In 1969, Night of the Living Dead was unleashed on the innocent children of America. I didn’t get to see it — I was only 12 — but I do recall browsing through my grandparents’ latest issue of The Reader’s Digest and reading Roger Ebert’s notorious review of the movie. He gave away the entire plot (we didn’t worry about spoiler warnings back then), and made it sound like we should dread the corruption of America’s youth by all the on-screen gore.

I don’t think the younger kids really knew what hit them. They were used to going to movies, sure, and they’d seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else. This was ghouls eating people up — and you could actually see what they were eating. This was little girls killing their mothers. This was being set on fire. Worst of all, even the hero got killed.

It’s hard to remember what sort of effect this movie might have had on you when you were six or seven. But try to remember. At that age, kids take the events on the screen seriously, and they identify fiercely with the hero. When the hero is killed, that’s not an unhappy ending but a tragic one: Nobody got out alive. It’s just over, that’s all.

I felt real terror in that neighborhood theater last Saturday afternoon. I saw kids who had no resources they could draw upon to protect themselves from the dread and fear they felt.

Man, I really had to go see this thing. I probably didn’t get around to it until I was in college, maybe ten years later. Then I’d be totally unimpressed by the bloody violence, but highly impressed by the scariness and the build-up of fear and the way it subverted most horror movie tropes — at the time, that is. It’s since become practically horror movie dogma. It’s a classic. Many of you will probably remember Night of the Living Dead, it’s still got some impact, despite being a low-budget black-and-white zombie flick about a single night of terror, and most of you will just shrug off the scene of the undead scooping up pig’s intestines out of a dummy lying on the ground. That’s kind of not the point of the story.

In 2021, The Suicide Squad arrived on the big screen, the pandemic had loosened its grip (don’t worry, it’s coming back), and I’m old enough to slip my leash and see it on opening night. I was looking forward to it. I am so tired of grimdark superhero movies, where Batman levels whole city blocks with his tank and Superman smashes through apartment buildings, killing citizens (indirectly and offscreen, usually) and everyone is so damned angry all the time. I also remember the Christopher Reeve Superman movie which was just as radical as Romero’s Dead, because it was all about optimism and hope and a superhero who was truly good, and I feel like I could use some of that light-heartedness. I expected some of that bright comic book color popping off the screen, with a cheerful pop-music soundtrack, and a plot about people coming together through adversity, you know, like James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy.

Holy christ, this is not that movie.

There is so much explicit death and murder and blood in The Suicide Squad. You know that in a Zack Snyder movie the heroes will be cavalier about meting out justice — cars will explode, presumably killing their occupants, and buildings will collapse in a shower of broken glass and dust and brick, presumably destroying the families inside, but you won’t see the corpses. This movie…well, the chains have been unshackled. It’s about an expendable team of bad guys on a mission to destroy everything on a South American island, and right at the beginning we’re going to see half that team annihilated. I hope you weren’t looking forward to finding out about more of those characters you see in all the trailers, because they’re going to set foot on the island and get faces blown off, literally. Goodbye, Nathan Fillion, Pete Davidson, Flula Borg, and even Sean Gunn as the repellent Weasel — those are little more than walk-on cameos before their characters are blown away in a splatter of fluids and body parts.

If the protagonists are going to get treated as scrap bits falling off the butcher counter, that’s nothing compared to the military trying to defend their island of Corto Maltese. They are literally monster fodder. The shark man eats them alive, and they die screaming. The shark rips off a guy’s head and pops it into his jaws, complete with a shot of the head grimacing, its eyes rolling, blood spurting from the stump of its neck. People are ripped in half, both lengthwise and at the waist, showering everything in blood. The Squad guns down an entire camp of revolutionary allies on accident, and they just say “Oops, my bad”, and the leader of the revolution shrugs it off.

There is a kaiju rampage in the last quarter of the movie, but don’t think back to Godzilla or King Kong marching through a cardboard city. Nope, that wouldn’t be realistic. The streets are full of dead civilians. The monster stomps on fleeing mobs. People are crushed by all the masonry falling from the office buildings. James Gunn is not timid about the slaughter, as Zack Snyder would be…and given that Snyder is a murderous monster towards his characters, that is a surprising sentence.

Otherwise, though, this is a well-crafted movie that skips along lightly, keeps the story going, has distinctive characters, and even is loaded with humor. It’s a black, cynical humor, but sure, I guess bits of it were funny.

I do wonder what the Roger Ebert of 1969 would make of 52 years of cinema progress, though. This isn’t even a horror movie. Genre has lost all meaning.

How odd that I have to get info about university policy from a TV news site rather than from our administration.

University of Minnesota professors are mulling a work stoppage if the university refuses to impose a COVID-19 vaccine mandate, according to American Association of University Professors meeting minutes and documents obtained by 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS. More than 500 faculty and students have signed on to a letter endorsing a vaccine requirement.

Hang on there. I haven’t heard even a whisper of a threat of a work stoppage from my colleagues or the university listserv. One way to look at it is that we are generally obliging sheep who will march to our doom without hesitation. A better way to look at it is that we take our responsibilities very seriously — our students are making a 4 year commitment to a structured, cumulative program of instruction, and we don’t want to compromise their advancement at all. A year and a half ago, we shut down classes on campus and scrambled to keep the students going with online instruction, at great personal cost, and we’d do it again. A work stoppage isn’t in the cards, a workload increase is.

I also expect that the prospect of students dying on campus is a more potent incentive to impose a vaccine mandate than the idea that professors might walk out. I hope. You never know with university administrators. My university doesn’t employ many adjuncts, so the idea of using adjuncts as front-line cannon fodder is off the table, anyway.

At least this part of the story is accurate.

AAUP members say they are frustrated by governing bodies of the university making decisions without consulting affected faculty and staff, who came to the following agreement:

“The consensus emerged that we should bring pressure for a vaccination mandate to bear through the media as well as through organizations like Council of Graduate Students, Minnesota Student Association, and college and university governance. Public pressure could give the administration cover to alter the present policies. Our targets and objectives are twofold: the U president, for mandating vaccinations; the U provost, for mandating versatility in instructional modality.”

Frustrated is right. The faculty as a whole have not been consulted on pandemic policy. We just get messages from on high. “No vaccine or mask mandate!” Then, “OK, mask mandate! But you’ll be teaching in a classroom!” Or, “Get tested!” But then, “we’re shutting down testing facilities! And the campus vaccination service!” We’re not asked, we’re told.

But there aren’t even rumors of work stoppages. At least, not until our classes are drained by the death or quarantining of mass numbers of students. I draw the line at asking students to die for their biology degree.

Well, this story was quite informative. Today I learned all about “poppers”, or alkyl nitrites, and it tells you everything you need to know about me that I’m so straight that I had no idea that they were popular in the gay community. I never saw ads like this, or they made no impression on me at all.

I have heard of Tom of Finland, however, I’m not totally clueless.

Strangely, the leading manufacturer of poppers in the US is another straight guy, like me.

Everett Farr, 65, is not the person you might expect when you think of nitrites and queer history. For one thing, he says he’s never tried poppers. For another, he’s straight, married, and has two adult children. He lives in a big home in a ritzy Pennsylvania county and owns a few cars, including a Corvette the same yellow as a bottle of Rush. But he’s not exactly flashy. When he met me at the train station near Philadelphia to drive me over to his plant in the last week of June, he was wearing shorts and sneakers and driving a modest, cluttered blue passenger van. The Corvette was parked inside the factory, covered in a layer of dust.

Except I don’t own a yellow Corvette or live in a ritzy place in the country. But like him, I’m not going to try alkyl nitrites — people with heart disease probably should avoid potent vasodilators. I see no problem in making them available to healthy people who want to experiment, though. I agree with this fellow:

Canada has required prescriptions for alkyl nitrites since 2013, and both the UK and Australia have come close to doing the same in recent years — moves that prompted backlash in those countries’ gay communities. One conservative British MP, Crispin Blunt (uncle to actor Emily Blunt), gave a speech in Westminster “outing” himself as a poppers user and calling a potential ban a “fantastically stupid” idea that would only fuel the black market. In Australia, the LGBTQ media dubbed it “an attack on gay and bisexual men” and a “war on bottoms.”

Zmith, the British writer, doesn’t believe the regulations governing poppers are motivated by anti-gay sentiment, but instead by “the complete madness” with which Western governments approach drugs — tolerating some dangerous substances, such as alcohol and tobacco, but cracking down on others.

Complete madness is right. You know that bans on these drugs are motivated solely by the fact that gay folk use them, not about health or safety — it’s all about Puritan hypocrisy.

I haven’t had the slightest interest in the games, and haven’t watched a single minute of them. But now I learn the Russian artistic swimming team had a spider theme, so now I’m regretting missing it.

Has the Olympic committee considered requiring all of the events to have a spider motif? How much would I have to bribe them to get them to consider it?