Update #6

When the road of life gets paved in yellow stones and you see a motley crew coming towards you, ditch Toto, he's useless...

Movies
As many of you know, I am now an official card carrying member of the local chapter of the International Foreign Film Fanatics fan club. After going to the Miami International Film Festival last year (We're going this year again...feel free to join us) I found out that in many cases foreign films are much better than the standard Hollywood stuff.

My two favorite movies of the film festival were 'Kontroll' & 'Old Boy'. I liked Kontroll so much that I found a Hungarian website that sold the movie. I bought it online. 2 months later, I get an email telling me that they had been out of stock but would be sending my movie that day. 2 month later, I get another email telling me the movie was returned because they didn't have the zip code. I sent the lady my full address and I took the opportunity to ask her what regional encoding the DVD had. What's that? You don't know what encoding is? Region codes are DVD's Little Dirty Secret.

Well, she told me that the DVD was region code 0, which meant it could be played in any country. Well, what she actually wrote was that it was a Region 0, PAL DVD disc. I was planning to get the DVD and play one of my favorite movies, I saw nothing wrong with that but that....HAHAHAHAHAHA.....my plan had a little flaw.

You guys remember the metric system? C'mon now, remember that strange measurement system that is extremely logical, based on the number 10 and which THE ENTIRE WORLD USES except the USA & Britain? Yeah, well we like to be different. The DVD format that the entire world uses is PAL and the USA is the only place that uses NTSC format. Of course, both formats are incompatible. Lucky me.

Now I have this excellent movie that I can't watch on my DVD player, I just get a disk error message. I did some research on the web and you can convert PAL to NTSC on your PC but it takes about 4 days of PC processing time and the quality is not good. Then I found places on the Net that will do it for a fee, only $14...for non-commercial, non-copyrighted movies.
Then I found a guy that would do it BUT he also said he would charge me $1 for each minute of the movie. Now, it's an EXCELLENT movie but not THAT great. What on Earth am I going to do?

As luck would have it, while Jeanne was in the hospital, she made friends with her roommate and her son (not the gallbladder lady, the other one..see previous update for details). The son works in video production. My savior! I gave the guy the DVD and he put it in his PAL to NTSC converter but no matter what he tried, the copyright protection prevented the conversion. Now what???

Jeanne and I went to Best Buy to look for printers and while we were there we decided to ask if they, by any chance, sold a DVD player that would play both PAL & NTSC. I had seen these on the web but they ran about $150 so I wasn't that happy about spending that kind of cash for another DVD player. The Best Buy dude shows us a box that's about one square foot and he says this DVD plays both NTSC & PAL. I was impressed by the tiny size. The thing is about 1/3 the size of my current DVD player. I as him how much, and he says.....you ready for this???? He says...$40!!! That's it?!?! Yup. $40.

I debated coming back for it but what the Hell, it's only $40. I grabbed a box and brought it home. It took about 25 seconds to hook up and I put the DVD into it. A few seconds later the movie played!!! Jeanne and I watched the movie the very next day. What an awesome flick!

So there you have it, a $40 solution to the evil, profit mongering, standards flaunting, corporate greed machine, that is trying to squeeze every single penny out of the working man!!! SCREW YOU!!! I GOT MY MOVIE!!! WRITHE IN AGONY AS YOU SEE MY HARD EARNED $ GO TO SOMEONE ELSE!!!!

Shopping
I made yet another shopping trip to try and stock my refrigerator. Yes, it is still empty. I just can't seem to buy enough food (that I can cook) in order to fill the fridge. But here's what I have so far!


As I was shopping, I noticed a few things that maybe a few of you could clear up. First, do I really need to freeze any meat that I buy? Can I just put it in the refrigerator or MUST it go into the freezer? I say this because I saw that all the supermarkets have the meat in the wanna be freezer aisle but they really aren't frozen. They're just sort of cool. If the supermarket doesn't freeze them, why should I?

I also heard a rumor that when you freeze chicken, you need to wrap it in paper before wrapping it in aluminum foil. Is this correct? Does chicken need to wrapped? It seems to me that the paper may just be an urban legend but I bow to others that know more about communicable food borne illnesses.

OK, so I haven't died of starvation yet so I must be eating something! I am making progress though, I admit. Even though my dishes tend to be very very very simple, I continue to make small improvements. Here, at long last, is the moment you have all been waiting for. Finally, I have made a dinner that can be shared with the rest of the world! I humbly present to you...Wednesday, June 23, 2005's dinner!!!!

(Meat & mashed potatoes, if you couldn't tell)

Oh yeah, how long can you keep mashed potatoes in the fridge? Do you have to freeze them first? Lately, I have been lazy and have been having cereal for dinner...sad but ohh so true...