Leaving family out of it, there’s not much I miss about living in the U.S. On the contrary. But the latest technology and media tend to trickle over here relatively slowly. TiVo hasn’t arrived, for example, and “The Daily Show” is available only as a once-a-week 20-minute tease on CNN International. Our video rental options are limited in Nova Gorica, too. The video shop in the center is hard for us to get to, so although the selection is pretty good, we don’t get in there very often, and when we do rent, returning the disc is a dreaded chore hanging over our head. So we were very happy last year when TechnoVideo opened up in the ground floor of our apartment building. It sounded ideal: DVDs automatically dispensed 24/7, merely an elevator ride away, and you pay according to how long you keep the film. Living 60 meters directly above the place we figured we’d clean up.

The only problem is that TechnoVideo’s selection, how to put this?…sucks. Mostly literally. Although this is my first exposure to the ATM model of video rental, I feel fairly confident in guessing that such round-the-clock robotic DVD dispensing machines are the business’s bid to make pornography even easier to access. The selection of ‘regular’ videos on offer is so thin as to be a veneer: “King Kong” and Tom Cruise vehicles, and precious little else. However, if you follow the touch-screen interface into deeper intercultural spaces, you’ll find that the number of “Erotični” videos available is prodigious. I think the key here is that there is no human handing you, say, “Sladko Spodnji Perilo II“, so the shame element is entirely between you and a metal slot.

After dealing with furtive porn-mongers, the robot’s fuckwitted search interface, a year’s worth of frustrating video hunts (culminating in last week’s desperate, marriage-jeopardizing rental of “National Treasure“, as well as a distinct aesthetic obstacle to even entering the place, we were wondering if we were done with film.

Rambota 1,2,3

Until this Rambo cartoon appeared in Friday’s “Vikend “, the TV-guide supplement to “Slovenske Novice “.

The cartoon’s text is pretty self-explanatory, even for people who don’t pretend to speak any Slavic languages, but here’s a gloss:

Frame 1
John Rambo: Rambo 1, 2, and 3, please.
Frame 2
Hapless Video Shop Clerk: We don’t have them, they’re rented.
Frame 3
John Rambo: What about Rocky 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6?
Hapless Video Shop Clerk: Sorry, no.
Frame 4
John Rambo: I shall destroy you, Hapless Video Shop Clerk, for this cultural transgression by which you demean my country’s military prowess!
Hapless Video Shop Clerk: AHIIIiii! I find to my displeasure that I am yet another victim of ill-considered American imperialist adventurism!

But now that iTiVi is on the scene, such senseless waste of life, 7.62mm rounds, and international understanding apparently need not happen. Like NetFlix in the U.S., this will allow us to select videos on-line and collect them from our mailbox, which is a few meters closer than TechnoVideo and usually devoid of pornography. We’ll give it a try. I hope their selection is extensive enough to include “Blondinka s Harvarda II “.