When we walked into the theater we noticed several seats that were marked “Reserved for DBOX Customers” and so we simply avoided them and sat elsewhere. This cinema has stadium seating so you could really sit anywhere, except right up in front, and have an enjoyable experience.
The movie started, everything was going according to plan, trailers, opening credits, then the movie itself. Nothing exciting or untoward until the first battle scene. The loud noise from the speaker system was joined with a tactile vibration and a rather annoying single-note throbbing sound. Turns out, it was these DBOX seats. Someone apparently paid for one of them to be activated and it was making a hell of a racket. It was so unsettling and disturbing that it almost ruined the movie for me, except that the movie kind of ruined itself, sort of. It was unpleasant, to say the least.
This DBOX thing is the latest cash grab from movie theaters trying to make a buck. They screw you for concessions (there are two definitions for concession, yah) and then there are all the other little add-on bits, like the difference between primetime and matinée prices, which I will admit has been around for quite a while, but it’s still a cash grab, all the way to the most recent worthless misadventures in cinema:
– IMAX and IMAX 3D
– 42 FPS Projection
– Real3D
– DBOX “Feel Around” Seats
Each of these things is fluff. The 3D doesn’t really add anything more than eyestrain and cluster headaches, IMAX is just a double-sized screen and new projectors, the 42FPS schlock that Peter Jackson is trying to hawk is just as useless. One thing I will give 42FPS, when Peter Jackson uses quick-cut-scenes in his dialogue pieces in his movies, you can feel the crisp tight jarring all the more than you could with lower-FPS presented movies. The latest bit of movie-time bullshit is this DBOX crap. Seats and shake and throb, little more than magic fingers for movie seats. It’s the collision of sex toys and movie making that I never thought I would witness in my lifetime. It’s loud, it’s distracting, and it damages whatever movie it’s paired with.
I left the theater glad I only spent $10 bucks for two people, but bent that I had to endure exposure to this cash-grab DBOX bullshit.
What’s the answer? Now that movies take only one to two months to come out on BluRay or DVD, there is something to be said about just waiting around for them to hit Netflix, RedBox, or hell, even a video rental shop and just popping it in at home.
The only reason to go out to the movies is to actually GO. It’s a special space, it’s dark, lots of strangers, there’s a spectacle and you might just lose yourself in what you’re watching. Now, with all this assorted bullshit surrounding the experience you want, making it worse I would argue, it ruins the “going out to the movies” specialness. Not only is it distracting and unnecessary but the collateral damage from some of these fluff bits (like DBOX) just ruins it for everyone, and it adds more price and distance between the movie-going-public and these cinemas. For an IMAX 3D movie, with DBOX seats, with 42FPS projection, a soda, popcorn, perhaps a box of candy for two, you are starting to breach the $100 mark of obnoxiousness.
So what’s going to happen? Cinemas will add more bullshit and the public will eventually erode away. It’s like trying to grab a handful of sand, the harder you squeeze, the faster the sand runs out of your clenched hands. They will have priced themselves out of business with all this extra fluff bullshit. Then, because nature and capitalism abhor a vacuum, there will be new movie theaters without concessions, with a shoestring staff and plain projectors and people will flock to them because that’s what they are after. Not the fluff, but the movie. If things go from bad to worse for the economy, this could be the exact thing that kills the cinema for good. Movie makers will just switch to the “Direct to BluRay” channel and skip theatrical releases altogether.
Responsibility
I took Scott to work this morning for Barnes & Noble’s after-Christmas doorbuster sale that starts today. I pulled in to my driveway and parked my 2007 Santa Fe and was fiddling around cleaning things up and I put a check that has Christmas money on it behind the visor. When I opened the visor everything that I had put there, mostly just coupons that were expired all came tumbling out and all over the place. No big thing, so I start picking up whats in the car and since I had the drivers door open some of the slips fell out onto the driveway. I got out of my car, bent over and started picking up the debris, as I’m not one for littering. I looked up and at a sharp angle back at my car and my eyes settled on the rear passenger window and the interior light was on, I noticed something out of place and opened the door and looked closer.
The ceiling mounted handle for passengers to enter and exit was pulled out on one side and hanging drunkenly askew. I looked all around it looking for damage, perhaps something pulled out of the frame or something else and all I saw was the screw that held it together lolling in it’s case as part of the handle. I opened the case with a fingernail and the screw shuffled out and onto the floor in the rear drivers passenger side. I went inside, searched high and low and found a serviceable phillips head screwdriver in the basement and went back outside. I reassembled the handle and screwed it back into the frame of my vehicle. I tightened it up and then went around to the other handles and tightened them up too. All in all, not a huge problem.
But what does bother me is that this happened to someone who I had in my car, a friend, and they didn’t report what happened to me so I could take care of it. I don’t know who used that handle, and I don’t know if it failed while they were using it or if they used it and then it just jostled apart, but those sort of things don’t just happen on their own. Ceiling mounted handles like that just don’t shimmy until they run out their screws and just fall on the floor. What bothers me is that nobody noticed and nobody thought to draw my attention to a problem with my car, just use it and if it’s broken, ignore it – that way maybe they thought to escape responsibility for their actions? How do I know? It’s not like I would have dragged them to a repair place and made them pay for damaging my car – it was just a screw, easy fix. It’s not really the severity of the damage either that upsets me, it’s that nobody took responsibility for it when it happened.
I can’t assign blame and perhaps the person who broke it doesn’t know they broke it, therefore nobody is to blame. It does strike me that people in general are rather unobservant at least, if a handle seems jiggly or shaky perhaps you should tell the owner that there might be a problem coming down the pike? Car handles, especially those ceiling mounted ones are supposed to be firmly affixed to their assemblies. Perhaps I ask too much of people to notice such things.
As it is, there are new rules for being a passenger in my car. I value my car and I’m still making payments on the vehicle, so since people won’t grace me with responsibility or even basic observational reports I will have to insist that all use of the ceiling handles be forthwith out of bounds. You will have to enter and exit my vehicle without them and if you can’t do that, then you should find some other vehicle to use. My car is important to me as is it’s value and it not being broken. I also will be making regular inspections now to ensure that my vehicle is respected by those that I transport with it, because nobody is observant enough or respects me enough to let me know when things are falling apart.
It’s a sad statement that I have to do this, but this isn’t the only mystery damage I’ve had to deal with either. Someone or something put a foot-sized hole in the drywall in the upstairs and never thought to even mention it until I discovered it later on. That was fixed many moons ago, but either I’m plagued with an occasional poltergeist who is out to mildly irritate me or I have someone in my midst who lacks the basic respect and responsibility of being an adult. One of those is more likely than the other. Since I don’t know who did what, I can’t address this open letter to anyone in particular. Know that I find your lack of respect, responsibility, and observation to be cowardly and shameful. Don’t come forward and don’t take the blame for it now, but in the future, and for anything else you may accidentally damage, think upon these words and be an adult.
How Lovely
I just got an email from my blog about a comment that was posted about my earlier post regarding controlling ammunition. There is no hidden agenda on my blog, I am a liberal and I proudly defend my opinions and thoughts and when it comes to weapons, what I write comes from the heart.
So, on with the comment from a user by the name of Joe Joe, email address bgyiu@gmail.com from IP address 166.152.62.75:
Move to chicago or new york ass munch. They have almost completely dis-armed their citizens, and now they are at the mercy of thugs who don’t follow the law anyway, dick mouth!! It’s candy ass turds like you who are the first to be raped and killed. Just because you don’t mind being defenseless, don’t expect the rest of us to be so anxious. Cowardly turds like you are precisely why this country has become a joke. Even if the criminals didn’t have guns, then we are at the mercy of an out of control, authoritative government. NO THANKS!!! Just move somewhere where they have disarmed everyone and allow YOUR family to be raped, pillaged, and plundered!!!! Keep your warped agenda to yourself, butt munch.
So that comment of course is certainly provocative. I find the actual word selection to be most interesting to me. Let’s set some assumptive defaults regarding the poster of the comment – first, I think it’s safe to say that anyone who reacts this way is likely a conservative and if so, we have to have pity for them because they are political lepers. Nobody wants to engage with them because all they have is vitriol, anger, and reactivity. This particular fellow also has a uniquely bent vocabulary.
Let’s move beyond the fear of control from the government and get at the core pillars of the comments contents. The first one is fear. This comment reeks of fear. Fear of criminals, fear of the government, and fear of what I said in my blog. I don’t feel anxious or attacked by the commenter, I feel sad for him – as I would anyone who lives in that much fear eventually would de-evolve into nothing more than a gross sort of pavlovian kicks and jerks. Now on to what really is entertaining about this comment, and these words are at the core of it: “ass munch”, “dick mouth”, “candy ass”, and of course, “rape”. Now my higher education is in psychology and english and I can’t help but feel excited at these very colorful phrases. The writer reveals more to me in his word selection than the actual content of what he is trying to convey. As I have said time and time again when it comes to conservatives who are so angry and upset with homosexuals, it has more to do with them fighting their reflections than it does anything else. This fellows comment is a perfect example of this. A rational argument could have been made without all these colorful epithets however this fellow spent time typing these in. I think this commenter has a deep psychosexual issue that he has not dealt with yet. He is typing “ass munch” and he is thinking about analingus. He writes “dick mouth” so obviously fellatio is foremost on his mind, “candy ass” has a rather well-known connotation to cowardice however when this phrase is in the same statement with the others, it’s not cowardice but rather a begging for anal sex. In the end we get to “rape”, and that imagery comes up quite a lot. I am unsure as to whether the commenter is fearful of being raped, anxious about having rape ideations or what, but he spends a rather long time thinking about it. I’d have to say that the phrasing is homosexually receptive, as it’s something that bottoms are fond of in general. So the commenter is probably a closet homosexual with ideations of being overwhelmed by a more masculine partner and likely fantasizes about having his will dominated by another man. The popular image of this is the ultra-butch muscle mary who at the drop of a hat drops their shorts for a righteous pounding. I would say that in the extremis, this fellow, if he wasn’t ruled by fear, would probably enjoy anal sex and from the sheer massive content of homosexual phrasing in such a short comment, how could anyone see it any other way?
So, I feel more pity for him than anything else. Joe Joe, I hope you stop trying to troll blogs like these because your deeper psychology is leaking out in your vocabulary and I suspect that you really would prefer people to not know of how much homosexual ideation goes on between your ears.
As for the message you tried to convey? It is lost on me. I know what you wanted to say and stripping off your homosexual panic and the fear, I do get you, however I still do not agree with you. I still believe that controlling ammunition is the best way to control guns. Obviously it isn’t a topic that a liberal or a conservative is willing to budge on so perhaps leaving the comment was a faux-pas on your behalf. In any case, you did entertain me and for that, I am thankful.
You should do something about all that homosexual panic though, it’s not good for you. Really.
Timon Throws Mud At Athens
I wrote this on Facebook, but I think I should publicize it to a wider audience. This is my best argument for the election of 2012:
This is an excerpt from an email I wrote to my father after he told me about how awful socialists are. Enjoy.
***
I honestly can’t say that I’m terribly upset by Quantitative Easing or that I harbor any fear of inflation. I find fear to be a worthless emotion. Fear and worry do nothing for anyone. It’s a lot like a rocking chair. Yes you shuffle about a lot but you don’t get anywhere. Plus fear is a kind of fog that sits on your mind and suppresses true joy and real happiness. I’m tired of the media telling me that I should be afraid or fear that or this or whatever. I get loads of it when I fly for work and it’s, to put it nicely, utter malarkey. The end isn’t coming, the politicians aren’t going to ruin the world. The globe will continue to spin day after day and people will continue to make a gamely try at it, doing what they always do. The color of the background may change, but life will go on.
As for Willard Romney, as I refuse to use his cutesy pet name, he’s got a lot of problems. He, and others in the Republican party seem to have fallen off the rightmost edge of existence. Even beyond you and your friends. That’s quite something! The GOP killed a paid-for-and-ready-to-go jobs bill for **VETERANS**. Dad, I know you look in the mirror to shave. I know you were in the Marine Corps and I also know that once you are a marine, you are one for life. So, that on some deep private level in your mind should bother you. That your party nailed a perfectly good bill just because they are racist and can’t stand to see a bunch of old white men subservient to a younger black man. I know you aren’t a racist, and I forgive you for being so incredibly conservative, but you have to admit that deep down, your inner Marine has got to smart at least a little to know that a jobs bill that was supposed to benefit vets got shot down for absolutely no good reason. Well, it bothers me. More than that though, is the entire GOP party being so intransigent. They started congress with the single aim of denying progress to our President beyond rational thought. They have killed and voted down every single effort, efforts that are meant to benefit the middle class. Middle class people like you, Theresa, and uh, THE REST OF US. Including me. I can’t say that I have a problem with taxing the rich, not really. I learned a little bit of history a few weeks ago that I will share with you. Trickle-Down Economics, that economic policy that if you cut the taxes on the very rich that everyone benefits because the rich will donate, they’ll start new businesses, and hire people and all of that. It sounds wonderful, but the rich really haven’t done anything they were supposed to do for the rest of us. They, especially Willard Romney, moved their money to Switzerland or the Cayman Islands. So, back to Trickle-Down, it used to be known by another more colorful name. It used to be called Horse and Sparrow Economics. The mental image was that you force fed a horse (the rich) with oats until it started to run oats in it’s droppings, and the droppings were for the Sparrows (the rest of us). I find that to be more accurate a representation of the economic policy of the GOP. Feed the rich until they start dropping food out of their ass for the rest of us to eat. It’s a delightfully filthy image, but that’s how a lot of us in the middle class feel. That the rich get richer and the rest of us could die for all they care – yet we’re doing ALL OF THE WORK. Then I learned that the rich do not create jobs. It is the Middle Class that creates jobs. The Middle Class makes enough money to buy en-masse, which encourages those who want to make money to cater to us and then they hire people to suit that need. The rich will not just create jobs because somehow they feel put-upon to do so! It’s the Middle Class that does the hard work and it’s the Middle Class that creates the need. So, really, when you get down to it, the rich are parasites. It’s diametrically opposite to how conservatives think – that the poor are the parasites. It hasn’t worked out in 200 years, perhaps you have it wrong.
Another thing that I’ve learned is the hot emotional core of old white man anger. There is a problem in your ranks, with the Republican party and it’s been happening for many many years. The GOP has switched in it’s leadership. It used to be run by Yankee power, by the Andrew Carnegies and Rockefellers . Now it’s run by Southern power. It’s got nothing to do with getting rich and leaving a lasting positive legacy behind. That’s a Yankee extract from the Puritan style of thinking. That if you make a lot of money you owe it to leave something behind that benefits everyone else. Compare that with how the GOP is currently structured – especially the Tea Party people, whom you are directly responsible for as a party member. It’s a Southern way. It’s all about fear, loathing, racism and hierarchy. There is a pecking order and that rules over everything else. Where does this come from? Not from the Puritans, but rather from English aristocracy running slavery plantations in Barbados. They brought their structure into the deep south and for at least 150 years the Yankees had power and the Southerners resented it. Now the tables have turned. All the things you remember and treasure about your dear conservatism have been perverted by Southern wretches who refuse to acknowledge your aspirations about what conservatism can do. You want Trickle-Down, or Horse-and-Sparrow to work, and I know it’s precious and dear to you. But it’s not being driven by the men you thought it was. It’s driven by men who are only concerned with the structure of hierarchy and maintaining the status quo. In many ways, the rank and file of the GOP are field slaves to your new Southern masters. The Southern Republican wants it only his way and no other. No room for anything else. And no room for someone as backwards as Andrew Carnegie or a Rockefeller to leave anything but a smoking husk behind.
So the rest of us, pretty much having to land behind the horse and eat whatever seeds might be dropping out of the rear of that animal see nothing but rigid structure and absolutely no progress. There aren’t jobs being made, the recovery is stultified and the men and women who are supposed to make things easier for us all are so racist that they’ve become nearly crystallized in their intransigence. Things aren’t getting better and then we hear about how the rich have $21 Trillion dollars stored overseas and how none of the rich are helping anyone else. There isn’t anymore bird seed for us Sparrows! The rich are sending their droppings off to Switzerland! So, we’re between a rock and a hard place. Nobody wants to help us, the conservatives don’t give a flying rip and the Republicans think we’re just a batch of worthless moochers, the 47% that Willard Romney spoke of. The 47% like YOUR MOTHER for all the time that I knew her when she was still alive, one of those 47%! So, the Middle Class, with nothing from the conservatives at all have to turn to anything else. So the liberals and democrats say that some socialization may help. You chafe at the word socialism yet you feed off of it. It’s a strange relationship, you know. The silent generation and the baby boomers are both entitled and you are reaping the benefits while castigating anyone else who might even show an interest in what you are taking advantage of. Socialism. Like your auto insurance and your homeowners insurance, which is socialized. Your Fire Departments and the public schools that educated… people you love… again, socialism. Medicare that pays for your trips to see the doctor. Socialism. Social Security, which has SOCIAL in it’s !@#$ name! Regular checks… on the backs of the rest of us. And we smile gamely and nod and wish you happiness, and what do we get in return? Sour grapes and angry yammerings about marxism and socialism. My tin ear aches.
So yes, socialism Dad. Wonderful glorious socialism. The poor and middle class are tired of eating horse shit. We are weary of the rich and their excesses and their rudeness and their stupid capering behaviors! They aren’t respectable. The rich are tapeworms that eat everything and leave nothing for anyone else. They contribute nothing but nasty snide comments and thanks to a disgustingly eroded public education system, they use fear to control the great unwashed masses.
And so, we come back to fear. Fear is what’s at the heart of the problem. The majority of Americans are too stupid and too fearful to engage in any rational thought. If they knew what the rich and the conservatives did to the rest of us, while they waddled off fat and happy there would be hell to pay. Thankfully we are an easily cowed lot. Obedient and silent and hard-working.
So, in a way, screw the rich. And frankly my dear, I don’t want to be rich. I want to be happy. Perhaps capitalism isn’t such a grand to-do after all. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe socialism isn’t oh-so-terrible! Maybe if the Sparrows are given fresh bird seed they might be able to fly again. I think that’s worth looking into.
So as a member of the Middle Class, I have no choice but to be deaf to the Republican party. The members of your party did their level best to hurt the rest of us through glorious inaction. We see the GOP’s intransigence and we’ll throw our chips in when it comes time to vote. The question will be simple for us: Select someone who has hurt us all or someone who offers at least a workable claim to want to move forward. Willard Romney or Barack Obama. At least for me, there is no real choice. The GOP are anti-American racist hypocritical ignorant bigots.
An empty chair would be better. Or maybe, a chair with Barack Obama actually sitting in it, leading. DOING SOMETHING. DOING ANYTHING.
Exclusive: Paul Ryan Quietly Requested Obamacare Cash | The Nation
Exclusive: Paul Ryan Quietly Requested Obamacare Cash | The Nation.
This requires, as President Clinton said so eloquently last night, real brass. This man has no concept of honor or truth, he can’t figure out what is a lie or what isn’t and simply says things that are most convenient or expedient for his current situation. After reading the article from Rolling Stone magazine about Paul Ryan and then reading this, and witnessing the Goebbels-level lying – it’s just overwhelming. It isn’t that Paul Ryan’s pants are on fire, no, that’s not a powerful enough image – Paul Ryan’s pants have induced a kind of dishonesty-based shining fusion. We aren’t talking mere combustion here, the petty touch of chemistry – this is an elevated form of lying. This is lying that can manipulate the Strong Force of the universe and it has made his pants into a kind of tiny sun of dishonesty.
It used to be “Liar liar, pants on fire!” Now it’s “Oh Hi Paul, would you mind helping me put on sunblock for the blazing UV shining off those … uh… pants you’ve got on. I’m also going to need welders goggles just to look at you. Thanks.”
And I might as well just get this over with:
Paul Ryan’s Hero – Joseph Goebbels
Neo Pangea To Launch Intern Abuser Website
Neo Pangea To Launch Intern Abuser Website.
I saw this and instantly thought of the Milgram experiments and thought about an expansion to his basic study which might reveal more about humanity. The basic Milgram experiment was to deliver a painful electric shock to an actor who was pretending to react to the shock. The person in the experiment was the subject with the control board – to see how far they’d go.
Milgram touched on so many parts of the human condition in his experiment but there are drifting outliers that bear study. Putting a sadist on the panel, or putting a masochist there for example.
Of course, tongue-in-cheek a part of me idly wondered if you were in a Milgram type experiment and you were told that there was a politician on the receiving end of the control box would that change the resistance level of the subject to escalate? I think that the experiment would display a certain measure of class warfare or even have a kind of respectability-quotient attached to it. What if you had a salesman, a politician, or a lawyer on the receiving end of the control box? How would you progress through the various levels of simulated sadism of the Milgram experiment?
I get to laughing about this entire idea. Not because torturing people is funny, but there is a part of me that would skip all the controls and go for the lethal one at the very end and just hold it down and savor the howling screams of agony – for salesmen, politicians, and lawyers.
🙂
What We Already Knew About The Tea Party And ‘The Newsroom’ Finally Said Out Loud | MoveOn.Org
What We Already Knew About The Tea Party And ‘The Newsroom’ Finally Said Out Loud | MoveOn.Org.
It takes a fictional show to do more truth-telling and honest true journalism than anyone that currently is sitting before a camera mugging for the masses. It’s the media’s inaction which, above everything else, will secure the wrong leadership coming to power in the United States of America.
To all the “Journalists” out there, this actor has outdone each and every one of you. Through this fictional work, this show has effectively emasculated each and every one of you. We don’t care for you, we do not respect you, and if you want to know what the people truly want, we want you to quit your jobs and do something else. Let others who are stronger and more passionate take your place. They will do it better. It has already been done, in fiction as it should in real life. Shame on you, “journalists”.
Every Sperm Is Sacred
So I was wandering Facebook, as I do, and I found a great image – but I can’t really link to where I found it because Facebook is a PITA. So, here’s the image:
And then of course on Facebook I left some comments, as only I could:
- Technically life begins at spermatogenesis. If body temperature kills sperm, and men who wear clothing usually keep their body temperature high in the region where these cells are being grown, then any man who is currently wearing pants is a mass murderer?