Random News from Valdosta, Ga.

Zombies are having the best week ever! ‘Zombie banks’ are the talk of the town in financial sectors. Like Weekend at Bernie’s 2, these banks goes through the motions of being alive, but you can see in their eyes they’re really under a voodoo curse. Zombie banks, like zombie movies, were invented in America but became huge in Japan in the 1990s. These banks are the walking dead in that most of their assets are in worthless mortgages. Even if they paid off all their liabilities they still would never be solvent.

Voodoo economics may keep the corpse dancing for a while longer, if Congressional Republicans get their way. The GOP is pitching it’s old standard of tax cuts as the silver bullet for our economic woes. Opponents of the bailout bill verbalized worries that the tax cuts in it are too small and won’t have a lasting effect on consumer spending which funds two thirds of our nation’s economy. Another concern is the impact the law will have on future generations. “The average person will get $8 per week in their paycheck and they will pass on to their grandkids $1.1 trillion in debt,” said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Zombieland will be wrapping up its filming at Wild Adventures. Word is the production moves to Atlanta next. For those of you who sleep in your closet with the lights off, Zombieland is a comedy starring Woody Harrelson. You may see some of your friends as extras when this movie debuts October 9. You’ll also see Amber Heard, who played the eighteen year old girlfriend of Seth Rogan’s character in Pineapple Express. The movie costars Jesse Eisenberg, whom you may recognize from The Squid and the Whale and Cursed. Abigail Breslin appears in the flick as well. She’ll be playing the precociously cute girl, no doubt.

Speaking of people who won’t die, Sarah Palin, who bills herself as a fiscal conservative/ excellent marksman, is calling for a $268 million reduction in the Alaskan state budget. Declining oil prices has taken its toll on the state’s finances, causing it to finally enter the worldwide economic crisis. Unfortunately the cuts Palin is asking for are mostly made up of unused tax credits to oil companies, so the they will not really add any money to the Alaskan budget. Maybe Palin will sell her wardrobe on Ebay to help make ends meet. That’s what a savvy hockey mom would do. Meanwhile, her daughter is speaking out against abstinence as a viable option for every teen. In an interview with Greta Van Susteran, the new mom reiterated that the decision to have unmarried sex was her choice, and had nothing to do with her mom’s views.

Girls did not go wild in Remerton. Good taste prevailed as a planned visit from the Girls Gone Wild bus was cancelled at The Milltown Groove. Heath Cox, the bar’s manager responding to a Valdosta Daily Times article, said “The newspaper article got it way out of proportion. It really hurt my feelings that people would think that I would do that kind of stuff in public. Once I got wind of everything that was going on from (Remerton Police) Chief Terrell and from some churches, and they expressed their feelings of how they didn’t want it I canceled it for them, for the good of the city and the council.” The GGW visit was scheduled for the same day as the annual Father-Daughter Valentine’s Dance, which teaches girls how proper gentlemen should treat them. I would guess there were no tatas-for-t-shirts at the dance.

We’re going digital– eventually. The government mandated transition was supposed to go into effect in February and many networks will have switched by now, but the FCC pushed the deadline back to June 12 in order to ensure everyone is aware of the change. So if you turn on CBS and are dismayed to discover you can’t watch CSI: Miami, that’s why. The Congressionally mandated end of broadcast television is aimed at freeing up airwave bandwidth for public safety communications and advanced commercial wireless services. Sounds like the government is coming to get our brains– or at least that’s what our editor’s parents think. They also think Elvis Presley shot JFK.

Hillary Clinton visited Japan as she began her American Idol runner up tour on February 17. Besides obviously the world economic crisis, Secretary of State Clinton also spoke with the island nation’s prime minister about it’s neighbor across the bay, North Korea. “The possible missile launch that North Korea is talking about would be very unhelpful in moving our relationship forward,” Clinton said in a joint press conference with the Japanese PM. The visit previews a six party talk aimed at disarming North Korea.

President Obama is on his own tour, of sorts. Beginning in Denver, Colorado the President signed his economic stimulus plan into law. He then flew down to Arizona to unveil his mortgage relief plan. When I say he flew down to Arizona, I do mean by Air Force One– so far as I know, flight is not amongst the superpowers our new president has.

Kids everywhere are opening their brownbags at lunch time to find “and jelly” sandwiches due to the massive peanut butter recall. Six people have died and contamination has been reported in 43 states. The Food and Drug Administration traced the outbreak to a plant in Georgia owned by Peanut Corporation of America. General Mills recalled two products while Kellogg recalled sixteen of its products in February.

Does Facebook own your content? Founder Mark Zuckerberg says no. The social networking site’s new terms of use agreement, updated February 4, went mostly unnoticed until consumer rights advocacy blog Consumerist.com pointed out changes. “On Facebook, people own their information and control who they share it with.” Zuckerberg said that in order to share pictures or status updates with friends, Facebook must have license to allow friends to keep a copy of messages or other information a user shares with them, even if you close your account. This is not the first run in Facebook has had with users– in 2007, Facebook initially defended a tracking tool called “beacon,” which broadcasted information about a user’s shopping habits and activities at other websites. Facebook ultimately allowed users to turn Beacon off.

Fire, Ice or Malaria?

John F. Kennedy’s poet laureate Robert Frost wrote:
Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.

I don't know if Frost was speaking figuratively. I never met the guy. Maybe he was just really into fire and ice. It is a well known fact that poets laureate are often pyromaniacs. As for the ice obsession, maybe he meant " ice" as in meth. It's an even better known fact that most poets laureate are junkies. I know for a fact that Maya Angelou used to be heavy into narcotics, but her Wikipedia entry doesn't mention which ones she liked. My money is on heroine. And probably Chips Ahoy. But let's say for the sake of argument that Frost was not chasing the dragon when he wrote this poem. If he was prophesying, then maybe he was predicting how humans would inevitably destroying our home planet.

It all started with Prometheus. In Greek mythology, he is the God who gave man fire. Ever since that fateful moment, we have been doing our damnedest to burn everything we can get our greasy little opposable thumbs around. Some random caveman in some ancient ice age must have seen a lightning strike cause a forest fire and think, "Ooga ooga! Fire good! Me like fire." Shortly thereafter, proto-man harnessed mother nature's most primitive force and created the very first carbon footprint. Sure, that caveman's footprint may have been more troll like than yours or mine, or most likely mine, but it was from that point that humans started adding harmful carbon back into our atmosphere at increasingly alarming rates. It is the nature of our society to burn things. We use fire to bake our bread, heat our homes, and fuel our Fords. Even if we aren't completely aware of it, burning fossil fuels accounts for the vast majority of our energy use worldwide.

So, like Billy Joel said, 'we didn't start the fire -it was always burning since the world’s been turning.’ Is our environment too fubar to fix? I don't know. I'm no psychic. But I do watch movies. If they are any prediction of how our time on earth will end, then mankind is officially boned.

So how will it end? I’m taking bets! Global warming is melting the icecaps. So will we end up like Kevin Costner in Waterworld? Will our world, too, be a featureless sphere with a handful of human outposts floating in an unlimited ocean? I'm not a strong swimmer, and I'm super pasty, so I'm not super keen on that idea. No one wants to see my sun-burned waterlogged corpse floating up to the side of his dinghy.

Or maybe ice is the way we’ll go out. According to my scientist friends (Bill Nye the Science Guy is on my speed dial, right after Stephen Hawking) after the ice caps do melt (and they will, I assure you) we’ll be in for another ice age. Sure, it’s going to get hotter before it gets cooler. Much hotter. Hot enough to, well, melt polar ice caps. When all the cool, fresh water from those glaciers and icebergs joins with the salty, warm waters of the Gulf Stream all currents will weaken and eventually subside. Currents, other than being sea turtle interstates, drive the mixing of hot and cold water across the planet and warm most of North America and Europe. It’s the warm water that currents bring to places like England and New York that prevents those places from being snowbound year round.

With no currents, the oceans will stagnate. Just like when you don’t rinse out your dog’s water dish and you leave it outside for a week, microorganisms will multiply and spread infectious diseases. Mosquitos will travel in packs of billions and pick cows clean in under five minutes. They’ll be more lethal than those shadow beasts in Pitch Black. You know you all saw that and loved Vin Diesel! But as far as disaster movie parallels, it would be more like Outbreak, but on a global scale. Think of Dawn of the Dead, but instead of zombies, masses of lepers, swaying crowds of malaria and bubonic plague infested refugees coughing all over you every time you leave your house.

Then, just when you think things can’t get worse, you realize that it is now getting colder. The ice age has begun. Everything freezes, but c’est la vie. This is a back-and-forth process that has been cycling for millions of years. Yes, we did hasten it this time. All those fossil fuels were good while they lasted. Now we’re in The Day After Tomorrow. The world is a flash-frozen T.V. dinner, except instead of peas, french fries and fried chicken, it’s small bands of humans clinging desperately to the shear edge of life in an infinite frozen tundra. So yeah, exactly like a T.V. dinner.

I abstain from betting on how humanity will go in the end– fire, ice, malaria… I know it will all end, and that’s enough. Ignorance is bliss. I’m just going to stock up on thermal underwear. And OFF!™. And sunblock–just in case.