Last night was fun. It was a chilly, rainy evening and the children were off to a swim-team practice. It was a nice evening to sit down in front of the computer with one's mother and watch Lilo & Stitch ripped from a VCD from Malaysia of questionable provenance while drinking homebrew.

Several weeks ago, I found a website that was offering VCDs of Lilo & Stitch (with Malay and Chinese subtitles). The site included no information on where the company was located. I went ahead and ordered one: it only cost $11 (including shipping). I wondered a bit whether the VCD actually contained the movie, or if it was something else. I have seen references to some deal Sony has, where they are bundling a VCD with the Interstitchial trailers along with their copy of the soundtrack. Whatever it was, I figured the opportunity cost of gaining the experience was relatively low.

The VCD arrived from Malaysia and included a nice jewel case with attractive cover art. The synopsis provided was a relatively inept one I had seen on the web previously. The disks were professionally manufactured and have a painted label (which says only 'disk 1' and 'disk 2'). The CDs do contain more-or-less the entire movie. The quality is moderately low: it was obviously made using a camcorder. The images are not quite level and the camcorder moves around a couple of times. One, you can see someone raise a hand up in front of the screen. There are missing bits, probably when they had to change tapes. The copy end cuts off shortly before the actual end of the movie. The sound track is understandable, but is about what you'd expect from a camcorder.

I'll look forward to getting the DVD when it comes out. I understand that there will be a collector's edition, which should be fun. It will be fun to see the scenes that were cut.

Regarding the homebrew, we had bottled it about three weeks ago. Charlie insisted I try a bottle during the first week. It waas undrinkable, of course. It had been so bad that I was deterred from trying any. When we had the BCRC staff pizza party, Tom came over. After the students left, Tom talked me into cracking a couple of bottles and giving it a try. When I popped the top, there was a reassuring hiss. As I poured it into my Istvan Bierfaristo beer mug, it had an admirable head. I took a sip and it had a nice bite -- and a nice flavor -- and a nice aftertase! It was good! In a week, Buzz is going to drive up for the afternoon so he can try the homebrew and we'll work on getting a new project started.