Friday, September 30, 2011

Random Stuff:

  • Robb's "Uncle Badtouch Wants You" is now available on a tee-shirt.

  • With the media circus surrounding the trial of Michael Jackson's doctor, it's a thousand wonders they haven't allowed a medium into the courtroom so MJ himself could testify via Ouija board.

  • And speaking of the public's morbid fascination with trials, could somebody explain to me why I have even heard the name "Amanda Knox"? I am given to understand that maybe she killed somebody in a foreign land and maybe she didn't, but people die like flies in foreign lands and I don't know the names of anybody who allegedly killed any of them except for this one chick.

  • I had never thought about that before. He's right; the whole basic premise of Poltergeist is bogus and makes no sense. I mean, in addition to the whole ghosts and dead people haunting stuff thing.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sooo... Spider-man's girlfriend is dead?

Dave said...

Pretty sure the point of the Knox media circus is that Italy has a messed up legal system. This is the same country trying seismologists for manslaughter because they didn't warn about an earthquake, after all.

greg said...

Since she is from Seattle, her story probably gets more time on the TV up here than where you are...count yourself lucky.

Like staghound said, if she was not a fairly attractive young lady(local talk radio calls her Foxy Knoxy) I'm not sure you would here as much about it.

I'm willing to be that in Europe, they view her as a 'typical' 20-something American Female, and I wouldn't be surprised if at some level there was an example being made.

greg said...

And on another note, please don't try to ruin Poltergeist for me...it was like the first scary movie I saw...back before I cared about things like home inspections, and building permits.

Obviously, the zoning and inspection folks were on the take also..why someone could even make a 2nd movie out of this, as Craig T. Nelson goes back to investigate how the county approved all this construction!

Bram said...

We like our chicks hot, crazy and white. When one of them kills her kid or roommate, or bangs her students, we are interested. We also think, she would be really really fun for a couple of weeks.

Stuart the Viking said...

When making horror movies in the 80s I don't think they put a whole lot of thought into the details. It was part of the fun of watching them pointing out all the plot holes. I mean really, it was the 80s. All they really needed was some kids running around being chased (at least one being a hot chick who's boobs you would usually get to see sometime before she was killed off), some blood (gore etc), and a few surprise scares (bad guy jumping out etc) and they called it a movie.

We watch them now and they just seem rediculous and not really scarry.

s

Joanna said...

Ah, the sweet sweet smell of fridge logic (as in, the logic that kicks in two hours after leaving the theatre, when you're staring into the fridge for a bedtime snack). Almost always accompanied by "Hey, wait a minute ... " and a vague sense of having been duped.

TV Tropes has whole sections devoted to it (fridge logic, fridge humor, fridge sadness, fridge horror ... ). I'd link but I'm in a good mood today and I won't do that to you. :-)

og said...

Most of those subdivisions were slab-on-grade. Southern California has no frost to speak of, so electric, gas, plumbing is only buried about 30" below grade. Even swimming pools, which are usually six feet deep or shallower, might not disturb an old grave, given a gradual accumulation of additional topsoil. To say nothing of fill brought in by the contractors. And yes, the contractors are always in on the game.

ravenshrike said...

The italian cop's bungling makes that one forensics guy from Missouri look like a model for outstandingly performed forensics.

Basically take the most railroaded murder case you've heard of in the last 50 years in the US and multiply the outright incompetence and cronyism times two.

Jay G said...

Re: Poltergeist.

At least this one had a supernatural component. I always hated the standard slasher films, because I'd be sitting there thinking, "Gee, if even one of these idiots had so much as a J-frame this movie would be *much* shorter"...

Guffaw in AZ said...

Knox is an American, White chick accused of a violent sex murder.
If she'd been a Black Zimbabian, we'd never have heard of her.

cj said...

And she's kinda cute, so if you plaster pictures of her on every story, it gets a bunch of people looking at it. Which is really what media and reporting is actually all about.

Robert said...

RE: Poltergeist

The university I attended had it's administration building and the dorms I happened to live in the first year built right on top of an old pioneer graveyard. About midway into my freshman year a crew working on the foundation in the basement of the admin building found several old bodies that had been left behind when they relocated the graveyard. They were left in situ for quite a few months while they wrangled out the legal details involved in moving them, as there was a possibility that they were Native Americans and there's a heap of paperwork involved with messing with native remains.

And yes, there were rumors that both buildings were haunted, though I never saw any ghosts.

Larry said...

It's in the script.