By Chris Cosci

Unless you are a college football fan, New Year's Day has traditionally been a bad day for watching television. The airwaves are inundated with college bowl games. This year was no exception, with enough stations covering bowl games to cause severe finger injuries to remote-control-obsessed fans. Between the Sugar Bowl, the Humanitarian Bowl and the Galleryfurniture.com Bowl (I really wish I was making that one up), one can easily get lost in the mix.

Arguably, the most popular of these bowl games is the Rose Bowl. The Rose Bowl is preceded by what is probably the most elaborate parade on the planet, The Tournament of Roses Parade. This year, I watched most of the parade on a cable channel called Home & Garden Television.

For those of you unfamiliar with this channel, let me give you the basics. HGTV is a channel devoted to home decorating, interior design and household construction. The shows on HGTV feature relatively insane individuals who can rip apart a bathroom, re-tile it, re-install the plumbing fixtures, and re-paint it - all in one day. And they do it with a chipper smile on their face, trying to keep from bursting into maniacal laughter as they try to tell you how easy it is. Meanwhile, the average viewer probably can't hammer a nail into a wall without injuring themselves, or worse, missing the nail and creating a hole the size of a Buick.

Along with household projects, HGTV is filled with arts and crafts specialists capable of turning a piece of dried fruit into an entire living room furniture set. Needless to say, these crafters hosted the parade for HGTV. For them, this parade is a virtual smorgasbord of ideas and creativity.

As a casual spectator, one could reasonably enjoy dozens of beautiful floats parading down the streets of Pasadena, California. However, watching the parade on HGTV, I learned that the process of making one of these floats is immensely detailed, precise, and time-consuming. One of the criteria for a float is that every inch of the float must be covered with something in the food or plant family. Among the materials used were crushed rice, coffee beans, seaweed, raspberry seeds and kumquats. So, with each float, the announcers went into all the details of all the materials that were used.

"Each straw on the house was cut to exactly sixteen inches in length. Then each strand was individually glued to paper towels that covered the wireframe design."

"Notice the use of crushed walnuts to accent the folds in the dinosaur's skin."

They showed a woman working on creating a full-sized Cadillac that was only part of a float. It took her two and a half days just to make the spokes of the wheels (which were made using silverleaf, of course). People spend months making these floats. In fact, there are professional float makers that will spend almost an entire year or more making a float.

Personally, I think some of these people may have spent too much time around the glue fumes. However, they do make an impressive, if not excessive, display. And isn't that what makes life fun?