Despite dismal reviews, Warner Bros. “Suicide Squad” is heading for an impressive $140 million opening weekend at the North American box office, early estimates showed Friday. The supervillain tentpole, playing at 4,255 locations, will wind up in the top 20 domestic launches of all time.
It is having an enormous box office weekend.. And doing very well in Mexico and the UK along with the United States..
Critics be damned.. this movie is huge. Perhaps a strike back against movie reviewers in a big way: With dollars.
About 42 percent of likely voters favored Clinton, to Trump’s 39 percent, according to the July 31-Aug. 4 online poll of 1,154 likely voters. The poll had a credibility interval of plus or minus 3 percentage points, meaning that the results suggest the race is roughly even.
Among registered voters over the same period, Clinton held a lead of five percentage points, down from eight percentage points on Monday, according to the poll.
KDKA received some calls into our newsroom about it, starting around 8 p.m.
People reported seeing a shiny, silver object in the sky. The reports were coming from areas west of downtown.
“Around 8 p.m., we were looking up into the northern sky and saw what looked like just to be a bright, silver object in the sky, and then after we got a telescope on it, it looked like it was a clear balloon that was catching the light as it moved from west to east,” said Russ Moll, of McKees Rocks.
Moll says it was it a very odd sight in the evening sky.
“It stood out because it was before dusk and so the stars weren’t out yet, so it just really caught our eye,” Moll said. “You noticed it as being something out of the ordinary.”
And this..
The National Weather Service sends balloons up to measure atmospheric conditions; however, they said they had no issues Thursday night.
In a statement, they say: “We’ve had no issues with the launch this evening or any calls about objects floating/glowing in the sky.”
Look to the sky! You’ll never know what you will see..
The Post is using homegrown software to automatically produce hundreds of real-time news reports about the Olympics. Starting tomorrow morning, those items will appear, without human intervention, on the Post’s website, as well as in outside channels like its Twitter account.
The idea is to use artificial intelligence to quickly create simple but useful reports on scores, medal counts and other data-centric news bits — so that the Post’s human journalists can work on more interesting and complex work, says Jeremy Gilbert, who heads up new digital projects for the paper.
“We’re not trying to replace reporters,” he said. “We’re trying to free them up.”
Gilbert and Sam Han, the paper’s head of data science, have a team of three engineers working full-time on Heliograf, the Post’s AI software. A few more product analysts are spending about half of their time on the project, and four or five newsroom staffers are also spending time shaping the software.
This is what a STRANGER THINGS VHS cover art box would have looked like if it would have been released in the 1980s.. And since the show is based with the 80s as the setting, the cover art and photo just feel right. Like it WAS made in the Reagan era..
Critics have lambasted the film.. some have called for the website ROTTEN TOMATOES to actually be shut down because of the negative press that has been linked on the SUICIDE SQUAD page..
What is noteworthy about the aforementioned article linked here: My friend Anghus Houvouras from Flickering Myth got quoted by CNBC about the movie and controversy:
“I think they believe the potential is there. Take (2016’s) ‘Ghostbusters’ which pushed a very strong misogynist narrative. It became less about the quality of the film and more about the 'importance’ of a blockbuster with an all-female leading cast,” Anghus Houvouras, movie maker and writer for the pop culture website Flickering Myth, told CNBC via email.
“Sony and Paul Feig got on board and beat that horse to death. But it didn’t end up resulting in the kind of cultural zeitgeist they were hoping for. Those who benefit from feuds are the media and websites that proliferate a binary narrative. Conflict breeds clicks,” he said.
On Friday, the FDA released a final environmental assessment of the trial, finding that it “will not have significant impacts on the environment.” The project, led by Oxitec, a biotech company that focuses on insect control, calls for the release of thousands of genetically engineered male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. The lab insects are bred so that over time they could kill off much of the local mosquito population by passing on a gene fatal to any offspring they have with wild females.
“NEWS ACCESS RULES APPLICABLE FOR THE BROADCAST OF THE GAMES OF THE XXXI OLYMPIAD, RIO DE JANEIRO, 5-21 AUGUST 2016”
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The title of the document from the
International Olympic Committee that is prohibiting without exception the use of GIFs of memorable Olympics moments..
The full text reads:
“Internet and Mobile Platforms Notwithstanding any other applicable limitation included in these NARs, Olympic Material must not be broadcast on interactive services such as “news active” or “sports active” or any other related Video on Demand services, which would allow the viewer to make a viewing choice within a channel and to thereby view Olympic Material at times and programs other than when broadcast as part of a News Program as set out in Clause 1 above. Additionally, the use of Olympic Material transformed into graphic animated formats such as animated GIFs (i.e. GIFV), GFY, WebM, or short video formats such as Vines and others, is expressly prohibited.”
and with that.. the GIFs are banned.. Done. Edited out. Down the memory hole. Nonexistent.
The summer Olympics are set.. Brazil is ready? Maybe.. The opening ceremonies begin tonight even if there are still pollutants in water and mosquitoes on the loose.
Zika was the big fear.. other fears have come since.
A sampling for some headlines potentially paints a not so rosy scenario concerning the Rio Games …
Americans are getting heavier and heavier. But new U.S. estimates may still come as a shock – since the late 1980s and early 1990s, the average American has put on 15 or more additional pounds without getting any taller.
As expected, David Paulides dropped new stories during his appearance last night on Coast to Coast AM.. Stories of hunters. Weird tales of people who know the forest, people who utilize various forms of instrumentation to find directions, people who carry weapons, all vanishing without a trace. In some instances, traces are found. In one specific story, one man was found after being dead for two weeks. But he wasn’t dead the whole time.. the coroner’s report in that instance said he was dead for only four days. The weird anomaly: His feet were literally worn down to the bone—literally the bottoms of his feet were worn away.
These are the types of stories that David Paulides tells George Knapp, the occasional host of the macabre airwaves under the cover of moonlight..
There was a new bombshell dropped last night during the program. Paulides described a bow hunter in the forest with her Blackberry—before the bankruptcy of the company, obviously. She noticed how the forest seemed to stop dead—no noise, no sound. Just silence. It felt strange. She went on to describe what really makes little sense: Just like in the movie PREDATOR, fuzzy saran-wrap-like figures jumping from one tree to the next.. She even snapped a photo of what appeared to be a mostly fuzzy landscape with a hairlike structure near the edge of the picture. The amazing story aside, the bow hunter’s husband is Dr. Bruce Maccabee—a very well known UFO expert..
It’s all so weird, so bizarre.
Paulides went on last night to also remind listeners of some prior cases where people came back from being missing. Those people describe having fuzzy memories, people looking at them from behind shrubs in the woods, or not even recall being last. Almost like walking into another reality, as George Knapp pointed out during the show. I have been an avid reader of Paulides books. I also spoke to George Knapp about this very topic a bit ago…
It fascinates me and scares me alike. I live near the woods in Pennsylvania. And I also had me own experience that I wrote about in May 2014.
During that time, I had a similar experience where the ‘forest went silent.’ Though my moment of silence was even weirder because, at midnight when it occurred, one lone songbird actually began to sing in the middle of the night. I saw a meteor or something streak across the sky, and then immediately began hearing what sounded, for lack of any better explanation, a chain-like noise. Almost like something being drug across the forest floor. But I did not hear footsteps. My dog Mutley heard it too and got into an attack formation, coupled with the hair on his spine rising as high as I ever saw it.. The noise continued to get louder and louder until it seemed like it was literally on top of me. I grew very cold and afraid. Despite turning on a spotlight on the side of the house, I saw nothing at all.. The noise dissipated after a few minutes. It felt like I was in the middle of a recording, or endless loop of some other reality..
The most troubling aspect of my personal tale is this: I had this foreboding sense about the whole thing. While I wanted to go about 15 more feet and step into the forest, I had some weird notion that whatever it was making this noise WANTED me to walk into the woods.. almost like it was tempting me to enter its territory and terrain, as though there was some weird boundary that it could not cross… Equally strange was a conversation I had with a deer hunter a few months ago. Given my interest I the unusual, I asked him if he ever had a ‘dead forest’ moment when he hunted. He said he did.. but it did not last long. He was deer hunting at a camp with several other hunters. While outside for a cigarette, he said the woods literally went dead and lifeless for about ten or so seconds. And then the noises of the forest came back again.
All so weird.. so strange. So peculiar.
The complex mystery continues. There seems to be no sound answer to the lost and unfound. David Paulides offered no reasonable explanation, as he purposely does not. George Knapp described it all as best he could: Like a harvest.
The harvest idea may be the most frightening of all to contemplate.
Apparently he is planning to have 3d holograms and a solar paneled tombstone that will constantly play his music.. He is also reportedly very serious about the funeral plans despite some early laughs from those close to him.
It is a little bizarre perhaps.. But Biebs is 22.. he saw some pretty amazing people die young this year, like Prince.. And maybe he is also aware of the dreaded ‘27 club’ that so many stars have found themselves become the victim of..
After all… we all have something dark and menacing tagging behind us until the end..
