fine whine

Looking up at my shelves of DVDs, I see the results of a lot of poor decision making, misjudgment, and silly impulsiveness. And the occasional good film.

I could count them now, but what would be the point? At last count they numbered close to two hundred, but there's really no need to quantify them exactly. We're talking about art here, right? It should be a matter of quality, not quantity.

I didn't always think that way, I suspect. For a long time I was important to me in some way to know, to a single digit's precision, how many movies I owned on optical discs*. That, in itself, wouldn't be so significant if I hadn't spent so much time, and to some degree, money on acquiring so many of them with such frequency as to need websites and a Palm Pilot to accurately count my collection.

My rationale for buying many of them, collected together on the same shelf, oddly enough, was that I couldn't otherwise see the movies easily. I speak primarily of my thirty-odd Criterion Collection DVDs, which, back in the early years of the twenty-first century, were rare and exotic, but primarily rare enough, such that a person could conceivably be able to own, or at least watch, every one of them. Back in those days I aspired to be such a person.

Prior to college, I'd watched movies, but more or less in the same fashion as any teenager with little else to do than opt for the easy out when looking for something to do with friends. My friends weren't the sort to regularly see things opening weekend, so I'm sure to have missed out on some briefly popular turkeys, but at the same time I do recall seeing more than a few movies in an otherwise empty theater.

For some reason, a year after I'd started college I started taking a greater interest in movies. Part of it may have been that I was a projectionist in the student center, but I approached that more as a social opportunity and a job than as some gateway to becoming a cinephile. The beginnings of my DVD question had nowhere near as lofty a goal, to be sure. An avid bargain-hunter, I stumbled across an un-refusable deal to buy movies for a quarter apiece... from the notorious low-rent film studio Troma Entertainment, well known to fans of messy splatterfests and cheesecake exploitation flicks, and entirely unfamiliar to me. Not knowing anything about the movies (though I'd heard of The Toxic avenger, the cornerstone of their catalog) I picked some twenty of them, more or less at random, paid a higher-than-necessary shipping charge, and patiently waited two to three weeks for the box filled with movies I had no way to watch.

I didn't have a DVD player, you see. My dorm didn't even have a DVD player, though I think some of the more students with more well-to-do parents did. I certainly wasn't going to hang out in somebody else's room to experience Rabid grannies for the first time.

This was a bit before I was known, by some, for having a taste for bad movies.

The Troma movies were bad movies. I may well have overpaid, even without considering the shipping. But they were more than just eighteen randomly selected movies (two had been out of stock and they sent VHS tapes I quickly traded away as substitutes). They were an excuse to buy myself a DVD-ROM drive, so I could at least play movies on one of my computers.

There was a brief time when I had more computers in my dorm room than DVDs. And such was still the case when first my eighteen discs arrived, unfortunately. The only one that mattered, though, was the one inside which I installed my first-ever DVD drive and its accompanying hardware decoder--computers not being powerful enough to decode the digital movies on their own back then--and could consider such a shrewd move because the real players were still hundreds of dollars more.

Also, I had no television, so I saved the money not buying that too.

Once I bought the drive, I was able to finally watch the movies, and it wasn't long before I realized I needed some better movies in my collection. A co-worker of mine did me the favor of having a couple of the discs stolen while he borrowed them, and I replaced those with a few "real" movies I bought on eBay.

The online auction site quickly became my primary source for new and used DVDs. My early purchases were less than consistent - I bought The Matrix and Contact around the same time, even though I was less than impressed with the former and didn't particularly need to watch the latter another time. I think I bought The Matrix because everybody who had a DVD player owned it. I'm fairly certain I bought Contact because it was an early example of a studio's labor of love, as it contains considerable supplemental features including an unprecedented three commentary tracks.

I was a sucker for supplemental features. I think it was their appeal that prompted me to buy my first Criterion Collection movie. It was Terry Gilliam's Brazil, about which I'd only read, and generally the DVD set itself was lauded more than the film. So I bought it, the first of many movies I bought hoping I'd like them, and as with almost all of them I was quite right.

I did love the movie. The attention Criterion had lavished on it, providing not only Gilliam's cut, but also the butchered studio version, struck me as very promising for the future of DVDs, and quite possibly set me on my path of seeking films that ended up a little outside of the mainstream.

More immediately, though, it made me want to make more of the Criterion Collection part of my collection.

In retrospect, had I known I could watch pretty much any of them, as well as a whole lot more important movies, by visiting the school library, I might've saved a lot of trouble.

For that matter, had I not been too cheap to pay the buck or two the town library charged for borrowing their discs, I might not have 'needed' to spend twenty bucks a pop (on sale) to buy my Criterion discs from Borders.

Seems a bit silly, that, when I think about it now. Especially for how many of them I bought without having seen the movies first. I'll never know if I'd consider myself a fan of the movies of Luis Buñuel if I hadn't bought Criterion's Discreet charm of the bourgeoisie for its interesting cover art and good price (considering it was a double disc).

I did the same, more or less, with the movies of Jacques Tati, when I bought Mon oncle, though I can't recall quite why I had done so, though I am of course now quite happy I did so.

Those were not the only films I bought for less than rational reasons. I bought several movies (Repo man and the original Wicker man among them) because they came in unique cases.

That's how I ended up seeing Akira for the first time, in fact. I'm almost suprised now that I never picked up other limited edition tin-cased movies like Supergirl, attributing that to either sheer chance, or perhaps some tiny bit of common sense.

Shiny collections also caught my eye. I bought Fox's collections of the Die hard and French connection films, and was yet again pleasantly surprised to enjoy them.

For every French connection or Conversation (also purchased unseen!) I own, though, I've got an Antitrust or a Swordfish.

Along the way I picked up about ten movies from BMG, picked as much based on value for the money as for me wanting to own (or see) them. That's how I finally got to see most of the movies of Kevin Smith (Chasing Amy being a Criterion disc, and one of the most widely available, I already owned it). BMG also fortuitously introduced me to the TV series The Prisoner, a series I am proud to own even now as it is available for free to watch online.

As I write this I keep glancing back up at the shelf. I can only wonder how many other collections feature The Prisoner alongside Knight Rider and Boston legal. When I started writing this I meant it to be a rumination on what I could possibly do to begin culling the collection of stuff I don't really need to own (like the forgotten Killer elite pitting rival hitmen Robert Duvall and James Caan against each other, or my Dutch imported Raging Bull (special edition) or Things to do in Denver when you're dead, neither of which really do much for me, but neither of which are playable to most normal people here in the US). I meant to touch a little on how I ended up with multiple editions of Highlander and Starship troopers and The meaning of life, but somewhere along the way I seem to have lost track of what I was doing.

Which, now that I think about it, is as good an explanation as any for many of the discs being up there on those shelves.

* For the sake of sticking to close to a single line of reasoning, I'm not going to even mention my large laserdisc collection.

Those of you with Facebook accounts likely know what follows.

To everybody else, there's a so-called meme going around to get people to the use Facebook Notes feature that has people writing 25 facts, goals, thoughts, and whatnot about themselves and then 'tagging' 25 people connected to them on Facebook to presumably do the same.

If you happen to be in the former group, feel free to comment there instead of here.

I may have written about some of these things before. None of the below is a boast about my stellar memory.

1. I don't like to pick favorites or rank things in order of personal preference, generally. I wrote this list out without numbers first* and then reordered them several times. To my knowledge, they're not supposed to be in any particular order anyway, but I'd hate to have some sort of preference or priority suggested by them.

2. The backpack I carry every day to work with me is the same one I used in sixth grade. The zipper got replaced once or twice, but that's about it. I now realize that, back in high school, when I used to scrawl slogans and jokes on it atop pieces of masking tape, that doing so was a good thing lest I show up at work with a bag suggesting we "PAVE THE WHALES". Why I also had electrical and gaffer's tape with me as well was not really clear then and even more so now.

3. I once owned the domain name peanutbutterandjelly.info but never got around to doing anything with it before it expired.

4. I've never been entirely satisfied with capitalization. I Really Hate When All The Words Are Capitalized In A Sentence, Or Song Title, Or Headline, Et Cetera. Sentence case, on the other hand, isn't always entirely appropriate either, particularly when it comes to band names. I may go to my grave not knowing exactly how I'd want to capitalize, say, the dysfunctional psychedelic Waltons, or I am the World Trade Center. all lowercase looks immature and unfinished to me, whatsisname cummings be damned.

5. I spend far too much time correcting titles and artists (and capitalization) of my mp3s.

6. Early in my freshman year of college I was threatened with a lawsuit from the RIAA, for operating an mp3 distribution FTP site. At the time the amount being thrown around was $15 million, but fortunately after deleting all of them, giving up my school-provided email for a year, and writing some 'informative' newspaper columns, I was off the hook. They never filed suit. This was before they started cracking down on everybody.

7. Also in college I got in trouble with the computer lab guys for hiding rc5-64bit encryption-cracking programs (for science, and a competition, not hacking) on the workstations with processes named like 'ps' and 'grep'. Apparently their long run times and CPU usage were a dead giveaway. I told them I'd stop doing it, and haven't contributed to any distributed computing effort/contest since then, using my computer or anybody else's.

8. During high school I was on the local YMCA swim team. I wasn't very good at it (the best I think I did, other than garnering a 'most improved' trophy, was winning my heat at regionals, once. Afterward, when picking up my ribbon, I learned that I was 31st of 36. Somehow I managed to be in the same pool with the every single swimmer slower than me), and now when I get into a pool I find myself wondering what I'm supposed to do to pass the time.

9. I know I abuse parentheses in my writing, though I would not consider my use of them to be improper (see above).

10. My only home internet connection was dialup well into early 2008. I even played World of Warcraft over it for quite some time.

11. I don't play World of Warcraft anymore, and haven't for quite some time. It stopped being fun when I couldn't play at the same time as my friends and I wasn't finding a dollar's worth of entertainment in it every day.

12. I've found myself to be fiercely competitive when the stakes are low or nonexistent, even to the point of cheating if I know I can get away with it. This does not apply to playing board and card games with people, though. I don't try to cheat anymore - it's no longer fun to win by cheating. I'd rather play and have a good time, then work to make sure I win at the expense of the fun.

13. There is a great disparity between the number of words I recognize, and the number for which I know the correct definition. It's always a pleasant surprise when I go out on a limb and use one I think is appropriate, and it turns out to be particularly good in context. In a recent conversation I tried this with "austere" and it was just right. More than once I've completely misused a word.

14. I haven't bought anything off of eBay in at least three months. This wouldn't be that surprising except that I've probably won some 200 auctions over the last decade there.

15. I claim to never watch TV but can't say that without many caveats. I am fairly current on a small handful of shows, and would like to be so on a few others, but I only ever watch them online. The last time I deliberately watched a TV show at the same time it was being broadcast was the episode of The Simpsons that followed a SuperBowl and preceded the (horrible) pilot of American Dad. I also watch a great number of shows on DVD, and even own a few.

16. I own a couple laserdisc players, and some 100 laserdiscs or so. I haven't watched one in a while, and the number of them that I can't replace with DVDs dwindles every year. I got into them in the month that everybody but Pioneer stopped making them, and picked up a great many of them for a dollar or two. The rest, primarily Criterion Collection discs, were grabbed here and there at resale shops. I don't recall paying any attention to them in the days when they could be bought new in stores or rented.

17. In 2007, on a lark, I willingly and deliberately watched over 60 Bollywood movies. Apparently this makes me some sort of guru in the eyes of the other white suburbanites.

18. I'd like to drive a classic 70s muscle car or two sometime.

19. On the average, I consider myself to be a better driver than most people who consider themselves better than average.

20. I've had two bikes stolen over the years. The second one was even locked to a rack.

21. I think I got the MVP award for Academic Challenge my senior year of high school out of some sort of misplaced pity - I wasn't really that big a contributor to our (less than stellar) scoring. I've never done anything with the corresponding fabric varsity letter other than file it away.

22. I can't help but proofread the things I read, finding typos and other mistakes. Which is all the more ironic because the first time I published this, having read through it a number of times, both #2 and #22 were exactly the same. It's not like I used an apostrophe wrong, but still...

23. As a kid I loved to doodle. Somewhere in the intervening years I lost the ability to doodle new things, and often find myself drawing the same cars I used to draw back then, other than the odd website layout.

24. My handwriting has not improved one bit since seventh grade.

25. The same may well be true for my writing in general - I was an adequate writer back then, from what I've seen since.

(Thanks, Morydd, for being the tipping point in me finally doing this.)

* I originally planned to put "I put two #8s in this list" in the middle somewhere, but fortunately thought of something else to write for that last salacious factoid.

Right now the date of the previous post just below this is from last year*. I'm not going to make much in the way of excuses for the gap. I've posted enough of those before. Believe me when I say the last several months were not uneventful.

Just before, or soon thereafter, that aforementioned previous post, I was told at work that my position was being moved to another non-downtown location, and my computer, my phone, my chair and me would move with it. At the time I was more than unhappy about that prospect, and everything hasn't yet played out completely, but for the time being I'm pretty happy there with things and people as they are. I just hadn't felt like writing about it. More changes are to come later this year as we are due to move again, so I can't get used to too much yet.

So what else? Why haven't I written? I've still been doing pretty much the same stuff, save for writing about it. I've been watching just as many DVDs as before, playing some video games here and there (I've come to think that the PSP was a great platform that is not too far from being the next Dreamcast for how a system's actual potential turns into how well it does for the market at large) but none of them was so noteworthy as to merit anything more than the odd mention on Twitter.

Oh yes, Twitter. To say I haven't written since August is to ignore all the words I've txted and tweeted to my Twitter status updates several hundred times, up to one hundred and forty characters each. It's no substitute for this site, and at some point I'll probably need to come up with some sort of export/dump so I can grab that chunk of my digital output and shoehorn it in with the rest of this, assuming I have some sort of output in the days and years ahead.

But enough with the melancholy. If I try to fit everything in I'll lose steam on what got me back at the keyboard in the first place. This post isn't very good, but I'm rather a bit out of practice. If you'd bear with me for a couple weeks (assuming I write during them) that'd probably be best for the both of us.

So I just watched a DVD. It was called Who killed the electric car? and it was not a great film, documentary or otherwise. It was too long, too slanted, too unfocused, and too often contrived. I recognized that, even while I was watching it (and really, knew about it going in thanks to most of the less-than-favorable reviews it garnered back in 2006), but it still got to me.

The argument put forward by the film, and I hope I'm not spoiling it in any way because people really should see this movie, is that the Zero Emission Vehicles mandated in California a decade ago, and produced by GM, Toyota, Honda, Ford and probably others not mentioned, were great technology that worked, and deserved far better than to have been swept under the rug, the cars not only forgotten but crushed and/or shredded, and their environmentally-friendly mantle taken up by less-than-worthy successors, and the blame falls upon not only the car companies, but also the government(s) and consumers alike. And a few other "suspects", but I don't want to give everything away.

Shifting gears slightly for a moment, I must admit I have a problem throwing things away that aren't yet broken and useless. The headphones I use daily at my desk only work in one ear. At least two of the digital cameras I use have pieces broken or missing. My iPod, already on its third hard drive, often needs less-than-gentle encouragement (that is, whacking it with my hand repeatedly) to get going. One of our cars, not my daily driver anymore, doesn't have working air conditioning. I'm using reclaimed car speakers for my home theater system. I have piles and heaps and bins of stuff that may turn out to be useful (and many have, though less than a majority of the things I haven't thrown out). So just seeing the stacked GM EV1s (read about them here), crushed and left to rot, bothers me on that level. Never mind the environmental aspects of crushing all those batteries, and metal and plastics that likely won't get recycled.

When those cars were crushed (and likewise the shredded Hondas, etc) with them was crushed a major hope for making things better for today and tomorrow both. Here (and now I'm talking about those EV1s) was a fleet of perfectly adequate, technologically advanced but entirely functional, people moving vehicles that people wanted to own, liked to drive, and loved to talk about. Sure, there are some doubts that switching cars from burning fuel to running batteries charged by burning other fuels, but those concerns could be handled easily if we, as a country, if not as a global society, stopped looking backward and dragging our heels today and looking forward with fear and trepidation, and embraced new and promising technologies for what they could do to get us from always needing to burn things to get what we want.

To oversimplify a related issue, new nuclear power plants could generate a whole lot more, relatively clean and considerably safe, electricity, but they happen to produce some by-products that could be devastatingly useless (read: dangerous and deadly) if they fell into the wrong hands. Fear of terrorism isn't the only thing keeping American reactor technology in the 70s, but from what I've heard, it's one major contributing factor.

Back to the cars, though. It's easy to follow the filmmakers when they point out that barely a month passed between GM's acquisition of the Hummer nameplate, and the shutdown of the EV1's assembly line. Hummers could, and did, make money for GM hand over fist, and they weren't the only oversized peoplemovers on the road, just the most ridiculous. It should be telling that the suburban SUV is an American cliche, this being the land of selfish demand and greed. It's easy to follow their implication that the auto companies wanted nothing to do with the electric cars because it would shut down the whole regular maintenance and repairs and replacement part revenue streams. That there partially explains why so much more support has been thrown behind hydrogen fuel cell cars (untested and as-yet-unavailable technology) and gas-electric hybrids (the benefits of an electric motor along with the regular maintenance of a gas one too!) instead of all-electric ones.

Anyway, I'm losing steam quickly. My rage and sadness are subsiding, somewhat. It's easy to see this whole thing in the same light as the current economic crisis, brought about by unchecked and rampant greed in the housing and mortgage industries. It's all about greed. I'd say I'm all for capitalism, but honestly, if there's a better way to make a better future than sheer profit motive alone, that'd be super. If there's a way to stay in business, and satisfy shareholders, while doing something innovative that can lead some real change (like, say, creating a fleet of working electric cars and pickups and actually letting normal people drive and buy them), companies should want to do it. Even if it means they take a hit on their bottom lines for a while. Hell, right now everybody's taking a hit anyway, and for doing business as usual, not from worthwhile research and trailblazing new technologies.

If I were in charge, I know which I'd want to make a case to do, but then again, I'm not in charge.

I have a daughter, and I'm likely not finished having kids, either (as scary as that thought may be, for you and for me) and I should not, cannot, must not act now without every thought of the consequences to the world I'll leave them. Hell, if I do no better than both of my grandfathers, I've still got sixty years of living here too.

* I'm of divided mind as to what to do with the only other unpublished post I even got around to creating in draft form. Most likely I'll publish and date it that day, instead of backdating it as I had many a time before. And at the rate I'm going, I'll be doing that around Independence day. Hopefully sooner.

This was meant to be a list of accomplishments, but somewhere along the line I got sidetracked*

In 2008, I

• survived a tax audit (well, it was only the city, and they told me I didn't need to make up the difference. I already figured out how much it was and how I'd missed it when I got there).
• stopped playing MMOs, again.
• watched ten Bollywood movies - fifty fewer than 2007. Maybe I got a little burnt out on them after all.

* I'm publishing this in March in an effort to clear up old unpublished material. Why not, I figure, fix up the stuff I started writing and abandoned, rather than trying to create new material from scratch?

1. A pillow
2. A flashlight
3. A chair
4. Firewood and/or kindling
5. Another pillow*

* Seriously, I went camping and didn't take any pillows.Or flashlights, chairs, or firewood. I've heard campers aren't really supposed to bring their own firewood anyway, but the pillows and flashlight would've been handy. Also, my 8' x 6' was supposedly able to fit three sleeping people. For that matter, it's only supposedly 8' wide - it seemed much smaller inside than that.

Two and a half months ago I started a new job. I work in a skyscraper downtown, and I was rather a bit surprised to find that any ascending or descending more than one or two floors' worth of stairs got me out of breath*.

That came as a bit of a shock, as I had never been that badly out of shape. I haven't been working physically-demanding jobs for a while, but even then I hadn't realized I'd let myself go that much. Either I hadn't noticed, or during my months of unemployment and contract work I'd atrophied considerably.

So I decided to do something about it. After a month (I didn't say I decided quickly) I started getting back on my treadmill every night I could. Since then I've burned over 11,000 calories and walked almost 60 miles, which would just about get me to Zanesville or so. My goal is to keep at it at least every other night, and better yet, every night. I've only skipped a few, but tonight's going to be one of them as right now Natalya's resting peacefully on my lap and shoulder. If I set her down, she screams. I'm hoping this is a one-night thing.

Anyway, I'm not posting this to complain about her. I'm trying to guilt myself into making sure that every night when I don't have that good of an excuse not to do it, that I get back on that treadmill. I've recently raised my average mileage (of course to keep myself interested I'm tracking all of this on a spreadsheet) and it would be a tremendous disservice to me to quit with such great momentum.

At least now I can take the stairs without taking a breather in between floors. And that's a pretty good start.

* Another surprise was that the stairwell door of the floor about five below mine that has the nearest convenience shop and snack bar is locked. Fortunately for me, just as I was discovering this, somebody came through the door into the stairwell.