Ghostbusters IIIJun 26 2009

Over on BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh shares his idea for a Ghostbusters III screenplay based on NYNEX, the telephone company that served New York and New England from 1984 through 1997.

Pay phones ring for no reason, and they don't stop. Dead relatives call their families in the middle of the night. People, horrifically, even call themselves-- but it's the person they used to be, phoning out of the blue, warning them about future misdirection.

Every once in a while, though, something genuinely bad happens: someone answers the phone... and they go a little crazy.

Thing is -- spoiler alert -- halfway through the film, the Ghostbusters realize that NYNEX isn't a phone system at all: it's the embedded nervous system of an angel -- a fallen angel -- and all those phone calls and dial-up modems in college dorm rooms and public pay phones are actually connected into the fiber-optic anatomy of a vast, ethereal organism that preceded the architectural build-up of Manhattan.

Manhattan came afterwards, that is: NYNEX was here first.

Geoff of BLDGBLOG makes a passionate caseOct 16 2007

Geoff of BLDGBLOG makes a passionate case for Los Angeles being the greatest city in America.

The whole thing is ridiculous. It's the most ridiculous city in the world - but everyone who lives there knows that. No one thinks that L.A. "works," or that it's well-designed, or that it's perfectly functional, or even that it makes sense to have put it there in the first place; they just think it's interesting. And they have fun there. And the huge irony is that Southern California is where you can actually do what you want to do; you can just relax and be ridiculous. In L.A. you don't have to be embarrassed by yourself.

I'm not sure I agree, but seeing as I've only been to LA for 24 hours in my whole life, my objections don't carry much weight.