Matt of All Trades blog, like the title suggests, is by a Vermont author and offers offbeat musings on pop culture, media, journalism, humor, weirdness, stupid people, smart people, my life as a journalist, landscaper, photographer, married gay man, dog lover and weather geek and more. It's run by me, Matt Sutkoski, a native Vermonter living in St. Albans, Vt.
2016 was pretty much a horror movie. You can see the clever, hilarious "movie trailer" for 2016 as a horror film, below.
Many of us think 2016 was just a horror show.
An outfit called Friend Dog Studios thinks so, too.
So they created a trailer for a horror film called "2016: The Movie" You can see this hiliarious, ingenious trailer at the bottom of this post.
The movie trailer has all the tropes of any promotion for an upcoming horror movie blockbuster: The quick edits which begin with happy characters, then a growing realization that Something. Is. Wrong.
One of the characters in the clip intones, "It's like things you'd never expect are happening everywhere."
Indeed.
The abrupt music and clips from the movie in the trailer then leave you wanting - or not wanting - more. It closes with some scary scenes, filled with potential violence.
Yeah, that pretty much sums up 2016
Here's the video, but you might get nightmares from it, but happy New Year anyway:
Once again, we're shell shocked by yet another huge terrorist attack. (In case you've been alone in a cave the past couple of days, a coordinated attack by suspected ISIS terrorists on a concert hall, a soccer game and a restaurant/bar in Paris killed more than 120 people.)
We're all going through our usual expressions of sympathy and solidarity to the terrorism victims in Paris.
I'm not disparaging that. Paris needs all the support it can get. They need to know the world is behind them.
I'm just despairing because we've done this sad song and dance so often I've lost count. And we will do it again.
The thing about fundamentalists of any stripe is this: They lack the intellectual firepower that most of us have to live in a world in which people differ from the rest of us. So they use actual, physical firepower to demand everyone adhere to the same crude simplistic beliefs they have.
That's why 129 or so people in Paris were executed yesterday for the "crime" of attending a rock concert, or going to a soccer game, or stopping by the tavern for a glass of wine.
Obviously, nobody knows how to stop people with this hideous mindset. There's plenty of noisy talk and yelling over what to do. We either ISIS bomb them too much or not enough. We're either too nice or not nice enough to refugees fleeing the ISIS-polluted Middle East. We're too Islamophobic or not Islamophobic enough.
Our world leaders' understandable inability to quash ISIS and their ilk means we're going to go through tragedies like Paris again and again, just like we saw in New York, London, Bali, Turkey and a whole bunch of other places.
There was probably a method to the madness of the Paris attacks, as there always is. The conventional wisdom, which I buy, is that ISIS wanted to provoke a backlash. More bombing, a big clampdown on refugees, discrimination against Muslims.
That way, they can say claim they are right, the West really wants to get rid of Muslims. It's a vicious cycle.
ISIS, in their fake flowery language, said they were killing western people, people of loose morals, prostitutes as they called the innocent Parisians. Again, because everybody is supposedly expected to be just like the fundamentalists, because their heads explode when people act with freedom and independent thought, and don't adhere to their gloomy, prison like mindset.
Religion through the centuries has done a lot of good in the world. But from the most hard core, rigid fundamentalists, their religion has brought us nothing but suffering, death, oppression and hate. Amazing how much damage a small minority of lunatics can cause.
It's been going on for thousands of years in one form or another, so I'm pessimistic about ever stopping it.
All we can do is defiantly put our freedoms, our intellectual skills, our social liberalism, our independent thought, our quest for peace and our desire for a full and wide ranging life front and center. Especially when something like this happens.
I do like how people initially reacted to the latest terrorist attack in France. When police evacuated the soccer stadium, departing fans spontaneously started singing the French National Anthem. Across the world, governments lit up famous landmarks with the red, white and blue colors of the French flag, a nice symbol of solidarity with Paris combined with a perfect "fuck you" gesture toward ISIS.
"Imagine" won't change any minds among ISIS, but it is a reminder of what the rest of us need to strive toward.
No, scumbags like the ISIS idiots aren't going away anytime soon. But neither will the world's majority of people who only want to live their lives, as fully and freely as possible.
This desire is the ultimate and best way to torture the fundamentalists we detest.
I'll let you go with the video of Martello playing "Imagine" on that Paris street yesterday:
From the video: A K-Cup monster destroys Halifax, Nova Scotia and kills much of the populace in a strange but fun video from K-Cup opponents.
Keurig Green Mountain K-Cups are convenient as hell. It seems everybody uses them, including my husband, for their nice single serve fresh coffee all the time.
The K-Cups, however, are not the most environmentally friendly contraption.
They're made of plastic and foil, and they're full of wet coffee grounds after you use them. They're next to impossible to recycle, so they add to the trash piling up in our landfills and such.
Not a nice PR thing for a company based in oh-so-environmentally friendly Vermont.
You can watch this way, way over the top, but strangely compelling and funny video at the bottom of this post.
Here's VPR to set the scene up for you:
"To anyone who has seen Cloverfield,the 2008 film depicting a monster attack on Manhattan through the lends of a home video camera recovered by the government, the style of the new video is familiar. "An aircraft appears in the sky shooting the beverage packs into the streets at a high velocity, killing some onlookers. The person holding the camera runs away and records, in order: a car being blown up by K-Cups, a massive Godzilla-like monster made entirely of K-Cups belching a high volume of K-Cups down onto an unnamed city; a photographer bing crushed by a car-sized K-cup, a woman being stomped on by the aforementioned K-cup monster; soldiers shooting at an unseen enemy; and finally, the recorder's own death by an aerial assault of K-Cup shooting K-Cup trays."
Yeah, way, way, WAYYY over the top.
I just hope my husband's K-Cups don't decided to attack him one early groggy morning in the future.
The movie was made by Egg Studios in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was shot over the course of a day in Halifax. It was done by Egg Studio staffers over six months during down time when they weren't working for paying clients, says VPR.
Kill the K-Cup has launch a change.org petitition to get Keurig Green Mountain to change the K-Cup into something recyclable now if not sooner, not Keurig's 2020 target date.
For its part Keurig Green Mountain says finding an environmentally better alternative to a K-Cup is a priority for them, that they appreciate the humor, creativity and message in the video.
In any event, here's the most unusual, but strangely entertaining video:
Halloween season is here, which means its the peak time for really, really, really bad horror films.
Nice looking young people not going into the haunted cabin. Beautiful, and not so dumb.
They all feature people doing things that no sane person would do in that situation. You know, be a scantily dressed, um, healthy young woman who goes into the basement alone to see what that noise was.
Or have a beer party in a graveyard. Or not run very, very, very fast away from that strange man with the knife. Or the chainsaw. Or the hockey mask. Or the rotting flesh that's falling off from him.
I guess horror movies would be boring if the people in them weren't so stupid, but they'd be a bit funnier.
Here's a video with an example of how rational people should behave in a horror film. Not the most suspenseful, but still a lot of fun:
You'll probably see this video on the news tonight, but it just came out.
A terrible plane crash happened the other day in Bagram in Afghanistan. A 747 cargo plane crashed on takeoff, killing all eight aboard.
It turns out a dash cam on a vehicle along a nearby highway caught the whole thing. You see the plane rising, losing control, and then it gets absolutely terrifying.
The Taliban claimed it shot down the plane but the U.S and others say there was no incoming fire or missiles. The dash cam video seems to support the U.S. claim, as, at least from what is visible in the video, there are no signs of rockets or anything like that.
I hesitate because the video is a little exploitive, but it is just so incredible, and so terrifying, I had to share.
But the sounds pack such an emotional wallop. It's the sound of 20 or so people huddling in a convenience store cooler as the tornado hits. The sounds and the terror are haunting. You don't want to ever be hit by a tornado, that's for sure.
