Usery-like tobacco tax, gay marriage, marijuana  and my seatbelt are all things, among others, that I think the government ought to get its slimy little (huge) nose out of. As a child, the concept of freedom seems huge. As an adult, it’s easy to see how the word is convoluted—and probably doesn’t mean what it used to.

Well, there’s one thing I have to applaud our government for. The liquidation of millions of dollars worth of tainted trailers left over from Hurricane Katrina.

If you don’t know much about the debacle (and frankly, I’m not completely in the know either), there are all these trailers that FEMA bought to house Katrina victims. It was a sloppy production, and quality control was almost non-existent. A huge number of the trailers had ‘unsafe’ levels of formaldehyde (though the only ones testing for it are FEMA). Hundreds of thousands of people got sick. It was a series of bad decisions, eventually covered up by more bad decisions.

Well, for years now, millions of tax dollars have been going toward storing these defective units. But finally, the government has agreed to sell most of the units at a mass auction for pennies on the dollar.

Now, it seems to me that opponent’s main complaint, besides the more theoretical speculations that fly about, is that it is unfair to the consumer who may purchase these units. What if someone bought a tainted unit and got sick? Wait. Hello? There’s a big huge ‘unsafe’ sticker on the outside! Now, forgive me if I’m wrong, but if you’re worried about formaldehyde shouldn’t you weigh the risks yourself? I mean, I can eat McDonalds every day if I want and no one will stop me. But If I did that, you think I’d live more than another 30 years? Probably not.

So, the FEMA sale of these trailers is a complicated topic. Sure, they could just destroy them and be done with it. But, if people want to buy them, the government shouldn’t get in their way. Nor should they get in the way of two dudes who want to get married or a college graduate who wants to smoke pot. It’s just not that complicated.

Freedom to make good decisions, but not bad ones is not freedom. Amongst a lot of complicated situations, I think that is really quite simple. Let the government stay small and our own decision making power stay big. That’s my two cents. The trailers are pretty cheap, maybe you can take it and buy one.

Related posts:

1. Leave Me Alone, Government!
2. Men’s Rights in Abortion
3. The Trailers Are Awesome, But The Movies Suck

Related posts:

1. Go Gmail

Do you ever wonder why it seems like every movie looks awesome after you see the trailer? Especially action movies? I mean, we really can’t trust trailers. Well, not most of them anyway.

Remember the trailer for the movie Sunshine? It was the sci-fi action movie about the team of scientists headed to reignite the sun which was on the verge of extinction. The movie was alright. I enjoyed it. But it was nowhere as tense as the trailer had led me to believe. Or how about the movie The Day After Tomorrow? The previous movie from the doomsday director of 2012 and Independence Day? While ID was pretty awesome, The Day After Tomorrow was a pretty big disappointment, though you’d never have guessed based on the trailer. Or to continue down the road, how about the X-Men Origins: Wolverine trailer? That movie was terrible. But for some reason I still went to see it.

I could really keep listing movies. In fact, if you’ve caught the drift I’m going for, you can probably start naming movies yourself. It seems that regardless of what movie they make, they’ve got the art of a compelling movie trailer down to such a science that absolutely everything looks awesome.

You just can’t trust the trailer anymore. Some people I know wish they wouldn’t show trailers for anything. I used to disagree because watching the trailer was so much fun. But now, seeing no other alternative, I’m beginning to agree.

I have a hypothesis as to why this phenomenon is taking place: It’s all in the music.

Sometime around 1993-1995, someone in Hollywood figured out that epic sounding music was a sure fire way to sell movie tickets. If you watch the trailer for Terminator 2, you’ll notice that it fits pretty nicely in with modern trailers. The music is the most epic possible mash-up from the movie’s score. If you rewind into the the 80’s and watch the trailer for the first Terminator, it’s borderline silly by today’s standards.

But today, enter the music from such commercial artists such as Corner Stone Cues, X-Ray Dog or Immediate Music, and it all starts to make sense.

These groups (which I must say I’m quite a sucker for. I have them all in my iTunes library.) make music that is specifically intended to sound like soundtracks, although it’s not tied to any one particular movie. It’s like a store-brand soundtrack. Feels and sounds like the real thing, but it’s actually not. These groups, and groups like them, appear in virtually all trailers that don’t feature a song from a pop artist. And the songs are so awesome sounding that a string of action packed scenes placed on top of them automatically turn to visual gold.

While it makes the trailers pretty fun to watch, it almost seems like they’re not trying as hard to make really great—or at least really fun—movies, cause they know we’ll go see them anyway. Though, that might sound a little too much like a conspiracy theory

I imagine at this point it’d be pretty much impossible to go backwards to the way things used to be, which frankly, wasn’t so great either. (Really, I’m glad the guy with the weirdly deep, raspy voice isn’t working so much anymore)

I suppose for us movie-goers, we’ll simply have to become more scrutinizing in our taste. Which movies we choose to go and see will have to send a signal to Hollywood that a really awesome trailer isn’t enough to get the eleven bucks out of my pocket.

You’ll have to do better than that, Hollywood.

Related posts:

1. Hollywood Messed Me Up
2. 2009 In a Shotgun Shell
3. Who will join the ranks with Queen?

I don’t remember a whole lot about this story. I remember looking at the pictures, and I remember it being read to me. But I don’t remember too many other details. I was really young.

But, I remember enough that the images (as they are for many) are burned into my memory as some kind of childhood staple. Although, I can’t say too much else about it.

Well, if you haven’t heard, Where The Wild Things Are is hitting the big screen in October. It’s directed by Spike Jonez. It might be the nostalgia, or it might just be a really well done preview, but either way, every time I see it I get very excited.

Another element of this clip that I can’t seem to get enough of is the featured song. It’s called Wake Up by the Arcade Fire. Here’s a song that’s been lying quietly on my computer, literally, for four years since it’s release, but I never gave it the time of day.

It’s absolutely worth listening to. Which you can do here for free thanks to imeem.com. Seriously, go listen to it.

No related posts.