Austin Bay writes shares his adventures in attempting to watch the Cowboys-Packers game, which was only available on the NFL Network, a channel many cable companies have yet to include in their line-ups:

Thursday around noon: Richard proposed we meet at a sports bar — Third Base, on Sixth Street near MoPac. Sounded fine to me, I’d never been there but I told him the place’ll be packed. We need an infiltration plan with a seize and hold objective. Richard said he’d get there at 6:30 pm. I said I could get there about 7:15 because I had to meet my wife downtown at a Rice University graduate get-together in our favorite Austin, Texas coffee shop, Halcyon. Cool deal.

Except Richard called me on my cell at 6:20 and said the line at Third Base already extended into the parking lot. Nix on Third Base (…a vague suggestion of Abbott and Costello…). My wife suggested I walk around the corner from Halcyon to a bar on Lavaca Street and see if that establishment had the NFL Channel. Indeed the bar did have the channel, but it also had a not-quite elbow to elbow crowd and no open seats or tables to seize and hold.

I phoned Richard and laid out a Yeats’ allusion: “This is no place for old men…who can’t stand up for three hours.”

Richard said to come by his house and we’d watch the game on his super Mac. I trundled in about 7:45 PM and we sat down to watch the game on the computer.

Internet stutter galore, occasionally interrupted by total freeze. Richard decided that NFL.com’s server was overloaded. We followed the game for a quarter-plus via the “game tracker” screen. For those who haven’t seen one, it’s a small football field where the line of scrimmage moves across the screen as the game progresses. You also get written commentary on the plays.

Well, you get what you pay for, or in this case don’t pay for.