Why we blog

I have been wondering, why do I post?

I don't have a cool reason like Flintheart, who posts so that his children have a record of their time growing up. I don't have a blog to satisify an army of minions ready to be unleashed upon the net to do my bidding like Birmo and his cheeseburgers, nor am I an awesome weaver of tales like lovely Ms Jenniki or her mischievous brother Loki.

So why should I blog?

It's a feeling of responsibility, that in return for all that I get from reading everyones thoughts, considered opinions, structured arguments, rants, expositions and tales I need to contribute something as well. Which in my case is alerting all the to the dangers of the zombieapocalypse. Here is a quick round up.

It's official. Galaxy 15 is a Zombiesat.
What chance do we have, not only do undead walk, but now they have their own satellite and I read it that could block the signal from another communication satellite for a two week period in late May, perhaps interrupting the final episode of Lost. I hope Jenniki's zombie plan included that contingency.

Apparel
I think I have found my next T-shirt

FEED
Thanks to a recommendation from the ever brilliant Orin I am keenly awaiting a great Zombie novel just released called FEED. When I read that the author Mira Grant is a serious virology nut whose dinner conversations include 'guess what I learned about MRSA today' and she sleeps with machete under her pillow, you know just in case -I am seriously excited about this novel.

Not Happy
I am less impressed to discover the novel Brains: A zombie Memoir by Robert Becker has a protagonist who is a zombie who can think. As if that wasn't band enough he went and named him Barnes. Colour me less than impressed. (Zombie Island by David Wellington did the zombie who thinks first and better)

Dead Winter
A excellent webcomic that Flinthart found and passed on to me. It's a character driven piece where you are really interested in the characters, not just waiting to see how they stuff up and die. FH says it's a good story even without zombies, ZED is just the icing on the cake. For me ZED is the icing, the sponge, the jam layer and the plate.

and finally

I worked out why I like Star Gate Universe SGU
There has been much posting over at Cheeseburger and the learned Mr Boylan's blog about the new stargate series. I was a fan as soon as I heard there were space lesbians. And as an aside isn't everything good automatically made better when space is added to it. For example Lesbians - already awesome, make it SPACE LESBIANS and is like awesome raised to the ninth power.


So that aside and really Mr Boylan makes a beautifully and well crafted argument for the role of SGU in the development of science fiction. For me it was when I had the epiphany that SGU is a post- apocalyptic drama.

The sort of drama I love.

The characters find themselves thrown together on a ship on the other side of the universe, the ship is old and resources air, water and food are limited. They have to work together to survive with little or no chance of ever seeing the world they knew again. The band are the usual ill matched combination of skills, experience and temperament that the PA stories make the nuts and bolts of the narrative and instead of facing zombies or mutants they have blue skinned aliens.

Did I mention there were space lesbians.

A great night thanks bob

A great night was had on the weekend, GuruBob was bacheloring so the call went out and Myself, the_weapon and gentleman John rallied around for a couple of hours of curry and boardgaming.

Beginning with the old staple - ZOMBIES

GuruBob looked like he was going to stroll off to the helipad until he suffered a brain freeze and wandered through a police station full of zombies. It was gentleman Johnathon in a stylish evening suit as he waved farewell to us out from the rapidly fleeing chopper as we fell under a wave of undead.

Then onto Arkham Horror
In deference to the_weapons underdeveloped liver we forwent the Advance insanity rules. For those unaware, and it is unlikely that either of you that read this haven't yourself played the odd game in the past, a quick recap.

The game is loosely based on the writings of HP Lovecraft's worlds of unspeakable (but obviously not unwritable) eldrich horror he spun back in the 1920s. You play characters who travel around a town and try shut down portals to other alien dimensions seeking allies, clues and tools whilst battling terrifying nightmare beasts and cultists with many visits to hospital and insane asylum to recover while the doom edges closer. A co-operative effort which saw the Miskitonic campus security, the FBI and the towns own police more effective at killing the monsters than our team.

Still bags of fun.

So anyone who is a big fan of the writings, one of the great nightmares is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep - He is a horror with infinite shapes, the soul and messenger of the Other Gods

"And at last from inner Egypt came / The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed...And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods — the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep."

so everyone got that, nameless, sprawling chaos of horror something like this.....

In his In his first appearance in "Nyarlathotep", he is described as a "tall, swarthy man" who resembles an ancient Egyptian... so he can take human form, however


On one of the anime blogs I came across this - a 'high tension chaotic comedy of light novels are being adapted into a Falsh anime project called Haiyory! Nyaru -Ani

The story centers around Nyarlathotep, a formless Cthulhu deity who can take on the shape of anyone it wishes, but particularly the shape of a seemingly ordinary silver-haired girl. Mahiro Yasaka is a normal high school student who is chased by aliens one night, until "Nyaruko" saves him. Seen as depicted on the right.

WTF


I realise he can take whatever form he likes but seriously the crawling chaos is walking around as a preteen girl? Being unaware of the amount of terror and destruction a preteen girl can unleash I turn to you to ask is this an unreasonable form to take?

I bet you wish you'd thought of it

Last year Seth-Grahame Smith and Quirk books released the mash up hit,

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Given the elephant bucks it made, how little work it took to insert ninjas and zombies in to a long since out of copywrite text Quirk went on to try to fill a whole shelf load of these, like 'Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters'

Honestly there are publishers and writers (authors are successful enough not to care, writers are folk who have to take any work offered to make money) kicking themselves that they didn't think of this.

While Seth-Grahame Smith has tried to move, a least a couple of genre shelves along at the Borders books store from the monster success of PP&Z with his alternative history novel

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

and with talks of a movie staring Padme Amediala (sorry Natalie Portman), It was inevitable we would return to the novel which started it all.

Quirk have announce a Prequel

Now I love a prequel almost as much as I love have my fortune read. Charlie Jane Anders the IO9 blogger had eloquently expressed what annoys me about prequels in her piece Prequels aren't just dumb, they're Evil. So I was probably going to let this one slide until I saw the fanficmade trailer for the book.



Now I have watched A LOT of zombie movies and some, perhaps many of them are woeful.
This one I liked.

We got it right this time

Today I took the_weapon to get the latest influenza vaccine that's become available this past week at the local medical centre. For $14 not only does he get increased protection against the (hopefully) upcoming seasonal flu but it also includes the H1N1 Vaccine so he has some protection against swine flu as well.

As a fan of those films where threats to humanity are faced off by steely eyed, squared jawed, well trained and well resourced team of professionals who have plans and contingencies ready to enact at the first sign of a threat. So I was kinda pleased how the health community and the public organised in response to the threat swine flu posed.

I realise its not over yet and some will claim that it was no big deal and we over reacted. To those I offer the following from the latest Australian Influenza report

In 2010, as at 5 March, there have been 50 confirmed cases of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 influenza reported in Australia, bringing the total of confirmed cases to 37,686 since 2009.

Or as more graphically put by the CDC in the United States.
For a parent these are chilling numbers, but they are only numbers. The late epidemiologist Irving Selikoff once referred to a statistic as "people with the tears wiped away." A friend, referring to someone who lost a child, shook his head and just said, "It's off the scale."

Flintheart over on his blog was talking about "The thing is, Stupid only has to win big once, and that's your whole fucking life trashed, right there" I have to say we as a society are doing the stupid when we allow vaccination levels to drop.

I was hearted to hear from the receptionist behind the counter that they had been really busy with people getting vaccinations. There is hope yet for us as a species. Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy notwithstanding.

Family values

The past couple of weeks the_weapon and I have been getting up at sparrowsfart to get him in for training. He is on the Falcon Academy team swim and they got through the district competition and on to the zones and regionals.

At the last meet I was sitting with the_weapon while we watched the team swim. One of the girls in his class MissyK was swimming. MissyK is from a family of evangelical Christians so in the past she has invited the_weapon along to her church. Needless to say being raised by a militant atheist he chose to decline, repeatedly.

MissyK swam stone dead last in her heat and she was pretty broken up about it, visibly upset as she got out of the pool and walking back. The_weapon got up and started to head over to her. I though what a caring, empathetic child I had.

I then remembered this is my child I was thinking about.

I jumped up and caught up to him before he spoke to her and said

"No asking, where is her messiah now, okay?"

The look on his face confirmed my suspicions. Fortunately by now one of the teachers was providing solace to distraught aquatic Christian.

So I think we have passed on the family value of atheism. As such I am excited that the Global Atheism festival is coming to Melbourne. Not enough stuff to hold a 10 year olds attention but still plenty happening around town like the atheism bus



and I am comfortable with that. What about you folk, any traits your family's have you want to ensure are passed on. Musicial talent, freakish recall of sporting minutia, ability to roll your tongue into a tube?

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is unintentional and purely coincidental.

This week we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny, and helped usher in a future brighter than anything we could imagine.

1st WIN
The BBC has reported UK General Medical Council (GMC) has found that Dr Andrew Wakefield acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" when doing the research that led him to conclude that MMR vaccinations were linked with autism.

Dr Wakefield published a paper in the peer reviewed medical journal the Lancet 351 (9103): 637–41 in Feburary 1998 titled ‘Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children.’

What did he do wrong?

The panel found that his research (involving spinal taps of children) was against the children’s clinical interest, that he was unqualified to perform the test, and that he had no ethical approval to do them.

Since then 10 of the 13 authors have retracted the conclusions. Alsoevidence has come to light that that Dr Wakefield may have faked the results of the study. Also he failed at the time he was conducting his research to declare his conflict of interests that he was being paid to develop his own commercial rival to the MMR vaccine.

This paper launched the Vaccines cause Autism scare, which has and is still leading to people to not get their children vaccinated, which has lead to a reduction in herd immunity which has meant that children too young to yet be vaccinated are exposed to diseases which had, at least in western countries, almost disappeared as cause of death. If you think that parents who don't get their children vaccinated only endanger their own kids read this letter and if your heart doesn’t break then you are not human. And I know the plural of anaecdote is not fact so here is the report from the Age last year showing in Australia the rise in reported cases of measles (measles for Frak sake) is on the rise.

2nd win
No doubt in an attempt to put this whole thing to bed The Lancet has formally retracted the paper published by Andrew Wakefield back in 1998 that linked vaccines with autism. From the Lancet..

Following the judgment of the UK General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al. are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation. In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were “consecutively referred” and that investigations were “approved” by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record.

3rd win

Perhaps the sweetest is this tit bit of news posted by the young Skeptics. Meryl Dorey the anti-science nutter who was best described by the Australian skeptics as "the truth-impaired mouthpiece of the Australian Vaccination Network, a group of antivaccination conspiracy-mongers who couldn’t find reality with both hands, a compass, and detailed instructions" has said

“..After almost 17 years of running the AVN, it is my bittersweet duty to inform you that within the next 3–4 weeks I will tendering my resignation as President of this great organisation and moving on to the next stage of my own personal development as mother, wife, activist and researcher".

Ms Dorey was the one on national television said “no one dies from pertussis anymore” even when the parents of the four-week-old Dana McCaffrey who died of that very disease were in the audience.

So after all of this you would hope the Anti Vaccine movement would be on its last legs.

Pigs arse

The GMC panel chairman was heckled by supporters of Dr Andrew Wakefield during his delivery of the verdicts.

People, children are dying and it’s because of bad thinking.

We must stop this, and the first step is to be aware of the problem. Knowledge is half the battle. If we can't eliminate childhood diseases like this then how do we hope to prevent to spread of Zombie virus across the planet when it occurs?