Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated is out now on DVD. The film, a collaborative effort by 150 artists, completely remakes George Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead using a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of artistic styles, from animation to puppets, and features as a bonus an hour-long zombie discussion panel moderated by me and including John Joseph Adams, zombie authors Jonathan Maberry and Kim Paffenroth, and producers Peter Gutierrez and Rob Hauschild.

Robert Kirkman’s graphic novel series The Walking Dead is a must-read, a wise and sensitive portrayal of the psychological toll that surviving a zombie apocalypse would exert — week after week, month after month, year after year. A trailer for the upcoming TV series has just been released. Also, check out Kirkman’s first ever prose fiction publication, “Alone, Together,” in The Living Dead 2.

Just came across the Toy Yoda story on Snopes.com. Man, that’s cold:

In 2001, 26-year-old Jodee Berry had bested the other servers at her restaurant in a competition to see who could sell the most beer in a month to that eatery’s customers, with the winner to receive a new “Toyota.” When the day came for her to be presented with her prize, Berry was led blindfolded to the restaurant’s parking lot to receive her award, but when the blindfold came off she was devastated to learn that the promised jackpot was not a Toyota automobile but rather a “toy Yoda,” a Star Wars doll. She quit her job and sued Gulf Coast Wings, Inc., the corporate owner of the restaurant, alleging breach of contract and fraudulent misrepresentation. In 2002 the suit was settled for an undisclosed amount of money, which one of the attorneys involved in the case said would enable her to go to the local car dealership and “pick out whatever type of Toyota she wants.”

I just noticed that the biographical documentary Harlan Ellison: Dreams with Sharp Teeth (which I caught the premiere of back in 2007) is now an instant download on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Just Say No was an action thriller movie my friends and I made in middle school. It turned into an never-ending project, and ultimately convinced me that I was happier working on prose fiction, where you don’t have to worry about crap like actors forgetting their lines, actors constantly glancing at the cameraman, actors being unavailable because their parents have taken them to Cape Cod for the weekend, and, most annoying of all, the family who owns the camera moving repeatedly in the course of making the movie.

If anyone cares, here’s the climactic finale, in which a pair of psychopathic drug dealers perform a home invasion and murder the only witness to their crimes, only to get caught up in a violent shootout with police.

Okay, so I’d never even heard of this movie Kick-Ass, but I just rented it on a whim and it was pretty epic. It’s got McLovin from Superbad and Nicolas Cage in his first role of the millennium that didn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out. Definitely not for anyone who dislikes graphic violence though.

Richard Dawkins questions the wisdom of faith schools in his new TV program Faith School Menace? There’s a constant effort in this country to force taxpayers to subsidize private religious education under the guise of “charter schools,” so it’s worth examining the disastrous effects this sort of thing has had in the UK. Faith schools in the UK have about 90% of their operating budgets paid for by taxpayers, but are free to discriminate on the basis of religion when it comes to admissions and hiring, and apparently have no real standards when it comes to teaching subjects like evolution and sex ed. Many parents are forced to switch churches, or fake religious beliefs altogether, in order to get their kids into a local school. In one appalling sequence, Dawkins discovers that every student at a Muslim faith school rejects evolution, and that the “science teacher” at the school is unable to explain how a scientist would answer the question, “If humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” — a question I’ve always regarded as the absolute gold standard of total stupidity. Dawkins also examines the role that faith schools have played in making the troubles in Northern Ireland into an endless, generations-long tragedy, because they ensure that children from Catholic and Protestant communities have no meaningful contact with each other. Much is made by proponents of faith schools of the right of parents to educate their children however they please, but Dawkins argues that children have rights too, such as the right to a balanced, broad-based education that gives them a fair chance to decide for themselves what religious beliefs, if any, they will hold.

Here are three interesting podcast interviews I’ve listened to lately:

KCRW interviews Christopher Nolan about Inception. Particularly interesting to me were his thoughts about using film techniques such as slow-motion as storytelling tools rather than mere stylistic gimmicks.

The Agony Column interviews Tim Powers. This will be familiar ground for most Tim Powers fans, but if you’ve never heard Tim discuss his fascinatingly quirky approach to writing a fantasy novel, this interview covers the topic pretty well.

Point of Inquiry interviews Alexander Zaitchek about Glenn Beck. Beck’s paranoid rants may be harebrained, but Beck is no fool, according to Zaitchek, who just wrote a book on him. Rather, Beck is cunning and sophisticated, a master at manipulating the media into giving him exactly what he wants — attention. Zaitchek also touches on Beck’s dark history, such as once getting drunk and phoning the wife of one of his radio rivals to mock her for her recent miscarriage.

So apparently The Living Dead 2 has been all printed up and will be appearing soon on store shelves. And check out who supplied the front cover blurb:

In response to my retrospective on Richard Garriott’s Ultima series, Joe Garrity of the Origin Museum writes:

Excellent article, David. Your summary was spot-on, and your opinions seconded. I too would love to see a new Ultima, but it might not be in the cards. There is always hope, however. Ultima’s current IP holder is EA (Garriott only holds copyright on the names Lord British and Shamino). EA is responsible for UO of course, and they’ve just started Lord of Ultima as an RTS through Facebook, which is doing well. Exercising this use of their IP may be a way of “testing the waters” for the popularity of a new Ultima game. I think the days of single-player are over, but I’d give anything to wander the streets of Britannia again, and adventure with comrades that have been my trusted allies since we were 10 pixels high! :)

Hi Joe. Thanks for posting a comment. Yeah, that’s cool that EA is testing the waters with an Ultima RTS, though I’ve never been a big RTS fan myself. Last night I was actually just talking with some friends about Ultima, and I was commenting that one thing that made Ultima more fun than other RPGs — particularly multiplayer ones — is that you play the entire game as the most important person in the world, and everyone you meet just falls over themselves praising you and expressing amazement that they’re actually getting a chance to meet you. It may not really be practicing the Britannian virtue of humility to enjoy that so much, but it is fun.

Looks like I got quoted in this sermon: “Sunday of the Living Dead,” by Cynthia Landrum, Minister of the Universalist Unitarian Church of East Liberty in Clarklake, Michigan. She notes that, “There have been several requests that I post a copy of this week’s sermon, a sermon subject purchased at this year’s auction: Zombies.”

In reponse to my post on colloidal silver turning skin blue, John Willy writes:

I am taking colloidal silver for sinus congestion, etc., and it works great. There are no harmful side effects at all. It is completely natural. To turn blue, my doctor states that you would need to take 2 bottles of silver a day for 70+ years. I am taking a couple teaspoons a day for a few months.

Hi John. To say that something is “completely natural” doesn’t indicate anything about its safety. Many, many poisons, from arsenic to deadly nightshade, are completely natural. There are countless reports online from people who are much younger than seventy who have suffered severe adverse health effects (turning blue is just one extreme example) from taking colloidal silver. Most chronic conditions fluctuate over time, so it’s very difficult to say with any certainty whether one person’s improvement is due to a particular treatment or not. That’s why it’s necessary to do statistically significant studies involving thousands of subjects to establish whether a treatment actually works or not. I strongly encourage you to do more research on colloidal silver, as I think the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence suggests that it’s not an effective treatment.