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So it turns out that the reason our DVD player- short of two years since we bought it- went bad is because of a part that costs less than a buck and can be replaced with a soldering iron. Fine, although it's a pain in the ass and we went out and bought a new one anyway. Here's the problem:

The company that makes the player KNOWS of this problem. It's COMMON. It happens ALL THE TIME. And they do NOTHING ABOUT IT.

Here's what happened- we dropped in a DVD and the sound suddenly went from normal to nonexistent. Turning up the TV volume all the way resulted in a whisper. After trying every possible menu option and tweak, and refitting the cables, and checking the switches, I went on the Net and discovered that putting the make and "no sound" in a Google search turned up a ton of entries that all said the same thing- it's a "known bug," it happens all the time, pop open the machine, find the C928 capacitor and pull it off the board, see if that works, and if it doesn't, pull the other two capacitors next to it off, too, and replace them all with a soldering iron.

Ah, I see. Simple.

You can still buy these models at the store. The manufacturer KNOWS they fail. They sell 'em anyway, no warning. Oh, and if you don't know about the fix and/or if you're not handy with a soldering iron or comfortable opening and working on electronic equipment, too bad- it's going to cost you more in service fees and parts to fix than a new one will cost.

This isn't just bad business, it's immoral.

But it's bad business indeed. As we plucked another brand off the shelf at the store, another family came up to us looking confused and asking if what we'd chosen was a good buy. "Yeah, it's a fair price and cheaper than most, and it's the price Sears is running as a sale right now," I explained, "but you don't want to buy that one over there," $20. more expensive but with a more well-regarded name. I told them about the sound glitch, only to see their eyes widen.

"That's what happened to US!" Same brand, same problem. And now, neither we nor they will ever buy that company's products again.

It doesn't have to be this way, except that it is the way the entire consumer electronics business transacts its commerce. Shoddy products sold without remorse, clueless salespeople, baiting-and-switching tolerated (I'd say encouraged, but I can't say that for certain), and products made impossible to just open, plug in, and use- what kind of business is that?

Take the whole HDTV thing, for example. Why, oh WHY can't you just go to the store, buy a high-def set, bring it home, plug it in, hook up the cable, and presto, HDTV? Because they DON'T WANT IT THAT WAY. Your new plasma wonder comes without a tuner, so there's a few hundred bucks extra right there. Cable doesn't offer much HDTV- Cox Cable here offers a handful of channels, sans most local channels, at $10./month for the programming plus $10./month rental of the tuner (mandatory)- and satellite doesn't have the bandwidth to deliver local digital channels, which, considering that I live in a spot where ZERO digital channels can be consistently received over the air, means I'm going to spend thousands on a set that won't be able to get more than about 6 or 7 channels of high definition for the foreseeable future.

Why do I have to spend a fortune and jump through hoops to get state-of-the-art TV? Why didn't the FCC foresee this and set standards and hard-and-fast drop-dead dates instead of the "flexible" deadlines we have now? Why can't I count on a DVD player to last more than 2 years, a computer to run trouble-free for more than 3 (don't tell me Apple does, I used to fix Macs for a living and I know better), a printer to run more than a year-and-a-half? Why, when I walked into a certain- I should say CCertain- retailer and asked when they expected to get the new Audiovox Sirius boombox (which they WILL carry and which IS arriving in other stores as we speak) did the salesman say "uh, um, I dunno, a year, maybe, I, uh, what?" and decline to look for it in the store's inventory list?

WHY DON'T THEY WANT TO TAKE MY MONEY AND GIVE ME WHAT I WANT?

Because they, like car mechanics and doctors, have us all where they want us. Most people don't know from capacitors and inventory and plasma and tuners. They're fully at the mercy of the "experts." And the "experts," for their part, are convinced that they can treat us like excrement and we'll take it and hand over our money and thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another? until we go away. They may be right, but all I'm saying is that there's a growing list of consumer electronics manufacturers and retailers that are on my never-patronize-again list, and I can't be alone. I'm an "educated consumer"- I can hook up my own equipment, I can open a piece of electronics and fix it myself, I know about bitrates and resolutions and OTA signals and capacitors and retail inventory better than the salespeople I run into at the place with the red shirts and the place with the blue shirts, and I'm exasperated. People who don't know all that- most people- have to be even more confused. It's time for all of us to tell our tormentors to stop the madness. I'm going to send a letter to the DVD maker, and the boom-boxless retailer, and anyone else who should know how unhappy I am. Am I wasting my time? Yes, if I'm the only one.

Don't let me be the only one. If you've encountered this kind of thing, it's time to tell someone. They won't care about one guy, or 10, but maybe, just maybe, if every unhappy consumer speaks up, things will change.

I can dream, anyway.

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At the end of a pretty bad day, this:

Tug McGraw, the zany relief pitcher who coined the phrase "You Gotta Believe" with the New York Mets and later closed out the Philadelphia Phillies' only World Series championship, died tonight. He was 59.

Damn.

It's perhaps no consolation to him or his family, but he'll live as long as those of us who are old enough and who were and are Phillies fans remember Willie Wilson at the plate and Tug throwing and then both hands thrust into the air as the entire city erupted in joy and relief.

And we do remember. Thanks, man.

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I visited the dentist today to find out why the left side of my mouth hurts. I found out.

Oh, boy, did I find out.

Let's see... wisdom teeth need to be yanked, and bone grafts have to go in. A crown needs replacing. Several fillings- I lost count- cracked and need to be replaced. There's infection, early periodontal disease, all sorts of stuff. Imagine if I DIDN'T floss and brush.

The dentist said it wasn't anything I could have avoided; a lot of it, he explained, was just the luck of genetics, the way my teeth grew in and the various spaces they have that no amount of flossing and brushing would have kept clean enough (even a hygenist, he said, would have missed much of it). As he said this, I could sense his thoughts: "hmm, that's another vacation home, and, ooh, that'll get me one of those Porsche SUVs. Thank you, Lord."

Yeah, this is gonna cost me, and it would be worse had I NOT sprung for the dental HMO, which will at least cover a lot of it. We're still looking at a lot of money and way, way too much pain in the offing, and it hasn't even started yet. Maybe it has- I distinctly felt a twinge in my heart when I heard the words "IF we can save some of the teeth" come out of his mouth.

And you wonder why people avoid going to the dentist.

Expect to read more about my impending doom as the drills and tooth-extraction contraptions and gum-cleaning gizmos come ever closer. In the meantime, I have to wait to hear what the insurance company is gonna cover and what my costs will be. If you hear a loud moan tomorrow afternoon, you'll know I got the news.

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My sister Joan's writing a blog/journal that's just getting started. Check her progress by clicking here. I'm to blame for the name.

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Exactly how does Dick Gregory going on a hunger strike prove Michael Jackson is innocent?

This kind of logic leap baffles me, but, then, hunger strikes do that as a matter of course. OK, now, explain this to me again- you go without food and I'm supposed to feel... what? How does your not eating affect me? You may die? Hey, that's your choice. Suit yourself.

Hunger strikes don't work as publicity tools, either. Take this one- so Dick Gregory's not eating to prove his friend Jacko's innocent. OK, I'm aware of the stunt, so is that effective publicity? Consider the result:

1. I still don't know whether Jacko's guilty.
2. The hunger strike didn't change my opinion.
3. After hearing of this stunt, I believe that Dick Gregory appears to be a delusional weirdo.
4. After hearing of this stunt, I believe that Michael Jackson appears to be a delusional weirdo.

If that's the net effect of a hunger strike, Dick Gregory might as well have taken a different angle on this- how about going on a 40 day eating binge for Jacko? 40 days of pizza and Krispy Kremes? Same effect, but at least you get to enjoy it. I like it. I may just try it, too. I think I'm going to go protest something right now. With fries.

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I don't want a new "Producers." The old one was good enough.

I don't want No Doubt's "It's My Life" when I can still get the nearly identical Talk Talk version. I didn't want a new "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," a new "Behind Blue Eyes," a remade "Coupling" cast with zombies. I may be alone in this, but I just don't want remakes.

Really. Look at "The Producers"- I loved the movie, enjoyed the musical, but do we need a movie of the musical? Is it necessary to diminish the memory of Zero Mostel by immortalizing the performance of Zero Lite, Nathan Lane? Is it really an improvement to see Matthew Broderick instead of Gene Wilder? No? So why do it?

Money. I know. But it sucks when you get an inferior version of a classic, and that inferior version supplants the original. I have no doubt that whether it's good or not, the new "Producers" will become the only one you'll see from then on out. The original will get relegated to the bargain bin, then gone, found only in collectors' catalogs, remembered only by old farts like me. And as the audience changes and new viewers replace old, there won't even be much recognition that there WAS an original.

This, of course, is how it always works. For all a 17 year old kid knows, Fred Durst wrote "Behind Blue Eyes," and the 'Saw was brand new in 2003. The remake IS the original for them. And they won't pay for the old ones- they're old!- but repackage it with Gwen Stefani in the role of Mark Hollis, and they'll buy it. It works, meaning that if you see Tobey Maguire as Rhett Butler or Pink as Holly Golightly, you ought not to be surprised.

Which leaves me in the sad old purist geek category. I'm the guy who always insists on the original, and I'm in a shrinking, sort of embarrassing group. But don't laugh. It's people like me who are the last line of defense against Ben Affleck as Don Corleone. You've been warned.

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The L.A. Times previewed an exhibit of anti-war art this morning. The show's called "Yo! What Happened to Peace?", a question that's fairly easy to answer- 9/11.

But the artists don't want to hear that. Here's the curator, a former Sony art director:

"What we're hoping to do is give a voice to the arts community," Carr says. "It's a very intelligent critique of what's going on, addressing issues like the weapons of self-destruction, obviously a fabrication. It's not just a band of idealists who aren't really connected with reality."

Yes, it's very intelligent, and there are no "weapons of self-destruction."

And then there's this:

Illustrator Yuri Shimojo was driving through Kenya when the war in Iraq began. "I look out the window and see people with no water, no food, no school to learn," she says. "Then I get to the hotel and see the war on BBC. It was like a fantasy game. What I thought about was greed and so much money being spent to kill people."

It's notable that her rage wasn't touched off by 9/11. 3,000 lives taken, 3,000 innocent people murdered, and that's not enough to move her.

Her poster was inspired by a black-and-white photograph of airplanes dropping bombs. Shimojo turned the planes into birds. Instead of dropping bombs, they were dropping what birds drop ... on a tank.

Ha ha. Geddit? Yes, "a very intelligent critique of what's going on," indeed. Great art often involves bird feces.

Colver's piece shows a sculpture he made from an old wooden movie marquee box, rounded on top. Beneath the words "now showing" is an old American flag. Beneath the words, "coming soon" is a swastika contained by iron bars.

Is it just me, or is the left completely unable to understand exactly what Nazism was all about? The trivialization of the Holocaust by tagging anyone they don't like with the "worse than Hitler" appellation is getting more than tiresome, it's offensive. And stupid, especially since there ARE people with Nazi-like tendencies out there, like the guy America happens to have overthrown. Funny how they're not concerned with people who actually ARE ethnic-cleansing, violent, murderous dictators.

Stuff like this has to be taken in perspective- it's preaching to the converted, people with set-in-stone ideas amusing each other. It happens on the right, too- "Mallard Fillmore," anyone?- and it's sort of pathetic. Among the artists featured in this exhibit is a guy named Robbie Conal, with whose work I'm very familiar. Conal's M.O. is to draw close-up portraits of his enemies- the President, Rumsfeld, Rice, the usual suspects- and add what can charitably be called a skin condition, and then post the results all over town and on a back page of the L.A. Weekly, where his "art" is celebrated as insightful, brilliant, revolutionary.

It's stupid. Really stupid. You draw a portrait- a poorly-drawn portrait- of someone you hate, and sketch zits all over him. Super genius. But if it makes the L.A. Weekly's readers happy, if it validates their world view ("gee, I hate Condoleeza Rice, and here's a picture with eczema all over her face- yeah, that's telling HER!"), good for them. But it takes the Weekly, and the Times, to mistake it for intelligence. There may very well be an intelligent, reasoned case to be made against the war. This stuff ain't it.

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My friend Joe HDTV told me he was worried about me. "You keep going like that, you're gonna burn yourself out."

"Like what?"

"I mean, you get worked up over those artists. They're just artists."

"Yeah, I know. I'm burned out already. But that's what I get paid for."

"Whatever. You gotta watch that."

He's right, of course. I've alluded to- no, actually, I've spent way too much ink on how fried my brain has been lately. It was a busy week, I have more coming up, and that dental nightmare is looming large as well. So I'm gonna take Joe's advice, shut the computer off, and go into the living room to watch something really stupid.

It's the least I owe myself.

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The infamous All Access interview of myself is still there, but it's moved from the main "10 Questions With..." page. If you want to read all about me, plus get the disturbing bonus of seeing a picture of the artist (described by writer/singer/talk show host/basketball maven Johnny Angel thusly: "You look like an Irish gangsta"), go to AllAccess.com, click on the 10 Questions With... picture for News-Talk-Sports (presently AURN's Bev Smith), log in, scroll down to the bottom of her interview, click on the Archives link, and go to the bottom of the list to click on my name. (The site's been retooled, so I can't link directly to it...)

It's a lot of work, but am I not worth it?

(Don't answer that.)

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These are the headlines on the KCBS-TV website's list of "Entertainment" stories right now:

MTV To Air Second Season Of 'Newlyweds'

Jury Selection Begins In Blake Murder Trial

Hospital Replaces George Harrison's Doctor

Move To Silence Jacko's Lawyer

Joey Buttafuoco Pleads Innocent

Four out of five entertainment headlines involve court cases, but the last one's the most disturbing- at what moment did Joey Buttafuoco become an entertainment figure? And can we get a recount?

Really, it's nice to see that murder, malpractice, child molestation, and adultery are now, officially, considered by news organizations as properly categorized with Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson. If they go ahead and move "Mona Lisa Smile" or Paris Hilton to the crime blotter, it'll all make sense.

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