the museum is dead - long live the museum

 

 
click 'er for bigger

 With the arrival of BIG SCREEN teevee and full 5.1 home theater audio to the folks on the E'ville ranch, the space formerly known as The Museum is radically transformed into The Room. The furniture is rearranged so that the new gear is aligned along the interior stair wall. It's true that it sits opposite the three unit window, and prior to purchase I was concerned that glare from these windows would be a problem on the proposed plasma screen. Salesmen that they are, the guys at Stereotypes said "We've never had a problem." When it comes to glare on the screen, that is. All their plasmas in the shop are in windowless rooms. As it turns out, during the day glare is quite apparent, but not so bad that the screen becomes unuseable. Who is doing any serious viewing during the day anyway?

I think the teevee picture, as seen on one of these excellent plasma screens, has finally reached the quality of being able to compare the experience to watching film in a cinema. With this setup, I expect to be able to do some serious viewing. The 50 inch screen is actually big enough to read credits and even subtitles.

What's been seen so far, after a week? We're still getting used to the reality, but have sampled a variety of sources. The BluRay disc that came in the box with the player, Spiderman 3, is yet another lameo effects laden picture. For something really different, I tried out some Bad Cinema: XXX with Vin Diesel. This too was viewed in BD, and is not as high budget as Spidey, so the signal's not quite as good. I think I've been seeing this movie since Connery was doing Bond and Dean Martin did Matt Helms. With the attitude Diesel has at the beginning of the picture, why should he care at the end whether the entire population of Prague is poisoned?

Trying out a current release on standard DVD, the picture was still a phenomenally great cinematic experience. We watched Namesake, and travelled back and forth between the U. S. and India in Mira Nair's film about immigrants who never feel at home anywhere. There is much allusion to the Ukranian writer Nikolai Gogol (one of the main characters is named after Gogol by his father, and hence the title of the film), who I've never read. Probably time to pick up a book and do some fiction reading for a change.

With so much cinema to watch on a great system, who has time for books?