North Korea's Kim Jong-Il Is Dead

One's mind fills with nasty things to say about North Korea's undearly departed dictatorial godhead, Kim Jong-Il. The fanatical leader has died, according to that country's media.

The first response, of course, is "Good." He was someone who led a country that made its citizens so miserable, so imprisoned, so intellectually impoverished, that his death likely can only improve things. There's always that old commentator's chestnut: Who knows what comes next; it could be worse. And that is true, unfortunately.

But for now, I'll stick with "good."

BBC Says Zombies vs. Humans: We Win!!!

I know, I know: Who's "we"?

Well, I continue to assume the readers of this blog are consistently human, so I was pleased to read a BBC report on a Canadian scientific study (I'm not making this up) that concluded that a zombie attack on humans could be defeated, if it was dealt with quickly and effectively. That means decapitate them.

The scientists modeled their zombies on classic film versions of the undead. That puts them squarely in the George Romero school of slow zombies; no fast, intelligent zombies here.

Reports the BBC:

[T]heir analysis revealed that a strategy of capturing or curing the zombies would only put off the inevitable. In their scientific paper, the authors conclude that humanity's only hope is to "hit them [the undead] hard and hit them often".

They added: "It's imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly or else... we are all in a great deal of trouble."

So that's what Canadian scientists are doing. I'm sorry to hear that the Swedish study on how to turn back a massive Abominable Snowman attack has been indefinitely shelved, due to global warming.