Category: Not-politics

AoSHQ & TAP do zombie posts.

Which you all know that I can’t resist commenting on.  TAP’s Paul Waldman piece is here; Ace of Spades HQ’s Open Blog (Mætenloch) piece is here.  Let’s get this out of the way: I agree with AoSHQ that Waldman’s done his homework, but I have to take major exception with his statement:

There are no highbrow zombie movies or novels, and admitting you love them amounts to a declaration that your tastes are unrefined.

It will all depend on how you define ‘highbrow’ – but I think that The Serpent And The Rainbow would qualify, as would 28 Days Later.  Admittedly, the first is more Afro-Caribbean than the standard zombie flick, and the second breaks a lot of the conventions, so I may be on thinner ice than I like – but if Waldman can include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in his list, then I can use these two*.  As to whether zombie films default liberal or conservative: well.  They default to satirical, in my opinion; and you don’t want to end up getting too overtly partisan there.  If you do, you end up making movies like Homecoming, which I cruelly mocked at the time (without even seeing**) as an inept attempt to use dead soldiers as mouthpieces for the antiwar movement (given that the living ones loudly declined the ‘honor’). There’s a lesson there, really.

That being said: I may pick up Revenge of the Zombies at some point.

Moe Lane

*And, of course, there’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! … which pushes the definition of ‘highbrow’ almost but not quite to the breaking point. And then there’s World War Z, which was in my opinion very sophisticated.  It’s not all that easy to do an authentic-sounding oral history book.

**Still haven’t, in fact.

Honor Their Service care package charity.

Provides care packages of extras for troops serving in the Middle East. Looks legit.

Via No Sheeples Here!, via Piece of Work in Progress, via The Other McCain – and yes, I could care less about Conor Friedersdorf, or that they’re smacking him around. Why should I? It’s not like he’s writing for either Republicans or conservatives anyway.

Crossposted to RedState.

Book of the Week: “You can do anything, Daddy.”

It being Father’s Day, we shall determinedly pick something much, much lighter than The Persian Night: Iran under the Khomeinist Revolution this time around. I have received for my Father’s Day present You Can Do Anything, Daddy, which is a children’s book that features robot gorilla pirates from Mars.

I am proud of the fact that my loved ones instinctively know that this sort of book is a perfect match for me. So: Book of the Week.

Moe Lane

This video will probably be infamous in fifty years.

One used by specialized activists to illustrate the inherent and unconscious organocentric prejudices of meatba… ah, ‘Carbon-Americans’… against robbies*. They’ll be quite vocal about this, in fact:



Well, one hopes.

Moe Lane

PS: There is, in fact, a Robot Wars: Arenas of Destruction video game. That looks cleverer and cleverer, the more I contemplate it.

*My use of ‘robbie’ here will be, of course, considered specieist and organocentric, and no matter that they use the term itself.