It's a Blue Ball

Oh, I thought I was so clever. My husband and I discussed only getting each other one gift for Christmas. He talks to friends on the way home from work every day so I got a him a Bluetooth headset. However, when I told him I had only gotten him one gift he gave me The Lip. You know, The Pouty Lip. I guess he didn't have the same "one gift" discussion I did. So I asked a girlfriend's husband what he thought I should get him. Without delay he replied "A high-definition DVD player." Easy enough.

I am not the kind of person to buy something without doing research. It was not as easy as I thought. High-defintion DVD players come in two types, HD and Blu-ray. HD DVDs won't play on Blu-ray players and vice-versa, although "old" DVDs will play on either. Evidently, the way it works is that movie studios only make one format or another (makes no sense to me, wouldn't they want to sell more movies?) It's like the old Beta vs VHS debate of the 80s. What most people don't know (and I didn't either) is that Betamax actually had better technology. But for some reason the movie studios went with VHS, and you know the rest of the story. The experts predict, however, that neither HD or Blu-ray will go by wayside, so what it boils down to is which movie studios you watch the most, as if we know or care. George Lucas has not decided. However, as the boy at the store told me, Disney has committed to Blu-ray. Sold.

Christmas morning came around and we were opening gifts. Mark was surprised and pleased, but not as surprised and pleased as I had hoped. However, he immediately hooked up the DVD player. We stood there and looked at it. It was lovely.

"Do we have any high-definiton discs?" Mark asked.

"I think the Transformers movie Santa got for Charlie is Blu-ray," I replied, picking up the box and reading. "Nope, HD." We stood there and looked at the DVD player. It was lovely.

"What shall we watch then?" Mark asked.

Charlie chimed in "A Christmas Story, we always watch that on Christmas."

"Right, I said, I'll go get it, at least we'll be able to watch something on the new DVD player."

I went downstairs and rummaged through the boxes of DVDs. We have most discs in the DVD folder upstairs, but not the Christmas ones. Wait, I take that back. We have The Year Without a Santa Clause up there (you know, the one with Miser Brothers) because the boys watched it endlessly this summer. Anyway, rummaging through the DVD boxes, I could not find it. But there, back in the corner, way way back in the corner, I saw two things. I pulled them out. There it was... in my hand I held A Christmas Story on VHS.

We have not had a VHS player upstairs in about 18 months when we got our LCD high-definition television. We still had the player, though, and I blew off the dust and scheppled the player and the movie upstairs. I plugged the player into the side of our TV (because it is so user friendly) and we enjoyed A Christmas Story in super-low-definition. Yes, that's right. The first movie we watched after Mark got his lovely high-definition DVD player was on VHS.