malvasia bianca

When talking about the new DVD/DVR, I forgot to mention one advance: improvements in random access. DVDs aren’t better than video tapes just because they look better: they’re better because you don’t have to rewind them, you can jump to any scene (once you get past the annoying ads at the beginning), because they look good when paused. Similarly, this DVR is better than a VCR because you can delete shows in any order, and because it has buttons to let you jump forward or backwards by 30 seconds, making it easy to skip commercials. We pretty much never use the fast forward / rewind buttons on it.

Having said that, improvements are possible. For example, when browsing through the saved programs, it gives you 5 different options for sorting them, but none of them are what we want, namely reverse chronological order. (I have a hard time believing that wanting to watch the oldest shows first makes us some sort of freaks.) Also, they divided the saved shows up into screens, but there’s no way to scroll a page at a time instead of a screen at a time.

We went to Top Hat last week. Very good: quite similar to The Gay Divorcee, but everything about it is a little better. More songs, better songs, better dance sequences, the plot makes a bit more sense, and I really like the wife of Edward Everett Horton’s character. (Played by Helen Broderick, apparently; never heard of her.)

I’m very glad the Yankees signed Jaret Wright for too much money (not that money matters to the Yankees). Last year was obviously a combination of fluke / Leo Mazzone; that deal’s going to look pretty stupid six months from now, never mind three years from now.