I‘m a bit of a zombie geek. In fact, one of the first real stories I wrote was for English class in  middle school, called Land of the Zombies. I wrote a little bit about it in Just A Geek:

"You were always such a wonderful writer, Wil." She said, wagging her finger at me. "We all thought that you’d end up as a screenwriter or novelist."

Something started to slowly turn in the back of my mind.

"Yeah, I always enjoyed it."

"Remember your Land of the Zombies story? All the students loved that."

I smiled and nodded. As a creative writing assignment around Halloween in 1985, all the seventh graders wrote horror stories. Inspired by "Night of the Living Dead," D&D, and a family trip to San Francisco, I wrote a story about a man and his wife, fleeing from the terror of zombies who had escaped an army research base, and were slowly taking over the country. They discover that water can force the zombie-causing chemicals out of the living dead, so they end up on Alcatraz island, which I had decided was the only safe place left in America. I remember the story ended with something like, "Alcatraz was once a federal prison for killers. Now it’s the prison that’s saving our lives. We even sleep in the Birdman’s old cell.

"As the sun set over the Golden Gate Bridge, I looked out onto America: once, the land of the free. Now, the land of the zombies."

It’s not Hemmingway, but it’s pretty good for a 12 year old. It was voted scariest and goriest story by the seventh and  eighth graders, and I proudly photocopied it, and sent it to all my relatives. They were all horrified and told my parents that I should get professional help.

If I can ever find that story, which I think is somewhere in my mother’s Infinite Bag of Childhood Relics, I’ll reprint it. Better yet, I’ll scan it so you can read it in all its Applewriter glory, complete with judicious use of bolding, outlining, and shadowing. Mmmm yeah. It’s good stuff.

As I grew older, so did my fascination with zombies. When I was a teenager, I was a total geek for Dawn of the Dead (not so much, Day of the Dead, though)  and rented it regularly on VHS tape from a video rental store (ask your parents, kids.) While I appreciated the humor of Return of the Living Dead, I watched that one less frequently (and then mostly for the boobies) because it just didn’t please the purist in me. Because, you know, one is capable of being a zombie purist, especially when one is a huge fucking nerd.

For example, Darin and I saw the remake of Dawn of the Dead when it was in theatres, and we enjoyed it, but I was left a little wanting. There were plenty of scares, and the gore factor was nicely balanced by the suspense factor, but I like my zombies to be slow moving menaces, rather than lightening fast maniacs. It’s what separates the Zombies from the Tasmanian Devils. Again, me=zombie purist.

I still haven’t seen 28 Days Later, or Land of the Dead (the former because I hear it’s not exactly zombies, and they are of the Tasmanian Devil variety, anyway, and the latter just because I haven’t had time — hey, even zombie purists have work to do, you know) but Anne and I finally got around to watching Shaun of the Dead last night.

Holy shit. What a fucking brilliant movie! I kept hearing about how great it was, but I was reluctant to believe all the hype. (Purist, remember? Okay! Fine! Not Purist! Snob! There! I admitted it! Are you happy now? I AM A ZOMBIE SNOB AND I DON’T CARE WHO KNOWS IT!!!!11) Not only is it a brilliant zombie movie, it’s a wonderful story about friendship, love, the importance of a good pint, and how there is greatness in just about everyone, even if it takes a zombie invasion to bring it out. I gave it five severed heads and nine out of nine chainsaws, for those of you who like to score this sort of thing.

And though it goes without saying, I’m going to say it anyway: if you have even the tiniest bit of affection for the living dead, you will positively love Twilight Creations’ Zombies!!!

Zombies!!! puts you in the middle of the action as you try to escape
the ever advancing zombie horde. Players must use a combination of wits
and brawn to be the first to the heliport and certain escape. The only
problem is, the zombies are everywhere, they appear to be very hungry
and your opponents would really prefer if you didn’t escape.

The basic set puts you in Small Town USA, and they’ve got several expansions, which add military bases (complete with glow in the dark zombies! for reals!) shopping malls, and even a cabin which is susipciously similar to Evil Dead 2. It’s more fun than eating a skullfull of brains, dontchaknow.

Last Friday’s WWdN poker tourney at PokerStars was an epic success . . . I even went out bluffing with the hammer!

96 people showed up to play, and as far as I can tell everyone had a great time, especially my CardSquad cohorts Derek and Joanne, who both made the final table, which included some of the greatest poker bloggers on the Internets.

Joanne eventually ran over everyone to get heads up with whoisspain, before she won the tourney. Congratulations, Joanne! The general consensus in pokerblogistan is that Joanne knows what the hell she is doing, and April and Iggy  encouraged her to blog about it, so we can steal all her great ideas and kick her out of the band. Luckily for us, Joanne wrote a fantastic series of posts at CardSquad discussing her tournament strategy, and how she arrived at it. The boobies is here, and it’s up to part six as I write this today. I highly recommend it for anyone who is thinking about playing in any tournaments, including our weekly WWdN affairs.

Speaking of! I’ve made a couple of changes to the tourney this week: the starting time is a bit later, and the tourney is named in honor of Decker711 who busted me out when my hammer bluff ran into his AK. (I had outs until he flopped two pair. Yeah.) I think that I’ll use that criteria to name the tourneys, at least for the near future, unless someone can come up with something better (like giving me piles of cash for the naming rights, for instance)

Here are all the details. Feel free to pass them around to your friends and neighbors!

What: WWdN: Decker711 Invitational
Where: PokerStars.
When: Friday, October 21st. 7:00 PM EST
Password: monkey
Tournament number: 13788952
Buy-in: $10+1

I hope that the later starting time and longer notice can accomodate a few more players than last week. Remember that this is a semi-private affair, open to anyone who knows the password is "monkey."

Via Pre$$titutes:

"The right-wing talk-merchants who, until Air American Radio came along
had the AM dial pretty much to themselves, complain constantly that the
mainstream media has a left-wing, anti-Bush bias. So too the cable news
chatterers. Much of the public believes this myth because it is
repeated so often – not, to be sure, on the strength of the evidence
which clearly proves otherwise.

"On CNN’s "Crossfire, Paul Begala reported the following results of a Nexis-Lexis Search:

"There
were exactly 704 stories in the [2000] campaign about this flap of Gore
inventing the Internet. There were only 13 stories about Bush failing
to show up for his National Guard duty for a year. There were well over
1,000 stories – Nexus stopped at 1,000 – about Gore and the Buddhist
temple. Only 12 about Bush being accused of insider trading at Harken
Energy. There were 347 about Al Gore wearing earth tones, but only 10
about the fact that Dick Cheney did business with Iran and Iraq and
Libya."

"The advantage of the myth of the liberal media to Bush and the
Republicans is enormous. To those who believe it, if a story favorable
to Bush and the GOP appears, the response is "it must be true, since
even the liberal media reports it." And critical stories? "Don’t
believe it, it’s just the liberal media dissing our President again."

The "Liberal Media" myth is a laughable farce, but it’s a tribute to the tenacity of the Right Wing Noise Machine that it’s become accepted fact by so many otherwise intelligent people.

Link to full post, at spun and spinning.

The earthquake in Pakistan was really hard for me to wrap my head around. I mean, I’ve lived with earthquakes my entire life, and I’ve lived through some really huge and terrifying ones, but nothing that even begins to approach the magnitude (pardon the pun) of the Pakistan quake earlier this month. Coming on the heels of Katrina and Rita, I have to admit that I was suffering from a major case of tragedy overload, and I didn’t really know what to say or do about it.

Just now, I read a story at Yahoo! News about natural disasters that brought the catastrophic enormity of the disaster into sharp, horrifying focus.

Of the estimated 61,000 people who have died this year due to natural
disasters, about 50,000 (according to today’s estimate) were victims of
the 7.6 earthquake that struck Pakistan Oct. 7. In 2004, by contrast, more than 60 percent of the total natural disaster deaths were caused by the tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

The whole story talks about how it’s not Mother Nature who is changing, as much as we who scurry about the planet are.
"Earth might seem
like a more active and dangerous place than ever, given the constant
media reports of multiple natural disasters recently. But a broader
view reveals that it’s not Mother Nature who’s changed, but we humans." It goes on to say "Drawn by undeveloped land and fertile soil, people are flocking to disaster-prone regions.

This creates a situation in which ordinary events like earthquakes
and hurricanes become increasingly elevated to the level of natural
disasters that reap heavy losses in human life and property."

Environmentalists have been succesfully demonized by the Right Wing Noise Machine, and some of the loonies out there don’t exactly help the cause, but we’ve only got one planet to live on right now, and it’s clear that we who scurry about on her surface are having an impact on how well she handles us. It’s something to think about, at least.

This diary at DailyKos has a fantastic list of organizations who can provide relief to the people in Pakistan who desperately need it right now. If you can help out, please do.