I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN: APRIL 2009 EDITION

Oooooooooo, book reviews!

JUST FINISHED

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
Essentially, Brooks takes the premise of George Romero’s films and expands it to its logical outcome. And, like Romero, he uses the living dead as a platform to satirize contemporary society and politics, revealing how inept bureaucracies, greedy drug companies and general unpreparedness would contribute to a worldwide zombie pandemic. Telling the story Studs-Terkel style is a stroke of genius – and probably the only way the story would have worked. Some of the geopolitical outcomes are a bit of a stretch, but otherwise it’s probably one of the best and most believable apocalyptic books I’ve ever read. Recommended. Unless you find zombies to be silly nonsense.

JUST STARTED

Maul by Tricia Sullivan
I picked this up as part of my attempt to try more female writers, which don’t seem to take up much space on my shelves. So far it’s got teenage fashion gangs shooting up a shopping mall and a mad scientist testing terrorbugs on clones. It’s fairly twisted. A good sign. Usually.

( Even more book reviews! ZOMG! )

By the numbers,

This is dF

BACKWARDS MASKING: NOW FOR PRESIDENTS

Did you know ... that Obama said “Let me express” twice during his victory speech. And that if you play it backwards, it says “SERVE SATAN!”

COINCIDENCE??????????

The best part is where the dude points out that this only works when Obama says it. If YOU say “Let me express” and play it backwards, it just sounds like Swedish Chef.

How does he DO that?

DISCLAIMER: Yes, I know, the “Obama = Antichrist” meme has been around for almost a year now. The backwards masking angle is new to me, though.

And there’s a lot of “evidence” about. For example,  did you know “Yes we can” said backwards = “THANK YOU SATAN”?

ZOMG! WHAT HAVE WE DONE? O GOD IN HEAVEN, WHAT HAVE WE DONE?

And so on.

So it’s official, then: Obama is the new heavy metal.



I buried Paul,

This is dF

GREAT MOMENTS IN FEARMONGERING: GOVT HOMOS RUINED MY LIFE

ITEM [via 50000000 Sparber Fans Can't Be Wrong]: Now that conservative Christians are in a tizzy over Iowa succumbing to the Homosexual Agenda®, there’s no better time to revisit one of the greatest (if most obscure) books ever written on the subject: Destroy The Accuser: Federal Homo Power Exposed by Frederick Seelig.



To hear Max Sparber tell it (because I've never actually read the book), Seelig was a former journalist diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, and in 1966 wrote this book to prove that not only was his diagnosis fraudulent, but that he was a victim of a homosexual conspiracy that reached as high as the White House, and was using Communist brainwashing techniques to attempt to dissuade him from reclaiming his two children from their foster parents, both “perverts”.

"It wasn't long before I established the existence of the nationwide homosexual society, with headquarters in Washington, and members in government offices, including the White House, and United Nations; their roles in tax-exempt foundations, and their international headquarters in Amsterdam, Holland!"

Classically deranged homophobia. What’s noteworthy is that it was taken seriously at the time – at least by several former Congressmen, as well as white nationalist Dr. Revilo P. Oliver and Sarah Palin favorite, Westbrook Pegler, all of whom endorsed the book on its jacket.

To be fair, there was a much bigger audience for Commie-related homophobia in 1967 when the book came out – it was still considered a mental illness back then. But so was paranoid schizophrenia. I guess if you were asked to trust the word of a paranoid schizophrenic or a homosexual in 1967, the paranoid would win.

Luckily that’s not true these days.



Mostly.

Diary of a madman,

This is dF

GREAT MOMENTS IN FEARMONGERING: HOW BILLIARDS LEADS TO HEROIN

Speaking of Iowa ...

I’m not big on musicals, unless it’s Rocky Horror. But for the most part, "proper" musicals don’t really do a thing for me.

The exception is Meridith Willson’s The Music Man.

Why? Partly because my mom had the Broadway soundtrack and I used to listen to it a lot. Which is probably why I’m the only person on Planet Earth who doesn’t hate barbershop quartets on general principle.

But it’s also loaded with the sort of themes that appeal to me: the power of music to change society for the better, how ignorance makes you easy to swindle, and a satire of Midwestern small-town American moral values of church, family, conformity and self-righteous intolerance that conservatives to this day wish we could go back to.

Which brings us to this clip, where con man Harold Hill needs an angle to sell boys’ marching band equipment to the people of River City, Iowa (and make off with their money). His solution: whip up moral outrage over billiards, which will lead to gambling, beer drinking, ribald jokes and dancing with scarlet women at the armory.

It’s a great song and a classic scene. And it’s one that I’ve seen repeated in various forms over the years. Replace “pool” with “television”, “marijuana”, “rock’n’roll”, “heavy metal”, “rap music”, “video games”, “MySpace” and “the Homosexual Agenda®”, and it’s pretty much the same routine.

Amazing how people still fall for it.

So’s yr old man,

This is dF