Mr. McCain should be required to see “Wall-E” to learn just how far adrift he is from an America whose economic fears cannot be remedied by his flip-flop embrace of the Bush tax cuts (for the wealthy) and his sham gas-tax holiday (for everyone else). Mr. Obama should see it to be reminded of just how bold his vision of change had been before he settled into a front-runner’s complacency. Americans should see it to appreciate just how much things are out of joint on an Independence Day when a cartoon robot evokes America’s patriotic ideals with more conviction than either of the men who would be president.

Dr Lane says: 'The movie industry seems to have settled on a shared concept; don't sell the movie, sell the anticipation of it. Create a frenzy of interest in a movie and then release in large volume which converts that 'hyped' interest into sales very fast. This can leave movie-goers standing outside the cinema in the rain thinking "That wasn't really very good". But a ticket has been sold. If they liked it, even better. They can tell all their friends about it and more ticket sales will follow.' http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/newsAndEvents/archives/2005/Film_Marketing.htm

Familiar events that are understood immediately, as well as events that bear no relation to the infant's knowledge, even though they are perceptually discriminable, are studied minimally. The longest bouts of attention occur toward events that share elements with the infant's knowledge. ... Put plainly, the interest of infants, like that of adults, is usually recruited by events that differ only a little from what is familiar and therfore are understandable with some effort. It is not a conicidence that thirty years of research on the brain reveals that discrepant and unexpected events are among the most reliable causes of activity in neuronal circuits.
Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, formalized the idea that humans are most likely to be alerted by events that are unexpected. This powerful yet simple principle applies to every aspect of psychological activity. ibid. p. 79.

         
                           MALCOLM
		 Maybe they wake up that morning
		 thinking they have a thousand
		 things to do and a thousand days
		 left to do them in...  And then
		 all of a sudden, it's all taken
		 away.  No one asked them.  It's
		 just gone...