Sidd's Happy Place
 

I'm in a happy place today. Thought you should all know.

First, it's Halloween -- the closest thing to a religious holiday in San Francisco, and among my favorite days.

Second, I saw Cecil Taylor in concert last night, and he was superb.

Third, it's Friday, and even though I should work all weekend that is somehow meaningful.

Came out in 1986. On my favorite movies ever list.

Sidd's Happy Place
 

Don't worry. It's early yet.

I was going to say whoop dee fucking do for you, but I couldn't pull it off.

Poll: Best tagline for a movie ever
 

Office Space.

Work sucks.

Okay. I have an actual fashion question, and it has nothing to do with socks.
 

Uh, did you miss most of the 1990s?

Left here after the edit just to add fuel to the liberal flaming. But, yeah, scroll, post, scroll, post.

Poll: Best tagline for a movie ever
 

"They're Here."

Still kind of creeps me out.

That is very mean and very funny.

I did something similar when I took two cousins (18 and 14) with me to see Blair Witch one afternoon. The movie is pretty creepy. After the film and all through dinner, I continued to remind them about the scary parts as they got more and more freaked out.

Then, my aunt went into labor in the middle of the night, and the 18 year old was stuck home alone with three little kids, terrified out of her mind.

Anyone know the name of this short story?
 

Don't know about the short story, but didn't you have major family issues that you posted about a while ago? What's going on with that?

aV

One for the TUIMMALB file
 

Link sent by email from a friend in the music industry who thought it was hilarious.

TM

Poll: Best tagline for a movie ever
 

Jaws 2 had a good tagline for a not so good movie "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water..."

The South Park movie tagline was not all that good, but makes me laugh anyway (probably because the whole movie made me laugh): "All hell breaks loose"

What was "Be afraid. be very afraid"? was that The Fly? that was a good one too.

Ghosts and Other Scary Things
 

A year and one week ago I took a ghost tour of Salem. I did not see any ghosts. But I saw a very scary roadkill squirrel. The memory haunts me to this day.

Ghosts and Other Scary Things
 

I killed that squirrel as a warning to you about the way your life was headed. Glad you got the message.

Terrorizing the Kiddies
 

We watched The Ring the night before letting the Wonk Princess watch it, to make sure it was appropriate. The next night, we let her get the movie on PPV upstairs in her room. I knew what time the showing was, and I sat and watched the clock patiently downstairs, cell phone at my side. At what I figured was just teh right time in the screening, I called her on my cell.

I think they heard the bloodcurdling scream down the block when I croaked out "seven days." She came tearing down the stairs, and didn't watch the rest of the movie.

Tax(I'm gonna make a shrink very rich someday)wonk

Ghosts and Other Scary Things
 

In an eerie--but not ironic--coincidence, I ran past a dessicated roadkill squirrel this morning. It was quite scary too.

Ghosts and Other Scary Things
 

Be warned.*



*shit, you Houston people are a tough lot to keep up with. could you all just get your lives in order already?

"Don't get mad, get everything."

"Not every gift is a blessing"

"Where happily ever after is just a dream"


My favorite is the Alien one though.


Oh, this one is pretty clever

"When it comes to love, sometimes she just can't think straight."

Terrorizing the Kiddies
 

If someone had called me during the Ring, I would have had a heart attack no joke. Especially towards the end.

God I hate that movie. A curse on the nightmares that movie has caused me. The times it has caused me to pause when I see a shadow in the tv screen.

I hear the japanese version is even worse. I will never ever watch it.

Ghosts and Other Scary Things
 

I have no doubt of your good intentions. But I question your methods.

Terrorizing the Kiddies
 

I wouldn't say that it's worse. The American version is _exactly_ the same. As in, they translated the dialougue, set in in the US instead of Japan, and that's it. There are no plot differences. There are no differences in imagery. I can't believe that whoever made the American version can actually consider it an accomplishment; a techically competent team of monkeys could have copied Ringu the way they did.

Terrorizing the Kiddies
 

Well, what's his name tried to copy Psycho exactly and no way in hell does he ever approach the feeling of dread from the original. In fact it sucked.

So perhaps that is the difference? Not having seen Ringu, I cannot say of course.

Terrorizing the Kiddies
 

A friend of mine hid in the attic in a black holocaust cloak and one of those masks from Scream while his daughter was hosting a slumber party for a dozen or so thirteen year olds. They put the movie on, and periodically, he'd thump around the attic and they'd all jump. After the movie was over, her jumped out of the attic stairs and scared the hell out of them. If the guys from Monster's, Inc. were working that night, they could have taken the rest of the year off.

Ghosts and Other Scary Things
 

Has anyone ever seen/experienced a ghost?

Years ago, I was out to dinner with my roommate (yes, just a regular roommate), our upstairs neighbors, and some mutual friends. Must have been this time of year because we were talking about Halloween and ghosts and believing in them. The 4 of us who lived in the same house said we believed and when our friends scoffed, and one of us said there's one in the house.

At that point we all looked around the table at each other, nodding our heads in agreement. We had never spoken about it to each other before (even the married couple upstairs). We all had the same impression of her, that she was benevolent old women. She wasn't spooky or scary. In a strange way it was comforting to have her around.

I never saw her, my roommate did. She would come into his room and sit on his bed. He kicked her one night and she stopped visiting.

Anne
No, I don't live in that house anymore.

Terrorizing the Kiddies
 

Damn you all for reminding me of this...I'm sure I will sleep well tonight.

So I'm home today, uh, "working" and trying to avoid the big bowl-o-candy I have for the kiddywinkles tonight. God help me - I'm weak. If I start posting like Cornholio, you'll know why.

And Wonk, that's just mean. Funny as hell, but mean.

-TL

Paging TF
 

Did I miss something? Did she get kicked off in the big sock purge as Leagl's straight sock? Where has she been?

We used to think we had one in our house when I was young. I don't know. What I do know is strange shit was always happening and things were always disappearing and reappearing in the oddest places. Especially the menorah.

For all I know, it was my dad messing around.

But I can tell you this.

Picture, if you will, a very old house, with a spooky attic and a spooky basement, out in the middle of nowhere, the sort of place where there are no lights to detract from your ability to see the stars at night. No neighbors within direct sight.

Picture a kid, oh say 13 or 14, home alone at night.

Now imagine the kid is sound asleep and is suddenly jerked awake by a screaming sound.

Ever heard a mountain lion roar or howl or whatever it is they do? Sounds just like a woman.

Terrorizing the Kiddies
 

I know the other guy said they're identical, but the Japanese version wasn't nearly as scary, and I didn't see the imagery, at least as realized, as the same. Maybe it wasn't as scary because of the subtitles, or maybe because the different culture makes it harder to relate (its okay if the calls are happening in Japan), or because I saw it second.

Paging TF
 

I was wonderig the same thing. All this socking has me confused, am I the only other person here? Am I alone in talking to Penske's various personas? Picture it, one lone man rushing from terminal to terminal, the multiple personalities arguing with each other for the right to respond.

Now there's an idea for a horror movie.

Paging TF
 

Yes.

-T(Penske's pregnant sock)L

Paging TF
 

This is the moment of realization at which you pass from a newbie to jaded old poster.

In a month, you'll retire, only to be pulled back two days later.

Paging TF
 

Please. Even my socks are gay. They just don't say so.

Tag lines & terrorizing kiddies
 

You are the coolest dad, ever. Very nice.

Anyhow, my favorite tag-line of all time is probably from The Abominable Dr. Phibes: "Love means never having to say you're ugly." Followed closely by the tag line for Deliverance: this is the weekend they didn't play golf.

Other goodies:
The Thing (remake): Man is the warmest place to hide.
Killer Klowns from Outer Space: In space, no one can eat ice cream.
Off the horror - changing lanes' tag line always stuck in my mind as being superficially amusing (one wrong turn deserves another).

Not really re: tag lines, but has anyone else noticed that, whoever is in charge of AMC's "MonsterFest" really, really knows their horror movies? First, they are picking really fine films, many of them NOT of the well-known or cultish variety (I was particularly impressed with their resurection of Funhouse). Second, the ads are picking up exactly the right lines from the movies to showcase. For Armies of Darkness, they got both "boomstick" and "groovey," and I think they also got in "gimme some sugar, baby," which was so funny that the first time I saw it I nearly peed my pants.

Ghosts and Other Scary Things
 

I've just gotten off the phone with PETA about you and your squirrel killing. It's a capital offense (to them) and they say you better watch yourself going home tonight or you'll be roadkill yourself. They aren't happy.

They've also informed me that if you go out tonight in a squirrel outfit wearing a "squirrel killer" sign, and hand acorns out to your woodland friends, they will consider a plea bargain.

Fair warning.

There are some great ones for old movies.

The wedding night. The anticipation. The kiss. The knife.

(from the Night of the Hunter).


or a classic:

Gaity! Glory! Glamour!

(guess!)

Paging TF
 

I think you mean "newber."

Ghosts and Other Scary Things
 

Lucky for me that PETA has never gotten much of a stronghold here in God's country. I'm sure the two displaced Berkeleyites holed up in an abandoned warehouse somewhere in Deep Ellum have way too much on their hands to worry about little old me and a couple of dead squirrels. First on their list being all the Park Cities ladies-who-lunch and their furs that they bust out the 3 times per year that the temperature is below 30 here.

I appreciate the heads up though.

Ghosts and Other Scary Things
 

The night before my Bat Mitzvah, I woke up to see an old man standing in the corner of my room. He put his finger to his lips in a "shhh..." kind of way, and walked across the room. He sat on the edge of my bed, laid his hand on my forehead, and I fell back to sleep.

He visited me again the night before I graduated from law school and the night before my daughter was born.

My mother thinks its my great-grandfather who died at age 99 when I was just 8 months old.

I also frequently think I see my best friend (who died almost 2 years ago) out of the corner of my eye.

Terrorizing the Kiddies
 

They aren't identical at all, though I think the US version was a pretty competent translation of the elements of the Japanese original that would play here.

They had quite different plots at significant points (the US version had significantly more plot explication, and it was different from the explication in the Japanese version - though I might be bringing some of the explication from Ringu 2 in).

They also had quite different imagery & subtext (horses, lighthouses, pervasiveness of TVs, gorey bodies, all new; children's rhymes about goblins, demon imagery, active relationship between science and the supernatural, disease and contagion suggestions, all gone).

Some things that were the same: the implicit "guilt" of the working single mother; oddly precocious kid; juxtaposition of juvenile innocence and knowledge of horrible truth was downplayed in the US version but still present; natural/resort/sea imagery juxtaposed with urban imagery.

The Japanese one was ... very Japanese. It was extremely terrifying, in its way, but that was completely different from the way the US version was scary. Ringu was much less obvious, and it gave were no real reasons for one to be scared. Western audiences seem too logical to appreciate being freaked just ... because you somehow are. OTOH, the Ringu camera work was friggin' brilliant - I found the editing itself creepy and disorienting.

Paging TF
 

See, I knew you were a Penske sock. Leave it to some dumbass guy to not realize a pregnancy lasts 9 months, not twelve.


(Or does it just seem like it's been that long?)

Fucking Frenchies
 

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2003/...een/index.html

[Halloween, a rather new introduction, is already dying out in France. Idiots don't know a good thing when they get it. Then again, with 247 days of national holidays a year, I guess they might get distracted. So long as they continue to sincerely celebrate All Saints and Day of the Dead, I guess I can forgive them.]

Paging TF
 

Let's just say I'm ready to begin eviction proceedings.

-TL