Well, yesterday, impulsive buying set in, leading me to do two things that, purchase-wise, I never thought I'd find myself doing.

The tail-end of January brought with it a re-release of Jerry Goldsmith's Gremlins-like score to Link from the good folks at Intrada. A 2000 unit release, I was sure that it would stick around for a while. (Witness the inexplicable - in my view - way that Varese has managed not to sell out of the 3000 copies it pressed of Goldsmith's rejected Alien Nation score.) Nope. Within a day, Intrada's site posted a notice of 'SOLD OUT!'.

Copies disappeared from soundtrack retailers across the web. The ghoulish way that the copy I purchased from Screen Archives disappeared somewhere between placing the order and receiving the e-mail about it still haunts me. What does one do in a situation like this? Scour e-bay, of course! However, the jack-holes I was bidding against liked to jack up the price, even with a fair starting price of 99 cents (If only...).

Amazingly, one seller had a 'Buy it Now' option, where he was selling three copies for the (comparatively) rock bottom price of $47.99. Hey, I said comparatively. I jumped on it. The issue here is...did I buy it because I enjoy the score or did I buy it just to have it? While I like the score, I'd hardly consider it a Goldsmith masterpiece (strangely, the far-more electronically based Warlock and Alien Nation hold bigger places in my heart). I had hoped to find the liner notes online, but no dice. (If there's the promise of thorough liner notes on a release I wouldn't otherwise acknowledge, chances are I'll want to have it. c.f. Intrada's RoboCop and Varese Club's North by Northwest)

$47.99 is the most I've ever paid for a single CD in my life, and God willing, that record will stand. (This is the 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' curse of the soundtrack collector: A CD comes out from a label, worth $20 plus shipping and handling. You can a) snap it up immediately and savor it or b) wait until the price gets lower/supplies begin to dwindle. The downside of this being that, in the case of a), it sticks around and you see it go for around $10, while in the case of b) you wait too long and it runs out from under you, forcing you to pay $47.99 for one CD.)

I suppose I can get rid of my CD-R that I've had these last few years and try to put the best face on this by saying that the money would've been wasted on something else, anyway.

The other thing I bought yesterday was a T-Mobile 3G smartphone. The offer to get a free one was for Friday and Saturday and I only learned about it Friday night. Clearly, action had to be taken. I often imagine that I'd end up getting one anyway, so why not speed up the process? (Now that I think about it, can you really say I bought it if it was free; I still need to send away for the rebate.) I think I need to take some time one day and figure out just how the hell it works. Unlike with Link, I'm pretty damn sure I got this just to have it. 'Free' is a powerful thing, folks.