Zombie Chia

Our Christmas zombie chia lady started to get sort of gross for real.  She was always kind of gross, particularly as we didn't get the hair on the top of her head to sprout, only the hair on the sides.  And then it started to grow forward because that's where the heat from the fireplace rose up.  But eventually the sprouts started drooping into the gel-like water and rotting.  Zombie sprouts on a zombie head.  Nasty.

She was surprisingly difficult to clean.  Even now I think there are some seeds that won't come off.  Life is tenacious.  Undead life even more so.

A bit disjointed of purpose....

 I recently read John Connolly's The Creeps and Frank Swain's How to Make a Zombie.  Despite one being fiction, the other nonfiction, my complaint about both is the same.  Both seemed to lack a certain direction.  I liked Connolly's first book in the series, The Gates.  But this one seemed to wander all over the place without much reason.  While you can't really expect a lot of reason in a book that mixes particle physics and demons, I was still hoping for a tighter narrative.  There was still some of the Pratchett-like humor, it was just that the humor fell short of what I'd expect from any of the Discworld books, so I'm left wondering why I wasn't just reading those instead.  And there's no reason I'm not as I've reserved a few for the future rather than reading them so I'm not out of Pratchett.  After reading The Creeps I went right out to the Dakota library site and reserved three Discworld novels and The Long War.  So while I don't really have any glaring complaints about The Creeps, it left me feeling like I need to cleanse my palate with a better wine.

How to Make a Zombie had a more straightforward purpose.  To explain all the explorations of reanimation and mind control from a historical and scientific perspective.  But there's enough material there that it gets pretty loose, covering zombies, secret agents and hallucinogenic studies, parasites, Prussian Blue (reminded me of Sacre' Bleu which my wife is currently reading), resurrection/reanimation, organ harvesting, the nature of death, and on and on....  While Connolly reminded me of not-quite-up-to-quality Pratchett, Swain reminded me of a not quite focused-enough and up-to-quality The Red Queen by Ridley.  So that's my review.  If you're going to read The Creeps, read Terry Pratchett's Discworld instead.  If you're going to read How to Make a Zombie, read Ridley's The Red Queen instead.

Night of the Living Dead

This afternoon we, as a family, went to a matinee of Night of the Living Dead, the play, at the Mounds Theatre in St. Paul.

Acting at the Mounds is never top shelf.  I think they pull a lot of actors from the local community, so it can be hit or miss.  But they definitely try hard and they put some amusing ideas on stage and their productions are always fun. We saw Mort there, based on the Terry Pratchett novel.  And they've done Guards, Guards! in the past as well.

Night of the Living Dead started out with a black and white remake of the car scene in the movie, which ended by Barbara fleeing to the Mounds Theatre where a number of other people were also holing up.  At that point it switched to the actors and never switched back to film again except to show an exploding pickup and some zombie cleanup at the end to the tune of Cash's The Man Comes Around, an homage to Dawn of the Dead.

During intermission, the zombies all come out to wander around and act like zombies, eating hands, pondering an electric saw, and attempting to use a shotgun.  One in a poncho sat down next to Eryn seriously freaking her out.  She wasn't having it.  And the idea of playing The Man Comes Around on her guitar while dressed as a zombie is apparently right out the door.

This picture turned out really well for accidentally leaving on the flash and getting it blurry.  She looks like a zombie.  We sat on the corner, so most of them walked past us at one point.  The little girl zombie came over to sniff Eryn's Milk Duds.

You can see a zombie lurking like a stage hand near the intermission sign.  As with many zombie-related shows, the humans are overrun in the end, both from the outside and from the inside, where a child bitten by a zombie turns into the undead and dispatches her parents and forces the main character into the conflict of shooting a child.  By the end, only the main character is left, holed up in an upstairs loft.  When the militia comes to eliminate the zombies, he throws open the doors blocking the loft, exultant because he's saved, and is promptly shot dead by the militia.  So the Asian guy lived the longest out of anyone, but still didn't make it through the show.

Elm Creek

I went geocaching after vacation up by Kyle's house.  I needed to pick up Luna (she didn't eat one of his combs this time) and I had the day to myself, so I spent it hiking around in the woods.  Elm Creek wasn't nearly as rich a geocaching environment as the Woodville Trail.  But at least no dogs tried to eat my ankle.

It was chilly out.  Which was good.  Running away from this next full of wasps might have been more difficult during high summer.  Toward the end of the day, I looked for a cache at a place called "lake view" or something similar.  After stomping around a big tree for a long time I thought, "maybe it's a diversion, and the cache is really at that nearby bird blind."  I poked around the bird blind, and then went to reach behind the sign in the blind that listed the birds you might see.  At the last second, I hesitated, withdrew my fingers, and took a peek.  Behind the sign was another wasp nest and half a dozen groggy wasps.  I took it as a sign that caching was done for the day.

This nest was NOT a cache.


But this bird is a cache.  You have to fish a small rolled up log out of his cloaca.


Out at the moose cache, which I almost skipped because it was almost a mile from the previous cache, there was a particularly interesting choice of loot.  I'm glad I didn't take the Casey Scott album because a.) it's a little boring if you look it up on YouTube, and b.) the First 4th of July has to do with printing presses, so it gives me some insight into Kyle's worklife.  I'm much more in tune with the day-to-day struggles of a friend.


I know they're just child zombies, and it's not their fault, and I should feel bad for them.  But they're zombies in the end and they'd eat my brain given half a chance, so I had to call in the troops.  A lady on a horse asked me if I'd found a cache.  I bet seeing a guy playing with toy soldiers and zombies on top of a thermos top isn't something you see every day while riding your horse in the woods.  I think Lewis Black once made a joke to that effect.


It doesn't look nearly as sinister as it was.  I followed trails in a circle for what seemed like forever.


Back at Kyle's house.  I really enjoy this picture because it looks like some sort of official Ford advertisement for a Fiesta.  It's just his front yard.


Doesn't his yard look beautiful?  You can really appreciate it if you don't have to do any of the raking.

Zombie, Ohio and Mieville's Kraken

I took Scott Kenemore's book (yes, book, not eBook) Zombie, Ohio, along on the Bike the Border ride Ming and I went on last weekend around Minot, ND.  Ming grabbed it to read as I was also reading China Mieville's Kraken and he hadn't brought anything.  Which turned out to be a wise decision as nowhere within 30 miles of Minot, ND, was there a book to be purchased.  Most of the towns we were in a.) didn't have a bookstore, b.) didn't have a gas station that had books, unless they were Christian, and c.) didn't have a gas station that had a magazine.  Seriously, several Cenex's and not a magazine between them.  Everyone in North Dakota obviously uses an eReader and purchases their books in digital format or has them delivered directly to the front door via Amazon.com.  I strongly recommend Zombie, Ohio.  A very solid book in the Zombie genre.  At times it's like The Road.  At other times it's like The Postman.  And in places it's sort of a mystery novel and love story.  Without ruining it, the plot revolves around a zombie who finds that he's not your average dumb, slow zombie, but a one in a million/billion smart zombie who can talk, reason, plan, and emote.  You can do the math from there.  What does he do about his penchant for eating brains?  Is he a good zombie, a bad zombie, or both?  Definitely a clever twist.

Which is more than I could say about Kraken.  I really liked Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and even Iron Council, which was a bit more ponderous than the other two.  King Rat, which was sort of same genre of urban magic, although sans giant squid, was thoroughly enjoyable, particularly if you'd read any Gaiman or Emma Bull (you can read my lengthy post about King Rat and War for the Oaks here).  Kraken was not. It sort of hopped all over the place.  And at times, Mieville came back to the thread of the story with references to things that had happened that he hadn't covered in text.  Which was damn strange given Kraken was over 500 pages.  He could have written the same story, with just as much depth, in 200-300 pages.  The last 40 or so had the most interesting aspects of the story and I shouldn't have had to breathe deep and utter, "Finally."  I'll channel one of the folks on Amazon who sums it up well, although I'd push the % down to about 30%, "The characters are flat. 75% of the way through the novel I realized I really did not care what happened to these characters and I only finished to see how the mystery was resolved."

Big Rat

Hey...I have over 1000 posts. Wonder when that happened? I'd consider it a lot, but I think She Says did six in one day not so long ago.

I saw a big rat in the company parking lot today when I was leaving to take Eryn to the doctor. I mean the thing looked almost like a bloated football and it was just wandering toward the back door through the parking lot, teetering along until it could get under a car. I pointed it out to another guy, and my uncle-in-law (who was strangely leaving the building at the same time I was), and the other guy questioned whether it was a rat or some other beastie, like a muskrat, and eventually decided I was right.

After reading that book on parasites, I can't help but think maybe it wasn't fat from digging in the company dumpster, but rathre because it was full of parasites that were bloating it up and affecting its brain, tricking it into walking very slowly and erratically across a dangerous parking lot on the off chance that if said, bloated, juicy rat were squished into lot kill, many other animals would eat the remains and carry the parasite on to its next host and stage of development. That thought kept me very far away from it. I don't want to be the vector for what basically looks like the beginning of some undead zombie disease movie (undead zombie parasite in this case).