Fast Green Monkeys

A friend of mine walked past my cube yesterday around 4:15 and asked if I'd like to go to the Vikings / Raiders pre-season game that night. He's on some cabinet for the United Way, and happened to score 13 free tickets to last night's game. Who knew donating could be so much fun?

It had been a few years since I had last been in the Metrodome, and I had forgotten how loud it gets when you have tens of thousands of fans cheering in an enclosed space. The Vikings lost, but overall the game was fun. I thought there would be a lot more Randy Moss animosity, but the worst I saw was a fan wearing his old Vikings jersey and had taped over the number a big red circle with a line through it signaling "no". Big dis.

Anyway, one of our conversations during the game was how on TV do they "paint" onto the field the yellow first-down line? I've wondered this for years, yet never looked into it.

Curiosity finally got to me, so I googled it, and found the answer. But before you look for yourself, guess as to which one is right:

a) There are two trained monkeys (genetically modified to have green hair) -- one with a yellow paint can, one with green or white -- that run across the field and paint lines all day.
b) After years of drawing shapes on the TV screen, John Madden has perfected the technique so well that he can draw perfectly angular lines in one swoosh of his arm. He does this for every game on every network. This is why he is still allowed to commentate.
c) Chuck Norris glares down the field in a straight line and makes the grass "yella".
d) Some computer nerds with a bunch of cool technology figured it out.