The Unofficial Badmovies.org Random Thought Thread!

[indianasmith]

Yesterday morning my next door neighbor was found dead in his driveway.  He shot himself.
    He was a kind old man, he and his wife often walked down the road together in the evenings and I always made a point to wave, or stop and say "hello."  I don't know what prompted this, but it's just very sad.

[Flangepart]

Yesterday morning my next door neighbor was found dead in his driveway.  He shot himself.
    He was a kind old man, he and his wife often walked down the road together in the evenings and I always made a point to wave, or stop and say "hello."  I don't know what prompted this, but it's just very sad.

Man...sorry to hear that, Indy.
We all have demons to fight. I guess sometimes they find that one break in the armor, and they have their way.

[BoyScoutKevin]

I wonder why they never started making a bunch of sequels & prequels & spinoffs to Corvette Summer, like they did with Jaws or Smokey And The Bandit & the like...

Jaws was the top grossing film at the box office for 1975, and I believe at that time it was the top grossing film at the box office of all time. Though, unadjusted for inflation, it has been surpassed several times since then.

Smokey and the Bandit, which cost $4,300,00 to make grossed almost $127 million at the box office in the U.S. alone, excluding what it made overseas.

I can't seem to find the box office gross for Corvette Summer, which I saw in the theater, when it was first released. Though I doubt it was as successful as the other two. So the simple answer to the question is a film that is considered to be a success at the box office will generate sequels, remakes, prequels, and what have you, and a film that is considered not to be a success at the box office will not.

Though how do you measure success? Some people will regard Rogue One a financial failure at the box office unless it generates a billion $ box office. Even though it has already generated more than 2 and a half times what it took to make, which by some measures would make it a financial success and raised enough to make the next one in the series.

I had to go back and modify this, because I had forgotten to add something. There was actually a sequel to Corvette Summer. Maybe an unofficial sequel, but a sequel nevertheless. A film which I never heard of called Stingray, which came out the same year--1978--as Corvette Summer.

[ER]

I resolve in 2017 to lead a life that focuses more on other people and less on myself.

[AoTFan]

EDIT: Left out a word.

Why do we hit puberty so young in our lives, long before our brains have really developed and gained even a fraction of the wisdom we'd need to know how to handle such feelings?  it's like nature wants to become parents before we grow old enough to realize what a dumb idea it is.

[ER]

Why do we hit puberty so young in our lives, long before out brains have really developed and the gained even a fraction of the wisdom we'd need to know how to handle such feelings?  it's like nature wants to become parents we grow old enough to realize what a dumb idea it is.

I think we are hard-wired to reproduce and preserve our species, and this is prioritized even above the parts of our natures that deal with our own individual good.

[ER]

Why do we hit puberty so young in our lives, long before out brains have really developed and the gained even a fraction of the wisdom we'd need to know how to handle such feelings?  it's like nature wants to become parents we grow old enough to realize what a dumb idea it is.

* 'course it could also be "because nobody wants to have sex with really old people."

[AlbertMond]

Why do we hit puberty so young in our lives, long before out brains have really developed and the gained even a fraction of the wisdom we'd need to know how to handle such feelings?  it's like nature wants to become parents we grow old enough to realize what a dumb idea it is.

It's not really that young.
People didn't live that long back in the day. What we ended up getting is rather generous to modern society, because it gives the average person a few years between hitting puberty and being customarily accepted as sexual. The only curse is that we treat sex as extremely taboo and young people more like children than they ought to be treated. Like, to me, having sex is something a young person can be much more readily equipped for than driving a car or even completing the more decadent math problems. And cars kill a lot of people, and you know it's not even just a ton of teenagers causing all that death and the world is full of known adults who are just really stupid.

My take is nature doesn't really want anything, let alone people to grow old.

[Newt]

Maybe it's just me but the internet is getting pretty dull, even dead.  Too many people actually working at work?

[Trevor]

Maybe it's just me but the internet is getting pretty dull, even dead.  Too many people actually working at work?

Agreed: I was made the acting head at my work this week. 

[ER]

Well...I don't know whether to be intrigued and optimistic or scared for the boy but something my godson said yesterday when he was off school has made his mother and his grandparents and now that I just found out, even me take sharp notice.

I think I've mentioned that in here before that I used to know someone who had synesthesia, meaning somewhere in his brain signals for different senses would become confused or at least were processed through neural pathways meant for other sources of input, and he would smell colors, or hear sounds associated with seeing numbers or letters, or even (less often) get flashes of sight from certain tastes, things like that. (He told me one thing he could not do was touch velvet. Velvet he told me made him see purple inside his mind, real strongly, and he'd get a smell like burning rubber, and if he kept touching velvet he'd start getting nauseated.)

Oddly these responses were not random and he'd have the exact same sensations repeatedly, looking at red always registered the same olfactory effect; smelling burning paper always had a definite and repeating sound which he described as a drumbeat or a low thump, like something dropped on a staircase, it wasn't just occasional and it never varied, each time would be the same, so that he knew it was coming.

I'd ask how he could stand living like that and he'd say he was not just used to it, he couldn't imagine it any other way.

A girl he used to go out also with told me if I was around him long enough I'd see he was also "a little bit psychic," as she put it, like he'd get impressions sometimes about places and people and situations that were usually useful and accurate. I saw that time and again.

No one else in his family has that condition, synesthesia, only he had it. His sister has told me she's never experienced that in her life, and like me couldn't imagine what it must be like.

Well yesterday as I started off saying, her son, my godson, who is eight, was off school and had just come in from being out in the snow and she was going to let him roast marshmallows over the burner on the stove, when she noticed he was siting there holding a marshmallow in his hand, staring at it, and he looked at her and asked, "Do you hear that?"

She said, "What?"

He said, "That sound. The marshamallows are making this sound, like...." And he sat there like he couldn't describe it, and finally he said, "They sound like sand blowing."

So she didn't let on that him telling her that freaked her out and later she asked him (she's asked him before) if he's heard sounds like that from things, and he said he hadn't, but now we're all wondering if, like his uncle, he has this condition too.

And in a big way, truth be told, I hope he doesn't.

[Rev. Powell]

Why do we hit puberty so young in our lives, long before out brains have really developed and the gained even a fraction of the wisdom we'd need to know how to handle such feelings?  it's like nature wants to become parents we grow old enough to realize what a dumb idea it is.

It's not really that young.
People didn't live that long back in the day. What we ended up getting is rather generous to modern society, because it gives the average person a few years between hitting puberty and being customarily accepted as sexual. The only curse is that we treat sex as extremely taboo and young people more like children than they ought to be treated. Like, to me, having sex is something a young person can be much more readily equipped for than driving a car or even completing the more decadent math problems. And cars kill a lot of people, and you know it's not even just a ton of teenagers causing all that death and the world is full of known adults who are just really stupid.

My take is nature doesn't really want anything, let alone people to grow old.

There are two elements to this. One is that people are hitting puberty at a younger age than they used to due to better nutrition. Some anthropologists believe our ancestors didn't hit puberty until the mid-teens.

The second factor is that society is much more complicated than it used to be. In a hunter-gatherer society, or even an agrarian society, a teenager may be able to contribute as much or more to the tribe than an adult. There weren't lots of complex decisions to be made; literacy was a luxury, not a necessity. My great grandmother was married and living on a farm at 14, to be a farm wife all she needed to know was how to cook, clean, sew, feed chickens...

[AlbertMond]

Maybe it's just me but the internet is getting pretty dull, even dead.  Too many people actually working at work?

I find life in general to be strangely deader than it used to be.
I suspect heroin.

In the internet's case, Google's increasingly poor algorithms don't help either. Somehow people don't explore the internet the way they used to, and part of the reason may just be that it's indeed harder.

[AlbertMond]

Why do we hit puberty so young in our lives, long before out brains have really developed and the gained even a fraction of the wisdom we'd need to know how to handle such feelings?  it's like nature wants to become parents we grow old enough to realize what a dumb idea it is.

It's not really that young.
People didn't live that long back in the day. What we ended up getting is rather generous to modern society, because it gives the average person a few years between hitting puberty and being customarily accepted as sexual. The only curse is that we treat sex as extremely taboo and young people more like children than they ought to be treated. Like, to me, having sex is something a young person can be much more readily equipped for than driving a car or even completing the more decadent math problems. And cars kill a lot of people, and you know it's not even just a ton of teenagers causing all that death and the world is full of known adults who are just really stupid.

My take is nature doesn't really want anything, let alone people to grow old.

There are two elements to this. One is that people are hitting puberty at a younger age than they used to due to better nutrition. Some anthropologists believe our ancestors didn't hit puberty until the mid-teens.

The second factor is that society is much more complicated than it used to be. In a hunter-gatherer society, or even an agrarian society, a teenager may be able to contribute as much or more to the tribe than an adult. There weren't lots of complex decisions to be made; literacy was a luxury, not a necessity. My great grandmother was married and living on a farm at 14, to be a farm wife all she needed to know was how to cook, clean, sew, feed chickens...

I think that the earlier average puberty may accelerate the roles they should reasonably play, though - maybe not, I guess I should look into it.

Teenagers really ought to be working more and get the rights that come with working rather than just the stigma of being a minor worker.

[AoTFan]

So, just read that a major pizza chain is offer fifty percent off on ALL menu items until January 9th.

Because, you know, losing that weight you gain over the holidays wasn't hard enough.