Stream of Consciousness Connects Some Dots

We watched a movie last night, The Devil's Miner, a streamer from our Netflix instant queue. It was our second streamer on our new Netflix box for receiving movies over the Internet, a birthday present from Ben and Zhanna. Thank you guys so much.

The movie is a documentary about the harsh life of a Bolivian family living at the mines at Potosi. The story concerns the amazing coping ability of a fourteen year old boy who works the mines on the late shift to support his family, while attending school in the mornings. The sub-story is about the religious duality of these miners. They are Catholic outside the mines. Yet each mine has an idol of a devil god, called a Tio (because the Indios' native alphabet has no D). The miners give ritual sacrifices and daily bribes to appease the Tio inside their mine, for they fear God’s influence ceases at the mine's entrance.

This duality brought to mind a book I read recently, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, a surreal Faustian tale inspired by the surreal life of Muscovites in the 1930's Stalinist CCCP, dealing with the different faces of good and evil, if they are really different. Notes on the book can now be found on the mo'foo blog, under Books page.
 
Back where I started, the Netflix box is connected via our wireless DSL modem to the internet. I ordered online an HDMI cable for video between the box and our 720P display. The stereo audio is streamed via optical digital pipe to the AV processor, which does a 5-channel conversion of the stereo input for 5.1 effect before forwarding to the speakers. Right now we have 1.5 mbps maximum downlink speed which gives 3 out of 4 dots on the quality meter in the box. This gives acceptable video, but the manufacturer suggests a minimum of 2.0 mbps downlink speed. After we move, we will get the higher bandwidth service and see if we can get all 4 dots on the meter.

This leads to a final observation on retail marketing sleaze. Not wanting to wait to order the HDMI cable online, I called both Radio Shack and Best Buy to see if they sold HDMI cables. Yes, they do, but they are excessively greedy; their price ranges from $50 to $80 for one cable, their price tag for instant gratification. So I ordered from the Internet for $3.18 including shipping. My new cable gets an A+. Best Shack gets an F-.