The drive on my multi-region DVD player is starting to skip and stutter. Amazon just paid me this quarter’s associate fees. Do the math.

Sure, I could have been geek enough to replace the drive on my player with a DVD-ROM, and there are resources out there to help me with such a task. But do I really want to spend a weekend messing around with the innards of the only DVD player I own?

I think I’m more concerned with the time expended than with the risk to the player itself. So I ordered the same player Jette bought. I chose the path of least resistence.

I placed the order yesterday because my player couldn’t even get through a 42-minute episode of The West Wing without burping. I also threw in Sunday in the Park with George on DVD and Meryle Secret’s biography Steven Sondheim: A Life in with the order.

I let Jette borrow my UA DVD to see if her player can play a Region 2 disc, which it did, so that bodes well.

Most recent impulse purchases: Kiki’s Delivery Service and Princess Mononoke. OK. I am turning into a Miyazaki nut. I will be very happy when Fox releases its stranglehold on My Neighbor Totoro.

I spent about $500 on my multi-region DVD player in 2001. The multi-region player I just bought cost $70 in 2005.