Chris Daughtry II isn’t bad, but horribly shy/awkward

Bucky II should get out from behind the guitar.

David Archuleta II/Kevin Covais II was too weak, not “vulnerable.”

Adam Lambert II’s screaming is fast becoming cliché, though it did make we want to go play “Paint It Black” on Guitar Hero again. It’s one of my favorite GH songs.

Ruben II sounds better than Ruben I and is ten times more mobile than the original was in Season Two.

Amy Adams II is going to wind up just like Amy Adams I – voted out quickly. (I think Allison Iraheta is still the only successful redheaded contestant in the series, and they do try to prop one up there every year.)

I did actually like the odd reggae remix that Jon Peter Lewis II did with his song. But, then, I’m not a Rolling Stones fan to begin with, per se, so I’m open to radical reinterpretations.

It’s too bad John Stevens II got eliminated last week…

Nothing against either gentleman, who both have books to plug, but I could give their interviews for them by now, if you’d like. (I can explain second curtain sync by heart now, thanks to Arena.) They pop up in my podcatcher constantly.

That said, I really really want Arena’s Speedliting book to come out, stat.

Turns out my first Amazon purchase was September 7, 1998.  I bought two things:

• The Fifth Element on DVD

I had gotten my DVD player a couple months earlier, so this would have been one of my earliest movie purchases.  Back then, DVDs weren’t a dime a dozen.  This one cost $20.99. Today, it’s available for $12.49. For goodness sake, the Blu Ray for this movie is less than $15.

• DVD Demystified: The Guidebook for DVD-Video and DVD-ROM

What can I say, I’m part tech geek. This $42.95 book promised to discuss the format and the processing in detail. I was very curious about it at the time.  I remember carrying this book out of the office one day, when one of the Veeps at the company I worked for (he’s very smart) looked at the book and said, “I didn’t think they were all that mystifying.”

Total price: $68.84

That’s right: There was no free shipping on orders more than $25 back then, let alone Amazon Prime.

• Haven’t done a hybrid car story here in a long time, but surely a Porsche hybrid calls for attention!

• Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” movie to be a 3D motion capture CGI film? Sure, why not? Like the initial reports that Roland Emmerich was directing it didn’t lower our expectations far enough…

• As a college Ultimate player, it’s very sad to see the guy who created the frisbee passed away recently.

• The Worst Apple Products of All Time. Includes the phone, the gaming console, and the iPod Hi-Fi.

• The military has been monitoring various social media to get ideas for where to help in Haiti. Interesting.

• Headline writers get it wrong sometimes. John McIntyre has some hilarious recent examples. Love his copy-writing blog.

• The first cowboy to draw loses. Here’s why.

• What is TiVo planning to unveil in March?

• Dear Amazon — I’ll take a free Kindle, too. I’ll subscribe to Prime, I promise. Thanks!

• Hilarious bit of SEO: A story about Facebook logging-in techniques gets higher rankings on Google than your actual Facebook log-in page. Confusion ensues from the clueless who use Google to go everywhere. Seriously, there are still people who type Facebook into Google to go there, instead of just typing Facebook.com. Ugh

• Rumor: Hulu to move away from Flash for iPad? Oooh, Adobe would not like that.

• Shocking: Higher song prices lead to fewer downloads. Does the music industry have any feet left to shoot itself in?

• I think I might still be drooling over the Canon T2i. And it’s only the entry level camera. This is nuts.

So damned primitive, it was. Now, my 46″ widescreen television is too small for me, but I know there comes a point where one has to make a choice between art and finance. You can only afford so much. . .

* My Commodore 64 monitor was used at one point as a TV, also. I had an older VCR hooked into it. I remember pausing through “Tiny Toons” learning to draw from that.

* That first DVD player didn’t last long. Bought a standalone DVD player that Christmas for $199, I think. Maybe $299? Tough to recall. Looked much better on the 27 inch TV screen in the living room, complete with surround sound system that was a repurposed Cambridge Soundworks system sold normally for computer games, I guess. It wasn’t until 2001 that I bought a new Sony Trinitron TV that did anamorphic widescreen on a 4:3 CRT, and looked stunning. “Stunning” was by the standards of the time. Widescreen TVs were available at that point, but not yet practical. There wasn’t much at all on TV in 16:9 format, and HD was still years away.

* We went through a few VCRs in my family from the time we got our first (I’m guessing 1985). What amazes me, in retrospect, was the different ways those VCRs marked time. Most of them measured time in what we called “blocks.” Our first had a physical counter — three scroll wheels that spun in time with the VHS tape. You could push a button to reset the counter to 0. So you knew the next episode of “Tiny Toons” started 100 blocks later.

Problem is, the next VCR had a new measuring scheme, and so your “blocks” were useless.

* Perhaps the greatest limitation of the VCR was that you couldn’t watching something back from the beginning while you were taping it. Today, that’s the cornerstone of my DVR habit, which has prevented me from watching TV commercials for the past decade.

* I got my first TiVo as a Christmas present in 2000, I believe it was. I quickly paid for the lifetime subscription. My parents are still using that unit. It’s made that $300 back and then some. I later upgraded to the Humax TiVo that included a DVD burner. Didn’t get as much use out of that DVD burner as I thought I might, but it came in handy a few times. Thankfully, I paid month to month on it, so I didn’t lose money on the deal.

* The TV I grew up watching was on the floor, built into a piece of wooden furniture, on top of which sat the living room’s main lamp light and, of course, the cable box. We had several cable boxes, from ones that had thirteen switches across to ones that you slid a pointer along the line of channels to change stations. We were years away from a remote.

And the TV had a physical issue in it where the screen would suddenly and randomly get very dark. The brightness just dropped right off the scale. A simple slap to the side of the TV (often during “Cheers,” it seemed) did the trick to brighten it back up.

* I remember MTV when it still had music, Nickelodeon when it ran black and white sit-comes in the middle of the afternoon (”My Three Sons,” “Mr. Ed,” et. al.), and HBO when it had “Fraggle Rock.” A cornerstone of my Sunday mornings was watching Hanna Barbera cartoons of the 70s on USA Network. Remember when cable TV didn’t really go past channel 27? Or 36?

Sorry, just had to write that all down. I was feeling old today.

• Amelia

Hilary Swank as Amelia Earhardt? Sounds like fun. Spoiler alert: She disappears!

• Casablanca

A classic. The last DVD restoration looked pretty good, though. Don’t know how much better you’re going to get, but I’m open to it.

• Doctor Who: The End of Time, Part One & Two

This is pure linkbait. I don’t watch the series. No time for it. But I know lots of you do!

• Gangs of New York (Remastered)

This is a legendary digital flop. The DVD was poor. The initial Blu Ray release was a bad upconvert of the DVD, from the looks of it. At last, they’re correcting it, and doing it right, we hope. The ironic part is that the film’s director, Martin Scorcese, goes around telling everyone how important it is to digitally preserve Hollywood’s past in the best possible way. Yet this movie of his has been an embarrassment.

It’s also the subject of the best Blu Ray review I’ve ever now read.

• The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration – Sapphire Series
• The Godfather, Part II: The Coppola Restoration – Sapphire Series

What, they didn’t bother with Part III? Interesting.

• Hellboy: Swords of Stone/Blood & Iron

These are the two animated TV movies they did after the live action theatrical release.

• Maid in Manhattan

And, really, isn’t this why digital preservation of films is so important?

• Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior
• Ong Bak 2: The Beginning

I still have the first, unwatched, on DVD. So sad.

• Walk the Line

It follows the standard Hollywood auto-bio Oscar bait formula, but it’s still entertaining.

• Zombieland

Woddy Harrelson. Zombies. Internet glee!

Next week: “The Phantom,” amongst others.