I am a happy camper!
Jun. 21st, 2016 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayneI was very not-happy when I left the house at 4pm. For a variety of reasons, it had been kind of a pissy day. Fortunately I was on my way to have dinner with two old best friends.
We had all been neighbors at a condo complex. Audrey was the first to move in, then Terry, then me. Terry was the first to move out: he got a job in Omaha. At the time he was working for the State of Arizona, and they royally sucked (I also worked there for almost 4 years). Then Audrey bought another condo elsewhere in Phoenix and sold the one where we were at. Then I got married 11 years ago and moved to New Mexico.
Audrey has since bought another condo at the original place. Terry got married 15 years ago, and Audrey and I were their Best Man/Maid of Honor.
Then Terry's wife died unexpectedly in her sleep. A day or two after her passing, he learned that his dad had terminal cancer in Globe, AZ.
Terry's employer, conveniently, has an IT office in Tempe, AZ, and Terry was able to do a temporary transfer there.
Tonight, the three of us got together over pizza and had a tremendous time.
But that is only one reason that I'm happy....
Back in the 1980s and forward, I was a HUGE fan of the BBC series Yes, Minister. Sir Humphrey was such a perfect character for Nigel Hawthorne, not to mention Paul Eddington as Jim Hacker. It was nigh unto the perfect series. So brilliant. And I also loved Yes, Prime Minister. I heard there was a Yes, M'Lord, where Hacker becomes a Lord and goes to the House of Lords, but perhaps I heard that it was being considered and never became a reality.
ANYWAY, I've never owned them on DVD. They were formerly consistently priced over $100 for the set. The only thing DVD-wise that I've spent that much money on was the complete Monty Python's Flying Circus. I just couldn't see spending that much on YM/YPM for so little time compared to Python.
Then I happened to look online and saw that the price of the new sets was down to about $40 and used copies could be had for around $25.
Thursday I was at one of my favorite used bookstores and I was looking over DVDs of TV series, I don't remember what I was looking for. As an idle thing, I looked under Y. And there were two copies of Yes, Prime Minister.
$25 later, I was practically skipping out the store.
They didn't have the first series, nor did the other good used video stores that I frequent. But Amazon has all, so Friday I ordered Yes, Minister.
And when I got home tonight, it was there on the couch.
VERY happy.
We had all been neighbors at a condo complex. Audrey was the first to move in, then Terry, then me. Terry was the first to move out: he got a job in Omaha. At the time he was working for the State of Arizona, and they royally sucked (I also worked there for almost 4 years). Then Audrey bought another condo elsewhere in Phoenix and sold the one where we were at. Then I got married 11 years ago and moved to New Mexico.
Audrey has since bought another condo at the original place. Terry got married 15 years ago, and Audrey and I were their Best Man/Maid of Honor.
Then Terry's wife died unexpectedly in her sleep. A day or two after her passing, he learned that his dad had terminal cancer in Globe, AZ.
Terry's employer, conveniently, has an IT office in Tempe, AZ, and Terry was able to do a temporary transfer there.
Tonight, the three of us got together over pizza and had a tremendous time.
But that is only one reason that I'm happy....
Back in the 1980s and forward, I was a HUGE fan of the BBC series Yes, Minister. Sir Humphrey was such a perfect character for Nigel Hawthorne, not to mention Paul Eddington as Jim Hacker. It was nigh unto the perfect series. So brilliant. And I also loved Yes, Prime Minister. I heard there was a Yes, M'Lord, where Hacker becomes a Lord and goes to the House of Lords, but perhaps I heard that it was being considered and never became a reality.
ANYWAY, I've never owned them on DVD. They were formerly consistently priced over $100 for the set. The only thing DVD-wise that I've spent that much money on was the complete Monty Python's Flying Circus. I just couldn't see spending that much on YM/YPM for so little time compared to Python.
Then I happened to look online and saw that the price of the new sets was down to about $40 and used copies could be had for around $25.
Thursday I was at one of my favorite used bookstores and I was looking over DVDs of TV series, I don't remember what I was looking for. As an idle thing, I looked under Y. And there were two copies of Yes, Prime Minister.
$25 later, I was practically skipping out the store.
They didn't have the first series, nor did the other good used video stores that I frequent. But Amazon has all, so Friday I ordered Yes, Minister.
And when I got home tonight, it was there on the couch.
VERY happy.
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no subject
Date: 2016-06-25 05:01 pm (UTC)(And the DRM's easily stripped using Requiem, leaving plain H.264/AAC/MPEG-4 files, but only up to iTunes 10.7, which on OS X, means Mountain Lion. Hello VMware Fusion! It's good for Windows 7 as well, though I've always just used it under OS X)
I might persuade myself to get a box of B5 someday, but I'd feel much better about doing so, if Warner showed interest in undertaking a ST:TNG grade refurbishment of the source material, given the video was all shot on film, so it'd be "simply" a matter of redoing all the digital effects - I'd be amazed if there aren't plenty of models in fandom now, which their creators would happily license.
Y,M/Y,PM really should be required viewing in schools. It's a comedy, yes, but it was all so brilliantly observed and founded in political reality. (On that note, you might well enjoy "Absolute Power", which started off on Radio 2, later moving for one season to BBC 2. It's all about figures in a leading PR agency, each week tasked with turning around a seemingly impossible situation. There too, the echoes of reality were strong - funny and illuminating!)
I were their Best Man/Maid of Honor
It wasn't until the next moment I scanned leftward and saw another name, making the sentence much more conventional. Oh well. =:)
It's always good to be able to reconnect with friends, especially if there's been a gap. FSM knows, if I can land something back in the Bay, I'll be delighted to see some friends I've known from previous jobs and LJ again, for the first time in five years, and one in particular, whom I've yet to meet IRL, but feel very close to.