The 2010’s equiv­a­lent of the 80’s Baby on Board signs, fam­ily car stick­ers. Google it and you will get hun­dreds of hits to places you can buy these things. They are infi­nitely con­fig­urable too, one cou­ple at work have a man with a fish­ing pole, a woman with shop­ping bags and a small girl. Add your pets too! You can even add names to make it eas­ier for the crim­i­nal ele­ment to abduct your wife, kids or dog.

The other day as we pushed out gro­cery cart out to the north forty of the Kroger park­ing lot to the Emperor we passed a cou­ple of SUVs with these stick­ers on the win­dows. The one that caught my eye and stood out from any of these fam­ily car stick­ers I’ve seen so far is below.

And I don’t mean the kind of movies those of you who are my age or older are think­ing of, I’m talk­ing about them blue ray movies. Last night as the MMC Christ­mas party was wind­ing down our host brought out his copy of Bul­lit in blu-ray so we could watch the famous chase scene. As one per­son put it, “They had to round up an awful lot of vin­tage cars to film this.” The pic­ture was so bright and crisp you could have sworn it was filmed ear­lier that day.

Donna and I were so impressed with the pic­ture that we thought maybe we would get one of those new fan­gled blue movie play­ers for our­selves. You can get them at Wal­mart for a less than a hun­dred bucks. Then I started think­ing, if we are buy­ing one, why not get one that includes Net­flix so I can stop drag­ging out the lap­top to to do the Instant Watch thing. Here is a Pana­sonic for about $130 at Ama­zon. It says wire­less ready, so you have to spend an addi­tional $80 on an adapter. Nah. A lit­tle fur­ther dig­ging reveals a Pana­sonic with the wifi adapter included for $170. Alright, but now I have to do a lit­tle research because it men­tions it is Wire­less N, I’m still chug­ging along with G and I need to know if they are com­pat­i­ble. Turns out it is. In that research I also find that the player will also allow me access to sev­eral inter­net appli­ca­tions like Twit­ter, Skype, Picasa and Pan­dora that are worth­less to me. Thanks any­way. What about get­ting all those tor­rented TV shows to my TV? Not pos­si­ble the Pana­sonic Viera Cast. This morning’s paper had a Tar­get flyer shows a wire­less ready Sam­sung for $110. You of course need a $80 adapter for this one too, but Ama­zon has the player for the same price as Tar­get and the adapter on sale for $60 mak­ing the combo the same price as the pre­vi­ous Pana­sonic unit. The Sam­sung player jumps into the lead with this lit­tle fea­ture All­Share: Sync up your entire house­hold. A wired or wire­less DLNA con­nec­tion lets you stream your PC audio and video files to your HDTV using your remote. But it is knocked right off the pedestal when inter­net search­ing turns up con­flict­ing reports of it’s abil­ity to stream any old file. Sigh.

Right now we are going to stick with what we have. I’m just not ready to spend the money on some­thing that may or may not work, espe­cially since drag­ging out the lap­top and plug­ging in an HDMI cable a cou­ple times a week is really no big deal, plus this had the poten­tial to develop into a money pit. For one it is $3 a month more to rent Blu-Ray from Net­flix. Then the wire­less G might not of hacked it stream­ing HD data, so another $70–80 would be needed for a new Wire­less N router. Next the 7 year-old PC would have trou­ble keep­ing up serv­ing the media. $2,000 later we would real­ize that a 32″ LCD wasn’t big enough to really enjoy our new found high def­i­n­i­tion video and the cheap $200 sur­round sound sys­tem wouldn’t sound good enough…