Who You Gonna Call?

Twenty five years ago, New York was under an attack. Invaders from the afterlife appeared across the city, wreaking havoc on the unsuspecting citizenry. A call for help went out. Four men in jumpsuits answered. They were the Ghostbusters. A quarter of a century later the boys in gray are due for a comeback. Here’s a run down of the Ghostbusters franchise; where’s it’s been and where it’s going.


Ghostbusters
President Reagan was practicing voodoo economics. Princess Di was pregnant with Prince Harry. Lionel Richie and Stevie Wonder had hit singles. The year: 1984.

Directed and produced by Ivan Reitman (Meatballs, Stripes), with the screenplay written by Harold Ramis (Knocked Up, Orange County) and SNL alum Dan Aykroyd, Ghostbusters starred Ramis, Aykroyd, Bill Murray (Lost In Translation, Meatballs, Stripes), Sigourney Weaver (Aliens, Copycat), Annie Potts (TV's Designing Women), and Rick Moranis (Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Spaceballs).

University professors Dr. Peter Venkman (Murray), Dr. Raymond Stanz (Aykroyd) and Dr. Egon Spengler (Ramis) lose their research grant when their experiment methodology is proven to be bogus. The team decides to go into business for themselves and open a ghost removal service. After struggling to get on their feet, they are summoned to investigate the strange happenings in Dana Barrett's (Weaver) Central Park West apartment. What they discover is that all Manhattan is being besieged by ghosts and other worldly demons through a portal in her building. After the role of Winston Zeddmore was turned down by Eddie Murphy, among others, Ernie Hudson signed on to play fourth ghostbuster. Had Murphy accepted the role his character would have been introduced much earlier. As it was, Zeddmore’s character was introduced later in the film.

Ghostbusters (the animated series)
Following up on the success of the movie, the cartoon featured the Ghostbusters keeping NYC safe from demons, curses, spooks and every other off-the-wall weirdness known (and unknown) to mortal man. This time they had help from their old nemesis Slimer, a new arsenal of weapons, and an occasional assist from their faithful secretary Janine. J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, wrote many of the episodes. Lorenzo Music, most recognized as the voice of Garfield, provided the voice of Dr. Peter Vankman, the character played by Bill Murray in the films. Allegedly Murray didn’t like that his character sounded like a fat feline and asked to have Music replaced. Dave Coulier, Uncle Joey from Full House, took over the part, basically doing his impression of Bill Murray in Caddyshack. Ironically, after Lorenzo Music died Murray took over the role of Garfield, voicing a CGI version of the cat in the two live action movies. The series changed names and formats a few times, running from 1986 to 1991.

Ghostbusters II
George H. W. Bush was practicing trickle-down economics. Sarah Palin was pregnant with her first child,Track. Milli Vanilli and Bobby Brown had hit singles. The year: 1989.

Five years after the events of the first film, the Ghostbusters have been plagued by lawsuits and court orders, and their once-lucrative business is bankrupt. However, when Dana begins to have ghost problems again, the boys come out of retirement only to be promptly arrested. They discover that New York is once again headed for supernatural doom, with a river of ectoplasmic slime bubbling beneath the city and an ancient sorcerer attempting to possess Dana's baby. Can the Ghostbusters quell the negative emotions feeding the otherworldly threat and stop the world from being slimed?

Ghostbusters: The Video Game
Barack H. Obama is practicing recovery economics. Nicole Richie is pregnant with her second child. Blackeyed Peas and Beyoncé have hit singles. The year is 2009.

Video Games | Ghostbusters | Annie Potts Reveal Teaser

Arguably one of the most anticipated video game releases of the year, Atari's Ghostbusters: The Video Game breathed new life into the long-dormant franchise. Set in 1991, two years after the events of Ghostbusters II, the player takes on the role of a rookie ghostbuster as the team attempts, yet again, to save New York City from a cataclysmic supernatural event. The game is largely being treated as the third proper entry in the Ghostbusters canon as the film's original writers, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, have penned the game's script, an unusual move for a film-to-game adaptation. Much of the original cast have returned to lend their voices and likenesses, including the mercurial Bill Murray. The game also features the original movie score by the late Elmer Bernstein, the hit theme song by Ray Parker, Jr., and memorable foes from the classic movie, including the gluttonous green ghost Slimer and the mammoth Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. It is available on the PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS.

Ghostbusters III
Barack H. Obama will still be practicing recovery economics. I have no idea who will be pregnant, nor who will have hit singles. The year will be 2012.

Rumors of a third Ghostbusters film have been floating around seemingly forever, like an unwanted pesky poltergeist. Aykroyd almost got a third movie off the ground in the late '90s, but the project never happened and rumblings about a third film have been relatively quiet since then. That is until September 2008, when Harold Ramis confirmed Columbia Pictures had asked The Office writers Gene Stupnisky and Lee Eisenberg to pen a script for a potential Ghostbusters III.

According to an e-mail he sent to the Los Angeles Times, Ramis says much of the original cast, including Bill Murray, are eager to be involved in a new movie. The concept of Ghostbusters III would revolve around the old team in a mentor capacity and handing over the reins to a new, younger group. Ramis, in a recent web interview, asked for realistic expectation for the potential sequel:

We faced it before with Ghostbusters II. No matter how much people love [the first movie], the sequel will never live to their expectations. Is Spider-Man 3 as good as the first Spider-man? Probably not. Certainly the last Indiana Jones felt like a disaster– although I read online that Harrison Ford made $65 million from it. And I guess that is the reward for creating these cultural icons. But if were going to do it, it’s impossible to say it will be better than the first one. It’s not going to be like the rebooting of Batman– we’re not going to be wearing sculpted suits with pecs and abs built in to them. What made Ghostbusters funny was the low tech aspect of it… for us it will always be about characters [first], then secondarily it will be about the pseudoscience, the fake mythology.

Watch the Original Ghostbusters for free online, courtesy of crackle.com. Ghostbusters

Raising the Bar

On the short list of fun things to do in Valdosta drinking is perpetually near the top, along side getting stoned out of your mind or playing World of Warcraft– yep, those are pretty much your only options. Most of us choose to drink. But how many of us think of recycling in that inebriated state? Hell, I can’t even think of my address by the end of my nights at the bar, let alone remember to sort my empties. But recycling can positively impact our environment and our lives. So if you, like me, spend much of your life at the bar, you’ll agree that recycling at the bar makes perfect sense.

Consider how much trash one person makes at the bar. I consider myself an average drinker– I consume about four or five drinks each night I go out. Sometimes less, often more. If I drink five beers a night, going out twice a week I will accumulate about ten unrecycled bottles or cans. So using a rather conservative estimate of my drinking, each year I account for five hundred or so unrecycled containers. Multiply that by every obnoxious drunk you see and you’ll soon realize how big an impact recycling can make.

North Carolina is the first US state to implement such recycling policies. In 2005 they passed a measure requiring establishments with Alcoholic Beverage Control permits to recycle aluminum cans and glass bottles. "As the waitresses and bartenders close down at the end of the night, they'll separate the bottles. Real simple," said Erik Hodgeman, who manages a Raleigh bar. "Execution is going to be the most difficult thing – figuring out the ins and outs of how it's going to work – but overall I think it's a good idea."

Mark Center, a district supervisor for the state Division of Alcohol Law Enforcement, said recycling will be checked during routine, unannounced inspections. Failing to comply is a class one misdemeanor with a possible fine. Wilmington is one of the cities most affected by the law. The 60 or so downtown bars and restaurants go through about 2 million bottles of beer and 140,000 bottles of liquor a year, which officials said amounts to between 10 tons and 12 tons of glass recyclables every week.

In some places the students are leaders, organizing community recycling projects. The Students for Bar Recycling club at Kansas University is collecting glass bottles from local bars to be recycled. Similar groups in California and Oklahoma are looking to start the same program in their college towns.

While glass is 100 percent recyclable, it has less value when resold than other containers such as aluminum cans or plastic bottles. According to the RecycleNet Composite Index, aluminum cans are currently worth $600 per ton when recycled, while mixed colors of glass are worth $5 per ton. As a result, it’s more difficult to find glass recyclers. In Earth911’s recycling database, there are 42 percent more locations nationwide that accept aluminum cans than clear glass.

If you’d like to help get a recycling program started at your favorite watering hole, here are a few resources that will get you started.

Earth911.com Put in your zip code and this site will tell you where the nearest recycling center is. You can specify what you want to recycle (paper, aluminum cans, computers– even paint).

greenstudentU.com An up-to-date encyclopedia of green terms, a guide to eco-friendly living for the college student, and links to resources to start recycling programs. It also posts news on all things green.

Partnership4recycling.org This is the official site of the North Carolina Division of Pollution Prevention and Environmental Assistance, the agency responsible for enforcing the state’s new recycling law. A good site for researching your potential recycling project. Check out the “best Practices” section for a guide to creating a successful recycling plan at your bar or restaurant. There are even case studies of bars in NC with successful recycling programs.

Fire It Up

I hear a lot about ‘personal freedoms.’ I hear that ‘the government’ is always trying to take them away. But I don’t hear much about ‘personal responsibilities.’ Is the government always trying to give them to us? It seems so. A new law passed in June aims to regulate the tobacco industry. Cousin to “Big Oil” and stepson to “Big Automotive” (but no relation to Biggie Smalls, AKA the Notorious B.I.G., R.I.P.), “Big Tobacco” has perhaps the largest lobby in Washington, and I’m not talking about the size of their foyer. According to Wikipedia, an infallible source, the tobacco lobby spends over $100,000 every day Congress is in session. Aside from direct contributions, the lobbyists ply politicians with dinner, drinks and dessert. They coerce Congressmen with caviar and champagne. They buy them things is the point I’m trying to make here. But despite their best efforts, these lobbyists have lost a large battle in the war on tobacco. So smoke ’em if you got ’em, because sooner than you think, you’ll notice a change.

The first change you’ll likely notice won’t be the packaging. The price of a pack has already gone up a great deal. In April the federal per pack tax grew to $1.01. That tax will undoubtedly rise, in part to pay for the new Center for Tobacco Products, a division of the FDA. No doubt some tax money will go to help defray the burden tobacco users place on the American healthcare system, especially if we move toward universal coverage. Canada has a universal healthcare plan for it’s citizens, A pack of smokes cost just under ten bucks there. Their thinking is, if people use a product that, when used correctly, results in death, they should pay their own hospital bills, albeit in the form of a hefty tax. Makes sense to me– let the 45 million Americans who do smoke pay for their own lung replacements. Just so long as alcoholics like me can still get free treatment for our cirrhosis of the liver, and so long as a gallon of grain liquor still costs less than a carton of Camels.

But it’s easy for me to be so nonchalant about the tax because I don’t smoke. Well, I did, but not regular cigarettes. I smoked kreteks. Kreteks are made of Indonesian tobaccco and cloves. Invented in the 1880s by a left-handed Java native with a penchant for puns ( I made up two of those descriptors), clove cigarettes were originally intended to treat asthma. The inventor smoked them to cure his chest pain, which the cigarettes did, but before he could patent his creation he died of lung cancer. In Indonesia nine out of ten smokers fire up kreteks, and five out of five dentists agree clove-smokers have pleasant-smelling mouths. It’s as if they just ate a holiday ham.

I still remember the first time I smelled the distinctive scent of a kretek. I was seventeen, so young, dumb, and full of… potential. Justin Hill (you’ve never met him), Patrick Spurlock (you may have met him) and I (you’ve definitely met him) went to Thomasville to see a movie. You have to understand that we lived in Moultrie, so driving thirty minutes to Thomasville just to see a movie is understandable. Standing outside the movie theater, Patrick lit up a Djarum Black. The first thing I noticed was the package– it was larger and squarer than a regular cigarette box, and it was black– how goth. The cigarette itself was black as well– how emo. But black is very slimming, so if you have fat hands consider holding one as an affectation. I noticed
the crackle it made as he pulled his first lung full. Kretek, it tuns out, is onomatopoetic– it describes the sound the cigarette makes.

Years later I would come across cloves again, this time deciding to try them. I think I was at O’Corleys and a friend was smoking Djarums. I bummed one. I was instantly hooked. Finding cloves was tough– most stores have never heard of clove cigarettes. A few independent (read: Indian-owned) stores had them, but they cost a bit more than regular smokes. After alI, they are imported. I soon discovered the rainbow of flavors cloves offered. Besides the Black version, Djarum also has, among others, cherry and vanilla varieties. Recently they’ve become so popular that even Flash Foods carriers them.

But after a short but passionate love affair, I gave up smoking, aside from the occasional clove at the bar. I don’t buy them anymore, only bum them. But the new law will ban them. They’re considered ‘flavored cigarettes’ and in October they’ll be outlawed. The rationale is that candy and fruit flavored cancer sticks are too seductive to kids. As if Mike’s Hard Lemonade isn’t. So I guess my tradition of passing out fruit-flavored White Owls to trick-or-treaters is over. And no more bobbing for cherry Djarums.

Here’s a heads up on the changes you’ll see in the coming year.
* Sept. 20, 2009: Artificial flavors other than menthol banned from cigarettes.
* March 19, 2010: FDA will publish rules and new enforcement plans on prevention of marketing and sales to youth.
* June 22, 2010: FDA will have the authority to issue standards for tobacco products to promote public health that could eliminate or reduce certain ingredients.
* June 22, 2010: Descriptors such as "light" and "mild" prohibited in advertising and labeling of existing cigarette brands.
* June 22, 2010: Prohibition on vending machine sales, self-service displays and free samples of cigarettes and smokeless products except in adult-only facilities.
* June 22, 2010: Advertising in print media and point-of-sale displays must be black-and-white text only.
* June 22, 2010: Larger, stronger warnings required on smokeless tobacco products.
* June 11, 2011: FDA must publish regulations requiring larger, graphic warning labels on cigarette packages; the regulations take effect 15 months later.

Critical Mass Valdosta 2009