Your thought for today

[Mr. Atoz]

For me, that is the best use of CGI -- when you don't even realize it's there until afterwards and you think: "Hey, wait a minute, how did they make Chris Evans look like a 98-pound weakling anyway?"

[Mr. Atoz]

"Real life is like opera. Try to enjoy the songs and the costumes because the plot doesn't amount to much." -- Dave Maleckar

[Mr. Atoz]

I was channel surfing the other day and happened by "Who Wants to be a Millionaire". Normally I don't bother with it, but a trivia question had just been asked and you know how it is... you can't resist pitting your brain against a trivia question. It was about the 1981 song "Rapture", generally considered the first recorded rap song. The question was: Who recorded it? -- Blondie, Duran Duran, Nirvana, or some rapper I'd never even heard of. Now, the contestant was a man who looked about my age (57 if you must know), so he should have known that the correct answer was Blondie (with Deborah Harry). But the poor schmuck was drawing a blank, so he called his daughter up on stage to help him! As soon as I saw the girl, I could tell at a glance that she wasn't even BORN in 1981! A fact which she confirmed a few seconds later when she said, "Dad, I wasn't born until 1989, so I don't have a clue. And now the whole country knows how old I am!"

[Niemz]

Ha ha

Sent from my LGL34C using proboards

[Mr. Atoz]

Cats are definitely smarter than dogs. You would NEVER be able to persuade eight cats to let you hook them to a sled and pull it through the snow.

[Mr. Atoz]

A little while ago I was in a big-box department store, and near the fireworks display there was a sign that said, "It is illegal to set off fireworks inside the building." Don't you wish you had been there on the day they decided that sign was necessary?

[Mr. Atoz]

I see on the Weather channel that you guys are getting some snow up in Michigan already, admiral. This didn't interfere with your annual hunting trip, did it?

[Mr. Atoz]

Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird:

Recently in the town of Ashton, England, a tracker/trailer belonging to "D****** Intelligent Logistics" got stuck in a narrow alley by mistakenly following its satellite navigation. The funny part is that the same thing has happened so many times, the town actually erected a SIGN on the highway saying, "DO NOT FOLLOW SAT/NAV HERE!"

[Niemz]

[Mr. Atoz]

Hey, remember the movie "Ghostbusters 2"? The lady "psychic" on Venkman's show predicted that the world would end on Feb 14, 2016! Just saying.

[Niemz]

I remember! I dont think the reboot of Ghostbuster will be any good.

[Mr. Atoz]

I must confess that I have my doubts, too. I saw an advertisement for it just the other day, and it just seemed pretty dull. I also don't want to sound like a chauvinist, but couldn't they at least have picked attractive women for the roles? I was focused on the woman with glasses on... the Egon Spengler character, obviously. Egon was a guy I didn't mind identifying with (being sort of a nerd with glasses myself). But this woman...

[Mr. Atoz]

Something that made me feel old yesterday... There was a question on Jeopardy! on the topic of "TV Characters"

"In 2015, fans mourned the passing of Yvonne Craig, who played this motorcycle-riding, 60s crime-fighter."

Not one of the three contestants even rang in. Admittedly they were all fairly young, in say their early or mid 30s.

[Mr. Atoz]

I still haven't seen the new "Ghostbusters" movie, but I have read the paperback. Basically it looks as if they just rewrote the original movie in their own words. It follows the original plot almost exactly except for the love story. There is no analog to Dana Barrett. A lot of details get switched around just for laughs. They don't set up shop in a firehouse. They LOOK at a firehouse, and the counterparts of Ray and Egon go nuts over it, but the "Venkman" character passes when she's told that the rent is over a hundred thousand a month. They end up leasing an old Chinese restaurant. I say "the Venkman character" not because she acts anything like Venkman, but only because she seems to be the central character.

It's difficult to judge from reading the paperback if the movie would be funny. For instance, the guy they hire as their receptionist (their Janine) is just a big, dumb blonde. He doesn't seem to know anything about secretarial work or even how to answer a phone. They hire him because he's gorgeous and he has a "sexy Australian accent". If I were watching this in a movie, I don't know, it might strike me as funny. Reading it in a novel it just strikes me as "huh?" But you see the main reason the original was so funny in the first place was because it was totally unexpected. Nobody had ever done a paranormal comedy before. Now they're all over the place, so just rebooting the original is bound to seem pretty ho-hum in comparison. But yeah, it seems pretty okay.

You can tell it's science fiction because when the Ghostbusters procure the First Ever Empirical PROOF that ghosts exist, everyone assumes that it's fake! The Media stampede straight to a "professional debunker" and slavishly believe whatever he says! Obviously the screenwriters set this movie in some weird parallel dimension completely unlike ours.

The novelization is dedicated to the memory of the late Harold Ramis, and this reminds me... I wrote a superheroine story Halloween before last which I also dedicated to the memory of Harold Ramis. Its title is "Halloween", and it's not actually based on "Ghostbusters", but Egon Spengler does appear as a character. If you'd like to read it, send me a PM and I'll send you a link. I don't want to post the link on the forum because the story has some sexual content (not a lot, but some).

[Mr. Atoz]

50 years of Star Trek! Can you believe it?

I have to confess that I haven't been watching any of the marathons (on BBC America or Syfy).