I used to think that our new DVD player only hated me. I would try to watch an episode of something like “Grey’s Anatomy” at lunchtime and it would refuse to play.  Or it would play the first couple of minutes, making me think it was finally behaving, and then stop without explanation.  Put in something like “Gossip Girl” and it would start to make alarming noises making me fear that the disk would be spat out scratched beyond use. Yet in the evenings, when Marty wanted to watch something, it would have no problem playing “Dexter” or some other violent show that Marty was into.  Marty liked to say that the player had taste, unlike me.

But last night it was devious.  Instead of refusing to play the film or stopping every five minutes it managed to skip whole chapters.  We were watching “Thor” which had a predicable plot, so it took us a while to work out that this was happening.

It is a cheap player as we wanted something that was multi-region and our only choices were badly hacked together machines.  When we first moved to Japan I wasn’t expecting this problem as both the UK and Japan are in region 2.  But our Japanese region 2 player wouldn’t play UK DVDs.  Something to do with having a player that wanted NTSC DVDs and not PAL DVDs.

Today it’s sitting sadly in the corner, no longer plugged in, as having to guess if the DVD is playing all of the movie was the last straw.  In its place is our XBox 360 which appears to be capable of playing Japanese and UK Region 2 DVDs.  Not quite sure yet what we are going to do with our Region 1 disks, but for now I’m happy that I can watch “Mad Men” over lunch and don’t have to venture near that scary thing the Japanese call T.V.