Tuesday links.

* I do feel a bit like my characters from one movie could walk into another one of my movies and it would make sense, whereas people from other peoples’ movies would probably feel a bit uncomfortable there. Wes Anderson interviewed in Interview. There's also a profile in this week's New Yorker, apparently, though it's not online. (via Rushmore Academy)

* Case Studies of Comic Book Medicine. More here.

* Graduating during a recession can have a lifelong impact on your earnings.

* Also from Yglesias: Cable monopolies are killing your internet access.

* Infinite Thought has Engels on entropy.

Millions of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no longer find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon, will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the equally extinct sun, and at last fall into it. Other planets will have preceded it, others will follow it; instead of the bright, warm solar system with its harmonious arrangement of members, only a cold, dead sphere will still pursue its lonely path through universal space. And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the earth while there is a living human eye to receive it.

The quote is from 1833's The Dialectics of Nature, and goes on to suggest a kind of eternal return:

It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves, a cycle that certainly only completes its orbit in periods of time for which our terrestrial year is no adequate measure, a cycle in which the time of highest development, the time of organic life and still more that of the life of beings conscious of nature and of themselves, is just as narrowly restricted as the space in which life and self-consciousness come into operation; a cycle in which every finite mode of existence of matter, whether it be sun or nebular vapour, single animal or genus of animals, chemical combination or dissociation, is equally transient, and wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes. But however often, and however relentlessly, this cycle is completed in time and space, however many millions of suns and earths may arise and pass away, however long it may last before the conditions for organic life develop, however innumerable the organic beings that have to arise and to pass away before animals with a brain capable of thought are developed from their midst, and for a short span of time find conditions suitable for life, only to be exterminated later without mercy, we have the certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it.

* And Boing Boing has your Scooby Doo/zombie apocalypse mashup of the day.

Four for Friday.

* Rabbits are terrorizing the public parks of Stockholm, so Swedish officials have decided to kill them and burn them as fuel. That's socialism for you.

* The One Comic Joss Whedon Reads: The Walking Dead, of course. See also: The 5 Hardest Parts of Being a Joss Whedon Fan.

* The Nation looks at Corzine's resurgence in the context of his apparent left turn.

* Some days I kind of like this Obama guy.

Thursday night links!

* I saw Zombieland tonight and was impressed with how well America kept its Big Cameo secret. (I won't spoil things either.) The movie itself is pretty fun, if less funny than it thinks and a little cartoonish at times. I find in general that I prefer my zombie movies to be psychologically realistic and thematically bleak, with roughly two-thirds of the film devoted to the building of systematic fortifications and the last third devoted to the spectacular destruction of said fortifications.

* This is a great blog and Imma let you finish, but MetaFilter has the best Balloon Boy thread of all time. Don't miss what could be the exciting start of Phase 2: "You guys said we did it for the show."

* Why Your Idea to Save Journalism Won't Work.

* Nice to see Mad Men getting some press in the Atlantic, but couldn't they have found someone who actually gets the show?

Mad Men’s most egregious stumble—though seemingly a small one—involves Betty Draper’s college career, and it is generally emblematic of this extraordinarily accomplished show’s greatest weaknesses, and specifically emblematic of its confused approach to this poorly defined character. Betty, the show establishes, was in a sorority. So far, okay. Pretty, with a little-girl voice and a childlike, almost lobotomized affect; humorless; bland but at times creepily calculating (as when she seeks solace by manipulating her vulnerable friend into an affair); obsessed with appearances and therefore lacking in inner resources; a consistently cold and frequently vindictive mother; a daddy’s girl—Betty is written, and clumsily performed by model-turned-actress January Jones, as a clichéd shallow sorority sister. (Just as Don’s self-invented identity is Gatsby-like, so Betty, his wife, is a jejune ornament like Daisy, though without the voice full of money.) But she’s also a character deeply wronged by her serial-philanderer husband, and she’s hazily presented as a stultified victim of soulless postwar suburban ennui (now there’s a cliché). So, perhaps to bestow gravitas on her, or at least some upper-classiness, the show establishes that she went to Bryn Mawr. But of course Bryn Mawr has never had sororities. By far the brainiest of the Seven Sisters—cussed, straight-backed, high-minded, and feminist (its students, so the wags said, preferred the Ph.D. to the Mrs.)—Bryn Mawr was probably the least likely college that Betty Draper, given to such non-U genteelisms as “passed away,” would have attended. So much for satiric exactitude.

As I complained in the MeFi thread, Betty's problem isn't that she's bland, humorless, or stupid but that she hates her life.

* Chicago and the Great Flood of 1992.

* How the Freaknomics authors blew a chapter on climate change in the book's new sequel, Superfreakonomics.

* “The original Gauntlet was released with no ending. The hundred or so levels were randomised and looped for as long as play lasted. Atari saw Gauntlet as a process, a game that was played for its own sake and not to reach completion. The adventurers continue forever until their life drains out, their quest ultimately hopeless.”

The last of our pictures from Michigan and Indiana are now online at Flickr. There's a lot, but keep in mind we had at least two cameras going at all times. Special shout-outs to the Labor Legacy Monument, one of the best monuments to anything I've ever seen, and Ann Lislegaard's SF-centric project "2062" at MOCAD. Oh, and zombies.

Jaimee made this.

George Romero, novelist. But there's something I'm not sure about:

Publisher Vicki Mellor said that zombies were "one of the new buzz words in publishing". "I think that the world is ready to re-embrace the zombie culture - after the massive amount of vampire novels that have been published, it's time for a change of antagonist," she said. "We are very aware that there is going to be an explosion of zombie novels being published over the next year, but we absolutely believe that we have the definitive novel from the one author whom every fan of the genre will want to read."

There's been a big-budget zombie movie every year since 28 Days Later in 2002, and that's not even getting started on video games, comics, and some already successful novel franchises. The zombie bubble is clearly about to burst; I'm urging strong sell on zombies and buy on the Wolfman.

The thing that makes "The Walking Dead" unique and interesting is that it's a zombie movie that never ends—that's the log line or whatever. To do a zombie movie that's based on that? Kinda dumb. The whole idea behind the book is that it's a long-term exploration on the characters and their situation and how they're dealing with these problems over a long period of time, the different things that happen to the characters and how it affects and changes the characters. You can do that in a series of movies, but it's not ideal. It's not really common for people to go, "Oh, I'll buy this thing and commit to making 10 movies based on it!" So, the TV show makes way more sense to me for all of those reasons. Robert Kirkman talks The Walking Dead at Comic Book Resources. Via io9.

At 12:28 p.m., a Memorial administrator typed “HELP!!!!” and e-mailed colleagues at other Tenet hospitals outside New Orleans, warning that Memorial would have to evacuate more than 180 patients. Around the same time, Deichmann met with many of the roughly two dozen doctors at Memorial and several nurse managers in a stifling nurse-training room on the fourth floor, which became the hospital’s command center. The conversation turned to how the hospital should be emptied. The doctors quickly agreed that babies in the neonatal intensive-care unit, pregnant mothers and critically ill adult I.C.U. patients would be at great risk from the heat and should get first priority. Then Deichmann broached an idea that was nowhere in the hospital’s disaster plans. He suggested that all patients with Do Not Resuscitate orders should go last.

This story from the New York Times Magazine about the breakdown in medical practice in a stranded New Orleans hospital during Katrina will stick with me a long time. Unprepared for the severity or duration of the crisis, believing things in New Orleans to be much worse than in retrospect they were, and apparently significantly undertrained in proper triage procedure or in the deep ethical minefields surrounding end-of-life care (including apparently not understanding what a D.N.R. is), these doctors made some very difficult choices that a layperson like myself cannot possibly judge them for—but what happened at Memorial Medical Center should be standard-issue training in medical, schools, nursing schools, and hospitals so that things never go so badly off the rails again. This was not a zombie attack; it was not the end of the world. Katrina was only a local disaster. To paraphrase the patient quoted in the article: If they have vital signs, Jesus Christ, get ’em out.

Thiele didn’t know Pou by name, but she looked to him like the physician in charge on the second floor. He told me that Pou told him that the Category 3 patients were not going to be moved. He said he thought they appeared close to death and would not have survived an evacuation. He was terrified, he said, of what would happen to them if they were left behind. He expected that the people firing guns into the chaos of New Orleans — “the animals,” he called them — would storm the hospital, looking for drugs after everyone else was gone. “I figured, What would they do, these crazy black people who think they’ve been oppressed for all these years by white people? I mean if they’re capable of shooting at somebody, why are they not capable of raping them or, or, you know, dismembering them? What’s to prevent them from doing things like that?”

The laws of man had broken down, Thiele concluded, and only the laws of God applied.

Some appropriately heated discussion at MeFi.

Traxus considers survival horror:

There are ‘left’ and ‘right’ versions of the zombie myth, but the message is always the same: the horrors wrought by humanity in extremis are always worse than the zombies.The absolute manichean split between human and zombie is insisted on only to be ’shockingly’ deconstructed, with all other differences either elided or made to look ridiculous by comparison. Like them, we must kill to live, even if there is no reason to go on (civilization is destroyed, etc.). We are them, they are us.

while Alex Greenberg considers Tarantino:

Tarantino does not critique violence. He loves it. The parodies of violence in Kill Bill are not criticisms aimed at violence but criticisms aimed at film. He wants filmmakers to understand that they can make violence fun and to revel in this fact. Of course, for him, film is film and real life is real life, and I agree that one cannot draw a connection between violent acts in film and violent acts in "the real world." But I would add that the relationship between ideology and action is always an ideological one: it shapes opinions and attitudes, forming how people look at the world, in this case, one starkly divided between good and evil, as Eli Roth said in an interview with The Onion AV Club: "[My character is] not taking pleasure in killing. He’s fighting evil on behalf of those who can’t fight. He knows he’s the biggest and strongest one in the bunch, and he wants to terrorize them. But he’s doing it to stop evil." This would sit very well with my "Bible and the Holocaust" professor, who viewed human history as a gigantic contest between David and Hitler. But for those of us who are stuck in the realm of the human, this film adds nothing to the conversation.

News of the upcoming AMC adaptation encouraged me to check out the trade paperbacks of Robert Kirkman's zombie comic The Walking Dead (wiki), whose ten-book / sixty-issue run I subsequently blew through in about three days (including some just-can't-stop reading until 4 or 5 AM last night). The Walking Dead is one of a handful of books like Y: The Last Man or Planetary that are just painfully, painfully good, and since neither of those titles are being published regularly it may just be the best title on the market right now. Or so it seems to me now, in the full throes of this terrible zombie high. Kirkman describes his intent in the introduction to Days Gone By to create the feel of a George Romero film that never ends, and damned if he doesn't nail it. Unflinching, brutal, innovative, and intensely unforgiving, with an acutely Mbembian sense of what survival is and what it means, this is a must-read instant classic of the genre.

I promise you won't regret picking it up.

Image Comics has generously put the first issue online to get you started. Then head down to your local comic shop to get the trades.

Wednesday miscellany!

* Startling: 50% of people think women should be legally required to take their husbands' names. Watch out, most married woman under forty I know! They're coming for you.

* Jonathan Lethem talks to The Jewish Daily Forward about the greatness of Philip K. Dick.

* Have we reached our civilization's tipping point? See also: why climate change is worse than we feared.

* AMC greenlights zombie series. Sounds promising. Between this and Red Mars AMC is making a strong push for my particular demographic.

* As of tonight, Microsoft can no longer sell Word.

* Another Battlestar reboot? Already? Really?

* Lesser-known editing and proofreading marks. (via)

* 'Gathered, Not Made: A Brief History of Appropriative Writing.'

* And Ze gets philosophical.

You partake in a medical experiment. In the experiment you are given one of two pills. You don't know which one until after you take it. One shortens your life by 10 years, and the other lengthens your life by 10 years. You have just found out which pill you took. The question is: which pill do you think will increase the quality of your life the most? Would one make you change the way you live your life more than the other?

Speaking my language: LEGO zombies. Via Boing Boing.

They've finally invented the cure for productivity: Plants vs Zombies. I actually bought the thing after the hour trial.

Lots of open tabs from the last few days. Here's a first crack at it.

* 'Parasitic flies turn fire ants into zombies.' You heard it here first, get ready for zompocalypse.

* By request (hey, Tim) my last two Star Trek posts for a good long while.

* Star Trek: a military analysis.
* Star Trek vs. Star Wars.

* See also, God help me: The Duck Tales theme song gone horribly wrong.

* First pages from DC's Elseworlds 80-Page Giant. Via MeFi.

* Famous movie misquotes. I defy anyone to quote the line from The Graduate accurately. Also via MeFi.

* Oldest piece of art determined to be porn. Via Cyn-C.

* Top PhD programs shrinking. Still trying to figure out whether this is good news or bad. See also: 'The Universities in Trouble.'

Sunday!

* Literature: no cell phones allowed.

JULIET: Fakn death. C U Latr.

ROMEO: gud plan.

Recently published narrative fiction is still uneasy about the telephone, much less cell phones or the Internet...

* In defense of The Life Aquatic: Jamie Rich defends the most unfairly maligned of all of Wes Anderson's films. (Via Rushmore Academy.)

* 'North Carolina Town Prints Own Currency to Support Local Business.' I support the effort, but I thought that was illegal...

* The Washington Post continues its efforts to make up for allowing George Will to lie with impunity on its editorial pages.

* Muppets vs. Zombies. If only it were real.

Super Happy Insomnia Linkdump.

* Here come your Simpsons stamps.

* Thomas Lennon says The State DVD is finally coming out this July. Meanwhile, State alums Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter have a new show and a new blog.

* Only 53% of Americans think capitalism is better than socialism. What happens when we cross 50%? Does it mean over-educated literary theory PhDs suddenly get to be in charge? I certainly hope it means that.

* The dark side of Dubai. Ugly, ugly stuff.

* On the neuropsychology of zombies. Via Pharyngula.

* A good post I forgot to link to a few days ago from FiveThirtyEight.com: Nate Silver predicts when various states will legalize gay marriage. My expectation is that a federal court ruling will make gay marriage a nationwide reality via the full faith and credit clause long before Mississippi—a state sweltering with the heat of injustice—gets its chance in 2024.

* And Part 4 of Matt Zoller Seitz's Wes Anderson documentary is up. This part's on J.D. Salinger.

Things I've enjoyed on the Internet today.

* A Seth tribute to Charles Schulz.

* The ruins of Detroit's abandoned Belle Island Zoo. Via MeFi.

* Spy Vibe, a blog devoted to the '60s spy aesthetic. Also via MeFi.

* Three Jane Austen sci-fi films are apparently in the pipeline: Pride, Prejudice, amp; Zombies; Pride & Predators; and Lost in Austen.. What can account for Austenmania?

* I can't believe putting a totally unqualified action-movie star in charge of the world's fifth largest economy has turned out so badly for California. More on this from Ezra Klein, who actually points the finger not at Arnold but at systemic gridlock, i.e., the California state constitution and deluded Orange County Republicans.

* Why we love gambling: almost winning is almost as good as actually winning, as far as our neurochemistry is concerned.

* Grade inflation is a feedback loop: students now expect a B just for showing up.

* Life as a tie-in novelist.

* Braid, Game of the Year 2008 by all accounts, is finally coming to the PC.

Link dump #3, mother of all link dumps.

* I thought I was over Obama kitsch, but somehow the kids' letters to Obama featured on This American Life last week still somehow got to me. Adorable!

* Austen gets a much-needed updating: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

* The Massachusetts lottery: if you've got $10,000+ to burn, it turns out it could actually be a good bet.

* Wikipedia is looking to ruin itself. More at MeFi.

* A zoomable map of the Moon from a 1969 National Geographic. Simply irresistible.

* How to nationalize health care.

* Rethinking your opposition to nuclear power? Rethink again. I've been working on a piece for the Indy on nuclear power in North Carolina that covers some of these themes. Via Steve Benen.

The 12 Days of Zombie Christmas.

Celebrity zombies. Via MeFi.