I just squeaked in the last book of 2007 last night (grand total of 21 for the year), World War Z by Max Brooks. The book was pretty enjoyable but, i’m not sure I should be reading a bunch of end of the world books back to back. There was a bidding war over the rights to make WWZ into a movie. The 2 big hitters were Plan B (Brad Pitts production company) and Appian Way (Leo Di Caprios Company). Plan B won.
Here is the post about the Script.
I think a movie version of this would be pretty great if for no other reason the locations it would need to be shot in (or at least faked well). The book is a series of interviews of survivors of the war and these survivors are from India, Russia, China, North and South America, Japan, etc… A bunch of the stuff would be water based as tons of survivors try to flee aboard boats. Huge Aircraft Carriers converted to floating refugee camps. Crap like that, pretty cool.
First up for the new year? The new Charlie Huston Book, Half The Blood Of Brooklyn.
Happy New Year. Please God, No Zombies…
Carter and I are off to do some Snow Camping at Lake Wenatchee in the morning.
- World War Z By Max Brooks
- The Road By Cormac McCarthy
- No Country For Old Men By Cormac McCarthy
- The Difference Engine By William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
- Kill Now, Pay Later By Robert Terall (Hard Case Crime)
- Slide By Ken Bruen and Jason Starr (Hard Case Crime)
- Colorado Kid By Stephen King (Hard Case Crime)
- Lemons Never Lie By Richard Stark (Hard Case Crime)
- Flashfire By Richard Stark
- Slayground By Richard Stark
- The Man With The Getaway Face By Richard Stark
- Money For Nothing By Donald Westlake
- The Shotgun Rule: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- Caught Stealing: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- Six Bad Things: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- A Dangerous Man: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- Already Dead: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- No Dominion: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis
- The Winter of Frankie Machine By Don Winslow
- The Name Of The Game Is Death By Dan J. Marlowe
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I have gone from reading The Road, about post nuclear wasteland, to reading World War Z, about a post Zombie wasteland. Reading these books back to back has made me realize ‘the end’ is just around the corner. With this new info in my head, I started looking around the internets for info on what to do when the poop and hits the fan.
First stop Wikipedia… Turns out most of the survivalists out there are… Wacko’s. I kept looking… After a few clicks I found The Zombie Squad. These guys are fill the gap between the Northern Idaho / Ruby Ridge types and my delicate liberal sensitivities. The web page is actually great. It has tons of useful info on what to do in emergency situations, and best of all it uses ZOMBIES for the hypothetical emergency example. Now these guys are the kinda wacko’s I can get behind… More stuff aimed at my indie GenX demographic please, less religious right with guns and backup generator.
I am a bit bummed that there isn’t a local chapter of the zombie squad in Seattle. Looks like they do lots of pizza and movie nights, Zombie walks for charity, food drives, etc… There is even a link about there Zombie Con ‘07, a 5 camping, canoeing, zombie hunting / movie watching trip… Sounds awesome. Anyone in Seattle thinking about starting up a chapter?
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I finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy last night. I got the book Christmas morning (thanks Kathy) and finished it last night at about 1 am. The Road won McCarthy a Pulitzer Prize and the book is just amazing. The book is about a father and son stuck in a post apocalyptic America trying to survive. All plant and animal life has died, and they just walk south to try to escape the nuclear winter that has taken the planet. There is a scene in which they come to the shore of the Atlantic and it is littered with millions upon millions of fish skeletons from all the sea life dying.
The father and son call themselves “the good guys”, which generally means that they don’t kill and eat the other survivors that they come across. Most of the encounters in the book tend toward the pair trying to escape being seen and becoming food. Christmas night I was about half way through the book at about 1 in the morning and had to go grab Carter and bring him to bed with vickie and I. I am pretty sure this is the effect that McCarthy was trying to have. I finished the book and woke to the headline that Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in a suicide bomb attack. Yeah. Pakistan has ‘the bomb’… good news… Time to go start stockpiling food and water. Merry Christmas.
I started World War Z, after finishing The Road. Going from nuclear war to zombie war. Awesome.
- The Road By Cormac McCarthy
- No Country For Old Men By Cormac McCarthy
- The Difference Engine By William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
- Kill Now, Pay Later By Robert Terall (Hard Case Crime)
- Slide By Ken Bruen and Jason Starr (Hard Case Crime)
- Colorado Kid By Stephen King (Hard Case Crime)
- Lemons Never Lie By Richard Stark (Hard Case Crime)
- Flashfire By Richard Stark
- Slayground By Richard Stark
- The Man With The Getaway Face By Richard Stark
- Money For Nothing By Donald Westlake
- The Shotgun Rule: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- Caught Stealing: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- Six Bad Things: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- A Dangerous Man: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- Already Dead: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- No Dominion: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis
- The Winter of Frankie Machine By Don Winslow
- The Name Of The Game Is Death By Dan J. Marlowe
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Vickie took Carter and Claire to a photoshoot and had some prints framed. She just gave them to me for Christmas today. This was a pretty great Christmas present. Vickie gave a couple of the pictures to Dot as well, she cried. I think she cries every time she gets a pic of the grandkids, but these pictures probably deserved it.
The photographer was Teresa McCann, she has a great website of her work. I also added a bunch of pics on our flickr account.
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Some guy in Bremerton decided to protest commercialism by crucifying Santa Clause in his front yard. I’m sure his neighbors love it… I do not think this would fly in, say, the bible belt…
Here is story…
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New HBII Trailer online here.
I got one of these posters at signed by Mignola at the San Diego Comic-Con this summer.
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If you haven’t seen I am Legend yet they just posted the new Bat-Man trailer. The new trailer for The Dark Knight movie is basically a Joker trailer, and he looks like a dirty freak.
Click the pic for the trailer at http://atasteforthetheatrical.com
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I just finished No Country For Old Men last night at about 2:30 AM. I saw the movie a few weeks ago and thought it was pretty great. The Coen Brothers did a great job with the script. They left the book pretty much intact. There were some subtle changes to characters and a few scenes were changed but overall the changes may have even been better than the book. Some of the folksy Texas dialog is pretty great and extremely funny… There is scene where one of the main characters comes home after finding a satchel with about $2 million in it. The dialog between the guy and his wife is great.
I pulled the scene from imdb and it is pretty well close to the dialog from the book…
Carla Jean Moss: Where’d you get the pistol?
Llewelyn Moss: At the gettin’ place.
Carla Jean Moss: Did you buy that gun?
Llewelyn Moss: No. I found it.
Carla Jean Moss: Llewelyn!
Llewelyn Moss: What? Quit hollerin’.
Carla Jean Moss: What’d you give for that thing?
Llewelyn Moss: You don’t need to know everything, Carla Jean.
Carla Jean Moss: I need to know that.
Llewelyn Moss: You keep runnin’ that mouth I’m gonna’ take you in the back and screw ya’.
Carla Jean Moss: Big talk.
Llewelyn Moss: Keep it up.
Carla Jean Moss: Fine. I don’t wanna’ know. I don’t even wanna’ know where you been all day.
Llewelyn Moss: That’ll work.
I think I have been a bit intimidated by Cormac McCarthy, he doesn’t have a reputation of being super accessible. I actually breezed through the book once I had some time to read. His sentence structure can be a bit confused at times and he doesn’t use what some might call "punctuation" or "quotations" in the standard way. Those rules seem to be more guidelines, which he chooses to ignore. I think ‘08 may be the year of McCarthy for me.
Anyway… Here is the end of the year book list:
- No Country For Old Men By Cormac McCarthy
- The Difference Engine By William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
- Kill Now, Pay Later By Robert Terall (Hard Case Crime)
- Slide By Ken Bruen and Jason Starr (Hard Case Crime)
- Colorado Kid By Stephen King (Hard Case Crime)
- Lemons Never Lie By Richard Stark (Hard Case Crime)
- Flashfire By Richard Stark
- Slayground By Richard Stark
- The Man With The Getaway Face By Richard Stark
- Money For Nothing By Donald Westlake
- The Shotgun Rule: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- Caught Stealing: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- Six Bad Things: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- A Dangerous Man: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- Already Dead: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- No Dominion: A Novel By Charlie Huston
- Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis
- The Winter of Frankie Machine By Don Winslow
- The Name Of The Game Is Death By Dan J. Marlowe
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Our family are pretty big fans of the Blue C Sushi in seattle. It is a conveyor belt sushi place, that has a fun atmosphere. They have a couple of projectors playing weird videos; Anime Stuff, Japanese street videos, and general J-Pop craziness.
We asked Carter what he wanted to do for his birthday and he just wanted a couple of his friends to sleep over, go to a movie (The new National Treasure), and eat at Blue C Sushi.
Carter and his buddies sat in there own area while Claire, Vickie and I sat a respectable distance away just to make sure they didn’t start throwing food. 3 ten year olds went through ~$100 in sushi. Awesome.
The Boys… grabbing food as it goes by…
The Damage…
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On our trip to Whistler we ate lunch at Zog’s Dogs. I ordered the Tofu Hotdog with tons of sauerkraut and yellow mustard, Carter got a cheese burger (no pressure to be a veg from dad) and Tim got the Poutine. "What the hell is Poutine?", is the correct response. See below and Wikipedia for the answer. I have been a vegan for about 10 years… It is food exactly like this that turned me into one.
Before the vegan hit me I ate tons of American style comfort food, Biscuits and Gravy, Mash Potatoes and Gravy, Country Fried Steak (covered in Gravy)… You get the picture.
The Canadians take the gravy fetish to the next level. French fries, cheese curds and gravy??? Canadians are awesome. They rock the heart stopping power of gravy pretty hard.
From WikiPedia: "Poutine (Quebec French pronunciation putsɪn (help·info)) is a dish consisting of French fries topped with fresh cheese curds and covered with hot gravy (usually brown gravy) and sometimes other additional ingredients."
"It’s also a very popular meal at ski resorts."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poutine
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