Stephen King’s Just After Sunset Collectors Set

According to Stephen King’s website there will be a limited-printing collector’s edition of Just Past Sunset, featuring the hardcover book and a DVD of all the video episodes of N.  The release date is November 11, 2008.  The special edition will retail for $37.50 and can be preordered here.

 

Buttery Inflation

Taking in a blockbuster movie this summer will cost you $12. But the small bucket of popcorn you enjoy while you’re watching will cost around $5.50, that’s more per ounce than filet mignon.

University of California-Irvine professor Richard McKenzie wrote a book about popcorn but even he doesn’t know how much it actually costs to make.

“Those are trade secrets, nobody’s going to allow me any access to their records simply because I may spill the beans,” he said.

But, he’s a professor, and figured out that it must cost less than 10 cents an ounce. Are movie goers really paying a whopping 1,300 percent mark up?

“Are they being exploited?” McKenzie asked. “If so, they’re being exploited with some enthusiasm.”

 

That Delicious Aroma

 

Everyone goes to the movies. And Americans eat more than a billion pounds of popcorn every year.

“No one is required when they enter the movie theater to buy concessions. We’re happy when they do,” said Patrick Corcoran of the National Association of Theatre Owners.

This is how movie theaters stay afloat.

“The theater can be paying 70 or more percent of the ticket price to the studios,” said McKenzie.

That’s because the studio makes the movie, pays the stars, and even pays for advertising the product. Once the movie-goer is lured in, he or she is easy prey to the popcorn.

“It is designed for the aroma to pervade the lobby,” McKenzie said.

And the theatre owners keep 100 percent of the profit from the concession stand.

“Many theaters consider themselves in the concession business, not the movie business,” said McKenzie.

They want to show good movies because then more popcorn eaters will show up and belly-up to the concession stand. And get this, sad movies boost sales. Scientists at Cornell University discovered that people watching “Love Story” ate 36 percent more popcorn than those watching “Sweet Home Alabama.”

 

Are Film Fans Ripped Off?

 

“You’ve got to understand that with that popcorn, you’re helping to pay for the lights and the sound systems,” McKenzie explained.

“Heating, lighting, air conditioning, the bulbs that are in the projectors take an awful lot of power,” Corcoran said.

“If you didn’t pay high prices for popcorn and other concessions, you’d be paying high prices for ticket prices,” McKenzie said.

Can you cut your popcorn budget?

“You can in fact buy popcorn and smuggle it into the theatre and get the cost, get the amount of the tub down to $1.25,” McKenzie suggested.

But then you’d look really cheap in front of your date.

“To me it’s similar to the idea of someone bringing their own food to a restaurant. It’s, sort of, a little unkind,” Corcoran said.

But if you do buy the popcorn, McKenzie said to avoid the large tub in favor of a bag.

“You might think you’re going to get more popcorn, and you can. But you might also get less popcorn simply because the sides of the bags are flexible while the side of the tub is not,” McKenzie said.

The professor said he once received a medium bag containing eight ounces and a large tub containing just seven ounces.

“You don’t want to buy the tub unless you’re going to get refills,” said McKenzie.

During his research McKenzie discovered that only 10 percent of people take advantage of the free refill offer on the tub. They’re too embarrassed, perhaps, to go back for more once the movie has started.  (Reprinted from ABC News)

 

IPhone 2.1 Update to Bring Turn-by-Turn GPS?

The future iPhone 2.1 software update will bring improvements to the GPS functions. Specifically, the iPhone will not only know where you are, but in which direction you are going and how fast you are moving. This is being interpreted by many people as the coming of turn-by-turn GPS. Proper turn-by-turn GPS would be a huge blow for existing satnav manufacturers, unless of course Apple doesn’t build the functionality into the Maps application and instead allows third parties to fill the gap.   

 

 

Breaking Stephen King News: “N”, An Episodic Graphic Novel Just Announced

Scribner, Simon & Schuster Digital, Marvel Entertainment and CBS Mobile have collaborated in a unique partnership to bring an episodic graphic adaptation of the previously unpublished Stephen King short story “N.” to online and mobile phone users. The first episode will be available Monday, July 28th but viewers can go today to www.NisHere.com to watch the first episode, which will also be unveiled at Comic-Con International in San Diego today at a panel event featuring the creators of this pioneering venture. You can watch a behind the scenes video here and get more information about this exciting project here.

The original series tells the story of a psychiatrist who falls victim to the same deadly obsession as his patient—an obsession that just might save the world! There are 25 episodes in total, with each episode running around 2 minutes.  The first episode will be available Monday, July 28th, 2008 with a new one released each weekday until August 29^th.  You can watch “N.” online, on your mobile phone or download it at iTunes.

“N.” is one of the stories included in “Just After Sunset”, a short story collection which goes on sale 11/11/08. Stephen King and Marvel will also be releasing a comic book miniseries based on “N.” in early 2009.

 

Randy Pausch, Author of ‘The Last Lecture,’ Dies

Randy Pausch, the charismatic young college professor who chronicled his battle with pancreatic cancer in a remarkable speech widely-known as the “Last Lecture,” has died.

He was 47.

A dear friend to Diane Sawyer and ‘Good Morning America,’ Pausch’s lecture and subsequent interview was one of the most powerful accounts of hope, grace and optimistism ‘GMA’ has ever featured, and drew a worldwide response.

It all began with one, age-old question: What would you say if you knew you were going to die and had a chance to sum up everything that was most important to you?

That question had been posed to the annual speaker of a lecture series at Carnegie Mellon University, where Pausch was a computer science professor. For Pausch, though, the question wasn’t hypothetical.

Pausch, a father of three small children with his wife Jai, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer — and given six months to live.

Friends and colleagues flew in from all around the country to attend his last lecture. And — almost as an afterthought — the lecture was videotaped and put on the Internet for the few people who couldn’t get there that day.

That was all it took.

Somehow amid the vast clamor of the Web and the bling-bling of million-dollar budgets, savvy marketing campaigns and millions of strange and bizarre videos, the voice of one earnest professor standing at a podium and talking about his childhood dreams cut through the noise.

The lecture was so uplifting, so funny, so inspirational that it went viral. So far, 10 million people have downloaded it.

And thousands have written in to say that his lecture changed their lives.

If you had only six months to live, what would you do? How would you live your life? And how can all of us take heart from Pausch’s inspiring message to live each day to its fullest? (Read more here, Reprinted from ABC News)

 

Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family.