NetFlixFax

Taking advantage of the two-week-free-trial opportunity at Net Flix, I recently became a joiner. Now, for 1/3 the cost of cable or less (which I'm banned from watching until I graduate. HURRY HURRY!!!), I can watch as many movies as I want in a month-- two at a time. How about THEM there facts?! (err-- fax, excuse me.) Oh, and they don't sell your personal info as such, but they do collect marketing data on you, and then use it to select ads from their 3-rd party vendors to include in your DVD envelopes. Trixy we are, my Precious. (Did I just say that? Oh, dear. The sky must be falling. Either that, or it's Monday.)

See... I came to the realization that I was watching a movie several nights a week, to give my brain time to rest, drain out all the academic goo, and reset itself. But, see, it gets expensive to keep BUYING DVDs when you get sick of the ones you own... and students just don't have spare change in the form of two or three $10 bills a week... and even though I am one of those odd individuals who LOVES watching the same movie over and over again... I am SICK S-I-C-K SICK of watching the movies in my collection. I mean, really, how many times can you watch "Down Periscope" before you start singing along with the songs and fastforwarding between punchlines? It was sad. S-A-D sad.

And, you know, NetFlix claims they have over 72,000 movies! That's a lot of movies. Granted, I probably don't want to watch a good 2/3 of them... and I might own about 30 of what's left... but that still leaves a lot of ground for me to cover (repeatedly) between now and graduation. I don't know about you, but I just cannot face driving to work (1 hour) working for 10 hours, driving home (1 hour) and then actually DOING anything else that day. Except, maybe, make a bowl of popcorn and pop in a movie. So that's what I do.

And, after much exploration, I have a whole 25 movie titles in my cart... which reminds me that I forgot to sign up for the movie that's been taunting me for months now, and is one of the main reasons that I finally gave in to social joinery and signed up for NetFlix. The Mummy Returns, here I come, baby! OOH-- and maybe they'll have the sequel to The Librarian! (action adventure, along the lines of Indianna Jones) One can only hope. Since I got several good laughs out of some of the titles I stumbled across in my online travels, I thought I'd pass a few of them on to you. These are all true. I swear. Although I may have misspelled "felafle."

The Watermelon
The Kiss of Debt
He Died With a Felafl In His Hand
Osmosis Jones
Smiling Fish and Goat On Fire
(I had no idea there were that many) Strawberry Shortcake Movies.
With Six You Get Eggroll
Totally Blonde
A Woman Her Men And Her Futon

Yes. I may have to rent the one about the Felafel's, just so I can tell you all not to see it.
And just so you know, I only looked through the Action-Drama, Comedy, and Family-Friendly sections so far. There was definitely a lot of overlap, somehow. I actually think I saw X-Men in all three categories, come to think of it. Having selected everything from Danny Kay's Court Jester to Disorganized Crime with Lou Diamond Phillips to Mary Poppins to Jet Li's latest... I think I confused the poor little "let me help you find more good titles" program, too. See, every time you add a movie to your que, a little helpful box appears that shows you a selection of six to eight other movies that you might like, based on your selections so far. After my first five picks, it just kept showing me the same three or four movies over and over, hoping maybe this time it was going to be right.
It wasn't.

Further bulletins as warranted.