That's how good it is

J and I spent a good amount of time last night watching an episode of "Six Feet Under," season one, which we'd received from Netflix that day, despite the fact that there was a very obvious crack in the DVD and roughly half of the episode was really unwatchable. As the characters jerked around and opened their mouths, and as their voices erupted from time to time in untranslatable spurts, we sat on the edge of the couch, straining to get the idea, adamant that this rough spot would be over shortly. It wasn't. In fact, at times the picture simply faded into black, the DVD player obviously trying to tell us, "Take it out! Take this damaged merchandise out of me!" But it was so hard to come to terms with. I mean, we couldn't just move on to the next episode like we'd fully digested the previous one. So we had to send an error report to Netflix and are anxiously awaiting a replacement disk. We didn't do so without fully exhausting all resources, however. There were several serious wipe-downs of the defective disk with a soft cloth and even a bout with Spanish subtitles (English wasn't available). We'd shout out in unison when we were able to translate correctly, which was a lot of fun, but it would have been even better, honestly, if the thing just worked.