertising. Kerouac would watch television with the sound off, thereby ‘decorticating’ the hard-driven drivel that most dumbed-down advertising amounts to, since watching a bunch of talking heads that are unable to speak turns an annoyance into a vast entertainment (of sorts). Many years later, I found myself reflecting on the possibilities of devising some sort of device that would automatically detect advertisements and switch the sound off, then subsequently switch it back on when the programming resumed. My observations determined that most local television channels have about a 1 to 1 & 1/2 second gap in continuity between programming and an advertisement (and vice versa). It would therefore seem to be a fairly simple exercise in engineering to come up with a gadget that would sense this critical interval and use it to actuate itself. Thus far, no one appears to have attempted to do so, but it strikes me as having great potential. Most commercial television advertisements are aimed at the ‘uncomplicated’ mentality, but something like this would turn the already banal into a delightful form of absolute absurdity. Thanks for this informative and illuminating backstory on TIVO.