After Xmas shlop

So I'm hanging out at Target the other day... I mean, who doesn't hang out there? Retail stores are typically bare after Xmas, but it appears that all the recalled Chinese crap has made the stores even barer than usual.

I was just there to get some dog food, but I ended up impulse-buying a radio controlled car for 7 bucks and the Heroes DVD set for 19 bucks. The remote controlled car is more fun that it has any right to be....mainly because I have hardwood floors and the thing just hauls buns on those. Growing up, I'd always see remote controlled cars, wind-up cars, and even Stompers on TV and thought they looked awesome. The commercials would always show kids playing with this crap on hardwood floors. I never picked up on that, back then. So I'd harass my folks to buy me some Stompers, then I'd get 'em home, open up and the things would just sink into the floors of my carpetted home, with no traction. This was back in the early 80's, when many homes still had shag carpetting. Try playing with your Stompers on that...they don't move. Hell, even my GI Joe MOBAT would sink into the shag.

Now, over 25 years later, I can finally open up a battery operated toy car and have the thing zip around my house.

I've watched the first few episodes of the Heroes DVD and it's allright, I suppose. People have been recommending the series to me over the past year, simply because I like LOST and comic books. It's not intriguing me, yet...but I've got a long ways to go.

What ticked me off was the first disc in the set. I popped it in and saw three options available to me: episode 1, episode 2 and a "director's cut" of episode 1. Having never seen the show, I figured I should start with the "director's cut" of episode 1...since it should have nifty stuff that fans have been clamoring for, right? But it turned out that it was quite different from the "official" episode 1 and had roughly two additional subplots that had no consequences in future episodes. Basically I filled up my brain with some crap I shouldn't have been paying attention to: like a terrorist subplot (including some guy called "The Engineer" who can emit radiation from his hand) and a prisoner in Moab, Utah. Plus, the "psychic cop guy plot" and the "precog art guy plot" were both significantly different. Only after watching the full second episode, did I realize some stuff didn't line up. So I had to go back and FF through the "official" episode 1. For instance, I realized: "hey, I thought that art guy had hacked off his hand, last episode?!"

I was a little miffed at how you had to have already seen the entire season before buying the "Season One" DVD. That kind of restricts any potential new viewers from purchasing the DVD. *Fart*