Long Shrift

and the abyss stares back

I had been thinking about blu-ray players for a while. I'm not an A/V geek: my idea of surround sound is when the radios in the kitchen and the bathroom are tuned to the same station. On a typical weeknight, we've got a couple hours of couch time after getting the boy off to bed, and we seem to spend much of that time catching up on the dozen or so TV shows we watch regularly.

The cable bill pushed me over the edge - specifically, the $14/month we were paying for HBO. Why, I don't know. It seems like everybody else gave up on HBO after The Sopranos ended. We got into a couple of their shows, like Carnivale and John from Cincinnati, only to see them cancelled, and now Entourage is coming to an end. It's rare that we have both the time and the energy to commit two hours to watching a movie, but if we do, we can be pretty confident that HBO is showing Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead.

An Internet-enabled blu-ray player would allow us to stream movies and TV from Netflix, Hulu, and so on. A $9 Netflix subscription would get us streaming movies and 2 DVD's a month. We could watch the last few episodes of Entourage for $1.39 each on Hulu. Far more content, and likely a few dollars less than we were already paying.

For us, the decision came down to wired or wireless. We went with wired, since the player and the our cable modem/router aren't far apart, and aren't likely to get moved around. Both are on the ground floor, so all I had to do was run an Ethernet cable across the basement. And a wired connection will generally offer a better connection than wireless anyway.

Some advice: Order the ethernet cable from Monoprice.com. A 30-foot cable will set you back about $5. Then, after you realize that 30 feet isn't quite long enough, go back and buy a 50-foot cable for about $7. While you're at it, pick up the HDMI cable you'll need to connect the player to your TV, which will set you back another $5.

And don't be taken in by ridiculously expensive Monster cables. If you're determined to spend a lot of money, just order the inexpensive cables from Monoprice, then pay for the Super Shipping option, where Heidi Klum and Padma Lakshmi hand-deliver the cables to your door, then make out in front of you.

As it turned out, a friend had won a Sony blu-ray player in a raffle and had no use for it. It was highly rated on Amazon and elsewhere, so I took it off his hands. Hooked it up, and within minutes it was connected to the Internet. The first thing I did was bring up YouTube and play 'Darthmatic Chipmunk' a few times. (Sony has an app that allows you to use your smart phone as a remote, which is very handy, and far less painful than keying in "d-a-r-t-h-m-a-t-i-c" via the number keys on the blu-ray remote.)

We had arrived.

I spent some time playing around with the controls, streaming some music, poking around with the offerings from Netflix, Hulu Plus and Sony's own service, Qriosity. (In related news, the English language has now officially run out of words.) If we get the snow day we're expecting, I imagine I'll order a movie. Or maybe I'll put some effort into fine-tuning my Pandora channel.

When I have time.

tooth in advertising

We had just put our Quinn to bed and settled down on the couch, and now he was calling. My wife went up to see what was the matter, and came down a couple of minutes later. He had lost his first tooth a few days ago, and now he was wiggling a second. My wife said he was asking for me.

I went to the junk drawer and pulled out a pair of pliers. Suddenly, my wife called me from the living room. She sounded anxious. I stood in the doorway, pliers in hand.

"What on earth are you doing?"

"He wanted some help with his loose tooth, right?"

"What is wrong with you?"

"I was trying to be funny." I paused. "Wait, you actually thought I was going to yank out his tooth?"

"I was thinking of your dad."

Which was not unreasonable. My dad is practical in the old country way, which is considered batshit insane in the modern way. I have seen my dad nearly cut his thumb off, shrug, finish what he was doing, and then go looking for something to use as a tourniquet. It would not be inconceivable that my dad would have gone to his toolbox before starting some dental work. My dad, however, would've considered the size of a 6-year-old's tooth and selected needle-nose pliers.

In this way, at least, I am not my father. I rolled my eyes and headed upstairs.

"So you've got a loose tooth?"

"Yes. Why do you have pliers?"

"I was trying to be funny."

"Oh."

bin and truly gone

As I mentioned a few posts back, the city suggested that we part with our extra garbage cart. I called them between Christmas and New Year's, thinking they'd pick it up, oh, never. Meanwhile, we've had several snowfalls, so garbage collection got pushed back. Meanwhile, our recycling bin is full, and we've taken to piling paper, bottles and cans in the garage.

And yet, a couple of days ago, the extra cart disappeared. You can see where it once stood, a dry square of asphalt surrounded by packed snow. I have to believe that aliens abducted the cart, because I'd have to think that city employees would have taken the far more valuable recycling materials in the next bin.

Perhaps some municipal employees have trouble figuring out their priorities, a task which citizens aren't making any easier. I suspected as much when I read about SeeClickFix, an app for reporting problems to government authorities. See a pothole? Take a picture, write a description, and the photo - including GPS coordinates - goes to, well, somebody, maybe. I downloaded the app, and went to look for issues that had been reported in my neighborhood. For example...

Issue #29829 - 794 is going to fall down - complained that a local parkway was basically a crazy quilt of patched potholes. Sure, someone will get right on that.

Issue #48294 - neibor burning building materials almost every eve - "neibor has been burning wood and other material that he has been removeing from the interior.smoke smells like burning house,when confronted he became threatening,yelling in my face."What the hell are you thinking? Obviously, what you should do is go back inside and download the Milwaukee Police Department app.

Most of the other complaints were from people who were asking for stop signs. One person groused about how people routinely use an onramp curb lane as a way to get onto the aforementioned 794. I'm one of those people, so I was tempted to comment, but I decided to let it go.