Interview With A Zombie

(photo source)

By Darryl Mason

Media reports continue to be suppressed about an outbreak of zombie attacks in Sydney, which social networking sites are reporting occurred under the cover of the Red Dust Storm, earlier this morning.

Twitter reports at least 12 confirmed attacks, most are said to have occurred near the north and south pylons of the Harbour Bridge, where hundreds gathered in the deep sepia-toned dawn to photograph the Bridge shrouded in ochre dust.

The Orstrahyun spoke to Zed Immortal from the Post-Life Institute For ReHuman Affairs (PLIRA) and president of the Association of Concerned Undead Citizens (ACUC).

Q : Are your lobbying groups responsible for the media blackout, and the silence from police, who refuse to confirm or deny at least 12 attacks by zombies earlier today at....

A: Let me just stop you there. Firstly, we have no control over the media, or the police. The idea is laughable, and...

Q: But you cannot deny that lobbyists working directly for you are...

A: Let me finish, please. I'll repeat, we have no control over the police or media reporting of these alleged attacks. And right now they are only alleged attacks. This Twitter thing is notorious for false reports of celebrity deaths and events that simply did not occur, and Twitter is the only place where these attacks have been reported. Now, I am not going to deny there was some violence this morning near the Harbour Bridge, but I've been told the violence was limited to a brief physical exchange between one of our association's members, out for a morning lurch, and a photographer, who did not ask permission before taking his photo, and ...

Q: I'm sorry...the smell is just, good Christ, it's so terrible....

A: Open a damned window then.

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"We are a peaceful people who, because of the derision of the general public fueled by the hysterical media and anti-undead politics, keep mostly to ourselves."

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Q: So you're saying reports of brain-feeding by, as you say, members of your community this morning are false? Are in fact just Twitter gossip? A hoax?

A: Right now, that is exactly what I'm saying. Now, I'm not saying that nothing violent did not occur, but I am saying that if it did, it only involved one or perhaps 50 members of our large Sydney community, and such incidents of violence, which I fully condemn, should not reflect on all members of our community, both locally and nationally. We are a peaceful people who, because of the derision of the general public fueled by the hysterical media and anti-undead politics, keep mostly to ourselves.

Q: Zombie attacks in Sydney have been on the rise in recent months, and there is ample evidence that...

A: I have to stop you again,, I'm sorry. But I and many of my fellow post-lifers find that word terribly offensive, and outdated. We prefer the term post-lifers, rehumans or, if you insist on using the jargon most popular with youth, and the movie and video game saturated public, the undead. .

Q: Excuse me, I didn't mean to offend you.

A: That's quite all right. But it shows how much work our associations and action groups have to do to change the way the public views people like me who are no longer living, but are not yet dead. "Zombie" is a word that should have stayed in the 1970s, along with all those awful, awful George Romero and Italian horror movies denigrating our kind.

Q: It's true, isn't it, that lobbyists from your institute are responsible for the banning of video games where post-lifers are massacred and brutalised?

A: No, it's not true. But I wasn't displeased by the decision of the federal government agency responsible. Now, we really need to wrap this up, I have religious duties to perform this afternoon and...

Q: Could you explain, briefly, some of the tenets of the post-life religion for my readers? The red dust storm that covered Sydney this morning was seen by some as apocalyptic, and related to the End Of Days Christian beliefs, and some are already blaming what they call "the ungodly existence" of post-lifers as being somehow responsible for it.

A: What utter nonsense. We don't control the weather. Today is the most sacred day of our religious year. We will gather around the graves of recently departed loved ones and wish them a speedy return. We believe in the Third Coming of our Messiah. We believe we are currently unliving through the Start of Days, and soon, very soon, our Messiah will descend from the living.

Q: You don't believe your messiah will come from the ranks of the already dead?

A: No, he will be born in a post-life state, he will be rejected by his family and community and will come to unlive amongst us, where he will be treated with respect and honour. The kind of respect and honour we all believe the still living deny us, all these years after the outbreak began.

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"We will be pushing for the Australian government to include measures to combat vilification of the undead in the new Hate Speech laws."

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Q: What it is like to be dead?

Z: Well, obviously it has its disadvantages. It's hard to get a decent table at good restuarants for starters. There is the smell factor, which is why we tend to only mix with our own kind. Then you have the moronic people in the street who keep shouting "Brrrraaaaainssss!" while you're trying to go about your business, or take your children to school. I understand why the pre-dead feel the need to mock and denigrate us, after all there are many, many popular movies where the undead are not portrayed in a positive light, at the very least. But we are taking action to rectify this kind of public vilification. We are sending a delegation to the UN in December to lobby for representation on the UN Commission for Human Rights. We will be pushing for the Australian government to include measures to combat vilification of the undead in the new Hate Speech laws.

Q: I'm sorry....I just....it's the smell. Christ, it's like finding a packet of old bacon that fell down behind the fridge two months ago. Can't you do anything about that?

A: We've tried. Nothing can cover our scent, and many of us choose not to try. We do, indeed, find it an attractive smell. Rich, tangy. I actually find the smell of the living quite repulsive.

Q : So are you in a constant state of decay? Are you rotting right now?

A : No. Actually I feel quite good. I haven't had any major repair work done in months. The decay across our community appears to be slowing, which is good news for state and federal health care budgets, and local hospitals.

Q : Isn't true that there are other ways for the undead to halt the physical decrepitude, so you don't have to have so much repair work done quite so often?

A : I know where this question is going. And I don't appreciate it. I made it very clear to you that we were not to discuss this topic.

Q : But it's a topic that very much fascinates people, living people I mean. About your people.

A : Well, that may well be so, but that's their problem, not mine.

Q : It's their problem if your hunger and horror of personal decay becomes so overwhelming that people like you jump on the freshest living human they can find and tear open their skulls and feast on the....

A : You've been watching too many movies. Incidents of...what you describe amongst the undead are very, very rare. As this morning's events, or non-event as it was, will no doubt prove, incidents relating to the old myths that you seem obsessed with are actually few and far between. All but non-existent these days, in fact. The living are far more prone to violence from their own kind, then from ours.

Q : But there's few if any recent accounts of normal people eating the brains of...

A : Normal people? Is that what you said? Right, I'm going to have to stop you there, and end this interview. Thank you very much.

Q : What do human brains' taste like it, sir? Is it true they're delicious?

A : No, that's it. I've had enough of this. You're not only being rude, but utterly offensive.

Q : How many human brains have you eaten, sir? 10? 50? 100?

A: I'm not answering any more questions.


A tense end to an interesting interview.

Reports of zombie attacks in Sydney are still appearing on Twitter, as the last of the red dust storm moves up through New South Wales and into Queensland, but these reports seem to be closer to satire, or blatant hoaxes, than any representation of reality.



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There are so many brilliant photos of the Sydney Dust Storm on Flickr, Twitter and dozens of blogs I haven't got around to seeing much of what the professional photographers of the mainstream media have come up with yet. But for me, it's going to be hard to beat TomHide's Flickr portfollio of incredible, apocalyptic images of the Harbour Bridge and Luna Park.

How Much Will It Cost To Stick Our Cool New Sunglasses On Those Old Digger Statues?

The Australian War Memorial, the Last Post and the Eternal Flame are now brought to you by BHP, Boeing, Qantas, BAE Systems, Rio Tinto, Fosters, the Australian Gas Association, News Limited and some 80 other corporate sponsors.

The Full Story Is Here

I suppose it makes sense that the manufacturers of weapons and bombs kick back something (if only a minuscule amount), from the billions of dollars they've reaped off Australia's century of foreign war fighting, to the memorials that honour the hundreds of thousands of Australians killed and maimed fighting those wars.

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Just Blame A Typing Cat

Hold the presses, associate editor of The Daily Telegraph, and hilarious failed litigant, Tim Blair, finds a spelling mistake on Twitter!

Deep thinking from Antony Loewenstein:

The thought of telling Israel what to do is plesant and necessary

Antony Loewenstein failed to insert the letter 'a' into the word 'pleasant'. Yes, isn't that exciting?

In part due to the very restrictive 140 character limit per post, Twitter is often a correct spelling, good grammar and even basic punctuation free zone. The information, the link, the joke, the snark, the insight, the trivial detail, the content of the brief comment, is all that matters, as all the established rules of the English language can be, and most often are, casually cast aside so as to fit the comment inside that tight character limit. Finding spelling mistakes on Twitter is piss easy. Too easy.  

Almost as easy as finding a spelling mistake on the Daily Telegraph website.

So while Tim Blair was busy stalk-trawling Antony Loewenstein for inconsequential spelling mistakes on Twitter (where Blair doesn't have an active account, at least not one under his own name) this doozy appeared in the first line of the first story on the front page of The Daily Telegraph, where Blair is, of course, an editor :

The Hurt of being "knocked bledding to the ground", you'd have to imagine, would be Immeasurable.

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Rupert Murdoch's UK Sun, where nothing is beyond the pun, even terrorism :

(via Reddit)

He Had Himself Nailed To A Cross For Your Entertainment

John Safran's new eight part series on love beyond your tribe, Race Relations, is only a few weeks away. It looks hilarious, thoughtful and very timely :



More detail from The Age :

John Safran's Race Relations will see the comic examine cross-cultural, interracial and interfaith love in a series that features scenes shot in Israel, Palestine, Togo, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the USA.
Other crazy stunts will see Safran talk to his dead mother, become a ladyboy and an Elephant man, and even turn black and go undercover in Chicago.

Pilger : The War On Afghanistan "Is A Fraud"

Australian journalist John Pilger was awarded the 2009 Sydney Peace Prize in August :

The jury made the decision on the basis of Pilger's “courage as a foreign and war correspondent in enabling the voices of the powerless to be heard”. It also praised his “commitment to peace with justice by exposing and holding governments to account for human rights abuses and for fearless challenges to censorship in any form”.

On November 4, he will receive the award at a lecture at the Opera House. On November 6, Pilger will speak to some 1500 students at a peace festival hosted by Cabramatta High School.

John Pilger's work is not published in any Australian city daily papers, despite being our most famous, internationally recognised journalist. Nor is Pilger published on supposedly "edgy" comment and opinion sites like The Punch or The National Times.

Why?

This is why :

The Afghan war is a fraud.

It began as an American vendetta for domestic consumption in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, in which not a single Afghan was involved. The Taliban, who are Afghans, had no quarrel with the United States and were dealing secretly with the Clinton administration over a strategic pipeline. They offered to apprehend Osama Bin Laden and hand him over to a clerical court, but this was rejected.

The establishment of a permanent US/NATO presence in a resource-rich, strategic region is the principal reason for the war.

Too Much Truth

Germaine Greer, in the recent documentary on Skippy The Bush Kangaroo, describes seeing the show while living in England in 1968 :

"It was one of those dead moments and I kicked on the television and there was Skippy. And I watched it absolutely hypnotised, because it was very sunny and there was a cobalt blue sky, grey vegetation and ruddy brown rocks, and that was what I was staring at. Just staring at, because I don't think I even realised how homesick I was until I saw those tree shapes. There was all kinds of things about it that were totally unbearable, but the landscape, and the light!"

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd : "You Can Get Fucked!"

Prime Minister Kevin "Strippers & Booze" Rudd listens to the latest string of complaints from Labor factional bosses, and replies, curtly :

"I don't care what you fuckers think!"

"Don't you fucking understand?"

"You can get fucked!"

Rudd's swearapalooza was unleashed on Labor faction leaders when they apparently kept whining about the slashing of MPs' printing allowances from $100,000 to $75,000 a year.

You can't say Rudd's response was altogether inappropriate.

UPDATE : The story above was reported by Glenn Milne, who Kevin Rudd called "the Liberal Party journalist of choice" when asked about his swearing this morning. Rudd didn't deny he unleashed as quoted, saying :

"I think it's fair to say that consistent with the traditions of the Australian Labor Party, we're given to robust conversations. I made my point of view absolutely clear, and that is these entitlements needed to be cut back, and I make no apologies for either the content of my conversation or the robustness with which I expressed my views."

Fair enough.

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That's Not A Name, It's A Thrash/Speed Metal Trademark

Somewhere in Australia, there is a child legally named Metallica.

However, according to this story, it is illegal to call your child 'Ned Kelly.'

Sir Lady Chief Maximus Duke Seven is also out.

"I've Not Felt This Well For Ages", Then Death

The last meal of legendary British TV chef Keith Floyd, stricken with bowel cancer, was as follows :

A Hix Fix cocktail - "a morello cherry soaked in Somerset apple eau de vie topped up with champagne"

Cigarettes

A glass of white burgundy

A plate of oysters, plus potted Morecambe Bay shrimps.

Red-legged partridge and bread sauce for the main, washed down with a bottle of Côtes du Rhone red

Apple pie and perry jelly

Floyd's personal motto was to enjoy good food and wine to the full. A few hours after the meal, he died in his sleep.

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You Drive Me Insane, In The Nicest Possible Way

Nick Barker's back on the road in October. Always an excellent show, from one of Australia's greatest live performers.

This is his song about his grandmother, who suffered from senile dementia. She came to believe that she lived in two homes, and wanted to know when her family would take her to "the other house". A song from the heart. Sad, but beautiful.

Murdoch Media Reports Murdoch Media Plans Won't Work



It was there on the front page of Rupert Murdoch's news.com.au for a few hours, then it was gone. A story featuring Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, explaining why Murdoch's plans to charge people to read digital news is doomed to fail :

Publishers of general news will find it hard to charge for their content online because too much free content is available, (Eric Schmidt) the chief executive of Google says.

Mr Schmidt was responding to an announcement by News Corporation chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch that he could start charging for content online.

"In general these models have not worked for general public consumption because there are enough free sources that the marginal value of paying is not justified based on the incremental value of quantity," he said.

The story was open for comments, all of whom agreed with Schmidt. One example :

Gone are the days of people getting all of their news from the one source. People get their news from a variety of sources now. There is absolutely no reason to confine oneself to a singular edition of news on a single web site. I wonder why Murdoch doesn't understand this?

No doubt the automated publication of that news wire story on news.com.au must have caused a few palpitations.

What Would Jesus Do...If He Took Control Of Your TV Remote?


image from the Orlando Weekly

The Australian Christian Lobby is sending out 'Stop The TV Smut' press releases again :

With standards governing on-screen content being reviewed for the first time in six years, the Australian Christian Lobby launched the "Tame the Tube" campaign to combat what it says are industry attempts to weaken TV standards.

"Sex, violence and foul language are normal fare these days as TV networks push the boundaries," ACL managing director Jim Wallace said.

ACL said it had about 10,000 registered supporters, mainly from orthodox and evangelical churches.

They don't like Underbelly much.

There should be a suburban crime show based around the jaw-dropping Biblical tale of Lot and his two daughters. Then we could have a God-fearers friendly TV drama where a stranger wanders into a new town, say St Kilda, pursued by a gang of locals intent on raping him, the stranger takes shelter in the home of Mr Lot, who then volunteers his underage daughters to the rape gang when they drop by to attack his house guest. The town explodes, killing just about everybody. Mr Lot flees with his two daughters, who then get their father drunk and seduce him. But no swearing, butts or tits, of course. The ACL thinks that would be going too far.

@ClubWah provides a provocative retort to the lobby group the Daily Telegraph has, curiously, branded the 'Wrath Of God' :

"fuck off you fucking shit-eating fundi cunts!"

In answer to the question posed in the headline, I'm sure Jesus would be regularly tuning into Top Gear, if only to marvel at how far transport has come since the days of the donkey express.

The Dan Brown Code

The secret is out. Outraged connoisseurs of fine literature, formal sentence structure and the holiness of the Queen's English crack the secret to Dan Brown's success :

(In every book, the) attractive protagonist gets called unexpectedly to help in a case where he/she is an expert. There's an obvious antagonist, physically unattractive, who's clearly out to get the protagonist. There's also the trustworthy mentor, who helps out the protagonist. At about three quarters of the book, the antagonist gets killed and turns out to be actually been helping the protagonist, whilst the mentor is the evil one. Meanwhile, the protagonist and his/her attractive helper of the opposite gender run all over the place to collect hints and clues, they persevere in the end, and in the final chapter they have intercourse. Oh, and every chapter ends with a cliffhanger.

Sounds great, fast-paced, a few twists, but easy on work-depleted brains. No wonder he's sold so many books.

Another commenter to the hilariously tweed-draped Dan Brown's Top 20 Worst Sentences rams through this observation, bursting with snark for the grammar nannies :

Proper grammar exists only to keep snobz in jobz.

It's all about getting yer message over, Innit? If yer message is much more interesting than the crap that some people write in t'fish wrapper, then everyone's happy except those who got battered as kids by sadists in public schools for splitting infinitives.

For many millions who buy and read Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol, it will be the only book they read this year, or will have read in years. But They're Still Reading A Book where they otherwise would read nothing. How anyone can see a massive, if brief, enthusiastic increase in novel reading as a bad thing, as something destructive, because the writer often beats the English language out of shape for the purposes of page-turning entertainment, is beyond me.

Move Over, Kevin, We Have A New Contender

Our prime minister is probably the world's most famous living picker of head-located orifices.



Well, not anymore.

While President Obama was posing for what will easily become one of the most legendary presidential photos ever taken (at least for the Star Wars generation)....




This guy went for a dig....



It's too late for Photoshop.



(h/t - Reddit)

Murdoch Celebrates Death Of Newspapers : "It's Going To Be Great"

By Darryl Mason

It's not just smirking bloggers and feisty independent New Media snarking over the Death Of Newspapers. Now Rupert Murdoch, who convinced a generation of British fathers in the 1970s and 1980s that they should be proud to see their 18 year old daughter's tits on Page 3 of The Sun, is joining in the newsprint grave dancing :

"I do certainly see the day when more people will be buying their newspapers on portable reading panels than on crushed trees.

“Then we’re going to have no paper, no printing plants, no unions. It’s going to be great.”

But the monopoly of distribution and political influence he once enjoyed, and exploited, with newspapers is gone forever. Now Murdoch's news has to compete in the ultimate free market, as he tries to force readers to pay for news that they will (soon after it breaks) also be able to find elsewhere on the internet for free.

Murdoch has also announced plans to increase prices for the cable sports programming he controls. He believes News Corp. has been “undercharging". Australian subscribers to premium Fox Sports channels will be surprised to hear that.

The first example of how Murdoch's YouWillPay! system will work, as far as news and opinion content is concerned, comes with the announcement that :

The Wall Street Journal...will start charging non-subscribers $2 a week to access content on mobile devices such as the BlackBerry, he said. Current subscribers will be charged $1.

So even if you already pay a few hundred dollars a year, or more, to access The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch's going to hit you up for another $52 a years minimum to read it all on your hand screen.

The headline on this Financial Times story reads :

Murdoch Hails E-Readers

Like he has a choice now.

How Can We Sleep While The Earth Is Weeping?

By Darryl Mason

I don't know about you, but this is one of the stupidest fucking things I've heard this year :

A Midnight Oil hit advocating Aboriginal land rights in the '80s is being used in the noughties to mobilise nations to combat climate change.

The band's former frontman and now Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, helped write new lyrics to Beds Are Burning, as part of the celebrity-led initiative.

Yes, Bob Geldof is involved. So is Duran Duran. Nothing in music is sacred, not even a Midnight Oil song that helped to bring the idea of Aboriginal reconciliation to a new, more open-minded, less bigoted generation. The only consolation I suppose is that Bono isn't involved.

Well, not yet anyway.

The original Beds Are Burning lyrics....

''Out where the river broke/The blood wood and the desert oak/Holden wrecks and boiling diesels/Steam in 45 degrees''.

....have become :

''Down at the river bed/The earth is cracked and dry instead/Farms a failing, cities baking/Steam in 45 degrees.''

This :

"The time has come/A fact's a fact/It belongs to them/Let's give it back."

Has become this :

''The time has come/A fact's a fact/The heat is on/No turning back.''

"The Heat Is On"? Someone call Glenn Frey!

Garrett won't be singing on the rebake, and it will be given away online.

In a few years time, if global warming doesn't turn out to be the "clear, catastrophic threat" that Rupert Murdoch predicted, and the Earth turns more icy than melty, Midnight Oil could always rewrite the lyrics to Cold Cold Change.



Great fucking song. By the way, Cold Cold Change is now 30 years old.

Impossible Fiction

By Darryl Mason

Found this on Twitter last night : 'Enter The Times Cheltenham Twitter Competition'. The task is to write "a story" in less than 140 characters. Fucking hard. Infuriatingly hard. Which, of course, is what makes it such a fun and 'must try this now!' writing challenge.

So here's a few of my post-midnight entries :

* "Run! the voice in her head yelled. "Run NOW!" She got up from the table and ran outside. A car mounted the curb and killed her instantly.

* The plane exploded. She counted the stars as she fell, ready for death. Then she saw her house far below. She aimed for her pool....

* "How much do you love me?" "More than life itself." She handed him a knife, "Prove it." "Okay," he said, "you're number two on my Love List."

* "I can't marry you," she sighed. "I'm not real. You made me up." The moment he realised this was true, she vanished. He picked up his pen, again.

* "One day you will invent a time machine," the visitor said. "I'm here to show you how." The visitor was decades older than my reflection

* When he left Earth, he was an astronaut. When he arrived on The Moon they told him he was, in fact, a soldier, and he would never go home again.

Note, these stories as they exist here are slightly longer than 140 characters, but only because I removed the Twitter shorthand which renders 'about' as 'abt', 'you're' as 'yr', 'realised' as 'realsd' and so on, for easier reading.

You can look at the other entries to the comp. here.

I'm still up in the air about Twitter as a vehicle for fiction, incredibly short fiction as above, or very well structured serial fiction told 140 characters at a time, over God knows how long. It's like trying to stuff a fat old reluctant dog through a tiny cat door.

Turning, or translating, a finished novel into a Twovel seems an equally impossible task. I've been working my way through a novel of mine that was published in 1996, Max & Murray, converting it into a twovel, as you can see if you look to the right of this page and down. But so far it feels pretty much like a total fucking disaster. Which makes me want to both abandon it and finish it as quickly as possible so this ridiculous experiment is done with.

Anyway, I'll get into all that in a longer post, later, with some examples of paragraphs from Max & Murray the printed novel versus the twovel posts I've done so far here.

Yes, I know, thrilling stuff.

@darrylmason

Professor Blainey : TV Has Taught Footy Players To Speak Proper

From the Herald Sun :

Prof Geoffrey Blainey said one of the biggest changes over the past 50 years was the astonishing improvement in pronunciation and grammar.

"That clearly has come from television and radio and films, not from what's been taught in schools," he told the Herald Sun.

Prof Blainey said earlier generations used to say things like "them days" and "all of youses".

"I'm not criticising them, that's what they learned in childhood, but that old grammar has virtually vanished," he said. "Even when you listen to the footballers today, they all speak well."