After Paranormal Activity didn’t just break the box office, but positively destroyed it, The Fourth Kind seemed like a good enough investment. Just swap out ghosts for UFO abductions, which are basically just an update of medieval legends about demons anyway, and you’re in like Flynn. Or that was the theory. Instead Universal realized that doing the viral marketing thing is a whole lot harder than it looks.

Right now The Fourth Kind has dropped to sixth place in only its second week of release and has a gross over 20 million dollars. With the DVD sales and foreign grosses taken into account, the movie probably won’t lose money, but neither will it be a success story? Why. There’s the Highlander theory, there can only be one viral critical darling passing itself off as a chronicle of real events, and this year that was Paranormal Activity. The Fourth Kind released later only looked like a bad copycat.

Then there’s the independence factor. The Fourth Kind was made by a buddy of Joe Carnahan and starred people who are not exactly obscure like Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas and Will Patton. By Hollywood standards that might be considered indy, but by audience standards, it made The Fourth Kind into just another Hollywood project, even if it was ranked a bit lower on the old totem pole. What it amounted to was Hollywood actors recreating imaginary scenes and announcing that they are recreating them. Which basically made The Fourth Kind into a much worse version of America’s Most Wanted, if AMW was dedicated to chasing aliens, instead of criminals.

Finally, and this is the slightly odd part, The Fourth Kind managed to piss off most of Alaska, which apparently decided that being portrayed as a bunch of hicks who keep being abducted by UFO’s was not good for tourism. After several lawsuits, The Fourth Kind’s production would up settling with a few Alaskan media outlets, everyone knew that the movie was a fraud.

Beating addiction is about more than just following a specific regimen, it’s about caring. Caring about what you do and the consequences of your actions, and about a drug rehab whose staff care enough to reach you. CARE Florida is a drug rehab facility whose unique holistic approach to drug rehabilitation facilitates more than just mere detoxification, but also addresses all the emotional and physical reasons and consequences of drug addiction. With a variety of therapies from acupuncture to opiate detox, CARE Florida addresses the mind and body to help you battle free of addiction and discover all the things in life you care about enough to break free of your addiction.

I saw an article recently that listed 10 useless things that no one needs anymore. On the list were books, the print kind. Apparently we aren’t going to need those anymore now that the Kindle is here. Today on the bus I saw someone actually using a Kindle for the first time. Now just the fact that I’ve seen thousands of people out and about using iPhones and only one using a Kindle, says volumes about its realworld popularity. But it was the first time I was up close and personal with the gadget, at least in an over the shoulder voyeuristic sort of way.

The Kindle was smaller and neater than I expected. The text was clear and very readable when compared to a laptop or a media player. But imagining myself with a Kindle still held no appeal. Sure I could in theory load every single book I could ever want on it and carry it with me anywhere, and still for all that even the thought of reading lost all its appeal. The Kindle isn’t ugly. It didn’t look clunky. It was flat and thin, and so is the idea of reading books on it.

Once out of the bus I stopped by a bookstore, just to compare the experience, and there is a real magic to seeing the tangible volumes all around you. Hardcovers and softcovers. New and used. Plain covers and big tacky and splashy covers. The Kindle and ebook readers turn books into something intangible and unreal. They break them up into a page of electronic text. And somehow by doing that they also kill the appeal of reading. Reading Lord of the Rings on a Kindle feels as appealing as reading a tech manual, practical but joyless. There is nothing alive in an eBook. It’s dead and broken down into bits for your convenience. Thank you Amazon, but no, I’ll stick to the magic of the printed word.

You have home insurance that covers your house and car insurance that covers the car you drive, but what happens when your car is also your home? While good motorhome insurance can be a trifle hard to find, Good Sam Club and GMAC offer Good Sam VIP motorhome insurance that has been especially designed to cover motorhomes. Stop trying to make do with car insurance, when what you really need is motorhome coverage that addresses the specific liabilities and needs of motorhome owners. Because it is designed exactly for motorhome owners, Good Sam VIP insurance lets you tour the roads and highways of America with confidence knowing that you have an insurance policy that’s meant to cover you, not the Chevy Cavalier in the next lane.

Reading the stories in Driving Blind you can view it as the intersection, the late 1990’s stories by Ray Bradbury that mark his transition to the purely nostalgia based fiction he writes today. There is one Science Fiction story in Driving Blind, though it is a high concept but particularly weak entry in terms of execution, and one genuinely great horror short story Thunder in the Morning that should have been reprinted endlessly in horror anthologies, but hasn’t.

But Driving Blind is for the most part more concerned with nostalgia, with old school classmates and ex-girlfriends, with looking into the other end of the telescope at adulthood and with growing old and seeing that all disappear, and while such ideas have always been present in Ray Bradbury’s work, in Driving Blind they seem to predominate and dominate the old Bradbury who looked at far horizons that were beyond himself, rather than only looking inward.

When you drive blind, you go to the destination you know best, like a horse with blinders on, because in the dark we can really only see ourselves. And Driving Blind is that one single destination arrived at over and over again, sometimes with talent, sometimes aimlessly, always with depth of emotion, but having read Driving Blind, I can admire Bradbury as a stylist, while finding little there to draw from beyond the shallow wading pool of memoir fiction. The Bradbury whose work I loved looked at the world and the world beyond with fresh eyes. The Ray Bradbury of Driving Blind is more comfortable with the romance of nostalgia and memory than with anything larger or vaster and while he still writes with love, it is a love so narrow as to be self-love.

Who are you? On the outside you are the clothes you wear, the job you do and the car you drive. Which means your car should be anything but generic. And car accessories from CARid.com help you accessorize, stylize and deck out your ride until it has as interesting a personality as you do. A car is not just a vehicle that gets you from point A to point B, it’s also a form of expression and CARid.com has everything from billet grilles to body kits to hid kits to make it an expression that everyone will see coming. Turning your vehicle into a vehicle for your sense of style begins with the kind of kits and accessories that CARid.com has to offer, so that your car says something more about you than just a brand name.

It took long enough for the show that never should have existed to become the show that no longer exists. FOX canceled Dollhouse after renewing it to escape the wrath of the fans. It might have been kinder to let Epitaph One be its epitaph, because Joss Whedon’s rabid fanbase certainly won’t be pleased by another 13 episodes, even when it comes at a cost of the entire year’s budget for some companies. Naturally they’ll complain that FOX was abusing Joss Whedon, when this time out it let him air and drag out a really bad show for 2 years, instead of giving it a mercy killing from the start. It’s not that Dollhouse is a bad show. Bad is fixable. It’s that Dollhouse is a series whose premise never made any sense and had no reason to exist, except to serve as Eliza Dushku’s employment agency. FOX knew from the start that the show was bad, and tried to have Joss Whedon fix it before it even aired. Joss Whedon knew it was bad enough that he was actually apologetic about FOX’s moves from the start. The question is why everyone involved just kept riding the train to nowhere for 2 years?

Back when Donnie Darko first came out, I would tell anyone who tried to assure me that it was really a brilliant movie you had to “understand” to appreciate, that Donnie Darko was actually a badly plotted disaster that only worked as an extended music movie, and not as a movie. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who thought that, or realized that without the director’s cut, Donnie Darko was just a surrealistic and stylistic music video that made no sense, and with the cut, pretentious garbage. But with Southland Tales and now The Box, it’s becoming really obvious to just about everyone that Richard Kelly has good ideas, but can’t actually tell a story. It’s like that high school friend who shows you a novel that throws together a dozen different elements that might be brilliant in some other context, but that never resolve themselves into anything that makes sense. Kelly has written four movies in wide release, Donnie Darko, Domino, Southland Tales and The Box… and none of those movies are defensible in terms of story. Not one. Think about that for a minute and then get Richard Kelly a copy of Screenwriting for Dummies.

Remember when vacations meant more than following a tour guide around on the same tour that millions of other tourists before you had already taken, or sitting on the same well trod beaches or eating the same bland food every other tourist was eating? In contrast to most other vacation experiences Karisma Hotels’ resorts have been designed from the ground up to provide a memorable and meaningful vacation experience for everyone, from first time couples to families. For the discerning vacationgoer, Karisma Hotels’ resorts offer such unique amenities as gourmet inclusive meals, swim up oceanside suites and a romantic ambiance perfect for anything from a Honeymoon Getaway to an on the spot wedding. If you are tired of the ordinary vacations, try a vacation into the extraordinary.

The producers and writers of Stargate Universe seem intent on delivering a different kind of experience from the old Stargate shows, and Time once again manages that. But Time also breaks with the pattern of using the Destiny as a deus ex machina, instead creating a fairly realistic problem and a solution that is not particularly original, but does make for another harrowing scenario. Time is an episode that reminds you that Stargate Universe has become the opposite of the popcorn fun of Stargate because it is actually anti-fun. Not that Time wasn’t worth watching, it was. With a realistic problem and the cast dying twice over, the dramatic material is there. And while leaving the story hanging is a controversial decision, the disconnected wormhole allows for a kind of infinite series of reincarnations, each of which allows the crew to learn more about the problem in the hopes of finally getting it right. However the episode also smacks of the Reset Button in that it features characters experiencing events and emotions that have all been wiped out by the next episode. And that makes you wonder what the point of watching characters grow in ways that will cease to matter by the next episode is anyway?

I can’t say that it’s much of a surprise that There is No Normal dropped in the ratings. But the third episode is likely to drop even more because V has a clear and obvious problem, and that problem is intensity. 90 percent of V, from the casting to the visual effects have been done right. The pervasive sense of paranoia that fills There is No Normal is also right on tap. But there isn’t very much story to go with it. There is No Normal features a lot of suspicious looks and nervousness, but not very much actually happens. And that is a real problem, because viewers are not going to tune in to sit through 40 minutes of unstructured free floating paranoia. V may wish it was the new Lost, and Lost in its time could get away with having the characters do nothing but run around for 40 minutes. But then Lost put a lot more effort into developing its characters as human beings, something V has yet to accomplish. And while There Is No Normal helps fill out the story, it doesn’t generate nearly enough story of its own to keep viewers watching. And unless that changes, V’s cancellation will be no conspiracy.

Beauty is an art form, but like every art form, its creative instinct has to be refined, shaped and polished in order for it to find its truest and best form of expression. The Regency Beauty Institute is helping to do just that for a new generation of cosmetology students. The Regency Beauty Institute is a Cosmetology School that takes a new and intuitive approach to beauty education by focusing on getting cosmetology students in touch with the realities of their field and by bringing a standardized cosmetology curriculum to campuses all across the United States of America. With dozens of campuses in nine states, the Regency Beauty Institute continues its expansion across the United States to bring the future of cosmetology home to everyone.

Stephen has given me permission to pass along that he has an idea for a new Dark Tower book, the working title of which will be THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE. He has not yet started this book and anticipates that it will be a minimum of eight months before he is able to begin writing it.

Considering the mess that Stephen King made of the last two books of the Dark Tower saga, the idea of him coming back to the table is a little unclear. The Wind Through the Keyhole seems to suggest more world bending adventures in store, but with King having ended the series by (Spoiler alert) killing of all the main characters and dooming Roland to repeat the same cycle over and over until he gets it right… whatever that means, hopefully this is King’s attempt to fix that ending, an ending that his own insert seemed to understand was bad, rather than an attempt to insert more story somewhere in between, or do a Sisters of Illuria type of story set in the Dark Tower world, but not involving Roland and his Ka Tet.

Part of the irony is that JJ Abrams’ career trajectory was based on reversing Braga and Moore’s failures. Where Brannon Braga and Ron Moore began by turning Star Trek First Contact into a modest hit, then got a shot at Mission Impossible 2 and blew it, J.J. Abrams blew Mission Impossible 3, but managed to turn the Star Trek reboot into a big hit. Next up is supposedly Superman, which makes sense as Warner Brothers has been casting for someone to reboot Superman into a crowd pleasing megahit, something J.J. Abrams and no shortage of people whose names are not Bryan Singer could easily do. That means turning his back on TV. J.J. Abrams will not do the much talked about Dark Tower miniseries adaptation. And while Lost passes away and Fringe’s numbers are dropping so badly that it’s likely to wind up in the Friday Night deathslot, after Dollhouse is through with it, Abrams can leave those projects behind and do the big picture blockbuster thing.

Numbers never change and the math remains the math no matter what. All over the country and in any field, 2 plus 2 will always equal four. However, the needs and challenges of companies in different industries are different, and while the numbers may not change, the way they grow and do business does. That is why it helps to have an accounting firm that understands not just how the numbers add up, but how companies in your field do business. Kondler, Chavez and Koch is a Las Vegas cpa firm with a great deal of experience in local Nevada and Las Vegas industries that most accounting firms don’t understand, particularly dealing with businesses focused on entertainment, casinos, development and bars. That allows Kondler, Chavez and Koch to bring this understanding to the table when it comes to the accounting needs of companies in non-traditional fields by understanding their needs from the inside out.

While Microsoft with its culture of geeky oneupmanship, obsessive puzzle solving and contests over at Bill Gates’ house would be a hard sell in the anti-elitist olympics, that is exactly the spin for the Windows 7 ads which take ordinary people who claim to be PC’s who inspired Windows 7. Back in the Windows 95 days, an ad campaign like that could have only been met with derisive laughter at the thought of Microsoft presuming to position itself on the populist side of the scales. But Apple’s own elitism and rise, not to mention Google on the side, have made Microsoft seem positively homey. And while Microsoft will never be your uncle, compared to Apple’s obsessive control freak nature, a Windows OS is practically an open world. Microsoft has taken Apple’s own ad campaign, comparing a PC to an Apple hoodie wearing freak, and turned it on its head by exploiting the elitism at the heart of Apple’s advertising, instead filling its ads with the kind of people that don’t belong in an Apple world.

The trailer for the movie adaptation of Mark Millar’s Kick Ass is here, and it’s being marketed as Napoleon Dynamite with superpowers, and probably couldn’t look any worse if Jared Hess had been responsible for this. Sure we get Joan Jett singing once again that she doesn’t care about her bad reputation. Then there’s the bad costumes and the revelation that this thing is likely to make Superhero Movie seem like a positive experience to sit through by way of comparison. Sure there are Mark Millar fans getting excited about this, but then again they are Mark Millar fans. And the timing is good what with the release of The Boondock Saints 2, because Mark Millar is Troy Duffy with a Scottish accent and Kick Ass is the sort of movie that Troy Duffy would probably make if he made comic book movies.

When the winter chill is in the air, cold winds blow faded leaves around and you wish that you were sitting somewhere warm and sunny where your breath didn’t steam in the cold air, that’s the time to begin considering a warm getaway that doesn’t involve turning up the heat. When the weather gets cold and the thermometer begins the long slide downward, Bookit.com offers a way to beat the cold with vacation deals to the sunniest parts of the globe. From panama city beach vacations to the Riviera, Jamaica and the Bahamas, Bookit.com has hot deals to warm places that let you stretch out on a sandy beach and leave the snow shoveling to someone else.

After another disastrous season, the Mets organization announced that it had made the painful but necessary decision to give up on sucking at Baseball and branch out into sucking at other sports.

“We’ve tried baseball and given it our best shot,” said Mets General Manager Omar Minaya. “For fifty years we’ve been trying to fill in for the Dodgers and the Giants and it just isn’t working anymore. Sure we’ve had our high points, but these days baseball is all about buying Japanese-Cuban players nurtured from birth on huge amounts of steroids and then paying them two hundred billion dollars on a ten year contract only to have them call in with a knee injury. And the Mets just can’t compete.

The Mets however are not giving up. The current plan is to take the Mets roster, made up of boat people on steroids and Daryl Strawberry, and explore sucking at other sports, including Mets ice hockey, Mets football, Mets urban soccer and Mets curling.

“We don’t know what the future will bring for us,” Minaya said, “oh wait we do, certain failure and defeat. But by switching sports unexpectedly we can keep the fans interested and unaware that we’re doomed to suck at anything we do that involves a ball of any kind. But until Queens sinks into the ocean, we’re still going to have loyal and completely clueless fans.”

A lot of people treat anti-virus as a fire and forget it problem, relying on whatever outdated programs were installed when they bought their Desktop or Laptop or Netbook. But that’s not enough. Malware keeps proliferating on a daily basis and relying on programs that your computer seller was probably paid the manufacturer to install on your computer, commonly known as bloatware or crapware, is not going to protect your computer and your data. Additionally such programs can be as bulky and resource heavy as the malware they’re meant to defend against, giving you the choice between one kind of crippled computer or another.

But with Sunbelt Software’s VIPRE, you get aggressive antivirus software that performs to the limit without clogging your system, no matter how fast or slow your computer might be. Whether you’re steaming ahead in a full spec Alienware rig or an Intel Atom based netbook, Sunbelt Software’s VIPRE will do the job of keeping bad programs in their place.

While your built in anti-virus program may keep on waiting for updates before taking any action against a new and cutting edge infection, Sunbelt Software’s VIPRE doesn’t have to wait. Even before the virus or malware has been officially identified and labeled, a process that can take days during which your system can be badly compromised and damaged, Sunbelt Software’s VIPRE is already on the case thanks to VIPRE’s Active Protection™ and its Genscan™ and Cobra™ heuristics which can find malware by pattern, without having to wait for an official identification and update. And MX-Virtualization™ can watch how malware behaves without damaging your system. But you don’t need a cutting edge system to enjoy the benefit of this level of protection, Sunbelt Software’s VIPRE works even on older systems and netbooks to give you next generation anti-virus and anti-spyware protection even if you don’t have a next generation system.

The bad guys have gone on to the next generation of trojans and rootkits, it’s time for your security solution to step up to the next generation of protection too.