Zombie Run

I posted a review of Jennifer Hillier's Creep at My Alternate Reality.  Go check it out. 

No quiz this week, but I have a picture category coming up that should be fun. 

On to the Zombie Run.  On October 22, 2011 in Baltimore, zombies will attack.  You must survive the zombie apocolypse by successfully navigating this 5k obstacle course populated with zombies that would love nothing more than to sample your flesh.  Upon completion you can find other survivors and start rebuilding civilization with life music and food. 

Runners are given a flag belt, when all the flags are gone they are dead, or undead depending on how hungry the zombies were and if they were dismembered.  There will be health bonuses throughout the course that can help you to survive.  The course has twelve obstacles, I could tell you the obstacles but that wouldn't be fair.   The course is 5k-10k long and it is a race with prizes.  Yeah, 5-10k, so choose your path wisely. 

If you don't feel like running from zombie, but still want go to the after party, you can even buy a pass for that.  Looks like they are trying to get these things started around the country.  I think it is probably good training for the inevitable zombie outbreak.    So, be on the lookout for one near you.   It is a bit pricey for a race at $67 bucks but you do get a cool party afterwards and are chased by zombies in makeup during. 

Afrofuturism

Hey guys, this is John Weaver, bringing you info on Afrofuturism.

One course I would love to teach is on Afrofuturist science fiction. I am a big fan of African-American fiction, not because I'm trying to be politically correct, but because so much of African-American fiction is geared to people who grew up in religious, working class and lower middle class homes. Among Afrofuturists, I particularly like feminist Octavia Butler. Butler's works are some of the most radical in the science fiction genre. Even when she gets a little doctrinaire, as in Parable of the Sowers (kind of the Handmaid's Tale of Afrofuturism), her characters always have more complexity than those found in white feminists works, like Margaret Atwood. I also have Brother from Another Planet, the first Afrofuturist major film (so far the only one, though there were a couple of minor blacksploitation entries in the seventies), which is interesting but the sound quality makes it slightly hard to understand. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the classic of all Afrofuturist works, Black No More by George Schuyler. Black No More is a hilarious sendup of racism in which all blacks are turned into whites through a scientific process and a one of these new whites becomes a member of a KKK-like organization. Unbelievably, impossibly politically incorrect, especially in the racist thirties, Black No More is the ultimate in science fiction's exploration of race.