TV Zombies

Frank Darabont, director of The Shawshank Redemption has been given the go-ahead from AMC to adapt the astounding zombie comic The Walking Dead for television. Time to get excited, and prepare your anti-zombie shelter.

Please, my anti-zombie shelter was completed years ago...

Mad scientists?

Much-needed Fun

Ok, who else saw American Ninja 2 on USA's Up All Night?

I [Heart] Rachel Maddow

This week on the Rachel Maddow Show is Geek Week, and all of the segments to date have been glorious. But this one takes the taco, her investigation of the USS Iowa Jima's embarking and landing procedures.



Here's why I love this:

Watch any news special or other documentary about Navy ships, and it's some guy spouting Navy-approved statistics and facts whilst standing in front of action or service members. Rachel actually goes on with a question (how the hell do you do this?) and finds out. My only complaint is the filler of the same Seahawk landing. But overall, you get a great understanding of just how complicated and not chaotic a seemingly uncomplicated yet chaotic-looking process really is. And from a geek who has the intelligence to understand how little she knows but the curiosity to try and find out.

In this role, Rachel Maddow performs a better service than the typical sycophantic, overenthusiastic bores spouting Pentagon-speak before staged action shots. Yeah, I'm talking about you Mack.

But those glasses Rachel...

Go Fuck Yourself You Tired Old Bastard

The House just voted to repeal DODT.

The Senate Armed Services Committee passed it. But it faces a filibuster in the Senate. And war hero turned cranky fundamentalist apologist John McCain is for just that.

"I think it's really going to be very harmful to the morale and effectiveness of our military," said Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee and a leading opponent of the repeal.

How? Positions without evidence are like omelets without eggs. But grampy thinks it; that's apparently enough.

And by the way, how many filibusters have these guys done? With all due respect to the Senate, has any Congress ever had this many?

Guaranteed Sick

The season finale of Criminal Minds will feature Tim Curry as a very disturbed serial killer.

I can't wait...

We Have To Get This Zombie Horror

City of the Living Dead

I will scour the DVD stores to acquire this purported sick-out zombie masterpiece. From what I have heard, it is up our very narrow, gross-out alley.

Much-needed Fun

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult's best song: Hit and Run Holiday.

A Late Entry

May 20 was "Draw Mohammad Day."

I was busy: I was working. But I have my late entry:

I can't draw, so here's my submission: Admiral Ackbar raping the One True Prophet Muhammad (here graciously depicted as a giant squid).

Come and get me you sick, misogynistic, superstitious, homophobic mother-hating assholes.

Why I Haven't Bought A House

I would rather rent than not buy pretty.

In the NASA town of Huntsville, one might expect some modern homes. On the contrary, every new home is as horrible as the next.

Even in architecturally progressive Chicago, this lament seems to be common:

When Kathy and Michael Caisley started looking for a new home, they visited several condos and single-family homes.

"So many were brand-new, luxurious and unaffordable," said Kathy Caisley, a city planner. "Then there were a lot of generic, cottage-style homes; we would have had to sacrifice the look we really wanted." What they really wanted was a sleek modular home like the ones they'd been obsessing over in Dwell magazine, so they did some research.

I spoke to one of the scientists at our lab: she and her husband are repulsed by the Georgian monstrosity that they live in. They are building a modern concrete-based home this year.

Maybe one of the reasons that the housing market is in the toilet is that its uninspired, talentless architects never built any modern, efficient homes for the smart people.

Sadly, I Want Him To Be My Senator

Al Franken is a great Senator. To say that should make me ill, but he is the LGBT's strongest ally in the Senate.

Said Franken: "Our nation's civil rights laws protect our children from bullying due to race, sex, religion, disability and national origin. My proposal corrects a glaring injustice and extends these protections to our gay and lesbian students who need them just as badly."

Despite the Obama Administration's push to ignore the problem, Congress will likely repeal DODT in the next two weeks through the defense appropriation bill. Only 70% of Americans are for the repeal of this bigotry, so it will be a controversial slog.

The gays are howling for the change that the President campaigned on. And by the gays, I don't mean our primary political institution, the HRC. I don't give money to that compromised organization of political apologists for a reason: there is no LGBT position that they won't compromise for a social invite.

We win when we convince enough of our straight allies (gay-adjacents) to put pressure on their families and friends. Not when we give money and credence to an organization that persists in sucking up to the (Democratic) powers-that-be and then apologizing for their lack of progress. And it looks like we will win through organized fits of indignity, as progressives join with socially-liberal conservatives to repeal disgusting, religious-based bigotry and unite to promote equal rights for all.

Your Gods Are...With All Due Respect...Pathetic

Biologists have constructed a usable genome and inserted it into a genome-less bag on potential cellular activity.

And it reproduced.

All the gods of humanity weep, for we are closer to needing them less.

Who was closer to the truth: the religious who believed that lightning was the arrows of Zeus or the philosopher who honestly acknowledged that lightning was inexplicable?

Gods explain nothing, but they excuse every kind of debase human psychology and behavior. Can we, as a species, self-actualize just long enough to stop our self-destruction?

Green Day The Musical

From American Idiot:

Album Review: American Idiot The Musical

Am I listening to a Broadway version of an album by a band that I saw in a shit-hole in Birmingham back in 1993? Really?

I'm the son of rage and love
The Jesus of Suburbia
From the bible of none of the above

Green Day's Tony-nominated American Idiot is unsettling. It is a surreal confluence of Broadway and my love of punk rock (and my love of Green Day's album by the same name). I don't know if I feel more gay or less gay listening to it. But it is brilliant nonetheless...I couldn't recommend it more.

Green Day always was very pro-gay.

Oh Dear...

To all of those to whom I have introduced Fringe:

Define mad and I'll give you the worlds thus defined.

YOU ARE FUCKING WELCOME!!!

Plan Jesus From Outer Biblevania

I can't wait to see this: Audience of One

Thanks to EP. Watching that trailer reminded me of this:

That's Stephen Baldwin after he (via a publicist) asked good Christian folk to send money to "restore" him. While it's on Funny or Die, it was originally a serious Christian proposal.

Restore Stephen Baldwin - watch more funny videos

How transparent does nonsense have to be? Or is it all a show? Or a scam? Or an Andy Kaufman-inspired joke? How could anyone judge? Except to say: it's funny and not true.

I admit that my disgust of the credulous has no credulous limits. But by the definition of credulity, how does one distinguish tragic irony from the bottomless credulity of the religious?

Logo's Second Best Show

The Big Gay Sketch Show:

Watch Gay Video & Lesbian Movies

"You F*ng Poo-face"

I [heart] Tim Minchin. He's the Australian They Might Be Giants.

See, women do need their gays

Part deux

I [Heart] The 14th Amendment

Never do I want my loved ones or anybody else (including me) stripped of the guarantees of the US constitution based on the accusation of treason, terrorism, or anything else. I would just as well strip myself of them by walking down the street.

I have my rights. Any naturalized citizen has the same. Any potential mass murderer from another country has the same. The US constitution clearly distinguishes between "citizen" and "person," and here's the 14th:

nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Our predecessors didn't fight Triple George, the Confederacy, and Nazi Germany so to coward at extremists. The ideals of an independent judiciary and of a democratic republic based on individual rights should not be so capriciously discarded just because someone could bomb a popular New York intersection.

If we are better than them, let's be better than them.

Well, There Has Got To Be A Hugo In There Somewhere

I didn't sign on for this, but I love Walter too much to sign out.

While I insisted that a previous Fringe episode should get a Hugo nomination, I think one or two since might be better candidates.

As my dad said, "Thursday nights are Fringe nights; I don't go anywhere."

As for tonight: holy fucking shit-on-my-mother's cuntballs! I had predicted the "secretary" part, but I didn't predict the rapid plot spiral. And that unpredictability, along with the serious and conflicting moral dilemmas, encompasses all that anyone could want from a science fiction series.

And Martha Plimpton is an unforgivably underrated actress. I know she does a lot of New York plays and character actor bits, but someone give her a regular TV part for fuck's sake.

Hey, All Straight Conservative Founders Of Anti-gay Christian Groups Do That

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"I Get Freaked Out By Churches"

"But I quite like the songs..."

"I Love Jesus"

I know you all loved the "Fuck The Mother Fucker" I posted by Tim Minchin. I had never heard of him until I watched that video on Pharyngula. And like I posted, it's like someone filmed the dialogue in my head.

Well, I bought Tim Minchin's last album on iTunes. And I must insist that all reading this go to iTunes and buy, "I Love Jesus." Buy it. Seriously, buy it. It deserves our money.

He's one of our people, and I can't recommend his work enough.