DAGNABBIT!!!! (spring '07)

I can only entitle this series of essays DAGNABBIT!!!! (with 4 - count 'em -FOUR - exclamation points) because I can't emphasize enough how much I get hacked off about certain things:

this spring it's Blu-Ray disc.

yes, BLU-RAY.

Not that I have anything against technology, mind you, not personally, but what I really prefer above anything is my collection - yes, my collection of stuff.

When I was a young man I had a collection of 78's - and those were slowly phased out by LP's, but that was OK, because LP's had cool music and I was able to make the shift over the span of a couple of decades.

Then cassettes came out, which actually didn't push out LP's but basically allowed me to play them in the car - so I generally had a collection of music that I listened to in the house and if I liked it well enough for travel purposes I would have the equivalent in the car. (and no, I pretty much bypassed 8tracks because they were clunky - dang! were they clunky!)

So, then CD's came along and I was faced with having to upgrade my ENTIRE music collection. That took me a decade or two, but I finally was forced to! (and now technology has moved to where you don't even NEED a physical source for your music - fairly cool, but it means no collection to touch, which is deeply sad on some level)

About the same time as CD's became prevalent, then came BETA and VHS, and movies were made for both - I thought that was cool - BETA had a better look but VHS were more accessible (and no, I never got into laserdiscs - they were like the video equivalent of 8 tracks - clunk-eeee!!))

Eventually VHS beat out BETA, which shows you how much marketing wins out over quality, and is another aspect of the pleebs wanting variety of choice rather than a solid product, but hey, what can you do?

So I made over the next decade and a half a nice little video collection.

Then DVD's come along and I was pulled kicking and screaming into the 21st Century! When I finally embraced DVD's I thought they were a great format and I couldn't believe that I ever even watched VHS - in fact, all my VHS suddenly became warbly and broke - did they have an actual lifespa, or did they commit suicide over being so depressed about being phased out? Who knows?

So, I have spent the last two years re-building my video collection on DVD

Now

BLU-FREAKING-RAY!!!!

It came out, and now everything is coming out on both DVD AND BLU-RAY, and by all accounts Blu-ray has something like 8 million times the storage capacity of DVD

but so what

WHAT ABOUT MY COLLECTION!!!

I am sick and tired of having to constantly update my entertainment collection to satisfy the technology used to support it. All I want is one good solid dependable technology and let me have something that I can consider permanent!

What now? Is it going to happen that by June this year all my DVD's will be obsolete, and I'll have to update everything to Blu-Ray? And if I break down and do that, what will I have to upgrade to NEXT year? Alpha-Ray?

Gamma-VID?

DNA-proton-strands?

It's insidious and it drives me insane. That's why I say DAGNABBIT!!

Plus - they haven't yet released Mediterraneo on DVD, and I was waiting for that, because that would have completed my collection! You see, I can't upgrade until it's completed!!

Oh Lord, where's the humanity??!!!



Oh, well, if you're going to do it, at the very least, make the darn things affordable, OK?


VG

One Quiet Night

Listening to the CD by Pat Metheny, the music steeped auburn-tinted and teabagged just like the CD cover itself, the tapping of strings are raindrops on the asphalt just outside the glass window of the café - the Zen and Tao Acoustic Café, where I'm having a cup of

real

coffee, and by real I mean strong and almost bitter without quite being so, and I'm sitting here with nothing but my penny-thoughts and my ears wide open,

listening to the guitar - that magical Matheny guitar.

Wishing that I could give a copy of the this CD to my Dad. He'd've liked it.