I Enjoy Watching Movies On DVD

I recently heard on a radio news broadcast that the retailer Best Buy was discontinuing the sale of DVDs because more and more people are watching movies via streaming services rather than on DVDs.

My introduction to streaming came about when my upstairs neighbors, Harry and Lilia, would invite me to their apartment numerous times for dinner, conversation, and the use of their laptop computers.

Harry or Lilia, while sitting on the living room couch, remote in hand, would skim through the menu offerings on Netflix, reading the plot summaries before deciding on what to watch.

From what I could see, streaming doesn't offer the kinds of features found on a DVD like audio commentaries, scene selection, behind-the-scenes mini-docs, blooper clips, trailers, etc. (Good reasons not to buy bootleg copies because they lack these important features.)

Being old school, I prefer to have the physical disc in hand. As the novelist Larry Duplechan points out in his memoir/film history book, Movies That Made Me Gay (Team Angelica Publishing, 2023, paperback), the DVD is a good backup because "you can't trust streaming services to keep your favorite old movies posted."

Book Discounts At Target

The super large Target store in East Harlem is scheduled to be closed permanently on October 21. It's one of nine stores across the country closing because of a high level of shoplifting that has eaten into Target's bottom line.

I'm saddened to see the store go because I enjoyed shopping there, mostly for groceries and the occasional book, which was always at a 20 or 30 percent discount, depending on whether it was a hardcover or paperback book.

To take advantage of the discounts while I'm able to, I recently bought two paperbacks during separate shopping trips--In the Likely Event by Rebecca Yarros (Montlake, 2023), a romance/adventure novel and Sparring Partners by John Grisham (Vintage, 2023), a collection of three legal thriller novellas.

I may decide to purchase one or two more books before the store shuts down for good.

I'm Finna Discuss "Finna"

The first time I saw the word "finna" was in a Facebook post by one of my great-nieces (she's 36 years old). It was a strange looking word to me, a baby boomer. My first thought was that it was something she made up.

But one evening, to my surprise, as I was leaving the public library on 115th Street in Harlem, at closing time, I saw a book on a book cart with the title Finna: Poems. The book is by Nate Marshall and was published by One World in 2020.

On its back is a definition of "finna." It's described as being from African-American vernacular English and means "going to; intending to."

No doubt the word is used a lot by those involved in hip-hop culture.

Well, folks, I'm finna sign off, bringing this blog post to a close.