A weird thing has been going on with my DVR. The last couple of months it hasn’t been recording shows that it recorded perfectly well in the fall, and instead it has been giving me “surprises” to watch instead.

For instance, it hasn’t recorded a single episode of Psych since its winter break. I was left with a cliff-hanger and apparently have missed all the resolution. I think it’s mostly online or On Demand so I can see it, but I just found out about that today when I heard the season finale is tomorrow. So there’s that.

Instead I’ve been finding other shows… like Man vs. Wild and Betty White’s Off Their Rockers. Now, the Betty White show is mildly amusing (I watched it when it recorded out of curiosity) but I know I had no intention of recording it because I didn’t even know it existed. As for Man vs Wild, well.. J occasionally watches it but we never record it, mostly because he’s never home to watch it and I find it an incredibly irritating premise. I mean, he’s never in “real” danger because he’s got a camera crew and an emergency lift out of whatever situation he’s in (which is good– I don’t want to watch someone really get mauled or freeze to death), but he also puts himself in such extreme conditions that they in NO WAY are anything realistic for the average person. Something much more helpful than telling us how to survive in the arctic circle (which most people don’t even fly over in airplanes, so the idea of crashing and being stranded there is remote at best) would be telling us how to survive in the woods for a week or so if our car breaks down in a national park. How does that work? There are people on the news all the time who “went for help” or “survived on rations” or whatnot, but I want to know how because I’m infinitely more likely to be in a state or national park and have a car break down than I am to be air-dropped onto a glacier.

Okay, I’m getting off topic.

The point is who has been recording these shows??

I see three options.

1. The cable company is now making suggestions for my viewing choices.  Clearly they don’t know me well.
2. The DVR is possibly becoming sentient.
3. The cats have figured out how to record things.

If the last one is the case, it might mean the cats are plotting an escape and are brushing up on their survival skills, but it does not explain their interest in Betty White.

Weird.