Van Johnson spent a lot of time trying to cook some eggs in the movie Battleground. Comic relief during the Battle of the Bulge. Of course it's old and in black and white so maybe it wouldn't fit.
We just had a quicksand "incident" at Popham Beach State Park. Oi. It quickly went viral and was picked up by the usual flagship clickbait news organizations like the New York Post and Fox News. Poor woman, who was with her husband at one of the most popular (and beautiful) parks in the State. Thought I was going to die! What if it had been a child!? We need more signs! Absolutely straight out of the movies. Park rangers did a great job of patiently explaining that everyone needed to calm down,
Summer camp horror [is] a product of the Reagan era, representing “a reassertion of conservative values” and “Old Testament draconian beliefs.”
That, pardon my French, is a bunch of merde. Using the 12 Friday the 13th movies as an example. The first was pretty good. It was a horror story about a vengeful mother whose son was dead and not a killer. Its success spawned 11 more. The directors, writers, and producers were all diferent but had one thing in common: they all had a long history in horror. The only agenda here was to make money. And that they did. And Hollywood being Hollywood, it was soon all about the Benjamins big time.
It's not just you. It's indeed everywhere and it's (been for a while) a major complaint from a lot of people who either really like cinema or make their living writing about it. No one's listening apparently.
I kinda did a double take with your "In case you aren't familiar with Alanis Morrisette's hit", but then I did the math. Yikes! Almost 30 years old ..already.. I think it has aged much better than Smells Like Teen Spirit, but that's just me I guess.
23 - I didn't know until I enlisted in the Air Force. It was an automatic disqualification from the electronics field. Guess they didn't want me cutting the wrong wire. . .
I always get a kick when something that's been around forever is all of sudden 'discovered' due to lack of historical knowledge. Not surprising in this case if your only music input is from some blonde woman. Anyway, if the fade out has been around forever, how can Mental Floss make the claim it was invented to appease programmers? That's pretty weak. Can't argue that D.J.s needed time to yak, but to give them that there were often two versions of a song - the album version and the one released for radio. And I distinctly remember a time back in the day when some radio stations were proclaiming "Have you noticed we're not talking over the songs?" Anyway, here's a couple articles that also explain the fade out: https://globalnews.ca/news/4615641/why-some-songs-fade-out-alan-cross/ and https://slate.com/culture/2014/09/the-fade-out-in-pop-music-why-dont-modern-pop-songs-end-by-slowly-reducing-in-volume.html
Other than reading, music has been one great love since the 60s. What I discovered over time is that every 10+ years, when music formats changed (evolved), radio station formats would change to "classic". Guess they just wanted to keep their current base. It wasn't a problem because I could normally find a new station that kept current. Until the 2000s. The DC area did this in the 80s but there was no replacement. It got to the point I was driving home on my hour plus commute listening to AM news-talk and thinking to myself "This is how it happens. I've become my parents." True story: My first exposure to Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit was Weird Al's version on MTV. Had no idea who Nirvana was. But I knew that musically, Weird Al was usually right on so I had to go on the hunt for this band named Nirvana. Then I moved to Maine, found my favorite station evah, and all was right with the world. For about ten years.
Yeah COBOL! Hard to forget Y2K if you worked in IT and had your once in a lifetime New Year's Eve millennium ruined. No Drinking. My company did indeed spends millions, maybe tens of millions fixing that. Sure it was important but everyone knew the end of the world stuff was a joke. Still, the [panic] fear, at a lot of levels was real. I was asked to store a couple of 55 gallon drums of diesel fuel for our generator in my garage. The fastest immediate NO to management I ever gave.
What a delightful read.