Money can be exchanged for goods and services!

Summer is fast approaching - honestly, it feels like it's already here - and I figured that I should make a few fun and kicky tweaks to cope with the climbing temperatures. So I temporarily unfroze my personal spending freeze and hit up eBay.

A hair past a freckle.

First I dropped less than $2 on this Chinese knock-off Fitbit Flex band. You get what you pay for, but it has held up for a week and counting. So far, so good! I have two official Fitbit bands, but they're getting really torn up after a couple of years of continuous wearing, swapping out the module, etc. This may just be a stopgap solution, but at least it's a dirt cheap one.

But my mom says I'm cool.

The second of my two purchases was this Simpsons Mighty Wallet. Some who know me are probably shocked that I didn't own it already, what with how that show is almost a second religion to me. (You're still tops, Jebus.) The construction is kind of weird: It's one big sheet of Tyvek - you know, the nigh indestructible stuff overnight envelopes are made out of - folded a certain way. It's taken some getting used to, but I've grown to really like this wallet. It is well worth the $3 I spent on it. Not for the seller, though. It was her first auction and per the mailer I received, the shipping alone cost more than that. There's an eBay learning curve. She'll get there.

Sour C.R.E.A.M.

And since we're talking about wallets, this is my old one, which I've used daily since the mid-aughts. I got it at a Tommy Hilfiger outlet in Hilton Head. See how the white in the logo is now yellow? Yeah, it's high time that I gave it a rest. Though when the situation calls for a little more professionalism - say, a business lunch or trip to the petting zoo (damn those judgmental goats!) - I'll bring it back out of retirement.

Yeah, I guess it's my favorite movie.

Or maybe I'll just go with my other standby, given to me by Kate the Great many moons ago. I imagine that this wallet will be promoted to be my daily companion when I enter the "walk the Earth" phase of my life. Wait. Shouldn't I be doing that right now? I need to call my career counselor.

Since when do effete, Volvo-driving, latte-sipping NPR types shop at Dollar Tree?

As I was picking up some supplies at Dollar Tree this weekend - oh, those delicious and dirt cheap maple cookies! - I noticed, mingling on the shelf with various baseball books and Bibles, a tome that I never thought would be sold there in a million years: The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman (the "PC guy" from those kinda funny yet also annoying Mac ads). I'd been meaning to give it a read for years now, so of course the one buck price tag made it a no-brainer for me to snap it up. Just flipping through this faux almanac, I think I've found a new bathroom book to replace the recently-read Our Dumb World by the Onion.

I passed on the very current book about Nü Metal, though. Maybe I'll pick that up for a laugh on my next trip. Or not.

Also at the Dollar Tree were a couple of Barenaked Ladies CDs that I shelled out $15 and $20+ for on their respective release dates. If only I had chosen to delay my gratification for six years, I could've saved a ton.

No region can contain me

A few weeks ago I decided to spice things up in the bedroom and buy a cheapy DVD player. No, not for that. Who watches that on DVD anymore? It's all about the internet nowadays. Seriously, I just wanted to be able to watch an episode or two of "NewsRadio" before I turn in each night (it's comfort comedy), reading books be damned. Plus, it'd be nice to have on those sick days when I'm bedridden. But I digress.

I ended up getting this Philips player from Target. It turns out that by entering a simple code via the remote, it becomes region free and can play DVDs from across the globe. (Cue "A Whole New World.")

So where do I go from here? There are only a handful international titles that have ever piqued my interest: the UK's "Spaced" and Japan's Grindhouse set. But I already have the superior Region 1 version of the former and I don't really want to drop 100 large on the latter. Plus, a complete Grindhouse DVD is supposed to be released Stateside...sometime. But then again, I'm still waiting for the long-promised Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.

I'm sure at some point I'll pick up a Pulp concert DVD. And maybe the Special Edition of the Fratellis' Here We Stand. But those are the only interesting things currently on my radar.

What else is out there? Any kick-butt special editions that we're neglected over here? Great movies and TV shows unavailable to us Yanks? Awesome concerts or video collections by cool bands that aren't quite mainstream in the US?

And what online vendors would you recommend a budget-conscious person shop at?

Note: I tried my damnedest to have the DVD display in the picture above read "80085," to no avail.

The return of Media Buying Tuesday

Fortunately for my wallet, there's only been a trickle of media releases that I've been intersted in lately...until yesterday. I don't consider it a Media Buying Tuesday unless at least two items of note are being released. Well, this Tuesday saw the release of two of my favorite movies of the year: Hot Fuzz and 300.

Buying the former has been an ordeal, which I still haven't finished. See, Wal-Mart has an exclusive bonus disc that contains pretty much every special feature from the UK version that was left off of the American release (and that's a lot). So I went to Wal-Mart during a break from work and the only bonus disc packs they had in stock came packaged with the fullscreen edition of the movie. Yuck! So, after work I hit up two more Wal-Marts only to find only more fullscreen DVDs. According to director and co-writer Edgar Wright's MySpace blog, 65% of the copies Wal-Mart ordered were fullscreen. Seemed more like 100% to me.

Anyway, I didn't want to totally miss out on the bonus disc, so I reluctantly bought one of the sets. Luckily, when you unwrap the set the copy of the movie itself is still shrinkwrapped. So last night I went back to the first Wal-Mart that I went to earlier and intended to exchange my fullscreen copy for one of the widescreen single disc editions, but they were sold out. That wasn't too surprising since Wal-Mart seems to have a fullscreen-to-widescreen ratio of 50-to-1. I guess I'll just wait another day or two for them to restock. Hopefully, I'll be able to enjoy some Hot Fuzz goodness this weekend.