give the 'net credit

I’m going to try to keep it short today because it’s my 38th birthday, and my wife and I have a date with a bunch of Survivor episodes my wife and I missed. I had a good day. I sneaked a couple of Wendy’s cheeseburgers and Pepsis into Avatar and watched it without the distraction of children. This leads me to my first rant …

Movie food policies: I know the rationale movie theaters give for prohibiting outside food, but I still don’t agree with it. For a movie that clocks in at nearly three hours with previews and starts at 4 p.m. I need a bit more sustenance than popcorn, nachos or Sour Patch Kids. Besides, they’re way too expensive at the theater, and don’t give me that line about how concessions subsidizes the price of the movie. I paid $8 for a matinee. There’s a theater close in Nelsonville I need to try because all first-run movies are $4 and all concessions are $1. That makes sense to me. I also can’t wait for my next visit to Salt Lake City where I can attend Jordan Commons and actually have a meal with my movie for the same price as the mall food court.

DVRs and commercials: Maybe I complain about the movies because we don’t go a lot now that we have DirecTV and a DVR. Don’t get me started on DirecTV and its horrible customer service. We still have a bunch of channels that we pay for and don’t come in, but it will cost us $50 to have the same knucklehead who didn’t install it correctly in the first place come out and fix it. I’m looking into signal boosters on eBay. But this rant is really about DVRs. Don’t get me wrong. I love having one, but I don’t think I’m watching fewer commercials now that I have one. In fact, I think I watch more because often an image will catch my eye while I’m fast forwarding and I’ll stop, back up and watch it. It reminds me of a friend I had in St. George that in the pre-DVR days avidly videotaped TV shows. He didn’t worry about editing out the commercials. He actually cataloged the ones he liked. I guess I do the same on the DVR. Our favorite lately is the one with the dad installing the video camera to the big-screen TV and the crazy Target Black Friday lady.

SEO: Maybe linking to commercials will get me some hits. It seemed to help when I mentioned HuHot, even in passing. Check out the comments on this post. It was gratifying to see that a business is online and checking what people say about it. It’s not that hard to set up a search. It was also nice to see someone had the same idea I had (even if they had it way before I did). I honestly did become a HuHot fan after reading that comment, and I noticed one of my Facebook friends did shortly thereafter. Coincidence?

Facebook Updates: That brings me to my final topic. I learned the Cardinal Rule of Facebook Status Updates about TV shows the hard way a couple of weeks ago. But I didn’t realize it was a cardinal rule until someone did it to me. I posted the Dancing with the Stars winner in a status update without remembering I’m in the Eastern Time Zone. Then on Monday, I read the winner of Survivor in a friend’s update. Ok, so he’s about the only one calling it a cardinal rule that I could find, but I think it’s one we should add to the common lists of Facebook etiquette: Don’t reveal TV show spoilers in status updates, especially in the age of the DVR. Your friends might be smuggling HuHot into the movies.

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