My Favorite Zombie Movies and the Things I Like About Them

10. Return of the Living Dead - "Brains!" followed by head biting.

9. Undead - A fisherman catches a zombie fish which proceeds to fly into the air and bite him.

8. Resident Evil - The part where the group leaves an infected member alone with one bullet, presumably for himself. The camera pans away, we hear zombies approach, and then a single gunshot. Cut back to the infected man and he's just shot a zombie in the head and is fighting them off, despite his inevitable death.

7. Planet Terror - Helicopter blades chopping up a pack of zombies. Also, the line "Don't cry over spilled milk," as said to Rose McGowan's character after she's just lost a leg and is coming to terms with it.

6. Zombi 2 - The zombie buffet. Zombie vs. Shark.

5. Dawn of the Dead (2003) - Zombie baby.

4. Doomsday - The security system blowing up a bunny rabbit. The evil villain getting splashed with zombie blood, licking it off of his face without realizing it, and getting zombified. Knights. Cannibals. The chase scene lifted directly from Road Warrior.

3. 28 Weeks Later - Helicopter blades chopping up a pack of zombies. (It made up for the zombie kiss and gratuitous eye-gouging.)

2. Dead Alive - Zombie baby. "I kick arse for the Lord!" A lawnmower used as a weapon. Stop-motion animation.

1. Shaun of the Dead - Everything.

My Magnificent Karaoke Career In Reverse Chronological Order

#4 - From a Distance (Bette Midler)
[Duet w/ Matt Simon]

#3 - Tainted Love (Soft Cell)

#2 - Flowers on the Wall (The Statler Brothers)
[Duet w/ Matthew Gish]

#1 - Loser (Beck)

Business as Usual

1.

Our school gave benchmark exams on Tuesday. The tests were 84 questions long, in order to mirror the EOC (End of Course) tests. Someone forgot that the EOC tests were three hours long, while class periods are 90 minutes. The solution? Set aside all of Thursday and Friday to allow the students to retest... with the exact same tests they took the first time. This was done to ensure that we have valid data to present to the district.

2.

At our PTA meeting last night, there were local nurses available to give free health screenings. They were testing body fat, cholesterol, and blood sugar. A speaker gave a short presentation on healthy eating and exercise. Then the principal took the stage to thank the speaker and invite all that were present to enjoy the large selection of cakes, pies, and other desserts that everyone had brought as refreshments.

3.

We had an odd number of students in chess club this morning, so I tore up freshmen for half an hour. I do not ever intend to let them win.

Sorry...

... but this is the inevitable fate of every website or online journal that I create. Usually they come back with a little spark of life every few months before they die out, but I'm not making any promises.

Dharma Wants You

For anyone who's interested, I'm volunteering with the Dharma Initiative this fall and have created a test to assess basic temporal reasoning.

Take it here.

Year 2, Semester 1, Week 1

This week was incredibly busy for a number of reasons, as is every first week of school. The first day of school is always the worst, for both teachers and students. Students are understandably nervous about their new classes, new teachers, new classmates, and in our case, a new principal and an entirely new system of schoolwide policies. I find the first days to be the most awkward because there are so many things you don't want to teach but have to in order to establish any sense of order later on in the year. Nobody likes going over the syllabus or the class rules, but it just has to be done. There's really no way to make it interesting though, no matter how hard you try.

I always try to do something to grab the students' attention, even if it's just for a minute or two at the end, and even if it's only vaguely related to science. One demo involves taking a bite out of a “candle” made out of string cheese with an almond wick (which lights up just like a real wick), and talking about the need for careful observation in science. The other demo involves making a mixture with acetone and water which, when poured on a dollar bill and lit, will engulf it in flames without actually burning it. That one's a little more of a stretch to relate to class, but the students never seem to mind.

My physics class is great so far. There are only seven students, and I know about half of them pretty well from last year. A couple of them were in my Earth Science class last fall, and were some of the top students. All of them are really excited to be taking physics, and have already asked if we can have an “advanced topics in physics” class next year if they all pass the state test their first semester. Our first week was spent building up our “physics toolkits,” which means making sure everyone has practiced the necessary math skills, knows how to graph and interpret data, and has basic lab skills. We've done two labs so far: one finding the density of several objects and relating it to floating coke cans (diet coke floats and coke sinks), and one testing what factors influence the period of a pendulum (exciting to physics people because it can potentially be used to find the acceleration due to earth's gravity).

Physical Science is good overall. My first period class is a little quiet, but we're working on getting people to talk. Whenever I ask questions or for someone to offer an idea, everyone just stays silent and looks at me like I'm going to get uncomfortable and give in without calling on them (I don't). By the end of the week things were a little better. I think it's because they're all sophomores and spent last year in a sectioned off part of the building for the school's STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) charter initiative. They're integrating all of the STEM students into the high school this year while still supposedly keeping them in the STEM program, so they're essentially like freshman as far as the juniors and seniors are concerned. The STEM students though seem a little intimidated by the chaos of the school as a whole.

Fourth period physical science is a larger class, and usually has a little more energy, which is good, most of the time, provided there isn't too much. The students range from 10th to 12th grade, and their abilities span the entire spectrum from EC (“exceptional children” - the new term for special education) to close to gifted. They're doing well though, and I'm better able to differentiate their assignments now that I know how to do it. Also, not dealing with chronic behavior problems helps. We haven't run into any of those yet, and are hoping not to. I thought it was going to be my toughest class to win over, but it's actually going very well so far, and the kids seem to be enjoying the work and have been completing massive amounts of homework so far (which is something I've never had happen before, even in physics).

I still have lots of energy from the summer, and I've been getting to bed early so that I'm actually able to get things done during the day. I'm sure that as the semester goes on I'll start staying up later and putting things off, but for now it feels good to be effective and efficient.

For the most part, the other TFA teachers seemed to do really well. There were a few problems with discipline, but overall, things seem to be headed in the right direction. The one exception was our biology teacher. She had been having difficulties from day one, but was asking for advice on how to improve and implementing it the next day. The trouble was, when something didn't immediately work for her, she'd get frustrated and try something else. To be absolutely realistic, things aren't going to go perfectly in your first few weeks of teaching. (Actually, if they're going even moderately well, you're lucky.) I was encouraged by the fact that she kept reaching out for help, but somewhat worried by the fact that she was so frustrated and impatient with her students. Friday afternoon we talked about solutions at lunch, and she said something to the effect of “I've had enough and don't want to come back next week.” I knew this wasn't just the frustration talking, and planned to sit down with her and Ms. Rosenberg (our 3rd year TFA English teacher) after school and talk her through it.

Apparently after school was too late, because when I went across the hall to her room, our human resources director and principal were speaking with her and she had signed a letter of resignation. It's hard for me to comprehend exactly what went wrong – whether things were genuinely so bad as to drive her away, or if she just “didn't like teaching,” (her own words) and made an extremely selfish decision without considering its broader implications.

Teach for America has a very spotty record in Weldon over the past few years. 2006 was the first year they placed teachers in the district in over a decade, and that year three out of the six teachers quit mid-year, for a number of reasons. Last year we lost three additional TFA teachers mid-year, bringing our attrition to over 50%. It's not that Weldon schools are harder to teach in than any of the surrounding schools – it's just that we have had very bad luck. At this point, having a TFA teacher quit reflects poorly on the organization as well as on the other TFA teachers still teaching in the system. We worked very hard last year to give the organization a good name, and it's really frustrating when the snap decisions made by one person set us back so far. More importantly is the impact it has on the students, who are now left without a teacher in a state-tested subject that they are required to take to graduate. I may be teaching Biology next week, like it or not.

I'm really confident that the other TFA teachers will do well though. They're incredibly grounded and remain optimistic, even when things aren't going well. Many of their students were in my classes last year, so I know from experience that they've got some challenges ahead of them. Regardless, they seem to be approaching things exactly how they should, and having a stricter schoolwide discipline system in place helps immensely.

Our football team scored its second win of the year this week, this time against rivals Roanoke Rapids (who make up the “district-within-a-district” that's a result of the gerrymandering that went on several decades ago). The score was 40-22, and even though the coaches said they were playing sloppily, that's still a pretty solid win.

Year 2, Semester 1, Week 0

Today marks the day before school starts, and despite all the planning, meetings, and back-to-school events, it really hasn't sunk in yet. Then again, it never really does until I'm in my classroom with twenty or more kids in my homeroom class staring at me. Or, more likely talking and running around the class.

We started off our workdays on Tuesday with the district's convocation ceremony, which is a mix of standard welcome-back speeches and southern baptist hands-in-the-air, can-I-get-an-amen preaching. The separation of church and state doesn't exist in our district, and is only sometimes acknowledged with an “I know I'm not supposed to say this, but...” followed by either a prayer or a sermon. The church is such an important part of the community, nobody even thinks twice about it. Still, it was a little different this year, since I knew what to expect. The convocation was followed by lunch – which, of course, was fried chicken, green beans with bacon, potato salad, and sweet tea – the same thing we've had at every social gathering thus far.

There have been a lot of changes in Weldon High since last spring, the most notable being the a completely new administration. Our new principal, Mr. Dixon, has lots of ideas in mind, most of which I'm willing to support. He's emphasized beautification of the school and has managed to do a surprising amount in the short time he's been here. Last year's philosophy seemed to be “the worse the building looks, the more likely we are to get a new one,” whereas now it's more along the lines of “let's do the best with what we have.” We now have a large school logo on the sidewalk in front of the entrance, freshly pained walls in almost all of the hallways, and new paint and furniture in many of the classrooms (which means the decade or so of graffiti is now gone). We also have a school-wide discipline system in place, which is going to be a struggle to implement consistently. Thankfully he's backed it up with a slew of positive incentives (for students and staff), but there's going to be lots of limit-testing going on in the first few days. Regardless of it's effectiveness, it's better than the system we had last spring, which essentially had two options: “handle it in your classroom” or “get a student suspended for three days.” We now have an Immediate Recovery Room (which collapses nicely into the hard-to-pronounce-without-sounding-silly acronym IRR) where students can be sent if they're disrupting your class, but not so severely that they need to be suspended. I was skeptical at first, but I'm impressed with how much has been accomplished in such a short time. I'm hoping that the changes aren't just cosmetic and that they last past the first few weeks of school.

We also were fortunate enough to get four new Teach for America recruits, all of whom we felt very positively about during their interviews last June. Two of them are replacing the old science teachers, pushing me to the position of department chair. Essentially, this just means that I get to sacrifice a few afternoons a month going to additional meetings. I've heard rumors that we're paid an additional stipend, but I've also heard rumor that the district isn't that careful about allocating funds to pay it. We also have a new history teacher, who's taking the place of TFA's last ill-fated attempt, and a new English teacher who'll be teaching freshman.

With the new teachers have come lots of struggles to find places to put them. Our school was assessed by the state last year to determine whether we needed a new building and someone determined that we were “not taking full advantage of the space.” I imagine this means that we didn't have teachers teaching in kitchens and closets, and now that we've corrected this problem, I'm hoping they'll revise their original judgment. Our new TFA history teacher, Mr. Allen, is floating between classrooms, and is being abnormally gracious and resilient about it. He's also taken very nicely to his cart (he is planning on naming it and dressing it up in costumes according to the period of history he's currently teaching), and remains unflinchingly optimistic. His other option was to teach in the kitchen, which may have offered some stability, but at the expense of throwing ovens, washing machines and fridges into the mix of possible things students might misuse.

I had been hoping for a new classroom, and had seemingly confirmed it with the new principal at our beginning of the year meeting. When I showed up for workdays, another new teacher had apparently “claimed it,” and was violently refusing to move. (I later found out that she reserved it for herself by placing a few markers in the desk drawer.) I wasn't aware that we had resorted to clandestinely marking our territory, and I foolishly assumed that the room assignments would come from the administration. Apparently not. Returning to my old room has been a blessing in disguise though. I left it extremely clean when I left for the year, and have managed to make it look a lot more inviting than it was last year. It's no longer like a prison classroom and doesn't look as institutional as it did. I now have a vocabulary wall, a small lending library (which may or may not get used by anyone other than me) and bulletin boards that aren't quite as bare as they used to be. The lights are still pretty dim, but I'm willing to work with it. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that it looks as good in two weeks once the kids have come back.

It's hard to say exactly what my classes will look like yet, other than that I'll be teaching one section of physics and two of physical science (an easy version of physics and chemistry for the lower grades). The district's internet servers went down today, which means that the online scheduling software they use to create the rosters has been unavailable. I'm just hoping that I have my rosters before my classes actually start. If not, I'm not too concerned – it would take something on the scale of a natural disaster to phase me after all the schedule changes and shifts that I went through last spring semester. Still, it would be nice to know exactly how many students I have to squeeze into my room. If it's more than 24, they'll have to double up in their seats.

I did get to meet the parents of several of my physics students during Thursday night's open house. All of them are extremely supportive and happy that their students are able to take physics. I didn't get a chance to meet any physical science parents, but that may have been because the rosters didn't exist at the time. The turnout for the open house was incredible. It's likely just because of wariness and curiosity surrounding the new principal, but having so many parents show up that they're literally spilling out the doors of the cafetorium is great, regardless of the reason. (Cafetorium, by the way, was a portmanteau coined by our principal last year.) I was expecting approximately three parents to show up, as was the case last year, but instead the hallways were packed for nearly the entire duration of the night. I'm not sure that involvement will remain as high throughout the year, but it's good to be off to such a good start.

Attendance wasn't quite so high at the Friday night football game, presumably because we were anticipating an easy win against KIPP Pride, the local charter school (which focuses on academics over athletics). I didn't stay for the whole game, but at halftime the score was 60-20 in our favor. Football games are always fun, and every student at the game inevitably notices you and lets you know they saw you the next day in school.

I'm getting used to lesson planning again, and falling into the routines, and I think it's shaping up to be a good year so far.

15 Years of Progress

I wanted to take full advantage of my last few days of summer, so I've been playing some video games. I just recently beat God of War, and it wasn't until after I finished it that I realized exactly what made me like the game. For the uninitiated, God of War is a game set in ancient Greece in which you take the role of a spartan warrior and kill essentially everything in Greek mythology. It has the vaguest hint of a story, but it doesn't let this get in the way of the main focus, which is the battles.

The first boss in God of War is a hydra, which you first encounter inside a wrecked ship. See the attached video: here .

I woke up the other morning and was lying in bed when it occurred to me that this boss was essentially the same one I fought years ago in a nintendo game called StarTropics. Video footage can be found here: here .

The more I thought about it, the more similarities I noticed. The weapons are essentially the same - Mike in StarTropics uses a yo-yo (yes, a yo-yo), and Kratos in God of War has knives on magic chains that make them act essentially like really dangerous yo-yos. The gameplay is the same: run around caves and ancient temples, fight monsters, collect powerups that incrementally level up your weapons and abilities, solve puzzles occasionally, and fight big monster bosses. Add Greek mythology and lots of blood to StarTropics, and you'd have the 8-bit God of War.

Maybe it's just that I haven't seriously played any console games since the SNES, but there were just so many similarities that it felt a little weird to me. I'm sure these are just standard gameplay techniques that have been upgraded to fit the technology of newer consoles. Still, to realize that I'd just played a new game with the gameplay of something fifteen years old made me wonder exactly how much innovation there's been that wasn't simply cosmetic.

Body Horror

As a fan of horror stories and horror movies, I've seen a lot of scary stuff. But after a while, some things just aren't scary anymore. I've seen enough mainstream horror films to be able to predict when something is going to jump out and say “boo,” and things like vampires and werewolves are becoming so familiar that they're increasingly common as heroes rather than villains (e.g. Underwold, Blade, the “Twilight” series of young adult novels, anything by Anne Rice - the list goes on and on).

Fundamentally, the reason I like horror stories is because I like being scared. As a kid, I'd watch horror films every Saturday afternoon on a feature some network called “Nightmare Theater.” Most of the time it scared me for days afterward, yet I kept coming back. Nowadays, I laugh at most of the corny movies that gave me nightmares as a kid, but it seems to me that while monsters and creatures of the supernatural lose their power with age and the onset of rationality, certain things remain frightening. There are fundamental things that everyone is scared of – archetypes of horror, so to speak.

I started making my way steadily through Clive Barker's fiction sometime last year, and found it was exactly what I was looking for in horror: something genuinely disturbing that didn't resort to cheap shock tactics (most of the time, anyway). One of Barker's recurring themes is the horror that comes from the disfigurement or transformation of the human form. Barker extends this beyond the simple horror of injury and gleefully mutates his characters into a number of grotesque oddities. Even being aware of the fact that he was doing this while I was reading, it's the kind of thing that managed to creep me out almost every single time.

It's easy to dismiss supernatural monsters as being make-believe, but nobody really gets over the fact that they rely on their physical body (and processes within that are largely out of their control) to remain alive. Whether it's a subconscious fear or not, Barker has no qualms about bringing it to the surface and taking it to extremes. Sure, imagining your hand revolting and trying to kill you (“The Body Politic”) is a bit of a stretch, but what's cancer except the body killing itself slowly? Everyone, even if it just comes from getting chicken pox as a kid, has to grapple with this issue at some level during their lives.

Furthermore, Barker draws upon the similarity of our physical form to that of our evolutionary ancestors to remind us that we have only recently become “civilized,” and that unbridled barbarism is just a step backwards. Whether it's a frightening portrayal of an orangutan become human (“New Murders in the Rue Morgue”), a trinity of reptilian, avian, and mammalian beasts merging in an accelerated evolution (“The Inhuman Condition”), or a criminal's soul that has fled into the body of a hog (“Pig Blood Blues”), we're constantly reminded that the line between man and beast is one that we have drawn arbitrarily.

It's stuff that's innately repellent, but fascinating to me when examined at a deeper level.

Body Horror on Wikipedia

First Post

I think people generally try to justify the existence of their blogs the first time they post, but I don't really have a reason for starting this thing other than that I'm bored and I like to procrastinate. Also, just to get this out of the way, I hate the word “blog.”

The past couple of weeks have allowed me to do pretty much nothing of importance aside from a couple of days spent collaborating with some other physics people in preparation for next semester's class. I did have a great dream last night though. It was one of those dreams where you wake up and feel like you've accomplished something of extreme importance or done something really significant. This time, I saved the president.

I was head of the secret service, and found myself in the oval office with the president and vice president. Neither were actual presidents, just people who looked vaguely presidential, like something you'd see in a movie.

“Clearly the threat is of no importance,” the vice president said. As I looked at him, I saw a black shadow surround his figure and his eyes glow a faint red. Clearly this man was not to be trusted.

“We need to evacuate now,” the president screamed as he pounded his fist on the desk.

“You're right Mr. President,” I replied. “We've no more time to waste.” I grabbed him by the arm and hustled him up a staircase to the roof.

I looked to the sky and saw the trail of an incoming missile. It was headed straight for the White House. “It's approaching quickly, sir! We'll have to hurry,” I shouted. Thankfully, a helicopter was waiting for us. We jumped into the tiny cockpit.

“Get this thing in the air, now!” I shouted at the pilot as he struggled with the controls. The blades of the helicopter spun slowly, and the helicopter moved horizontally towards the edge of the roof.

“We can't take off! If we move off the edge, we'll fall and crash! It takes 0.14 seconds once we leave solid ground before we can get into the air.”

I made a quick calculation in my head. “That's exactly how long we'll have in free fall. Get this thing moving.” I grabbed the controls from the timid pilot and drove the helicopter off the roof. We lurched downward and I glanced out of the door to see the ground quickly approaching. My faith in physics outweighed any fear I felt, but did nothing to stifle the screams of the cowardly pilot. Just as we were about to crash, the helicopter soared upward above D.C.. I saw the incoming missile streak underneath us and fly directly into the oval office's window. The whole building exploded in an immense ball of fire, taking the treacherous vice president straight to hell.

“I suppose I should thank you,” the president said to me.

“There's no need sir,” I replied. “It's all in a day's work.”

THE END