Step Away From the Brillo Pad

To be perfectly honest, I can't really say that I've had all too much happening that was bloggable. There might be, but until I confirm what really happened a couple of weeks ago in St. Cloud...everything is just an unsubstantiated rumor.

Back at http://spaces.msn.com/sweeneyland/ one of the most popular posts was my rant about Menards. After spending several days taping, sanding and texturing this weekend, I decided to just rent a movie and spend the last few hours of my weekend just relaxing. I settled on Peter Jackson's new "King Kong" remake, which ended up bringing up some Menard's like rage.


Remember back to the golden age of video rental? Let's say you ran down to your local Blockbuster (or down to the local gas station for us hicks who grew up out in the middle of nowhere) and rented a film that had come out on video a couple of years before. Odds are that the cardboard cover on the shelf was quite a bit faded and you knew the quality of the tape was going to be a crapshoot and you might experience some garbled soundtrack, some iffy picture in places. That was cool though, odds are you were paying like 79 cents unless you forgot to rewind it. If some moron ruined the tape, it was pretty obvious and they pulled it off the shelf and threw it away.

We've progressed as a society. We now have DVD. Your player will never destroy a DVD. The quality of audio and video will never degrade because you felt the need to watch Braveheart every Sunday afternoon for a year.

Now all we need to worry about is handing over your $3 for your silver disc, putting it in your DVD player and then watching 20 minutes of the movie. At that point, you might start to see some nasty stuff happen. Weird pixelation, the voice track is off the video track by a short time, loud screaching digital noises, blank screen...and if you're lucky enough...all of the sudden your DVD player might just suddenly eject the DVD.

The best part of this entire experience is that this will rarely happen in any mundane or uneventful parts of your movie. This will always happen right in the middle of the action. Even better for me is that since I use a DLP Projector in my basement with little ambient light in the room, I have to fumble around for like 5 minutes trying to turn on lights to find out what went wrong.

The worst part is always removing that DVD from the player. I guess I never look when I put it in to see what sort of condition it is in. How hard is it? They send you these neat little cases. You take it out, put it in the DVD player...and then when you take it out you put it back into the case. Apparently, some of you out there decide to take either a brillo pad or steel wool to it before putting it back into the case. Some of you insist on spraying 'mystery liquid' on DVDs before returning them. So in defense, I should let you all know that there is no need to try and sterilize these discs (if that is what you're trying to do). In one instance, it looked like there was a bike tire tread across the edge of a movie. Why?

Put down the brillo pad. Stay away from my DVD collection.