Zombiegeddon

So I woke up this morning and it’s like while I was asleep everyone realized how futile this war has become. Interesting. Unfortunately, in addition to missing this I also had the biggest nightmares of my life last night. Zombies. Lots of them. I really don’t ever recall my dreams ever being actually scary. Sure, they’ve been weird, as I’ve tended to not shut up about here. When I was 8 I had a recurring dream that I was conversing with the devil. But I’ve never been actually terrified in my dreams as I was last night when I was barricading myself into my grandmother’s house from the zombie hordes.
Far stranger than that, though, is how satisfied I felt when I woke up for not panicking in my dream, keeping a cool head, and picking apparently the safest place I know to hole up. Sure, I’d be lying if I said that I’d never daydreamed about a zombie uprising, or planned my route to the nearest safe destination. We’ve all rented storage lockers and filled them with guns and ammunition just in case the…I mean, um… Great now I’m gonna get a few hundred phone calls from Homeland Security. But I digress. The important part is that if you’re ever stuck in one of my zombie dreams, you know the guy to stick with.
So they announced that they’re going to refurbish and upgrade 8 nuclear weapons sites in the US and work toward building a new stockpile of 2,200 new nuclear weapons. On one hand, I think they should be making the existing sites in this country safer. The only thing worse than having a whole shitload of nuclear weapons is having an unsafe and unprotected aging stockpile ready to be stolen and sold on the black market (you hear that Russia?). What will be done with the 6,000 missiles we have now from the cold war? I don’t know, but if history dictates anything, they’re goin’ to Libya. So are we trying to start another cold war? Do people just forget how fucking long and costly the last one was? It’s kind of a shame to think about how strong the no nukes movement was during the 70s and the 80s and now how it was for nothing. Now we’ve got much more powerful weapons that are more accurate. Yes, the chance of accidental explosion is less likely, but don’t worry, they can still vaporize hundreds of thousands of people with a push of a button. So yeah, we can sleep well now. What really disgusts me, though, more than anything, is that this is basically the resignation of the idea that things can get better than a cold war. That to be constantly at odds with others is better than risking getting attacked off guard. So yeah, lets all hope the next 60 years are as entertaining as the last cold war, because the stakes are higher (hey won’t it be great when China gets all crazy like Russia did?) and we might as well start building that bubble around the country.
So yeah, I’m listening to It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown right now an I have to say I’m lovin’ it. The whole thing smacks of autumn, pointless attempts to kick a football, and “I got a rock”*. and rampant belief in non-Christian entities. Do you think any wars were waged for the Great Pumpkin? Anyone put to the stake or fed to lions? Was charles Schulz, I wonder, a pagan? I really couldn’t have asked for anything better this morning though, so I’m gonna get back to that.
Oh, Ipod turned 5 yesterday. I had some poignant and insightful things to say about this, but frankly I just don’t care enough to type it out and I can’t imagine you caring enough to read it. In short, they’re probably going to greatly affect the production and direction of popular music, and I don’t really mean in a good way. But we don’t have to listen to crazy people on the bus, so we got that going for us.
I’ve been reading an inordinate amount of hype for this Emily Haines solo album. I don’t know why this surprises me, because I always thought her band (one of them, anyway) Metric was extraordinarily overhyped. I remember reading articles about them and Vue in like 1999 that were embarrassingly overwrought with comparisons to bands I loved at the time. This was also before they’d recorded anything and only played a handful of times in front of people. I bought both the albums and was so pissed about it for weeks. I swore I’d never give either of them another chance. As far as I know Vue is long gone, and I’ve checked out a few Metric albums that actually had the band growing on me a little bit. I was really surprised with how much I like Ms. Haines’ solo album though. Her backing band is made up of a people from Broken Social Scene, Metric, Stars (aren’t all of these the same band by now?) and Sparklehorse. It’s a really mellow album, and provides a nice backdrop for freezing your ass off and pondering thermonuclear warfare. So there’s that.

“Crowd Surf Off a Cliff” – Emily Haines and The Soft Skeleton

“Reading in Bed” – Emily Haines and The Soft Skeleton

Buy Knives Don’t Have Your Back here

Download a zipped copy of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (audio) here, if you want it.
Buy the DVD here

Oh I can’t find any evidence that it was him on IMDB, but I’m next to positive that last night Eli Wallach played an old blacklisted actor on Studio 60 (which I’m almost ashamed of how much I like for some reason). It was really great, and it’s the sort of thing that should be brought up more often. The blacklisting, that is. And Eli Wallach, I suppose. I mean the man played Tuco And Max Calvera. and the third Mr. Freeze in the "Batman" TV series. Wait, where was I? Oh right, the blacklisting. It’s the sort of thing I grew up reading about and thinking it was so long ago, and it’s so not. This is the sort of shit that can get whipped up in fervor just as easily now as it could then. Being an American not only affords us the right to worship who we want or make sweet sweet love to whom we want or to say what we want (well, that used to be a right of ours). It also grants us the right to our eccentricities as a whole. As soon as we forfeit that, everything’s gone to shit for real. Remember that the people who were punished for being Communists then (which, remember, was not a crime), rarely were actual Communists. They were subversives a lot of the time, yes, but plenty of them were just someone that had a petty grudge against them. It would probably do everyone some good to remember that. I’ve read or seen no less than three stories about it recently, so I guess a lot of people are. Good for us.

*Yes, I was going to post the first Kid Koala mixtape, but I can't find it here and I'm too busy right now to remember to do it later.