I have determined that attractiveness is a recessive trait.
‘Cause those grandkids sure didn’t get their good looks from my side of the family.
I gave up on The Walking Dead. It was slow-paced, repetitive torture porn with a cast of unlikeable characters. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was a classic that reinvigorated the genre by attaching themes of infection and social collapse to an existing idea, but his stuff was getting formulaic in the sequels — it’s gotten calcified and uncreative. I liked Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die, but it was more of a knowing, self-referential wink at all zombie films, with a cast that knew all of the zombie tropes and went through the expected motions. It ought to have punctured the whole genre and ended it, but I think the title was another self-aware joke. Dead movie ideas don’t die, they get endlessly recycled.
There’s another way we know zombie movies are creatively bankrupt: we’ve entered the “Abbot and Costello meets…” phase of their existence. The fear is gone, the plots are predictable, so let’s milk it for comedy now. Worse still, we’re getting sequels to mocking comedy takes on the zombie movies.
Yeah, I saw Zombieland: Double Tap last night. It shambled onto the screen like a microwaved platter of dried-out raw brains, and it strained to provide some manic flavor to old jokes and random plot shifts, tired and pointless cameos, and a feeble attempt to add some challenge by saying that zombies had “evolved” and there was a new type that was harder to kill…but that just meant they had to fire their big guns with infinite ammunition a dozen times to achieve the same effect, a dead splattered zombie. Dreary, unfunny, and I don’t care how often Woody Harrelson yells, throws a tantrum, and blows stuff up, totally lacking in tension.
I have a better title for it: Zombieland: Tapped Out.
What an insight! Why go to class when you can just listen to Joe Rogan?
Why spend my time sitting in two anthropology classes a week listening to some puppet talk about how the earliest advanced civilizations started around 7,000 years ago when one JRE episode with renowned egyptologist, Graham Hancock proves WITHOUT A DOUBT that highly advanced civilizations were around thousands of years before that? GOBEKLI TEPE, ANYONE? Has my anthropology professor ever talked to God through the use of Ayahuasca? I doubt it. Well Graham has, and he’s not charging me $20,000 a year to hear him talk.
How is anyone still paying for an education when a tool for personal development as effective and readily available as JRE exists?
At one episode a night, five days a week, that’s more than a full class load. Two semesters of that, summers off, for four years, and you’ve got one enlightened motherfucker on your hands. All courtesy of my personal spirit animal, Joe Rogan. And even at that pace there would be more than 200 more episodes left to digest.
I once listened to a Joe Rogan podcast, and it had the opposite effect on me — it was like that dumb meathead was reaching into my brain and shredding the information therein. I had to read a whole issue of Developmental Biology to recover. I think it’s really easy to teach people what they want to believe, not so easy to actually teach them things they don’t know.
The first stage was Scienceblogs, which was great, but was burning through the cash, so they sold the network. Now it’s been bought up by a right-wing astroturf organization which is using our old content to sell ads. We got out in time.
We bloggers moved out to a new site managed by National Geographic, which you’d think was a step up, but they had no clue what to do with us, skimped on maintenance, and started blathering about imposing restrictions on what we could post. That’s one of the reasons Ed and I started up Freethoughtblogs. Then they started publishing garbage to court the yahoo dollars. We got out in time, because hoo boy has Nat Geo flushed itself down the craphole.
Hey, remember that guy who was so concerned about how my profanity-laced diatribes
and lack of civil discourse about religion
was going to ruin the reputation of dignified, noble NatGeo? I wonder how he’s doing nowadays.
Yeah, one of those. I’ve only uncurled from my nest to let the world know I’m alive. Then back to it.
Grading. Hell.
This seems about right for America: an Iowa family’s basement fills with blood. Real, genuine blood. The stuff had backed up from a slaughter house next door.*
Kaitlin Dahl said the company uses a catch drain to capture most of the blood during the butchering process. That blood is emptied into an offal barrel and taken away by a rendering truck.
“When you split a bone in half, there will be some excess blood that will drip on that floor,” she said. “That was allowed by the county to go down the back drain.”
Did I say good news? I meant slightly less horrible news than what’s going on in the regular news.
*Remember the real estate mantra: “Location, location, location.”
I admit to a growing addiction: for the past month or so, I catch an episode or two of Letterkenny before going to bed. It’s got the best rhythms and language since Deadwood, and is similarly profane and abusive, although it’s also extremely Canadian. It reminds me vaguely of Morris cranked up to 11, although I’m constantly brought up short by the fact that it’s set in a town of 5000 people, just like Morris, but seems far more cosmopolitan than this place.
Anyway, I watched two whole episodes last night before sitting down to grade student essays, which was a bad idea. The papers seemed less…eloquent, somehow. Lacking in Canadian hockey slang. A dearth of cunning slurs delivered deadpan. I’m not going to repeat that today, because I’ve got an even bigger pile of papers to grade, and I have to maintain a level of realism in my evaluation.
I think my plan for the day is to retreat to a coffeeshop (after tending to the spiders) and work in quiet isolation until the pile is gone.
Once that happens, then Letterkenny. Gotta figure out how many syllables Wayne can put into the word “day”.
Tuesday is also a crowded schedule for me, and I just got home. That’s partly because I pushed and got my cell biology exam written and copied tonight, and that means my morning tomorrow is completely free, no prep work at all. You know what that means?
I get to play with spiders all morning long! Putting in a little extra effort today freed up a big block of time.
My wife is away for a few weeks, so she’s sending me photos of things she knows I’ll like…like Texas spiders.
Oh, yeah, and also of #1 Grandson.
OK, memories, I’ve experienced this.
I was probably in second or third grade, somewhere around there. The town library was across the street from the elementary school I attended, and rather than walking straight home, I’d often sidle into the library and devour books for an hour or three. Unfortunately, the library had this policy that weird little kids like me had our own specific section of the library, and we were not allowed in the adult section. But I’d already read all the biology books in the kids’ section, and most of them were descriptive and phenomenological picture books, and I wanted to know why, not more what. So I snuck into the adult section one day.
And a librarian caught me. She said I had to have an adults’ permission to be back there with the real science books.
That made me mad. I think eventually I got Mom or Dad to tell them I was allowed to read anything in the main library, and that allowed me to consume everything.
I’m pretty sure that the Kent Public Library changed their policy a few years later, because in high school I noticed that they allowed all kinds of short riff-raff to run free everywhere. Good for them.
