Bob's Angry Rants

I just had the most frustrating argument with Martha about DVDs. She is convinced that the DVD format holds less information than VHS tapes because it crops the top and bottom of the image. I tried to explain to her that firstly, the widescreen format is not something that is necessarily inherent to DVDs and secondly, that she was actually seeing more of the image than she had previously in full screen. This concept was apparently incomprehensible to her. She is convinced that there are wild and crazy things happening under those two black bars. I can understand not liking widescreen, but I never thought that it would be so hard just to explain the concept of widescreen.

Also, apparently, Martha often cannot get DVDs to play in her player. It seems that the remote is too complicated for her and she can spend up to an hour trying to get the DVD to play. She has even returned DVDs to the rental store without watching them after giving up on trying to get them to wok.

Why, might you ask, does she own a DVD player at all? It is because she is convinced that VHS tapes will cease to be produced in a year or less, due to some sort of international video media conspiracy. When I told her that I thought that she was being a little paranoid, she told me that I was "so naive." So she now buys movies on VHS whenever she can for fear that they won't be available 12 months down the line.

I suggested that even if VHS tapes were, in fact, all yanked from the shelves, she could probably still get them on eBay. There were two problems with this proposition: 1) She wasn't really sure what eBay was, and 2) once she did understand she told me that she figured that it was some sort of scam. To Martha, anything originating on the internet is probably some sort of scam.

eBay? Scam. Amazon? Scam. MapQuest? Scam. Usenet? She didn't know what it was, but it was probably a scam. I've already discussed her views of e-mail. I just don't understand how this woman can function in modern society.

Maybe if I leave a Palm Pilot on her chair, she'll have a panic attack and go into cardiac arrest and I won't have to have these conversations anymore.