88 Illini: #40-#37

My wife goes to bed last night, I clean the kitchen and start the dishwasher, and then I sit down at the end of the kitchen island to start the next 88 Illini post. I notice that the TV is still on in the other room (I can see that it's glowing). I go in there to turn it off and I notice that the screensaver has come on. And the screensaver is scrolling through 2013 Camp Rantoul photos.

It's an older smart TV. It's so old that you can't load certain apps like Paramount+ because... actually I don't know why but I think it's "you're on Samsung operating system 5.3 and Paramount+ is only available on TV's running 7.0 or higher" or something. So our workaround was to add an Amazon Fire TV Stick and skip the smart part of our smart TV.

Once we were signed into the Fire Stick and it was joined with our Amazon account, the first time we paused a program, it put up the screensaver after five minutes. The photos, randomly, were all Illini football practice and game photos from the early 2010's. After some investigation I found out that it went looking for photos (I didn't ask it to) on our Amazon account and all it could find were a few folders of football photos that I had saved in an Amazon Drive account more than a decade ago.

So now, any time we pause a show to take a phone call (or whatever), we will return to find the Fire Stick treating us to Illini football photos from 2013, 2014, and 2015. Last night's photo? Eaton Spence (#27), Pat Flavin (#74), Aaron Bailey (#15), and Chris O'Connor (#73):