December 11: HALLOWEEN: CURSE 'producer's cut' to appear?

Fango recently caught up with writer/producer Daniel Farrands, who has most recently won notice as co-scripter of the Jack Ketchum adaptation THE GIRL NEXT DOOR. However, as any self-respecting horror buff will know, Ferrands got his breakthrough penning the screenplay for the much-troubled sequel HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS (pictured), 1995's sixth installment in the long-running slasher series. The good news, Farrands reveals, is that the alternate 'producer's cut' of the much-criticized follow-up may finally see the (legal) light of day after a decade's worth of bootleg trading.

'It's going to be the subject of a conference call that I'm having with Miramax,' the writer tells Fango. 'I've finally gotten somebody's attention over there. I have been in touch with them over the years, and during the past month I've had e-mail exchanges with everyone from their home video marketing people to their legal affairs department. The long but sad answer is that first, no one could figure out who had the rights. The movies Dimension made at the time when they were funded by Disney have reverted back to Disney, so they own the sixth, seventh and eighth HALLOWEENs, and the Weinsteins no longer have the rights. But not only did Disney not know they had them, they did a cost analysis [once they were informed], looked at it and said, '˜We don't think it will make any money.'

'I told them everyone who had bought a bootleg would go back out and buy [an official release],' Farrands continues. 'We could do a two-disc version with the producer's cut and the theatrical version, commentaries, behind-the-scenes and everything. They said no, and I said, '˜Well, could you license it to a company such as Anchor Bay? They have done a wonderful job with the series.' But they said no again, and that was because they didn't want it competing with the bare-bones version they had in the marketplace.

'However, that DVD is now out of print. So I sent them dozens and dozens of websites and eBay pages, and I finally got their attention. So we are now going to have a discussion about it, and I hope I can convince them do something.'

Ok, so maybe it's not very popular to say anything anti-Xmas but being GNR fans we usually aren't too worried about conventional mores and ideas so....do we really give a f*#K about doing the popular thing??  I didn't think so.  With that spirit in mind what do you fellow Scrooges hate about Xmas?

My top three:

1. The crowds.  They are rude, obnoxius and ill-mannered!  (well, all of them except for me anyway )
2. The commercialism.  "Season of love"....my ASS.  Season of maxing out credit cards!
3. Having to pretend you like the assholes you MUST associate with on a regular basis.  If I don't like you 364 other days of the year chances are pretty good I don't like you now. 

....humbug!

Voyager 2 discovers solar system is bent By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer

LOS ANGELES - New observations from NASA's long-running Voyager 2 spacecraft show the solar system is asymmetrical, likely from disturbances in the interstellar magnetic field, scientists reported Monday. The discovery came after the 30-year-old unmanned probe sailed near the edge of the solar system this past summer following its twin, Voyager 1, which reached that part of space in 2004.

Researchers have long suspected the solar system was bent, but never had direct evidence until now, said Voyager mission scientist Edward Stone of the California Institute of Technology.

Voyager 2 crossed a barrier in the solar system known as the termination shock in August, some 10 billion miles from the site where Voyager 1 passed through. The termination shock is the region where charged particles from the sun collide with other particles and a magnetic field in interstellar gas and abruptly slow down.

Voyager 2 passed the termination shock five times and determined the boundary in the southern hemisphere was about a billion miles closer to the sun than the spot where Voyager 1 crossed in the northern hemisphere, Stone said at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Scientists believe the unevenness is caused by the interstellar magnetic field that is pitched at an angle to the plane of the Milky Way.

"The magnetic field is disturbing an otherwise spherical surface," Stone said.

Although Voyager 2 was the second probe to zip past the termination shock, scientists were nonetheless excited about the milestone. Unlike its twin, Voyager 2 had a working instrument that made the first direct measurements of the speed and temperature of the solar wind.

The nuclear-powered Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, are hurtling toward an uncharted region of space where the sun's influence wanes.

Voyager 1, the most distant of any manmade object, is traveling at 10 miles a second with its twin trailing close behind.

It will take about a decade before the probes reach the heliopause, marking the beginning of interstellar space and the end of our solar system.

This last paragraph intrigues me.  What mysteries will be revealed at this point?  Funny how "advanced" modern man finds himself when we haven't even began to unlock the mysteries hidden in our oceans, much less space.  We are still literal freshmen at best in the University of Knowledge.