Less than sixty seconds before they decided to go ahead with a scheduled fire drill at work, a bolt of lightning blinded Production, and the thunder hit only a second later.
When the fire alarm rang my options were thus:
Option 1) Stay inside with fake fire, or
Option 2) Go out in rain with very real lightning.
Considering how the building emptied out, I fear for our collective survival instincts.
While bathroom graffiti is usually of some entertainment, it has become rare to find anything of note. Although my first interest is often sparked by the inexplicable concept that someone went to the bathroom with a pen-in-hand, most of this modern philosophy has been reduced to three words or less.
When was the last time you saw a paragraph (ie. more than one sentence) composed on the toilet stall? For me it’s been a while. It occurs to me that with the proliferation of Web 2.0, everyone in the blogosphere is simultaneously getting their fifteen minutes of fame. Instead of this resulting in the celebrity of a singular “You”, it instead results in the celebrity of the collective “You” as observed by the Time Magazine’s Person Of The Year for 2006.
We have a louder voice, but our thoughts are more anonymous than ever.
The bathroom walls are more barren than they once were. Perhaps people are carrying fewer pens than they did in the 90’s? Instead of searching for the longest restroom comprehensive effort, I find myself instead looking for the ones written in Sharpie instead of ballpoint.
I figure that someone who brings a Sharpie with them to the washroom must have a piece of momentary universal clarity that could be lost before he reaches an Internet connection, allowing it to fade back into the cosmic ether from which it spawned.
Unfortunately, since I usually only frequent pubs and sports bars, that ‘clarity’ is often nothing more than “HABS SUK BAWLS”
Following a difficult search for last year’s Die Hard movie at the Blockbuster, I just dug it off the “Previously Viewed” shelf and paid the $6.99 to take it home. It wasn’t until later that I realized I was searching the shelves in the “D” section, while the full name of the movie catalogs it under “L”, “Live Free or Die Hard”.
This leads to yet another observation on movie nominclature, and how casual films that start with letters early in the alphabet probably do better than those in the latter part.
Where the theory fails is movies with star power. Just one week after an article asking “Who Killed The Movie Star?“, Will Smith’s poorly reviewed Hancock had a 100-plus million dollar opening weekend (al beit “extended” and “holiday” weekend). In these circumstances people are going to the theatre, already set on seeing Hancock.
Where the theory has legs is when your movie has a little star power, but is more likely to fall in the field of, “I feel like a movie, what’s playing?” For example, I was surprised to find that “Don’t Mess With The Zohan” is actually named “YOU Don’t Mess With The Zohan“. I’m confident that there would have been more casual movie viewers had the title placed it in the front half of the movie listings. Placement BEFORE instead of AFTER “Iron Man” could mean the difference between life and death in the first few months of this year’s summer movie season. No doubt there were many conversations this May/June as such:
“Do you want to see a movie?”
“Sure. Get the movie listings. What’s playing?”
“Umm… Chronicles of Narnia, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Harold & Kumar, Indiana Jones, Iron Man, Sex and the City, and You Don’t Mess With The Zohan.”
Movie theatres list showtimes alphabetically by movie name. However, I doubt that any Hollywood producers have caught on yet, or else all movies would be named like in the Yellow Pages; once you get past the advertising, everyone will call “A1 Plumbers” because they’re first in the book.
“Zohan’s Plumbing” won’t do very well at all, and “You Don’t Mess With The Zohan’s Plumbing” won’t fare much better.
