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Getting back to zombie basics

Slate’s Tim Cavanaugh comes out firmly in favor of a fundamentalist approach to zombies in his review of IFC’s Dead Set and AMC’s The Walking Dead..

I couldn’t agree more.

Cavanaugh argues that zombie films have shuffled away from some of their core values, including, most importantly, that “zombies need to chow down on raw human flesh.”

And the more gruesome the munchies, the better.

Quoting Cavanaugh:

“I realize that few will concur in my opinion that recent films such as Zombieland, Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, and George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead were not bloody enough. But none of these movies featured what Romero calls “the banquet,” the scene wherein flesh-eating zombies, having won control of the battlefield, eat with relish the inner organs of the living. True zombiephiles won’t be satisfied with a few fingers or a severed lower leg. We want ribcages ripped apart, strings of intestines devoured by hungry freaks, characters we have gotten to know over the course of the movie being quartered into steaming pieces by the hunched, hungry hordes.”

Bring it.

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In defense of parasites …

Caught an amazing edition of Radiolab this week while I was out driving around. It turned into one of those moments where I took the long route so I could hear the entire thing.

It was a vigorous defense of parasites. Yes, parasites. The details of how the zombie wasp, the blood fluke and the nematode operate are diabolically cool.

This is long but if you listen, go all the way till the end. That’s the part that really piqued my interest. They discuss how parasites can affect the way animals behave (one parasite infects the brains of rats to make them attracted to cat urine so the rat will approach cats, get devoured and allow its parasite to move to a cat, the only host where it can reproduce). And then they speculate about how this might affect human behavior.

Could a cat-borne parasite be responsible for schizophrenia?

Are parasites slowly manipulating us and turning us into a race of zombies, much the way wasps do to cockroaches in the YouTube clip above?

Fascinating.

Listen to it here or download it here.

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Suffering the Benz Top Posts

When I migrated from Movable Type to WordPress, I realized there’s a lot of crap on here. More than 600 posts over the past seven years. Someone beaming in from the Google Transporter would be hard pressed to figure out what’s going on here. So I’ve pulled together my favorite posts in a single category that I’ve labeled Top Bob.

Here they are.