Walking

High-fives all around, humanity. You’re familiar, of course, with the terrible story of James Robertson, the Detroit man who walks over twenty miles a day to work at a job that pays $10.55 an hour. A crowdfunding effort has raised nearly $300,000 – that’s Robertson’s take-home pay for a decade, by the way –  to help him get to work.  And now he has a  “team of financial advisors" to help him out. Problem solved!  And here you crazy lefties thought that the problem was the economy we've chosen to have, and the cities we've chosen to design. Ha! Ha! 

In other news, a crowd-sourcing effort is underway to save a drowning polar bear whose ice flow has melted due to climate change. We'll alert you when the polar bear is saved and that problem is solved, too.

Surrender

“And the day after Christmas, the whole family gathered into the SUV and drove to the big box plaza, which was FAR, FAR away from the core of the city where nasty hipsters and EVEN people needing social assistance lived. Then they returned all the crap they didn’t want and snapped up things they did at bargain prices!  And ran their credit card balances UP and UP and UP! The end.”  

For immediate release:

The War on Christmas, one of the least effective military campaigns in the history of the world, has been lost. Anti-Christmas forces, having been reduced to a handful of deviants muttering something about the winter solstice and Jesus not having been born on the 25th of December, surrendered unconditionally, their efforts having been proven futile for the 50th year in a row. 

Once again this year, the Christmas season returned on November 1st (some localities waited until November 12th out of respect for those who gave their lives in the early battles to save Christmas) and stayed for its customary seven weeks. During this period, multicoloured lights appeared on trees and rooftops everywhere, alongside the visage of the Great Leader – who, you will recall, has children under perpetual surveillance to ensure their compliance with behavioural norms – and variations on the same dozen songs played incessantly from speakers in every public place in the Western hemisphere. A minority even went to “church”, but most, as is the custom of the past half-century, went to shopping malls and spent themselves into oblivion, despite the cluck-clucking from a handful of Christian conservatives, who represent the last bastion of anti-capitalist thought in our society. Meanwhile, televisions bombarded revelers with hours of familiar but repetitious entertainment, including Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer, The Charlie Brown Christmas, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and of course the annual mawkish, maudlin, mediocre and incomprehensible Dr. Who Christmas Special. As usual, the North American Aerospace Defense Command issued reports of the Dear Leader’s progress across the Northern Hemisphere on Christmas Eve, part of an ongoing disinformation campaign. On the day itself, "families" (groups of people associated on a biological basis but barely known to one another) gathered for stressful meals where they outwardly cooed over how very good everything tasted, but inwardly reflected that pretty much everything was overcooked and cold by the time everybody sat down to eat.
 
In other news, on a local street corner, one of the few surviving anti-Christmas cranks was heard to say,  “Political correctness has run amok. You used to be able to say 'Happy Holidays' and 'Seasons Greetings' to people without anybody getting offended. Now, if you don’t go around saying “Merry Christmas” they jump all over you." He has been evacuated to a nearby Toys ‘r’ Us where he will be required to listen to “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime” over and over until he is fit to rejoin society. 

-30-

Horror

Bad news. For some reason, the dead have risen. All of them. They are now shambling about in search of human flesh and their bite turns their victims into more zombies. They can only be killed by destroying their brain. Brains do their thing because they’re part of a nervous system and fed by a circulatory system, but massive bodily trauma doesn’t stop zombies. Pretty much any poke to the noggin will, though. Shoot ‘em, stab ‘em, bash ‘em in the head, they go down like bowling pins. The trouble is that there’s too many of them. So, the few survivors of this zombie plague are now huddled together in boarded up buildings, fighting to survive as their food and supplies run low and as internal dissent rises – there’s always one asshole ready to screw things up, isn’t there?

This was the premise of a grim, grimy, grisly and really rather seedy 1968 horror film called Night of the Living Dead, and one think that that would be it, really. What else is there to say? The sequel, where the zombies shamble amok in a shopping mall, nearly indistinguishable from Christmas shoppers, provokes, I will admit, a slight crack at the corner of one’s mouth, but this supposed “social commentary” is just a veneer to conceal the real plot of the film, which is running from zombies. And the exact premise has been retold in literally dozens of films now, including quite pointless remakes of both Night of the Living Dead and its sequel, and in a small avalanche books (including at least one best-seller, World War Z, by Max Brooks), and, of course, in video games, where zombies have become the necrotic analogue to Space Invaders. You keep shooting them. They keep coming. Repeat.

Recently some students commended to my attention a new TV series entitled The Walking Dead. Reading up on it a bit I heard it hailed as as being the very zenith of the zombie drama. This is not the highest accolade, of course, but I did take note of the fact that the show is airing on AMC, the network that brought us two masterpieces of modern television: Mad Men, about 1950s-era advertising agents on the cusp of becoming dinosaurs amidst the social turmoil of the 1960s; and Breaking Bad, about a terminally ill chemistry teacher who becomes a drug dealer in order to provide for his family after he’s gone. I watched some of it and thought that, as zombie television shows go, it was eminently satisfactory, and will be loved by people who love that sort of thing. The producers might want to be careful how they promote their program, though.

The alleged “source material” — as if it needs any — for The Walking Dead is an utterly depraved “graphic novel” (that’s a comic book with sex and swearing) of the same name. I dipped my toe long enough into those waters to wish I hadn’t. A few selective readings revealed, among the usual zombie mayhem, decapitated children, vividly portrayed gang-rapes, and a woman shot through the chest with a shotgun while clutching her baby. They die in a spray of blood and body bits. If you meet people who like this sort of thing, I recommend that you take a step in the opposite direction. The comic's creators offer up the defense that this sort of thing goes on in reality anyway. Okay, granted. The horror genre is about the fear of death. But this isn’t about fearing death - it’s about making pornography out of it.

Zombies seem to be the next big thing in horror, perhaps because nearly all of the vampires have forsaken evil in favour of bedding teenage girls instead. You need only visit the “teen” section of the bookstore to see what I mean. Publishers have apparently given up on trying to get boys to read at all (well, somebody has to vote for the Tea Party) while for girls the teenage girl-meets-vampire-classmate genre has resulted in an avalanche of titles on the bookshelves. I’ve complained elsewhere that I invented this genre in 1986 and won’t renew this complaint here.

Anyway, in any other context, the efforts of a very elderly man to have sex with borderline or flat-out underage females would be called statutory rape or worse. (Edward is 98, Bella is 17; Angel is 240, Buffy is 16; Bill is 140, Sooki is, about 20, I guess.) Now add to it the fact that he is not merely elderly but, according to the genre’s own lore, deceased, and moreover almost invariably trembles on the brink of ripping her apart and eating her, and we have something else entirely. Let’s call it sadocanabalistic necro-adolescent-philia shall we? Something for the DSM V, as apparently millions of teenage girls have it.

Is there nothing new under the horror-genre sun? I am tired of vampires, zombies, witches, werewolves, ghosts, science-experiment run-amok monsters, and, above all, the slasher film, where people, usually teenagers, get butchered by a mask-wearing psycho because they act as if the live in a world where they don't have slasher movies. So I admit that I am curious about this, Rubber. It's a movie about a tire that comes to life and starts killing people. And I hereby claim copyright to the genre of teenagers falling in love with tires that come to life and start killing people.