Michael Jackson dead at age 50.

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In continuing his lifelong pursuit to quantify the essence of the human spirit, Michael Bay has created a film that is both BOOM! KAPOW! BLOOOOSHE!!! yet literally bursting with the mechanized emotion for BLAMM!!! ZAPOW!!! HOT CHICK RIDING A MOTORCYCLE!! For the joyful glee of wanton nihilism expressed here as BAM! KABOOM!!! GIANT ROBOTS!!! MACHINE GUNS!! yet it is through this flaw in their dynamic that we see Shia LaBouef at his most ZOOOOOOOOOM!!! CAMARO!!! BLAAAAM!!! with the possible exception of Megan Fox, who for all her MINI SKIRT!!! CLEAVAGE ARRRGHH!! EXPLOOOOOOSION!!! for this dichotomy to work, and though there are certainly manifestations of her SLOOOO-MOOOOOOOO!!! KARATE ROBOT!!! BLOOOOOOOGGH!!! likable enough, however her ROBOT TURNING INTO A TRUCK!!! GRRRRRR-CRUSH!!! CRUSH!!! Michael Bay, mirroring his own BOOOM-POW!! EXPLOOOOOSIOOOOON!!!! ROBOT ROBOT BOOOM!!!! humanity isn’t enough; it serves as a greater metaphor for BLARRRRRRZZ-SPLOSION HOT CHICK!! ROBOT!!! FERRARI EXPLOSION!!! enough to know where machine ends, and human begins?

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Full disclosure: I’m a bit of a moron. My IQ hovers around the mid 80s depending on how much model glue I’ve been huffing, and I barely made it through a half semester of junior college before I was kicked out for stealing a vat of formaldehyde from the science lab so I could mummify a dead possum I’d found. Still my lack of cognitive skills does not excuse that fact that it took me over a week to put this together, because it should’ve been forehead-slappingly obvious from the get-go who the filmmakers have based their Jonah Hex character design on…

Yup. Fox News correspondent Greta Van Susteren. Just to be clear, Greta’s the one on the right.

To be fair to myself, it’s not like Greta’s on the brain 24/7; in fact I generally try to block her out of my mind altogether. I mean its tough enough sustaining an erection at my age, and weight (though I’m down to a slim 450 lbs. thanks to something called “bulimia”), without some neo-fascist, arthropod-worshipping screechy skeleton hovering around the recesses of my psyche. But it just so happens that I was at the gym the other day, where the TVs are — inexplicably — always tuned to Fox News as opposed to say ESPN (perhaps the folks at LA Fitness see me head for the treadmill and quickly change the channel – hoping the GOP’s propaganda network will raise my blood pressure — in an attempt to induce a stroke and free up the machine for more attractive clients). It was there that I caught a bit of Greta’s ranting and raving about her “outrage” regarding the “controversial” joke by David Letterman wherein he accurately described Sarah Palin’s daughter as a slutty baby-incubator who can’t keep her legs shut through the seventh inning stretch of a major league baseball game (specifically, Dave mused that Yankees superstar Alex Rodriguez had “knocked up” one of Governor Palin’s trailer-spawn on their recent trip to New York City).

And let me emphasize, Greta was outraged.

Until this point I’d been unaware that this was a controversy at all. This barb (they’re called that for a reason) came care of one of Dave’s typically innocuous opening monologues in which Letterman makes jokes at other people’s expense. That’s his job; and he’s been doing it adequately on national television for about thirty years. But while Dave may have been on the bleeding edge of comedy in the 1980s, back when he hosted Late Night for NBC (aka the Failure Network), his CBS show is only controversial when compared to reruns of Full House. And it’s not like Palin is even a “hot topic” anymore. So to quote Bugs Bunny: “What’s all the hubbub, bub?”

But let me re-emphasize, Greta was outraged.

Now normally I’d forgo the ad hominem attack, but since this was Fox News I was watching, and per their own modus operandi ad hominem attacks are intrinsic to “fair and balanced” news coverage: Why would Greta Van Susteren’s “outrage” mean anything to me, a somewhat rational human being, when her moral compass has been bent by a steadfast conviction that our bodies are inhabited by the souls of aliens who died in a nuclear blast thousands of years ago at the hands of an evil intergalactic space wizard named Xenu?

This is not conjecture; this is not satire; this is what she believes. THIS IS HER RELIGION, a religion contrived more or less on a whim by a paranoid-schizophrenic science fiction writer. Per the tenets of her belief system she’s also outraged by psychiatry, frowny faces and people who think Tom Cruise is gay. Hell — blueberry pancakes, Labrador retrievers and kettle whistles probably set her off too. But apparently Greta wasn’t alone in her outrage. There was a veritable army of humorless, literal-minded, right-wing-fringe lunatics out there who were similarly upset by Letterman’s joke, not the least of which being Sarah Palin herself.

Per the statement released on the Luv-Guv’s Facebook page (:-) LOL TMI ;-):

‘Laughter incited by sexually-perverted comments made by a 62-year-old male celebrity aimed at a 14-year-old girl is not only disgusting, but it reminds us some Hollywood/NY entertainers have a long way to go in understanding what the rest of America understands – that acceptance of inappropriate sexual comments about an underage girl, who could be anyone’s daughter, contributes to the atrociously high rate of sexual exploitation of minors by older men who use and abuse others.’

Ohhhh… kay… um, what?

First of all, who is the “rest of America” Palin is speaking for? Certainly not me, or anyone I know, or anyone with an IQ of 80 or above. Secondly: Fourteen? Really? Letterman didn’t specify WHICH Palin girl A-Rod had been slipping his A-Rod to, but common sense would tell you this joke was aimed at Palin’s famously fertile 18-year-old daughter Bristol. You know, the one who got mothered up out of wedlock, then kicked the bastard’s Skidoo-riding redneck daddy to the curb so she could embark on a whirlwind speaking tour — whoring lil’ oopsy and herself out to any TV talk show that would take them so she could share with the world the wellspring of knowledge she’d garnered from shooting a broken-rubber-baby out of her fetus-cannon? Yeah, that one. That’s the point of the joke. But apparently Bristol hadn’t accompanied the LuvGuv on her trip to Fancy Town, so Sarah jumped to the illogical conclusion that Dave’s joke was aimed at her 14-year-old but by no mean any less slutty daughter Willow. And that’s just WRONG, man. She’s like… FOURTEEN. 14-year-old girls don’t have consensual sex! Ever! (Though one whiff of my be-mulleted, high school freshman iteration’s index finger would’ve told you otherwise).

Palin’s equally vacuous husband Todd also released a statement, probably via Friendster because he’s a backwards rural hill-man:

‘Any ‘jokes’ about raping my 14-year-old are despicable. Alaskans know it and I believe the rest of the world knows it, too.’

Okay, now who the hell said anything about RAPE?? Let me make something perfectly clear: I am a connoisseur of rape jokes. I love them, they love me and sometimes, they are my bread and butter. So as much as I’d love for Letterman’s harmless one-liner to have been a rape joke, it just wasn’t. I know rape jokes, and that was no rape joke.

So where are the Palins getting this stuff? Read through their statements again. Or search YouTube for any one of the many, many, MANY interviews they’ve done since this “controversy” broke last week: It’s like sexual-perversion, rape and pedophilia are the sugar plums dancing in their heads. Am I the only one who finds this FUCKING CREEPY? Seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a feral JeanBenet Ramsey chained to a water boiler in the Palins’ basement. These people are FREAKS.

But the true motivation behind Sarah’s very public cries of outrage is pretty clear: Sarah Palin wants our attention. Nay, she NEEDS OUR attention. She is no different than those superficial non-humans on The Hills, or John and Kate and their eight little inbred demon-spawn. Once you give these idiots a taste of the spotlight they will stop at nothing to gorge themselves on more, like ravenous piggies gobbling up every crumb of their fleeting fame. Don’t think for second that this has anything to do with Sarah’s political aspirations. She’s a politician as much as she is a beauty contestant, or a TV weather girl. Politics for Sarah is just a means to an end, another route to achieve the fame and attention she so desperately craves, despite the fact that she has nothing to offer society in exchange for such notoriety – other than being an easy punch line.

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Per trade publication Variety, Dark Hero Studios’ David Hayter and Benedict Carver are teaming up with producer Bill Mechanic to adapt Image Comics’ Deadworld into a feature talkie. Deadworld, as the name implies, concerns a world overrun by zombies. The rub here however is that the zombies are sentient, or at least possessing the intelligence to hold a grudge against the planet’s few human survivors. Oh snap! Hayter, besides being the voice of Solid Snake in the Metal Gear games, recently scripted the Watchmen adaptation for Legendary/Warner Bros. Carver produced Neil Marshall’s post-apocalyptic pastiche Doomsday and Mechanic is currently changing the head gaskets on my Ford Taurus. But seriously – did you notice how each of their surnames suggests that they are doers-of-deeds? Hating, carving, changing head gaskets? There’s something to that, no? At least on the subconscious level I bet these guys are empowered by the fact that their surnames suggest they are men of action. Maybe I’d be more successful if my surname had been a verb made into a noun with the suffix “er.” Maybe I should change my name? I’m thinking… hmmmm… Raper.

But lest you think I’m skipping out on the opportunity to use this story as a springboard for a rant about zombies, rest assured that it begins right after the period at the end of this sentence. I’ve been hearing some chatter lately — mostly amongst hipster types, development execs, the folks at my AA meetings — that zombies are, per the colloquialism of idiots, “all done.” Or worse yet, that “vampires are the new zombies.” Meaning that zombies have oversaturated popular culture to the point that they’ve gone the way of dodos, Reeboks Freestyles, and the Republican party. And this sentiment is understandable. For a while it seemed like every week there was a new zombie picture going down the development River Styx. Remember Brad Pitt’s gazillion dollar bid for the rights to adapt Max Brooks’ (outstanding) novel World War Z? And of course there’s been a glut of ultra-low budget, straight to DVD zombie pics, but that’s ALWAYS been the case; zombie films are easy to make on the cheap. Then there’s the internet — stupid, stupid internet – where zombies have been unfairly lumped in with pirates and ninjas as the go-to post-modern references for unimaginative Maddox clones. But see, whereas pirates and ninjas are IRONICALLY cool, zombies are just cool. And by cool I mean (per the parlance of my 8th grade New Englander iteration) wicked fuckin’ cool. In fact, if it is even possible to quantify “cool” (which I believe it is) zombies might well be the “coolest” things ever. Which means, unlike Fonzie (who in actuality was only somewhat cool), they are immune to pop culture shark-jumpage. THEY ARE THE FUCKING UNDEAD. And you can’t kill what’s already dead.

But even if one is to discount my theory of their shark-jumping auto-immunity, there’s simply no real evidence of zombies oversaturation, at least in cinema. Name all the zombie movies that have come out this year. I don’t mean your cousin’s shot-on-video zombie piss take that he screened at his junior college’s “film fest,” I mean actual zombie films with actual distribution. Okay, after you’re done counting to zero, name all the zombie films that came out LAST year. You might be able to pull a few limited releases out of your ass, like say Jenna Jameson’s Zombie Strippers. And while that film was not a blockbuster by any means, it did perform WAY above expectations. Which brings up another point: zombie films almost ALWAYS exceed expectations. Slasher films — especially reboots/remakes of 1980s slasher films — crash and burn as much as they succeed. And PG13 Asian style “ghost” movies lack the requisite gore for today’s discerning horror junky. But zombies don’t lack for anything in that department; they are WALKING gore. So where are all these fucking zombie movies that we’re supposedly being inundated with? And don’t say Japan, because Japan’s love for zombies is PURE and TRUE. I’d never be having this discussion in Japan (mostly because I’d be too busy masturbating into soiled schoolgirl panties purchased from vending machines).

The hype is an illusion. Or more accurately, the over-hype is an illusion. Zombies transcend the zeitgeist. They are woven into the collective unconscious. Yet it is for this very reason that (I theorize anyway) all those zombie projects you read about going into development never get made. Zombies terrify the very people charged with making zombie movies. As good as the idea seems on paper, the average studio exec would rather spend a year of their life working on something that doesn’t give them night terrors – something like Bride Wars (you know, something that gives ME night terrors). Zombies evoke feelings of genuine dread. As improbable as zombies rising from the grave might seem, there’s something very real about this scenario. Vampires and ghosts come off as fantasy; and especially in the case of the former, there’s something romantic about them. But there’s nothing romantic about zombies. Chubby goth girls don’t crank up the Bauhaus and diddle themselves to fantasies of a zombified Peter Murphy coming through the bedroom window and biting them on the neck. That shit’s just creepy. Which is why – for horror films – zombies work so well.

If anything the world needs more zombie movies, not less. So enough of this “zombies are all done” business. Try as you might, you soulless culturistas can’t kill my love for zombies, not even with a head-shot.

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