Doovdé

I don't have any money at the moment, but I am quite adept at scavenging, when the time is right. And when I say 'scavenging', I'm not talking about food or clothes or things I need to survive. I'm talking about pretty, shiny things that make me feel more like a geek. Like a DVD player.

As some of you may know if you've been paying attention, I broke my DVD drive while trying to review a porn film a while ago, so from that point the only time I've managed to watch any form of DVD (and in this case, it was one epiosde of Fawlty Towers) has been when my parents explicitly wanted to watch Fawlty Towers, and I have the DVDs. We have two televisions downstairs with DVD players attached, but I can't really go downstairs without someone growling at me. So I really needed a DVD player in my room, if not a new DVD drive for my netbook (of course, I can't play games that run via CD-ROM any more, either).

Anyway, we're clearing out the attic. It used to be my sister's bedroom, then my studio for music, and now a room heaped with piles of junk. And when I say "we", I mean "my parents", by which I actually mean "my dad". He's quite good at this clearing-up-stuff lark. I tend to hoard things instead, in case they might Come In Useful. He's the opposite. However, instead of throwing something away, he decided to present me with...

"Does it work?" he said.
"I don't know. It's not plugged in. Does it have a remote?"
"I don't think there was one. Can't you use your fingers?"
"Well, I suppose I can. Thanks, Dad."

And I took the dusty, old DVD player and plugged it into the SCART socket on my TV.

I then proceeded to watch Kamikaze Girls, a film that Robinson got me for my birthday. It ran perfectly, and I enjoyed the sensation of seeing a film I haven't seen before via DVD. There wasn't any way of fast-forwarding, rewinding or arrows - and there wasn't any menu or select button - but it ran the film, and that was fine.

Anyway, the real question here is: does it run soft porn?
"Simple," I thought (if you can count anything I do as 'thought'), "I'll just put a soft porn DVD in and see if it runs."

The problem here is my dad. As I may have mentioned before, my dad is an actor, and the net result of such is that he spends a lot of his time at home - and if I want to watch soft porn with any form of sound (and it's no fun without sound), then it needs to be at minuscule volume, or with headphones. High-resolution video capture fed through the speakers of a TV might not be the best idea. Yes, my dad may not exactly do much apart from sit in the kitchen listening to BBC Radio 5 Live, but it still makes me worried that he may switch off the inane sports-related banter for a while and hear something that he'd identify as soft porn music (although if he knows what soft porn music sounds like I have no idea - nor do I want to know).

"I'm going out for a while now," my dad said this morning. "I'll be back in a few hours; you've got a driving lesson, haven't you?"
"Yes, Dad," I said automatically through the door, my code for, "I'm not out of bed yet, so go away."

I have, in fact, got a driving lesson, but that's neither here nor there. The minute he'd left the house, I practically slammed Emmanuelle: Queen of the Galaxy into my new old DVD player. And, of course, it ran perfectly.

Something which I hadn't factored in when considering watching soft porn on my TV is the fact that, with the lack of a rewind or fast-forward button, or even skip scene button (something else this doesn't have), you can't skip to anything - meaning that I can't just jump to the sex scenes. Which does render most soft porn slightly useless. Even with films wherein they make some effort with the plot, no spool function of any kind necessitates sitting through the obligatory banal theme song, which usually features as its backdrop some lady getting dressed (because that's sexy, apparently).

So basically, if I want to see one particular scene and it's in a film I own on DVD, I'm going to need to make sure my dad is out of the house, and then sit through the entirety of the film until the scene comes up.

Having said that... while it's a pain... it's still a point in the right direction.

And it whiles away the hours.