“Nobody puts Baby in the corner.”  Sigh!  When Dirty Dancing was superseded by Ghost, It became official:  I was hooked on Swayze.  I even loved Road House and Point Break.  Looking back, that life-sized poster of Patrick that hung on the back of my dorm room, welcoming me back after each school day, is almost embarrassing…  Almost.  (Clearly, it takes a lot).

My immediate family is notoriously bad at gift giving, or maybe I’m just a bad gift receiver, probably a bit of both, but I distinctly remember receiving a VHS copy of Ghost for Christmas one year.  Bullseye!  So that’s what kids meant when they used to talk about how they loved presents, instead of becoming all anxiety-ridden about acquiring yet another rug hooking kit, collapsible suitcase (with the price tag still on) or Grandma’s old blouses.  All true stories, by the way, and pure gold as far as story-telling goes!  Or so I’ll inform my therapist someday (as soon as I find one that offers vouchers).

So when I recently stepped over a basket of VHS tapes at home, I thought to myself, right.  It’s time – those gotta go, my beloved Ghost video included.  Call it kismet, but when a deal of the day recently came up to transfer VHS tapes to DVD, I jumped all over it, not once, not twice, but right up to the 10 voucher per person limit.  Booya!!

No doubt there is some really simple tool you can purchase at The Source that will do this for you, but the convenience of just handing them over in a plastic bag is almost priceless, costing surprisingly a fair bit less than buying them all again on DVD or downloading them from the web somewhere (believe it or not, I am actually that lazy).  The real boon will be moving the countless hours of video taken during a trip to New Zealand, Australia and Hawaii with some friends back in the late nineties, along with a few other sucker videos, like from when I did my first two skydives and didn’t tell my Mom, but just sent her the VHS tape for her birthday.  Isn’t payback a bitch?

Anywho… Just like when we transferred our much loved CDs to .mp3s (okay, that’s still on the to do list), it only seems prudent to convert these videos now to a format that will be upgradable to the next generation of media, like holo-teleporta-vision-onics, and so far, DVD seems to be a reasonable intermediary (of course I will be backing up these precious DVDs post haste to digital format… right after I burn my CDs… you know, soon-ish.  Probably even this decade!)  Hmm.  Any summer students out there looking to make a little moolah on the side?  There simply has to be more lackadaisical loafers like me who’d be willing to pay some geek $10/hour to rip their CDs and DVDs to .mp-whatever format for them, and/or import them to iTunes.  Just saying…  Could be a nice add-on service while babysitting.  Go on, tell them it was LaLa’s idea!

But ya, I’m thinking how, in the future, people will just be able to think about an actor, and the movie images will suddenly project from their forehead, and they’ll be able to scroll through the google-plex of data by merely twitching their nose.  I want to be sure my man Swayze is amongst my search results.

And in somewhat loosely related freaky futuristic thoughts, may he rest in pieces, uh, I mean, peace, wouldn’t you hate to be cryogenically frozen and wake up next to Michael Jackson?  Cause you’d be wondering if some parts of his face had not thawed properly.  And then how it would be so weird to have everyone around you communicating in Cybernese, and all mocking you for not knowing what to do with your gagoozer.  (This is but one shining example of why I will never be a science fiction writer).  Kinda like how Hugh Jackman didn’t know how to use the indoor toilet in Kate & Leopold.  Gawd, I’ve seen a lot of pretty bad chick flicks…  Okay, now if only I could figure out how to teleport some dinner without any house-elves around…