{"id":831,"date":"2009-12-06T15:06:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-06T15:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/?p=831"},"modified":"2009-12-06T15:06:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-06T15:06:00","slug":"twilight-at-blockbuster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/?p=831","title":{"rendered":"Twilight at Blockbuster"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this year, I&#8217;d gotten a payment for a job, and I thought I&#8217;d buy myself some DVDs I&#8217;d wanted for a long time. This wouldn&#8217;t be a wholly frivolous purchase because almost all of them were titles I have on crappy VHS tapes and use at regular intervals for cycling\/workout videos. I made a list and starting filling up a &#8220;shopping carts&#8221; on Columbia House and Amazon&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and at the very last minute, my Saturnian conscience kicked in and whispered, &#8220;No. You should use this money to buy the projector for your presentations, because that&#8217;s a professional need.&#8221; So I cancelled the DVD orders and bought the projector. I&#8217;m sure Columbia House and Amazon were very disappointed, and I brooded over the woes of a tight budget and obsessive-compulsive frugality.<\/p>\n<p>But I have a hard time passing up a bargain. I made out like a bandit when the video store down the street closed and sold all its stock, as sorry as I was to see that store go out of business. So, when I went up to Nashua on Friday and saw signs that the Blockbuster by Royal Ridge shopping center was closing, and everything was on sale at huge discounts&#8211;even the shelves, furniture and equipment&#8211;I had to check it out.<\/p>\n<p>The shelves were still almost full, I think the sale had just started. I went around looking for vampire films for my collection, mostly, as well as the very few other movies I wanted on DVD (I have two main criteria for owning films: I can work out to them, or they go into one of my collections, vampire or Johnny Depp. There are exceptions to this but they&#8217;re rare). They didn&#8217;t have <em>Sweeney Todd,<\/em> which I hated but need for the JD collection (I just hate to have to <em>pay<\/em> for it, *grump*). I was surprised, however, to spot one copy of <em>Pirates of the Caribbean: At World&#8217;s End<\/em> and nabbed that. I picked up a bunch of vampire films (cleaned them right out of bloodsucking movies, actually! \ud83d\ude42 ) Some crappy ones I bought &#8220;for reference,&#8221; but also <em>Shadow of the Vampire<\/em> (I only have it on VHS), <em>Let the Right One In, Perfect Creature<\/em> and <em>Day Watch.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>But of course, the one vampire movie I was <em>really<\/em> looking for was <em>Twilight<\/em>, and I didn&#8217;t expect to find it. I figured that the second the word went out about the big fire sale, there was a stampede to snatch up all the copies of <em>Twilight<\/em>. I looked, very carefully, on every shelf in every section, but no <em>Twilight<\/em>, not even among the &#8220;new&#8221; (as opposed to &#8220;pre-viewed&#8221;) DVDs. I did find the first <em>Underworld<\/em> movie &#8220;new,&#8221; which has proven tricky to get, and I was pleased to get that&#8211;also discounted.<\/p>\n<p>Then, I went up to the cashier to check out, and&#8230;sitting in a single-title display box on the counter, in front of the cash register, all by itself, was&#8230;<em>one<\/em> copy of <em>Twilight<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I think there was a sonic boom, I moved that fast. Edward couldn&#8217;t have gotten it first. *g*<\/p>\n<p>So I dropped some money I shouldn&#8217;t have, but I got great deals, and hey&#8211;I did my workout last night to <em>Pirates of the Caribbean: At World&#8217;s End<\/em>. New movies always give me a boost. It&#8217;s&#8230;a health maintenance investment! That&#8217;s right, yeah&#8211;preventive health care or business reference expense. That&#8217;s my story and I&#8217;m sticking to it. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this year, I&#8217;d gotten a payment for a job, and I thought I&#8217;d buy myself some DVDs I&#8217;d wanted for a long time. This wouldn&#8217;t be a wholly frivolous purchase because almost all of them were titles I have &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/?p=831\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vyrdolak.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}