Why I Hate Mail Order Companies

I ordered an "Atom Smasher" from Radio Shack, and when it came in the post, it was smashed. It was a Van der Graaf-type kind of a static collector that was a rubber band belt that passed between an electromagnet and which collect these magic particles in an aluminum sphere, which was not anywhere near round from the trip through the mail. I returned it to Radio Shack for a miniature tape recorder of the same value, but I never heard from Radio Shack again. There was an advert on the inside back cover of a comic book, "10,000 Firecrackers for $7.95!" that caught my attention, so I sent $7.95, and forgot about it. Some months later, I got a card from the railway off that there was a package for me. It was a big crate full of firecrackers, from Lady Fingers to 1 7/8" firecrackers. Evidently, 2" firecrackers were in a different class of pyrotechnics. I had firecrackers for two years! I took some to summer camp and sold them for a quarter apiece and made my money back, too.

Ah man, the only thing they're good for is sea-monkeys. I think they used to sell "teacup monkeys" and baby raccoons back in the early sixties, but we have laws against that type of thing nowadays. You can't just go jamming a baby spider monkey into a small box for weeks as it gets shipped to some random kid in Peoria by US mail. You should have totally gone with American Science & Surplus: it's like the Island of Misfit Toys but with misprinted lab equipment, astronomy books that fail to mention Venus and Neptune, three-sided die, and enough random kitbash electronic components to actually build that atomic death ray.

AS&S has my heartfelt endorsement for people who don't actually care what shows up on their doorstep. While the rest of my friends were wasting their allowance on Jurassic park action figures and ice-cream I was rummaging through my new mystery box trying to a). figure out what most of the stuff was, b). figure out how it worked without destroying it, and c).figure out what the hell I was going to do with my new magnetron*. In my later childhood not a month went by where I wasn't getting some sort of crap from AS&S.

*Okay, I think the magnetron came from a neighbor's old microwave and I know all the mercury switches were ripped from all my friends' parent's thermostats (multiple times), but AS&S still rocks.

Maybe I ordered the Atom Smasher from Edmund's and tried to trade it to Radio Shack, which would account for why I never heard back about the subminiature tape recorder.

My childless sister (lets call her Linda because thats her name) had spent the first 11 years of my child's life getting her noisy messy battery-gobbling gewgaws, without thinking about how much noise or mess they make nor how many batteries they consume in any given play-time thereby taking away MY play-time with the Weapon O' Doom.
(just kidding.. mine's a plug-in affair)
When we were kids without large disposable incomes, her and I, we would spend many a Saturday afternoon eating potato chips, chugging pixie-stix and reading comics. Averring that when we had Real Jobs, we would buy the wonderful magical things in the back of the comic books, we would spend an inordinate amount of time imagining how they would change our lives in wonderful magical ways. I REALLY wanted a pair of x-ray glasses for some perverted reason of my own that now eludes me -although it may have something to do with a fetish for fleshless femurs.
She, on the other hand, thought that it would be extremely cool to have Real Live Sea Monkeys! That you could Train! to jump through hoops and wear top hats and Impress Your Friends!
I eventually got rid of my comic books (although I regret that now as they are supposedly worth much more than I paid for them out of my hard-earned baby-sitting money) and moved onto other higher pursuits like boys and drugs and ..boys.
Exit the wasted self-centered years, enter the mommy years.
I am now a mother with a kid and Linda isnt AND Linda has a disposable income!
Instead of her buying my kid STOCKS and BONDS and giving the child HER collection of comic books that she did not get rid of and are worth much more than she paid for them, she starts on many years of birthday and x-mess gifts that she wanted when SHE was a kid, thereby living vicariously through my child for the hour long visit then going home to her neat and tidy and more importantly- QUIET home. Leaving US with a fully functional fun snare drum kit with play-along tape or the Grape Escape game that takes hours to set up and its sole purpose is to cover the game board, the players, and the floor in as much squished purple play-doh as a fast 4 year old can smear it around. Not to mention the Magic Water Dye Bath kit-thingy to make your very own wrapping paper (water and floating oily dye as a craft toy is just plain wrong for a kid of any age). The final straw was a mini-potters wheel that, with the aid of eleventy-two thousand C batteries (not included), SLINGS mud about the room all the while screeching like a chain-saw wielding banshee.
Because she didnt understand my pleading for sensible (read: thoughtful to me) gifts, and the seriousness of the matter, all the while smirking while the kid joyously opened the gaily wrapped gift. I told her that THAT particular toy was going home with her so that the kid could have happy play-time with auntie at HER house, not mine. Then amidst the weeping and wailing I unceremoniously dumped it, clay, box and all, into the back seat of her car.
After that, I must admit that the message finally sunk in and the gifts were a little less annoying. And then came the Sea Monkeys.
For the uninitiated, they really dont look anything like monkeys at all unless you think what looks like MOSQUITO LARVAE to resemble monkeys or happen to be on mind-altering mushrooms. They do not nor ever will wear silly hats or jump through hoops despite the instructions to train them. In fact, they do nothing at all except float around their Plastic Fantastic Sea Monkey Castle, doing the funky chicken at intervals and bumping into the walls. I flushed them soon after they hatched
-the sea monkeys go down the hoooole-
and chucked the whole Plastic Fantastic kit into the recycling bin.
Thankfully over the last couple of years, my sister has finally learned that it is easier to give cash than to pound the pavement searching for that Perfect Something to send me over the edge not knowing that most of the noisy, messy gifts she gave over the years were in pristine shape when they were given to the Sally Ann.
Now why couldnt Linda get my daughter something useful for the whole family, like a pair of x-ray specs?

You ordered a product containing a progressive rock band?

Yes! Why, did they send it to you by mistake? If so, plz fwd it to me and I will reimburse you for postage and handling. If you don't handle it too much.

When I was a kid, I found a paperback "young adult" book in a used bookstore -- the book was called Trouble After School. I think. Anyway, it took place in the 1950s, in some idyllic American town. It was the woeful tale of a good kid gone bad after falling in with the wrong crowd -- these days, the book would end with the kids burning one of their peers alive or something, but in the '50s, the worst it got was shoplifting, stealing money from one's parents, and ordering a baby crocodile from an ad in the back of a comic book.

Yes. You read that correctly. This was portrayed as a rebellious action. I don't remember how.

When the crocodile arrived, as I recall, it was half-dead and ultimately finished the journey to all-the-way-dead not long after. I think they flushed it down a toilet or something. I think this book might have been the reason they discontinued sending small mammals and reptiles via post; or maybe PETA got to them very early on.

Trouble After School

Great cover art! If that kid came in my neighborhood looking like that, he'd definitely have trouble after school. I wanted to send for one of the "Please Give Me a Home!" chihuahuas in-a-tea-cup doggies. And then turn it loose in the sewer to see what kind of a mutant monster developed. 'Dawn of the Dead' is in the local cinema this weekend. "They're dead. Walk funny. Crave human flesh." "The mall sound system pipes in instrumental versions of such insipid radio hits as "Don't Worry, Be Happy"" Two out of a possible four stars, but what the hey.

I'm going to have to rush out and see the original before I see what they did to it in the remake. I saw the modern "Night of the Living Dead" before I saw the original; that was a mistake.

http://www.dawnofthedeadmovie.net/

Didn't see the remake yet; flew out of work early and across town only to find the last showing sold out. Anyway, from what my sister tells me, it's watchable and fun, but they're fast zombies.

Slow zombies are my favorites; all they have in their corner is persistance. They're not agile enough to run, they don't have super strength - they can't even think - but eventually you're going to do something stupid and some zombie will eat you. Maybe not this particular zombie, but one of them will. They're a huge crowd, the literal masses, and they will make you a part of them, no matter how hard you try to remain an individual. The drama of slow zombie movies like NotLD (and the remake) and original Dawn and Day of the Dead wasn't man vs. zombie, it was man vs. himself.

In fast zombie movies, like the Return of the Living Dead series and 28 Days Later (although not technically undead), the focus is more on action, less on survival and social commentary. The slow zombie infestation is on a par with a flood or an earthquake - an inexorable natural phenomenon with no specific desire to kill - while a movie about fast zombies might as well be about a big swarm of killer bees or a pack of wild dogs.

Also, Evil Dead is not a zombie movie. It's about the generic undead, caused by dark magic. Not that it's not excellent, mind.

Maybe the Fast Zombies and the Slow Zombies would interbreed creating: "The Attack of the Variable-Speed Zombies"

Fast zombies unbalance the zombie equilibrium. Sure, zombies had a perseverance that goes well beyond dismemberment, but mostly they had tremendously large and continuously growing numbers on their side. A single zombie was never a real threat to a survivor simply because the survivor could always outrun the zombie. The true horror came from realizing that the numbers of allies you had could be counted on two hands, tops, and there are only so many shotgun shells in the world. Long-term threat. From that base you could put the survivors in any number of other situations from being locked down in close quarters with complete (possibly hostile) strangers to rebuilding a new world after you've hooked up with enough badass Hell's Angels.

Fast Zombies wang up the entire base since they're an immediate threat that needs to be dealt with now, now, now, OH DEAR SWEET JESUS SOMEONE SHOOT IT! No one would survive the first two weeks of a fast zombie outbreak. Nothing can help you. No body armor, no heavily modified homemade battlewagons, no fortified stronghold, no badass Hell's Angel society, and don't even try to make it to the local gun shop: the mob will always just tirelessly run you down like a pack of hounds.

Also, what is your criteria for what makes a zombie movie? Except for the happy ending, Army of Darkness is the archetypal zombie movie in an Arthurian setting (although I do have to grudgingly agree with your assessment of the first two flicks).

For the record, my "pack of hounds" comment is supposed to prove a completely different point from the previous "pack of wild dogs" comment. Although I think I just inadvertently proved Annna's point to myself.

That just may prove my theory about a horde of feral chihuahuas. All growling, with their little eyes bulging insanely.

Okay, so obviously the original zombies were a single human (alive or dead, depending on what you think of Wade Davis) commanded individually by a voodoo guy or gal to do specific things. This is a very personal and intelligent kind of threat - the zombie isn't intelligent, but its sender is, and there's some kind of plan.

I think the reason even Army of Darkness isn't a zombie movie is simple: in the best zombie movies, there's no reason. Sure, maybe it's a satellite or the Russians or God's judgement making the dead rise again, but does that help us? Not unless you see a priest turning zombies or some kind of radioactive gun that makes them sit still. In Army of Darkness, the skeletons were raised by the Necronomicon, led in organized ranks by generals of the dead. They didn't just want to feed; they wanted to kill Ash and protect/retrieve the Necronomicon. Classic zombies would have just shambled around, eventually forming a ring around the castle, waiting. No tool use and no siege engines there. The Birds is more of a zombie movie than Army of Darkness.

In summary: classic zombie movies have a large force of zombies, for no reason or for a reason that can't be remedied. Their only desire is to feed, and desire is putting it strongly. They only have numbers and patience, not strength or wits. They're a force of nature, against which we only have what teamwork we can forge in two hours with the other people in the truckstop diner.

On another topic, it makes sense that zombie bites would be a death sentence, but I like the plain old 3-day gangrene that results in a corpse which turns into a zombie just the same as a heart attack victim would.

a} Do they make decent burgers?
b} Do they have any monkeys?
c} Are there any chrome mudflap women?

try graveyard dust. And "Uncle Legba's Do-It-Yo'sef' Zombie Kit"