You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2008.
Since my husband’s retirement from the military, I now live in “Small Town, America.” I always thought I would enjoy living in such a place, coming from a busy tourist town in New England myself. But now, after having endured small town politics, sports and schools (not to mention no recycling), I have finally arrived at the pinnacle of my pain, the Small Town Newspaper.
The first thing we discovered was there is no website for our little paper. In fact, it is nearly impossible to find any mention of it on the World Wide Web at all. Secondly, you can’t order a subscription over the phone. Any one requesting delivery of their newspaper is required to make full payment for the entire year up front ($27.00 whole dollars – for 5 days a week) either by dropping it off at their office or by mail. Next, because we live “outside” of city limits, our paper is mailed to us so we actually get it a day later than everyone else.
I suppose we should have actually taken a look at the paper before we signed up but all of our neighbors said it was a must have if you live out here in no man’s land so my husband and I took a ride into “town” one morning, found their tiny office sandwiched in between the water department and a lawyer’s office, and paid our $27.00. We paid by check, were given a receipt for our purchase and our first copy of the paper. When we got into the car and took a look at it, we thought they were kidding; surely this was not their daily newspaper.
Our newspaper usually consists of four pages. If there are several large ads it can sometimes be as large as six pages long. The classifieds take up the entire third page. This meager section consists primarily of “No Hunting On This Property” notifications, ads for cars, farm equipment and various livestock for sale and a smattering of job opportunities. The other two pages are generally ads, birthday, engagement and wedding announcements, etc. But it is the front page that really blows your mind, the page that really makes you wonder, what am I doing here?
The first thing you notice are that the obituaries are prominently displayed on the first page, many times these are the headline stories! What a way to start your newspaper experience! Then you start perusing the other headlines and find, to your dismay, it truly does not get any better. There is no rhyme or reason to the madness; perhaps they put together the newspaper as the stories are delivered to their office. Over the last couple of weeks we have seen these following articles on our front page:
- A story about a boy who can blow up a balloon with his nose,
- A story about a board of supervisors that changed their mind about letting a paranormal group hunt for ghosts at an vacant building which once was a mental asylum,
- A story about a guy, half way across the country, who stole a guitar by shoving it down his pants (how tall is this guy and how big were his pants?),
- A story, with photo, regarding the upcoming Library Week,
- Board of Education meetings, and
- Water Department Board meetings.
There were other just as interesting tidbits of news also and all of these “news worthy” stories were sandwiched in between the obituaries on the front page, many in different type face and size, ya know, just for fun. All of which leads me to wonder, what qualifications do you need to be the editor of this paper? You put your hand up first? No one else wanted it? The guy in the mailroom got it when everyone else quit?
I guess I will watch the news on our local television station instead and you don’t even have to worry about missing anything – they show the EXACT SAME STORIES THREE TIMES, on three separate newscasts! You can watch the story about the guy who’s mother gave him kerosene and sugar for a cold when he was a kid three whole times! (Is he sure she was trying to cure him???) Talk about getting mileage out of a story – these guys definitely win the prize.
But I’ll leave that story for another day.
WARNING – MOVIE SPOILERS (SOMEWHAT)
In light of the current trend in movie making of killing off the main characters or at least making their lives an absolute hell, I believe the MPAA needs to add an additional category to the motion picture rating system for the benefit of us avid movie watchers – the rating of “ incredibly sad ending” or ISE.
I watched “Into The Wild” two days ago and I am still attempting to get a good night’s sleep. I thought it was a great movie and I really enjoyed the first two hours until it became apparent how this was going to end. My heart rate increased as I watched him put more and more holes into his belt in an attempt to keep his pants from falling off his thin body. As I tried to fall asleep that night, I saw his skeletal face in my mind and was wide-awake once more. Would I have watched if I had known how it was going to end? Maybe, maybe not, but it would have been nice to have some kind of a “Head’s up – your heart is going to be broken” warning before I gave it a go.
Some of the other films I have watched of late in which the ending left me feeling like I got punched in the gut include, “The Mist” – this ending was bad even for a horror film, “Sweeney Todd” – who couldn’t see that coming, “I Am Legend,” “Atonement,” “Becoming Jane,” “30 Days of Night,” and “No Country For Old Men” to name a few. I don’t consider any of these movies “bad” (with the exception of the last one), only that I felt quite miserable after watching the films for some time afterwards. I felt physically ill after watching “The Mist” and kept hoping for an alternate ending on the DVD. As a Stephen King fan I read “The Mist” years ago when it was first published and although my powers of recollection are not that great anymore, I am pretty sure that ending was not in the book.
I don’t ask that all endings be happy endings although for me I would be quite pleased with that prospect. As a reader, I feel disappointed when I invest hours and perhaps days rooting on a hero or heroine through a 500 page novel only to have them die tragically on page 498 of some rare disease or strange mishap and I feel the same when it comes to my movie choices. Some movies are based on true stories such as “Into The Wild” and “Becoming Jane” so they could not possibly have ended differently but for those of us who did not research these characters beforehand, perhaps just a little red flag on the front of the DVD as a warning of the end? Or an upside down smiley face? Is that too much to ask?
Maybe I could ask those of you who write the reviews of these films to mention something along the lines of “not for the faint of heart” or “not for film watchers who are already depressed as this may push you over the edge” or perhaps simply, “incredibly sad ending – view at your own risk” within your reviews. At least we would be forewarned of the impending doom and gloom and can decide ahead of time if we want to spend the time and the money to feel miserable or if we would rather simply turn on the nightly news and feel miserable for free.
I have finally given up on Netflix and cancelled my account. I don’t know if they went under new management or what but they have really gone down hill in the past four years since I became a member.
Have they stopped purchasing sufficient copies of the DVD’s for their customers? I put We Are Marshall in my queue when it was still in the theaters. By the time I finally received my copy, the movie was premiering on one of my premium channels. There is usually a five to six month wait between a movie first appearing on DVD and when it shows on the premium channels. I don’t think I should have to wait months and months before receiving a movie from Netflix, I don’t care how popular it is.
And why is it taking so long for movies to be processed once I return them? I am less than 45 minutes from a distribution center – you will never make me believe it takes more than two days to reach Netflix, even via snail-mail.
So what happened to the once popular and efficient Netflix? It is a testament to them that I have remained a faithful customer so long – I will dump a crappy service quicker than you can say Jack Robinson and not give it a second thought. They have always been so good at getting new releases out in a timely fashion, I can’t imagine what has happened.
I knew that I could see new releases on Pay-Per-View for $4 each but that always seemed expensive compared to Netflix. But when you consider that I am queuing up a lot of movies just so I can keep my queue filled and not necessarily movies that I really want to see because the movies I want to see are not available, maybe I have been looking at it wrong. Plus I have noticed many movies are now available on Pay-per-view the same day they are released on DVD. Not to mention the fact that they are, in fact, AVAILABLE. Additionally the movies can be recorded to DVR to view anytime which is also a major convenience when your life is really busy.
I think that Netflix started out as a great idea whose time has passed or perhaps it has just grown too big for its britches. It is a sad, sad day.
