Skip tracers.

Oh, if it was Dog the Bounty Hunter, I'd have offered my assistance. This smacked of bill collecting, though.

The best method is what Rio or Lee did, with a direct connection to the car stereo that doesn't use either FM (lowest quality) or cassette (higher quality).

Damn. I can't do that. No changes allowed to a company car. And no cassette deck either. So FM transmitter it is.

Thanks for the heads up, vortex.

This smacked of bill collecting, though.

They have them for bill collecting, too. Or, at least, the level just prior to court was called skip-tracing. I skip-traced for a Big Bank for a while. As a temp. That was.... interesting.

I'm with msbelle! Look at all the options!

Dog is scary, stay clear of scary leather-skin bad hair man.

I would very much for today to be Friday. I would very much like a nap.

I should just be happy that no one at work is bothering me, right? shrift, I am holding you up as my "there but for the grace of god" work example. A rescue squad really should be put together for you.

The pricing of PPV, however, is above that $2 figure, which reflects that somebody ain't getting paid. Guess who?

This argument is flawed. In both cases, your money is going to the rental facility, and not the studio. The studio has already been paid, whether by Netflix, Blockbuster, or Comcast. They get a license fee in exchange for providing the rental facility with the product in question and the right to distribute it in a certain market. How that rental facility charges the customer is entirely unrelated to the licence fee paid to the studio. The only difference between PPV and Netflix is that PPV delivers a digital file to your cable box, and Netflix delivers a physical DVD through the mail.

So FM transmitter it is.

Don't get a cheap one.

OMG! KAT! We agree! That is so odd!

Seriously, when the kid gets a little older, we'll have a laptop and a DVD player in the minivan

I've seen that a few times, and I always wonder about it. It seems to me like the video would be too distracting to the driver. (I know the driver can't see it, but somehow I feel like movie sound is more likely to cause driving into a ditch than radio or CD sound.) Perhaps I am just being a luddite, with a side helping of, "Bah, when I was a kid we didn't have DVD in the car! We just had to sit there and fight over who was on whose side of the back seat!"

I bet you can buy that DVD for money very close to the rental price, even now.

Doubtful. Even if a rental is $5 and you only buy and watch movies that are in the $9.99 bin at Best Buy, that's still twice as expensive to buy. If you want to watch a TV program, which can easily sell for $60 or $70 for five discs (still no more than $25 to rent), it's even worse.

Plus, there are storage issues, as ita has pointed out.

That's new money by WASP standards.

Well, how many generations are we talking about? Vanderbilt and Astor were both tradesmen, and the Vanderbilt children claimed a higher status on basis of their father having been a fur-trader rather than anything lesser. But within that one generation, the Astors who were their age-peers had bought their way into the same status. It took maybe one more generation to iron out the difference between them.

And that was in the wicked slow 19th Century -- I think that the concepts of "old money" and "new money" are being/have been replaced by "serious money" and "frivolous money". If you act old-school, support the Met, have a career or at least a deep and abiding charitable interest, you pass over into the Not-VH1 version of money, no matter how recently you got your money. Don't you think?

In fact, I imagine that over a lifetime, it is possible to move from one money category to the other. If Jennifer Lopez survives her foolish youth, and at 70 is a grand dame of some charity that offers scholarships to kids from the Bronx, I think she'll finally start getting invitations that are offered on a basis other than her ability to attract cameras. I mean, Josephine Baker did it (granted, mostly in a foreign country, but consider the times.)

Say what you like about American social class, but one of the key aspects is that we come down with convenient amnesia on a regular basis.