The Sure Thing

TigerBlog was waiting for the 10 a.m. episode of "The Sopranos" to start on A&E yesterday. It was the one where Janice takes care of Richie Aprile, solving a bunch of problems for her brother Tony, and it features this immortal line from Christopher: "It's going to be awhile before I eat something from Satriale's."

If you've seen the episode, you know the reference. And, by the way, even with all the editing, the show is still tremendous.

Still, it was only 9:30 or so, so TB had a half-hour to kill before "The Sopranos" started. That's when he stumbled on "The Sure Thing."

For those who've never heard of it, "The Sure Thing" is a 1985 movie that starred a very, very young John Cusack and a very, very young Daphne Zuniga and was directed by Rob Reiner. It received 3.5 stars (out of four) from Roger Ebert's review of May 1, 1985, in which he says this:
The movie industry seems better at teenage movies like "Porky's," with its sleazy shower scenes, than with screenplays that involve any sort of thought about the love lives of its characters. That's why "The Sure Thing" is a small miracle. Although the hero of this movie is promised by his buddy that he'll be fixed up with a "guaranteed sure thing," the film is not about the sure thing but about how this kid falls genuinely and touchingly into love.

Basically, the movie is about two college freshmen at an Ivy League-type school in the Northeast (the scenes for which were actually filmed at the University of the Pacific) who don't exactly get along on campus and then set out inadvertently to travel across the country together as they both sign up for a ride to Los Angeles on a ride board. Zuniga is going to visit her geeky boyfriend, while Cusack is off to see his best friend (a very, very young Anthony Edwards), who is fixing him up with a "sure thing," played by a very, very young Nicollette Sheridan.

It doesn't take a Ph.D. to figure out what happens. How they get there is at times very cute and very, very funny.

TigerBlog remembers clearly the first time he saw the movie, as it was the first movie he ever rented in a video store. TB and his friend Corey went to the new video store that opened up on Route 9, and the guy at the store recommended it.

The movie was, of course, on a VHS tape, which went into the VCR (TB knew a few people who clung to Beta until the bitter end). One of the great challenges of the late '80s and early '90s was hooking up your VCR to your TV and cable box, something that seemed so challenging then and seems so simple now.

Today, of course, DVDs have long since wiped out the VHS and Beta tapes, and DVDs themselves are on the verge of being wiped out as technology continues to evolve. The video store itself was a place where people would congregate and hope to get a copy of whatever movie had just been released on video, and people would agonize over what movie to bring home.

And don't get TB started on the stress of getting the movie back to the store before getting charged for an extra day.

Today, there's Netflix and On-Demand ad DVR and every other way of watching movies, none of which requires actually going somewhere and interacting with another person.

The VHS tape was a bit of a pain, because you had to rewind and fast-forward to get to where you wanted to be, rather than simply advancing the scene like on a DVD.

TigerBlog has a few VHS tapes in his closet, tapes of Princeton games from years ago. Among the tapes are the 1996 Ivy League men's basketball playoff game against Penn, the Princeton-UCLA NCAA tournament game and three NCAA championship games in men's lacrosse.

Of course, TB would have as much success holding them up to the light to watch them as anything else, as the last VCR long ago stopped working.

TB has mentioned often the way storage of files has evolved around here. When TB first started, old publications and such were kept on floppy disks, which were replaced by 44 MB cartridges (and then 88 MB cartridges) that looked like old eight-track cassettes. From there, it was the Zip disk, which gave way to the CD and ultimately the DVD.

Other than the CD and the DVD, none of the other ones are readable anymore.

Probably the No. 1 area this is going to affect in the long run is photography. Here in the OAC, we have a scanner, so anything that is an actual photograph is scannable. The problem is that most of what we have from the 1990s is in the form of either negatives (see, you used to have to put film in a camera and take it to a place to get developed, which meant creating negatives) or slides. Those are pretty close to useless now.

More than once, TB has been asked for a picture of a late-'90s athlete, which has created huge problems, because we just don't have that many of them.

And what about 10 years from now? Right now, we have binders and binders of CDs and DVDs (it used to take about six CDs to store all the pictures from one game that can now fit on one DVD). We also have a shared hard drive and a bunch of individual computers that have thousands of pictures electronically identified and stored.

But what about the pictures that aren't? What about when an athlete from the last 20 years becomes an astronaut or movie star or President of the United States, and we need to find pictures of him or her? Then what?

As long as we have a CD/DVD drive, we'll be okay. But, if the recent history of technology is an indication, we won't have those forever.

Will all of our CDs and DVDs become worthless? Will we be unable to find a way to make it work?

If TB had to guess, he'd say the day is going to come when we're no longer able to retrieve them.

In fact, he'd say it's probably a sure thing.