Dispatches : 2000

21 October 2000

The LEGO® Technic 8458 Silver Champion arrived Tuesday. Coincidentally, I had scheduled 5 hours of annual leave for Wednesday. With 1413 pieces (and very few left over at the conclusion including—yea! a steering wheel for my blue 8448!) it took me every one of those 5 hours to complete the instructions for assembly. I must be catching up with the pace of technological innovation at LEGO®, there were not as many new pieces as I might have expected. There are new shock absorbers, in yellow, with much stiffer springs.

03 October 2000

I took a small chance earlier this week and purchased the Star Trek the original series Volume 14 Episodes 27 & 28 DVD. I watched the Errand of Mercy episode today. I am really tired of a fawning video press ignoring the 22 year history of releases on laserdisc when gushing about DVD titles. Yes, the soundtrack is marginally adapted to allow its labeling as Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround which the hopelessly monophonic, analog FM, CX-encoded sound of the laserdisc cannot hope to match. But I found little difference in the color fidelity or detail—the same hairs are visible sticking from the actors’ heads.

16 September 2000

If ever I had the chance, it seems to be gone now. The last domestic release of a laserdisc, as judged by the editor of The DVD Laser Disc Newsletter, was on 18 April 2000 with End of Days. However, I have been able to obtain a release from 2 weeks earlier, The Bone Collector. How bad can it be? The jacket has photographs of both Angelina Jolie and a Genesis locomotive in what looks like Northeast Direct livery. There’s a blue NYPD cruiser, too! (The cruisers are white now, by the way. I hope this anachronism in police car livery does not bother me as much as it did during The Professional.) I am a sucker for movies filmed in New York City. We’ll see if this one qualifies. American Psycho did not. UPDATED! The Bone Collector offers just enough landmarks to offset the credit for Toronto at the end. The film happens, actually, to straddle the change in cruiser scheme for the NYPD, as one of the white cruisers is seen. The film itself is extraordinarily gruesome if it is supposed to be a romance between the paralyzed forensics expert (Washington) and the disillusioned rookie cop (Jolie).

04 September 2000

I could not resist the Star Trek Deep Space Nine Companion [ISBN 0-671-50106-2] last month. (I had passed up the Star Trek Deep Space Nine Technical Manual a few years ago). I have been slowly reading the plot descriptions and production anecdotes and re-visiting the laserdiscs and videotapes of certain episodes. When I was watching the series, I was suspicious that the war with the Dominion and the multiple episode arcs were a response to the popularity of Babylon Five. I found no evidence for that theory in this book. Big surprise! Babylon Five is mentioned only with respect to the many failures of DS9 to receive an Emmy, and the casting of Bill Mumy in Episode #558. There is no index!

Entries subject to editing at any time. Last edited on: 12-Jan-2008