Show!

Joe and I recorded a new episode of Pseudocertainty last night. Included this week are reactions to 1-31, Atlantis news, the aurora spacecraft, the Doomsday Vault, and a long discourse on the Harry Potter books.

Joe has been reading the books for the first time, so we were able to have a good discussion about aspects of the books that we both recognize, as fans of epic storytelling. We had prior phone conversations earlier in the week, that we should have just recorded for the purposes of the show, that dealt with a lot of the Potter stuff we discussed yesterday.

If the show's not up at the site already, it should be up pretty soon...

I finished reading "Monster Island" by David Wellington, the most recent book about modern day zombies that I've finished. It tells the story of DeKalb, a UN Weapons Inspector in Somalia, who has to bring a group of soldiers to the zombie-fied city of New York, to get AIDS medication for the leader of the group of people who are holding his daughter as a "guest." While in NYC, DeKalb meets Gary, a med student who intentionally turned himself into a zombie, figuring that he'd get eaten if he didn't. He did this by infecting himself, and then keeping himself on life support while the transformation occurred. In this way, he kept his brain from lacking oxygen, so he didn't get stupid like all the other zombies.

The book overall was a good quick read, and I'm starting the sequel today, "Monster Nation," which actually tells the story of the outbreak, so is actually a prequel. I think I still prefer the zombie approach that Max Brooks takes in his books "The Zombie Survival Guide" and "World War Z," where the zombies don't have any glimpse of humanity, but it's good to read something that is a different flavor than what I'm used to in my zombie literature.

I actually didn't even realize, before reading Brooks' books that there was a zombie genre of writing out there, but I really shouldn't be surprised.

Yesterday, Sue and I went to go see Smokin' Aces. I won't bother summarizing the plot here, there are plenty of other sites that do that type of work. We did both generally enjoy the movie, although the ending got stretched out a bit longer than it really needed to be. I did like how in the first 20-30 minutes, you leared that any character could get killed at any time, because it's usually so predictable who will live to be the hero to the end of any film.

More to come! Battlestar Galactica is on tonight, so I have to get ready for that...

NP: Fish - Institution Waltz