Before I delve futher into fixed income derivatives, I'd like to take a bit of time and focus on the positive aspects of television. Deriding TV is very common, and I won't deny there's a lot of crap out there. But some people will go even further and agitate actively against TV as a medium, saying that it only makes people stupid and nothing worthwhile ever came of it. Well, they're wrong. Here's a first-hand account why. Yesterday morning I stacked the dishwasher full of plates, glasses and silverware. I closed the dishwasher. It popped open. I closed it again. It popped open again. I could not figure it out. Nothing was sticking out, the latch seemed OK, but it would released as soon as it caught. After half an hour's of futile tinkering, I started to panic. What if I can't get it work? What will happen with the dishes? With the lag times involved in getting an service engineer out here, it could be weeks before I could have clean dishes again. I'd have to buy more dishes in the interim. Disposable dishes? Good heavens! This was serious. And the current set of dishes would sit here until they could be washed again. I needed my dishwasher badly.

How does this relate to television? TV brought me the answer. I knew all those hours of TV watching in my youth would pay off someday, and this was the day. I used to watch MacGyver, and the one central lesson that he brought to America's (and the world's) TV watchers is that you can't have too much duct tape. All problems can be solved with duct tape, including my dishwasher problem. I just taped the door shut and let it run. Clean dishes! Thanks to duct tape, MacGyver and TV.

So there.