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Top 5 Scary Movies You (Probably) Haven’t Seen

It’s Halloween — a time of year when “Scariest Movie” lists haunt the internet like so many kernels of uneaten Candy Corn.

But, you’ve seen The Exorcist, The Shining, Halloween and Rosemary’s Baby. So, Wired.com decided to offer up a quick list of titles you might not have shivered through — though we admit the more diehard cinema nuts out amongst our readers are difficult to surprise.

1) Curse of the Demon: Entitled Night of the Demon in the U.K., this 1957 British supernatural thriller holds up surprisingly well as its surreal mix of witchcraft and moody settings seem a likely enough patch for the devil to dwell. Yes, the demon in question looks to be a denizen of puppet hell, but make sure no one passes you any rune parchments if you don’t want to come face to maw with this maniacal muppet.

2) Session 9: A simple set-up has a team of asbestos removers (including Peter Mullan, Stephen Gevedon — the movie’s screenwriter — and a million miles from CSI-Miami David Caruso) tearing apart an abandoned insane asylum. As one team member discovers abandoned recordings of a patient’s evil second personality (Simon), the others begin turning on each other as if the history of the building is feeding on them. The body count climbs without cheap, excessive gore, and the film’s final images and words (“I live in the weak and the wounded…”) will stick with you for days.

3) Something Wicked This Way Comes: Yes, you can have a scary movie connected to Disney. In fact, there was a time when Disney scared folks (especially kids) better than anybody in Hollywood — but we digress. More creepy than terrifying, this Ray Bradbury story of a devilish circus tempting the souls of small town Americana is beautified by a dazzling performance by a young Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark. The States hadn’t seen much of Pryce when this film hit, and the fact that he held the screen with the legendary Jason Robards speaks for itself.

Barack obama sr

4) Dog Soldiers: British soldiers trapped in a cabin out in the woods and under attack by werewolves. What more do you need to know? This is the funniest movie on this short list, but it packs plenty of visceral scares — in some cases, literally. Certainly the most action-packed of the movies here, it looks to the Aliens model of monster movie terror. And keep a look out for Sean Pertwee, son of Doctor Who #3, Jon.

5) The Woman in Black: First a novel by Susan Hill, then a very successful and long-running (in fact, still running) London stage production, The Woman in Black and its vengeful Mrs. Drablow should find a way to the big screen some day. But, a modest 1989 British TV production was a surprising success. While the West End stage version literally causes people to scream aloud in their seats, the TV adaption packs enough of the story’s gloomy mystery and unavoidable tragedy to make you stay off the moors.

Image courtesy Columbia/Tristar Home Video

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October 31, 2008: Superman Homepage “Speeding Bulletin” News Video

here’s the “speeding bulletin” video report in investigate in place of the week october 24-30, 2008.the “speeding bulletin” is your weekly superman press release video, recapping the latest events in the sphere of superman. it also includes the “bailey planet” bombast, neal bailey’s thought of the week, brought to you in his own infamous style.october 24-30, 2008 (or youtube version)the url respecting the “speeding bulletin” rss feed is:http://feeds.feedburner.com/speedingbulletinor you can subscribe to the “speeding bulletin” vodcast via itunes.merchandise seen in this instalment:steve is wearing a superman cross swords torn t-shirt available from supermansuperstore.com purchase the superman cookie bucket at davidscookies.com pre-bid “mortal kombat vs. dc universe kollector’s edition” for ps3 or xbox 360 from amazon.com purchase this week’s superman comics from tfaw.com buying “speeding bulletin” and “bailey planet” merchandise from cafepress.com.

The tingler

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Around the Block in the First UPS Hydraulic Hybrid Vehicle

hydraulic hybrid is “ready for prime time”

I had a short ride through the streets of Atlanta yesterday in the prototype UPS HHV delivery vehicle (package car). We haven’t heard much about HHV technology, but after yesterday’s press conference in Atlanta, that is likely to change. How does the HHV vehicle work? How can you move a truck around just using hydraulics and a small diesel engine? This short video and illustration offers a good introduction (more detailed information to follow in subsequent posts).

HHV technology was developed by the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Michigan in partnership with Eaton Corporation under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement signed in October of 2001. Navistar designed and built the chassis for the vehicle. Road testing by UPS under real world conditions have proven the technology works in real-world conditions. With the first 7 vehicles now on order for deployment throughout 2009, further testing is now possible, leading to the scaling up the concept as one global solution to energy efficiency and emissions reductions in delivery vehicles, shuttle busses, and other short-haul urban duty cycles.

The cherry pit

(please click the headline if you would delight in to expansion on this post)

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The state of independent local online news, part 1: Donations fueling the Voice of San Diego

by david westphal: [editor's note: today ojr begins a week-long look at the state of independent local online news start-ups. each day's account will include a drawing card article, as spout as a q & a with one or more of the day's sources. in wing as well as, at the expire of today's entry, you want find links to and information about tons of the websites we'll be examining this week.]

SAN DIEGO The 10 reporters, editors and photographers working out of a small office on a former military base here represent some of journalism’s brightest hopes.

The nearly four-year-old website they work for, the nonprofit Voice of San Diego, is doing some of the best and liveliest muckraking reporting of any Web-only news staff in the country.

Mostly former newspaper reporters, the Voice’s staffers have rattled off a string of exposes that has grabbed the attention of the city’s power structure. They think their site will prove not only that local journalism can thrive on the Web, but that their enterprise can grow many times over as mainstream media continue to decline.

There’s just one thing missing: a business model. Even with a small operation like this 10 people reporting about the nation’s eighth-largest city it’s not clear whether sustained funding will materialize.

Buzz Woolley, the San Diego businessman who created and still bankrolls a large chunk of the operation, says advertising is unlikely to fund more than 10 percent of Voice of San Diego. The rest of the site’s budget, about $780,000 this year, will have to come from small contributions and philanthropy, he said.

Axelrod

“How exactly is that going to happen?” he said in a phone interview. “I don’t know. But nonprofit journalism is starting to strike a note with people. They know something like this is going to have to be done.”

The Voice of San Diego is at the leading edge of a growth industry online-only news sites that in some places are establishing themselves as players in their hometown media landscapes.

They come in all sizes and shapes, from mom-and-pop shops focused on a single community concern, to seven-figure operations that reflect wide civic interests. While nearly all of the sites struggle to find advertising dollars, the number of communities served by online-only news staffs continues to grow.

Most are nonprofits, though some are testing the waters of commercial viability, convinced that opportunities will widen as mainstream media continue to struggle.

Some, like the $1.2 million-a-year MinnPost and the brand new St. Louis Beacon, cover the meat and potatoes of traditional community news city hall, politics, education, the arts, crime, mass transit mostly using professional journalists as reporters.

Others, like the ChiTown Daily News, are deputizing “citizen journalists” to write about their neighborhoods territory most newspapers have been forced to scale back in recent years, or never really achieved. The Daily News has carved up Chicago into 77 neighborhoods and is recruiting a citizen journalist for each.

One newspaper company, GateHouse Media Inc., is trying the citizen approach by starting a website, the Batavian, in a community where someone else owns the local paper a possible sign that the newspaper competition that used to exist in most communities could return, in a new Web form.

Jan Schaffer, executive director of the new-media center J-Lab at American University in Washington, D.C., says many of the new sites are taking an entirely different approach by focusing on a single topic, and by reporting as participants in that topic as opposed to journalism’s traditional outside-in approach.

“People may not necessarily be looking online for cover-the-waterfront sites, or geographic or regional sites,” said Schaffer in an e-mail. “Instead they want picky’ sites that offer them stuff that they like knowing because it’s useful and interesting and doesn’t waste their time with must-cover stories.”

Some of the sites winning Knight Foundation grants this year as part of its New Voices project attest to the specialty trend: Digital Journalism in the Nation’s Birthplace of Aviation; Green Jobs Philly; Immigration: The View from Here; Voices for Veterans; Family Life Behind Bars.

But one thing unites nearly all of these experiments. Profit or nonprofit, they’re struggling to make ends meet.

“Some day, just like General Motors, we too might make a profit,” said James Macpherson, who with one other paid staffer operates the Pasadena Now site. Macpherson stirred up controversy a year ago by disclosing plans to outsource some of his community reporting to India a plan he is now carrying out. (A recent transcript of a City Hall press conference cost him $1.70, he says.)

He complains that merchants in Pasadena are “antediluvian” wh …

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Discuss: Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’

we planned it in drunk school, which made it amazingly boring. i tried again a some years later, but just couldn’t get into it. saw it on the capital screen relative to ten years ago and inexorably got what one was raving about … but quiet the film didn’t really “connect” with me in any great way. but then a two nights ago, i sat down with my awesome 2-disc special edition of stanley kubrick’s 2001: a lacuna odyssey, and was blown away as if i’d never even heard of it before. thousands of writers much cleverer than i drink committed a billion words to this bare fine shoot, but after watching it earlier this week, i was struck by how simple the alibi actually was. i mean, a film is a include of manoeuvres, and as such each viewer will have their own interpretation of the knowledge, but if we’re talking about the oh-so-confusing and deliciously indefinite stripe of the plot, um, here’s what i adage:a. primordial the human race is little more than an animal before a mysterious object appears on their planet and signifies the next step forward: the creation of tools, which as soon as leads to the creation of weapons, and then we (awesomely) caper-slit to millions of years later. our first weapon has evolved into our ultimate weapon: a atomic arsenal poised ominously in outer measure out.b. then we (slowly but very coolly) stumble upon that another mysterious purpose has been discovered beneath the surface of the moon. when modern man places his penmanship on the younger “monolith,” a signal between the moon and jupiter is opened. looks like man is officially “ready” for his next diminish.

Filed under: Classics, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Warner Brothers

Woody hayes

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ENERGY STAR for Consumer Electronics Gets a Gold Star

ENERGY STAR® is now recognized by four out of every five persons in the U.S. Due to the successful branding and marketing efforts of this joint EPA and DOE program, the stakes have indeed risen for all parties involved in the development and execution of the program. Two recent reports in Consumer Reports and BusinessWeek with quotes from an esteemed colleague of mine, Dr. David Goldstein, have exposed some real concerns about the credibility and upkeep of the government-sponsored consumer product labeling program. Both articles examined the market of the big energy using appliances, namely refrigerators and clothes washers. Possible industry gaming, whereby product compliance testing is carried out by industry-sponsored test labs, and standards levels that have fallen behind the times leading to high market penetration of ENERGY STAR-labeled brands were among the chief concerns.

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Despite the critical examination of ENERGY STAR in Consumer Reports and Business Week, on the whole, the program is performing very well. A report released in 2004 by the non-partisan think tank, Resources for the Future, showed that for around $50 million a year, ENERGY STAR was responsible for saving nearly 1 quadrillion Btu per year (that’s around 1% of ALL energy used in the U.S.). In terms of cost effectiveness, that’s less than 1/5 of a penny for every kilowatt-hour saved, or put in another way, 20 times less than what you’re likely paying to use your electricity at home.

I have been engaged in the ENERGY STAR stakeholder vetting process for displays (computer monitors) and computers (including desktops, notebooks, thin-clients, workstations, and game consoles) and can say that I’m quite impressed with the EPA staff and consultants who are leading the discussions ahead of new and improved standards for these products in 2009. EPA has remained on schedule with both product types and this is important for a fast-growing consumer product segment. Overall, ENERGY STAR ain’t broke, but with some minor fixes, we hope it will get even better.

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EA Tried To Buy Take-Two Out Of Charity [Ea]

speaking with the wall street journal, ea boss john riccitiello has said that ea’s attempts to acquire overdone lifting auto owners take-two weren’t driven by greed. they were driven by leniency, riccitiello saying the buyout talks were intended “to help that party move on account of what has been an uneven profit experience”. heart-warming stuff. as to go to the reason behind the deal, he’s up-front, saying “time was of the essence, because we wanted to impact holiday 2008 sales of grand pilferage auto iv”. and instantly that they can’t? all’s powdered. they’re already at an end it, riccitiello now describing the attempt as a “waste of ink”. it’s like the seven steps to overcoming disappointment, all played senseless in bromide interview.

Electronic Arts/Take-Two: We Were Just Trying to Help [WSJ]

Lisa ann