============= MARK MORFORD'S NOTES & ERRATA =============

[madokie]

SFGate.com - Friday, March 2, 2007

== Sweet DVD Players In Hell =
Watch in horror as one columnist gets sucked into the high-def gizmo vortex, dies screaming
(By Mark Morford)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2007/03/02/notes030207.DTL&nl=fix

This much I remember clearly: "Howl's Moving Castle" is one truly astonishing, beautiful piece of anime filmmaking, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. The rest of this tale is, shall we say, a bit of a frightening blur.

Here's how it went down: Miyazaki's finest was innocently playing on my aging Toshiba DVD player just the other night, when suddenly the device appeared to receive some sort of final instructions from the gods of throwaway technology and the disc began to skip and the little laser began to jump and the machine hissed and spit and screamed and abruptly froze for good, committing some sort of gizmo suicide and leaving me staring at a blank screen just as the ending credits were beginning to roll.

It was, I now realize, a sign. It was a moment of reckoning, the Thing That Changes Everything. And lo, it was expensive.

I acted quickly. I did the right thing. Like any good American, I immediately went online to research reviews and prices of new DVD players -- which is, I now realize, a bit like saying I was looking into getting a nice rotary telephone for the den, because apparently they don't actually make DVD players anymore, not really, not if you know anything about recent advances in the silly overwhelming universe that is home theater A/V gizmology, which I sort of don't but like to think I do and which, not ironically, is almost exactly what being a columnist is all about. Shhh. ...

Read the rest:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2007/03/02/notes030207.DTL&nl=fix