Weekender #13: Home Sick Edition: October 6, 2009

I didn't have time to do this over the weekend, but now that I'm home sick, I have plenty of time. And phlegm too, for that matter…

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Weekender

Ah, Germany: where the men are too stinky, the cars are too small, and the new foreign minister refuses to speak English.

Animal news: crocodile arrested for loitering; do not pee where the crocodiles be; piggy-back polar bears; Kit Smart's cat Geoffrey gets a thoughtful revisit from Robert Pinsky; I am going to vegan hell for this, but this article's headline combined with the picture made me cackle out loud.

Here's a nice reversal on the usual statements from Muslim clerics: Egypt's highest Muslim religious authority wants to ban full women's veils, saying they are merely a tradition without any basis in Islam or the Koran. It should be a woman's personal choice, of course, but better to ban it altogether than to make it easy for fathers and husbands to force their unwilling womenfolk into wearing the niqab.

I saw The Danger Committee at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival over the weekend, and they were awesome. Anyone who can throw knives in the rain is cool by me; anyone who can do so while sporting a goofy hat and a silly Spanish accent is even better.

Angsty teenage girls, beware: the next time you wail that you just want to die, someone might take you seriously. And then take you down with a hatchet.

I am starting to understand what the A.V. Club's Scott Tobias meant when he described the trailer for 2012 as "sicker and more pornographic than anything in the Hostel movies, Martyrs, and Rob Zombie’s filmography combined". Watching this five-minute promo, my emotions ran the gamut from amused tolerance to mild annoyance to a creeping feeling of sickness and revulsion. Apparently, even I have a threshold for scenes of mass death and destruction. I will now go cheer myself up with the Anne Frank YouTube channel and teenage upskirt ninja pornographers.

Maybe this Canadian Forces helicopter crew wouldn't have made an emergency burger landing if they knew what those burgers could do to them. I'm just saying.

Best marriage proposal ever, or worst breakup ever? A little bit of both, actually. On the bright side, at least Jennifer has a car, and her date didn't steal it.

That's right, neo-Nazis, get out of my town!

A lamp that runs on human blood leads to a Romy that runs screaming from the room. Cool, but squicky…

When the zombies start coming after you, ditch the rural farmhouse for the shopping mall — an Italian study suggests that "random walkers" (i.e., mindless killing machines from BEYOND THE GRAVE) are less effective at eliminating their targets when the targets are holed up in a complex, maze-like structure. Not mentioned: the chances of surviving the zombie apocalypse just long enough to look out the window and be shot in the head by one of your live-human allies.

Raise your hand if you want to go on a centennial anniversary cruise retracing the Titanic's route across the Atlantic. No takers? Yeah, it does seem like tempting fate, doesn't it? Let's all stay home and read more bad Titanic poetry instead.

I'm not sure when this went up, but Fanfiction.net finally has a Dark City section — only six fics, and mostly slash at that, but six is better than zero.

Nobody bothered to tell me that Eleventh Hour was cancelled back in May, or that there are some rather odd plans for the DVD release, or that there was a small but fierce campaign to have it resurrected on another network. Not that the show was all that great, but I'll miss my weekly dose of Rufus Sewell.

From the Annals of Bad Parenting: making your kid ride in a box on top of your minivan; making your kids hike through the snow on Christmas; injecting your kids with your own saliva (?!?).

Everything is being outsourced to India now, even murder.