BILL LAMBERT
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Tuesday, October 20. 2009
Zombieland
| A virus born of bad hamburger infects the vast majority of mankind, turning them into crazed killers with a rabid craving for human flesh. There are only two kinds of people left in the world: roaming gangs of zombies with the super-munchies, and those who kill them--the remaining few who, by dumb luck or well-honed combat skills, have avoided the disease.
If your taste in film includes the living dead slurping down sinewy human sashimi, then Zombieland might be just your kind of sick diversion. After a while, killing zombies gets to be wicked fun--their heads get crushed by SUV's and pianos, their limbs torn off and skulls splattered by high-power weapons fire. There's nothing to like about them... friggin' zombies. We enjoy watching zombies meet their ex-maker with a total lack of empathy, pity or remorse. As more blood flows and more gore globs, the laughter rises. You know what's going to happen, but that won't stop you from getting into this fast-paced chronicle of the great zombie genocide. |
If it weren't for Harrelson's and Murray's big tickets, Zombieland would have cost about $19.99 plus a case of red food dye to produce. |
Nerdy OCD college student 'Columbus', portrayed by Adventureland's Jesse Eisenberg, religiously observes a self-made set of rules that keep him alive: No. 6, for instance; Always check the back of the car; No.14 - Avoid public restrooms, etc. Making his way from college in Austin back east to his namesake hometown in Ohio, he hooks up with Tallahassee, cowboy zombie executioner par-excellance, who reluctantly allows the kid tag along.
As Tallahassee, Woody Harrelson resurrects his murderous character from Natural Born Killers, dealing out a double-deck of zombie death wearing his trademark pasted-on impish smirk. This role seemed remade for him.
"Mama always said someday I would be good at something.
Who would have thought it would be killing zombies?"
Now, even the best Zombie-killing buddy flick can be a drag without enough cool chicks to go around and a healthy dose of tight-jeans T & A. While Tallahassee obsessively rummages through what little remains of America in search of Hostess Twinkies, the boys meet up with the grifting sisters Wichita and Little Rock, who promptly relieve them of their hopped-up Escalade, their pride and their weapons. Of course Tallahassee and Columbus eventually chase down the girls, and after mutual mistrust melts away and a romance begins to blossom between Columbus and Wichita, they all head off for the left coast to take young teener Little Rock to the California theme park she loves so much.
There's not much more to be said about the story, which got started late and never really ended before the credits rolled. I smell a rotting-gut sequel.
I downgraded my rating half a Buddha because, after the four arrive in Lalaland, they kill Bill Murray. You just can't kill Bill Murray and expect to get away with it.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5.0 exceedingly grossed-out
Fat Laughing Golden Buddhas
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Wednesday, October 14. 2009
Oh! Canada...
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The last time I made the trek up to Halifax, Nova Scotia, was more than half a long lifetime ago. Don't remember much, except for endless stretches of gorgeous desolation throughout most of New Brunswick into the western part of Nova Scotia, plus way friendly folks the few times I accidentally happened to bump into one.
This time around we managed to hit leaf-peeping prime-time all the way up through Maine and the Maritimes. A new postcard vista greeted us over the crest of every hill, while countless rivers and streams crisscrossed the highway, running fast, deep and beautiful, filled with the autumn rain.
Nature freakin' rules.
So, Eastern Canada turned out to be much the same as I recall through the fog of 36 years, at least outside the few and far between smallish cities. Urban and suburban areas have grown considerably, unfortunately, taking on that hideous American fright mask of chained food and shackled marketing: Walmart, Staples, Home Depot, Target, and all that crap, generously peppered with a shaker full of cheap-ass chain hotels, mega-markets and video stores.
Inevitable, I suppose... though disconcerting. The main detail of difference between Fredericton, NB, and Nashua, NH is the license plates... just replace all the Dunkin Donut shops with Tim Horton's, the Canadian equivalent.
The same US-made commercial ugly stick will beat a garish neon bruise on places like Mogadishu, Papua, New Guinea, and Chad someday, the way things are going.
Too bad for Chad, but The Way of the World.
Our main purpose was a scouting trip; the resident high school senior has more than a little interest in continuing her education in Halifax, at either St. Mary's or Dalhousie University. It was worth a trip to see if this was place she could survive... to get a feel for of the schools and the students, the neighborhoods and the city.
Turns out Halifax is way neat--unique in many ways, still quaint and quirky. Except for scale, the city is much like Boston/Cambridge, with the seaport, the many universities and hospitals and the tourism trade dominating. It's a nice blend of the old and modern, well-cleaned and well-kept. (Even the homeless panhandlers were clean, much better dressed than half the customers at Market Basket in Nashua.)
My former little girl said she had set no particular expectations on Halifax or either college before we headed up there. She ended up impressed, as were we, with both the St. Mary's and Dalhousie campus facilities and the general city scene.
I wouldn't mind going to school up there myself.
Women--even young ones--often change their mind, I'm told (ahem). The kid may not end up in Halifax, but I liked her approach at evaluating things and discovered she did a lot more pre-trip research than I believed going in.
Good job on the kid.
All in all, an excellent trip. We all enjoyed the long weekend, including the resident terrier/baby surrogate Lylaboo, good as gold and no trouble at all during the entire trip. We might have done without the two nights we had to stop over in Fredericton, one on the way up and one on the way back, but Jesus, you have to sleep somewhere.
Total drive time from Saturday noon to Tuesday evening, including side trips, about 26 - 27 hrs. Gas: around $200 for my fuel-hungry VW Touareg.
Make sure to top up before you hit the Canadian border.
Monday, October 5. 2009
Signs of the Season
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| Autumn has arrived with two sure signs.
First, the ivy climbing toward the peaks of many of the tall, spindly ash trees that ring our yard has gone scarlet, one of the better years for color. Secondly, the Boston Red Sox make their way into the American League playoffs once again, making 2009 the sixth out of the last seven years; their two Wold Series wins achieved when they enter the end-of-the-year sweepstakes as the wild card entry, as this year. Before you know it, people will be putting out pumpkins, dressing like denizens of Zombieland and riding Duck Boats around the common. |
"In Theo We Trust..." |
Monday, September 21. 2009
More On Healthcare
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In my most recent blog entry, I tried to emphasize the inequities inherent in our current healthcare system. At the time I wrote that, I knew I lacked hard research data, no doubt weakening my case.
An article in the Boston Globe this past week cited a Cambridge Health Alliance report that appeared in the American Journal of Public Health: a study that followed 9,005 adults under 65 years old who took part in a national survey conducted from 1986 through 1994 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After 12 years, 351 people had died. Sixty of them were uninsured and 291 were insured.
I'll quote from the article...
Co-author of the CHA paper, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, noted in an interview that being uninsured is more lethal relative to being insured than it was 20 years ago, due to advances in treatment and prevention.
Even I didn't think the difference in mortality rate would be that startling... shocking, really. That means that lives lost due to lack of quality healthcare will exceed lives lost by american forces in the Vietnam War in about 15 months, and the Iraq war in about three and a half weeks.
Another Globe article Thursday reported on their recent survey of the commonwealth's major health insurance providers and the prospects of upcoming rate increases. Anticipated increases ranged from 7 to 12 percent, capping a decade of consecutive double-digit premium increases. Rates for 2010 will depend on the size of the employer and the type of coverage, but small businesses and individuals are expected to be hit the hardest.
The Globe claimed that, overall, premiums are more than twice as high as they were 10 years ago, but if the writer were familiar with the back-of-the-envelop "rule of 72", 10 years of at least ten percent increases gets you closer to a mind-numbing 150% boost. Massachusetts insurance costs are higher than most states, but the average cost of a family plan will be around $14,000 next year, with those insured through their employer footing around two-thirds of the bill.
An annual tariff of $14,000 is roughly double what an employee making $50K and her company will shell out for the twin payroll taxes, SS and Medicare.
These two trends are what the real healthcare crisis is all about. Private healthcare insurance is rapidly becoming beyond the means of the majority, and people will die because of it.
After accounting for age, education, income, and other factors, the researchers found that people without private insurance had a 40 percent higher risk of dying than people with private insurance. An earlier study by the Institute of Medicine based on 16 years of data through 1993 found that uninsured people had a 25 percent higher risk of dying than insured people, which translated into 18,000 additional deaths.
Wednesday, September 9. 2009
A Question of Equality
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For all but the last few ticks on the human time clock, the quality of healthcare or medical care mattered little. If someone developed a serious affliction or became critically injured, in all likelihood they were headed toward their rapid end. Indian or chief, royal or rube, you were lucky if your medical practitioner knew enough not to clean open wounds with river water, didn’t administer killing amounts of mercury or arsenic or blood-let you to death, not to mention passing on to you some nasty, lethal infection.
The threat of serious illness or death has always been the great equalizer. The high-born and the rich never fared much better than anyone else, and no amount of wordly goods could save you.
The modernization of medical care accelerated rapidly only during the mid 19th-Century. In one of the cornerstone achievements of mankind--along with the widespread use of fire, writing and the exodus of out Africa--we began to observe, discover and understand the things smaller than we could observe with the naked eye: our building blocks, our essence. Discovery of this micro-world drove development in the three basic sciences of modern medicine: biology, chemistry, and physics, and fueled the modern medical revolution.
Barely a-hundred-and-fifty years removed from the childhood of modern medicine, the average life expectancy has roughly doubled in areas with access to modern healthcare. The availability of quality prenatal care is the single largest factor in raising the live birth rate and reducing infant and early childhood mortality.
What could be more basic to, “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness...”, than our health and longevity? Denial of healthcare or pricing it beyond the means of many essentially shortens the lives of those left out.
This is a statistical no brainer, really. If you have health care, on average you live longer than those who don’t.
A new kind of inequality suddenly appears, a direct result of our misplaced, market-based system: some of us will have a right to expect a longer, better quality life; many of us will not.
Only the federal government can remedy this inequality by assuring health care access for every citizen, every indian and every chief.
I look on those who would deny universal healthcare access with pity. What kind of folks would deny their fellow citizens an equal chance at life as a political statement or to maintain their profits.
We should take the model of our one true socialized governmental function: defense and security. We aren’t left to hiring our own police or private armies to keep us safe. Since national defense and local laws apply to everyone, it is much more effective and better managed through the public sector, supported by our taxes.
Healthcare, so basic to our freedom and a core issue for every citizen, from every walk of life, demands the same level of national effort and attention.
Tuesday, August 11. 2009
Tom Terrific Returns
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My son Mark and his wife Catherine are home from Virginia for ten days or so. Since they're both big sports fans, on Monday I'd thought we could take a ride down to Foxboro and see one of the open practice sessions at Patriots training camp. Turns out Mark hadn't been to the new stadium yet. I haven't been there since they started surrounding the place with enormous shopping malls. It's impressively, massively tacky around there now... too little green and way too much asphalt. The practice session, was way cool. Though the afternoon was hot and humid, there was a nice breeze to tone it down and the clouds gathering by the time we arrived eventually gave way to blue sky. I'd guess there were somewhere around 1,000 to 1,500 fans and media watching from the small stadium set-up and grassy knoll surrounding the twin practice fields behind Gillette Stadium. The big question this year, of course, is the health and recovery prognosis of Tom Brady after last season's knee surgery. Tom, the best quarterback on the planet, sure seemed like his bad ol' se'f during the passing drills. |
To help Tom get through a very difficult off-season rehabilitation regimen, every morning Gisele took a break from writing her thesis on alternative fuel sources for inter-stellar travel to make breakfast: a pair of soft-boiled eggs which she would then secrete somewhere on her person and force Tom to hunt them down and consume them while hand-cuffed and blindfolded. |
Number 12 was one of the last players on the field; easy to spot in his red practice jersey as every eye went to him. The Pats have four QB's on the roster at this stage: Brady, Mike O'Connell, Andrew Walter, a free-agent cut by Oakland, and rookie Brent Hoyer. To begin practice, the four alternated throwing sideline passes to the running backs. Though Walter can really wing the ball, it was easy to see why Brady is Brady. Hard throws with perfect timing and on the money, time after time.
Effortless... Tom somehow makes it all look easy. Attitude has a lot to do with it, and if Tom has lost even an ounce of confidence with that season-ending injury, you'd never know it. His teammates love him, gravitate to him. At the end of the 90-minute practice, Tom was standing in the middle of a group huddle, screaming at the top of his lungs and pumping his fists. I think Tom will be back, and so will Mr. Lombardi.
I was disappointed Randy Moss and Wes Welker were held out from the afternoon practice. I really wanted to see Randy doing his thing close up. I was also impressed by young Brandon Merriweather, who came to the sidelines after practice to sign autographs. The way he spoke with the fans, he just seemed like a great kid... a great kid who happens to hit like a ton of bricks, mind you.
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