Have you ever heard of Krampus? No? Well, he's basically Santa Claus's evil twin who kidnaps especially naughty children to bring to his lair for drowning, eating, or transport to Hell.
My idea is for a slasher film featuring Krampus as the killer but instead of looking demonic, looking exactly like Santa Claus which would enable him to get close to his victims since they would let their guard down for Santa.
I picture him riding in a sleigh pulled by eight flying decaying corpse reindeer (with glowing red eyes of course) reined with rusted chains and the sack on board would be filled not with toys, but with the many weapons he would use to kill his victims who are presumably on the Naughty List. The weapons could be Christmas gift themed if you must like a doll whose head once removed reveals a dagger (let's say).
In the end, the Final Girl almost dies but is saved at the last moment by the real Santa Claus, who in the course of the attack would reveal Krampus's true form before dispatching him.
The world's naughtiness could be what keeps the creature from ever dying permanently thus allowing for many sequels if need be.
Given this creature's modus operandi, the cast should all be people who would be on Santa's Naughty List, even the Final Girl.
Stupid holiday fun!
Or you could play it as more a children's horror film and have Krampus with the same M.O. and disguised as Santa Claus. The film could feature several naughty children and one goody-two-shoes. The naughty children are kidnapped one by one before Christmas (perhaps taken via temptation by whatever form of naughtiness they symbolize - a Seven Deadly Sins for children). The goody-two-shoes makes a plea to Santa Claus who appears and together they rescue his/her friends and save Christmas.
.....Unless you want to go all in and have the children be killed in which case the goody-two-shoes and Santa would have to work together to rid the world of Krampus once and for all.
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
PEOPLE AGAINST DOLLAR COINS ARE RETARDED
Okay, I can't find a link to it, but in the December 2nd, 2012 issue of the New York Post, a brief editorial appeared to take a stand against switching over to dollar coins using the same retarded reasoning that I tend to come across. A Democratic congresswoman, Lacy Clay (D-Mo) is quoted as saying, "[M]en don’t like carrying coins in their pockets or their suits." Another NY state representative who apparently has not seen a dollar coin since the Susan B. Anthony Dollar, claimed that constituents had a difficult time distinguishing them from a quarter (not that I've ever heard this complaint regarding a dime and cent which are also nearly identically sized and differ in roughly the same ways).
You also still get the occasional problem with "heavy coins" even though four quarters weigh more than a single dollar coin. In fact, four quarters weigh about as much as three dollar coins. Three times the value per unit weight!
The editorial later mentioned bringing accumulated coins to the bank to cash in for bills. See, that's where the issue of dollar coins comes in. Coins weren't minted to be hoarded and cashed in periodically: They were made to be spent. The reason your coins fill up jars for days and weeks on end only to be cashed out at a later time is because they, the coins, have no purchasing power. Remember, a bottle of Coca-Cola didn't cost 5¢ "back in the day" because it was cute, but rather because the money supply was much smaller so five cents went further. The old song, "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" referred to a coin with actual purchasing power (based on inflation, a dime in 1931, when that song was written, is worth $1.52 today).
The fact is, our current monetary system contains several coins with negligible purchasing power. If you go back to 1913, when the U.S. government first started keeping inflation statistics, you'll find that a cent back then would be worth 23¢ today which suggests that the quarter today is our "penny" making the dime, nickel, and lowly cent far more a nuisance than useful. Our face-to-face transactions do not need to be more precise than the quarter-dollar.
Thinking back on it, I have no memory of ever being able to use a penny in vending machines or for pay phones. My entire life of over 30 years, the cent has been "nummus non grata", so why have we kept it? I remember when ShopRite first started offering 2¢ for a reused bag back in 1990, laughing about the worthlessness of 2¢ to my brother even back then. Nickel vending machines existed briefly during my childhood for the tiniest of gumballs only but I don't remember them after 1983 or 4. Dime vending machines disappeared sometime around 1993 or 4.
Cents, nickels, and dimes must be used in enormous aggregate to buy even trivial things. The average item value in a supermarket these days is about $2.30 (approximately 10¢ in 1913). That would mean the average item would cost 230 pennies, 46 nickels, 23 dimes, 10 quarters, 5 half dollars, or 3 dollar coins to meet or exceed that total. Justifying even quarters under this scheme is difficult but the first three coins? Forget it. They're not useful for transactions and more work than they're worth (by that I mean if you are diligent, you can cycle your pennies into nickels and nickels into dimes and so forth until getting a dollar again).
And here, people complain about dollar coins which now effectively have less purchasing power than the 1913 nickel (approximately 4.3¢). There shouldn't even be five and ten dollar bills at this point either. But that is another argument.
Back to the stupid Congresswoman's argument, large numbers of coins would not be carried in one's pockets if they were more valuable. In fact, they would be too valuable to be carried around like that. We only carry lots of change now because change, even in aggregate, cannot buy anything anymore and quarters are the only commonly encountered coins whose value adds up fast enough to be even minorly significant.
It's our mentality about change that is wrong. This was also evident in the editorial when the author mentioned other nations' high value coins (Like Canada and Switzerland. In fact, I believe the highest Swiss coin is worth more than $5) but using the same "pocketful of change" mentality we now have instead of realizing that if we regularly carried coins with significant value, that we would spend them accordingly because they would not be nuisances weighing down and wearing out our pockets but economically useful like the coins of the United States used to be, y'know...back in the day.
I hate inflation. I would rather a deflationary policy to improve the value of our money, but that's not gonna happen. The dollar bill needs to go (as does the cent, nickel, dime, $2 bill, $5 bill, and $10 bill). We need a more sensible coin and currency structure for this country.
In my opinion, it should be three sets of three: Three base metal coins (25¢, 50¢, $1); Three appropriately-sized silver coins ($2 or $2½, $5, $10); and Three pieces of currency ($20, $50, $100). With the presence of debit/credit cards, bills larger than $100 would not be necessary. The purpose of using silver would be to raise the intrinsic value of the high value coins enough so as to discourage counterfeiting. The cent, nickel, and dime have to be eliminated and I say this as an ardent cent collector too...
What do you think?
You also still get the occasional problem with "heavy coins" even though four quarters weigh more than a single dollar coin. In fact, four quarters weigh about as much as three dollar coins. Three times the value per unit weight!
The editorial later mentioned bringing accumulated coins to the bank to cash in for bills. See, that's where the issue of dollar coins comes in. Coins weren't minted to be hoarded and cashed in periodically: They were made to be spent. The reason your coins fill up jars for days and weeks on end only to be cashed out at a later time is because they, the coins, have no purchasing power. Remember, a bottle of Coca-Cola didn't cost 5¢ "back in the day" because it was cute, but rather because the money supply was much smaller so five cents went further. The old song, "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" referred to a coin with actual purchasing power (based on inflation, a dime in 1931, when that song was written, is worth $1.52 today).
The fact is, our current monetary system contains several coins with negligible purchasing power. If you go back to 1913, when the U.S. government first started keeping inflation statistics, you'll find that a cent back then would be worth 23¢ today which suggests that the quarter today is our "penny" making the dime, nickel, and lowly cent far more a nuisance than useful. Our face-to-face transactions do not need to be more precise than the quarter-dollar.
Thinking back on it, I have no memory of ever being able to use a penny in vending machines or for pay phones. My entire life of over 30 years, the cent has been "nummus non grata", so why have we kept it? I remember when ShopRite first started offering 2¢ for a reused bag back in 1990, laughing about the worthlessness of 2¢ to my brother even back then. Nickel vending machines existed briefly during my childhood for the tiniest of gumballs only but I don't remember them after 1983 or 4. Dime vending machines disappeared sometime around 1993 or 4.
Cents, nickels, and dimes must be used in enormous aggregate to buy even trivial things. The average item value in a supermarket these days is about $2.30 (approximately 10¢ in 1913). That would mean the average item would cost 230 pennies, 46 nickels, 23 dimes, 10 quarters, 5 half dollars, or 3 dollar coins to meet or exceed that total. Justifying even quarters under this scheme is difficult but the first three coins? Forget it. They're not useful for transactions and more work than they're worth (by that I mean if you are diligent, you can cycle your pennies into nickels and nickels into dimes and so forth until getting a dollar again).
And here, people complain about dollar coins which now effectively have less purchasing power than the 1913 nickel (approximately 4.3¢). There shouldn't even be five and ten dollar bills at this point either. But that is another argument.
Back to the stupid Congresswoman's argument, large numbers of coins would not be carried in one's pockets if they were more valuable. In fact, they would be too valuable to be carried around like that. We only carry lots of change now because change, even in aggregate, cannot buy anything anymore and quarters are the only commonly encountered coins whose value adds up fast enough to be even minorly significant.
It's our mentality about change that is wrong. This was also evident in the editorial when the author mentioned other nations' high value coins (Like Canada and Switzerland. In fact, I believe the highest Swiss coin is worth more than $5) but using the same "pocketful of change" mentality we now have instead of realizing that if we regularly carried coins with significant value, that we would spend them accordingly because they would not be nuisances weighing down and wearing out our pockets but economically useful like the coins of the United States used to be, y'know...back in the day.
I hate inflation. I would rather a deflationary policy to improve the value of our money, but that's not gonna happen. The dollar bill needs to go (as does the cent, nickel, dime, $2 bill, $5 bill, and $10 bill). We need a more sensible coin and currency structure for this country.
In my opinion, it should be three sets of three: Three base metal coins (25¢, 50¢, $1); Three appropriately-sized silver coins ($2 or $2½, $5, $10); and Three pieces of currency ($20, $50, $100). With the presence of debit/credit cards, bills larger than $100 would not be necessary. The purpose of using silver would be to raise the intrinsic value of the high value coins enough so as to discourage counterfeiting. The cent, nickel, and dime have to be eliminated and I say this as an ardent cent collector too...
What do you think?
Saturday, December 1, 2012
STEAL THIS IDEA, part XIII
Just a quickie. I had this thought walking to work looking up at the dark night sky and imagining how terrifying it would be if the darkness were actually just the eyelids of some incomprehensibly large beast and watching the "eye" open before me, an impossibly gigantic iris and pupil staring down at me.
I'm guessing this would be the kind of movie/show which ends badly for the protagonist.
I'm guessing this would be the kind of movie/show which ends badly for the protagonist.