From Publishers Weekly: Fans will relish the monster mash finale, in which a Welsh sorcerer, a horde of animated mummies and a decomposing zombie army engage in a pyrotechnic firefight complete with heavy artillery.

Your first question could be why “Monster” and not “Zombie” for the book titles? The answer for that lies in the several twists that Wellington has added to the Zombie genre; conscious zombies, the cause for reanimation lying in something referred to as “the Source” rather than a virus, and reanimated Celtic Bog Mummy from Scotland who turns out to be Mael Mag Och, a druid who believes he is to be the final instrument of judgment on mankind.

In Monster Island we meet Gary, a medical student faced with the inevitable choice of either becoming a zombie or zombie food. Working on the theory that the brain becomes damaged through lack of oxygen between death and reanimation, he decides to try and retain his consciousness by keeping his body packed in ice and his brain oxygenated through using life support medical equipment stolen from the hospital. He awakens to find his experiment a success. He is one of (we later discover) three individuals to make the transition as a conscious zombie.

These three individuals are the driving force of the “Monster” aspect for the trilogy. They have to decide between either retaining their humanity or abandoning it. As Mael explains to Gary; “There’s no debate, Gary. This is what we are. Uamhas. There’s good in this world and there’s evil, and we’re evil. Now either come with me or leave me be, lad. There’s work to do.” The choices the characters make throughout the course of the trilogy span all shades of grey as well as black or white.

Initially “The Source” was ambiguous; it could be either natural or supernatural. The way it was initially described changed depending on the character experiencing or using it. However as the story progressed through the trilogy, the magical and supernatural aspects of it and the characters became clear. I was a little disappointed by this. The traditional viral explanation for zombieism always left the genre in the category of extremely-unlikely-but-ever-so-slightly-possible and made it that much more intriguing. While I appreciate the twists of the genre to create something new to explore, I still wanted there to be logical explanations, even if the explanations weren’t apparent to the character.


As the next book for the Literati is A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf and is ready for me to pick up at the library and I’m going on vacation in a couple weeks involving a long plane ride and plenty of time to read, I’m going to have to come up with a really good excuse for not reading it.**

Maybe I can blame the time spent on making Easy Cheesy Chili Dip.

** I fully intend to read it, but it’s Virgina Woolf for fuck sake. The last time I tried to read Virginia Woolf was Mrs. Dalloway and what a goddamn boring book that was!

Law professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim supports secularism, in which a neutral state makes the laws for all citizens, while leaving enough room for them to lead their lives according to the rules of their own religion.

The Sudanese born Abdullah Ahmed An-Na'im teaches law at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Active in the fields of civil, human and international rights, he sees the Islamic Sharia as an important point of reference for him. The Muslim law system, which dates back to the seventh century, must, in his opinion, always be open to being questioned.

Every orthodoxy began as heresy. All religions have their roots in heresy. Christianity began as a Jewish heresy; Islam was once a Christian-Jewish heresy. It is in breaking with tradition that we strike the vein of greatest creativity. This is true of all societies. So celebrate heresy!

encourage people to begin the much more difficult task of developing respect for beliefs different from their own.

I watch what I do to see what I really believe.

I cannot believe in a God who metes out hurt for hurt, pain for pain, torture for torture. Nor do I believe that God invests human representatives with such power to torture and kill. The paths of history are stained with the blood of those who have fallen victim to "God's Avengers." Kings, popes, military generals, and heads of state have killed, claiming God's authority and God's blessing. I do not believe in such a God.

The only way I know what I really believe is by keeping watch over what I do.

The answer is because a devout believer needs to take his faith along in everything he does. If he didn't, he wouldn't be devout (at least so he thinks). The Islam and democracy presenter had to know - and had to let everyone else know - that he was a democrat because of his religion, not in spite of it. This is the "piety" part of religiosity that a secular humanist or atheist neither acknowledges, nor finds particularly interesting. The more confrontational might even call it a handicap, a crutch, or a sickness.

the House has now formalized, in whatever small way, four very scary ideas.
They're not stated explicitly, but implied, although the meanings are clear nonetheless. In the following list, the numbers correspond to the highlighted portions of the document that support each idea. (The highlighting and numbering are mine.)
Idea 1:
America is a Christian nation: 1, 2, 3, 5
Idea 2:
America was founded as a Christian nation: 3, 5
Idea 3:
Christians in America are being assailed by secularists and need support: 4, 6
Idea 4:
The United States has a mission to defend worldwide Christianity against its enemies: 2, 6, 7

Shame on you for voting for House Resolution 847 to “Recognize the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith.” I am not a Christian. I do not believe in the supernatural. And while I enjoy any holiday that gives me a paid day off from work accompanied by rich food and festive lighting, I don’t enjoy the constant threat against reason from superstition. The separation between Church and State is growing ever thinner and I’m saddened that you were not one of the nine representatives willing to stand up to enforce that line. America is not a Christian nation, it was not founded as a Christian nation, Christians are not being assailed by secularists -- if anything it’s the non-Christians that are being assailed -- and the United States should not be on a mission to defend worldwide Christianity against its enemies.

Only nine were willing to stand up and say “No” to theocracy. You weren’t one of them. Shame on you.

A "culture war" in America between religion and atheism is the underlying cause of the war on terror, political commentator Dinesh D'Souza told a crowd of about 150 people Wednesday night at Harris Hall.

…um… no… that would be completely wrong.

I’m not a political science expert (or even a novice) and my education on the subject is formed from watching the Discovery and the History Channel. And I don’t think a topic as involved as Western and Middle Eastern politics could be nicely summed up in a blog post, much less a once sentence sound bite.

But here are some of my opinions as to why there’s a “war on terror”:

In 1953, the United States decided to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister in Iran because we didn’t like him nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. In his place we put in a more U.S. friendly monarch, the Shah.

Surprisingly the Iranians weren’t too fond of our puppet leader, or us, and starting listening to an active critic of the Shah and the US; Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. They had a revolution. Since we kept messing in their business, they took the US Embassy hostage. We froze Iranian assets (and have to this day, not released them.)

Saddam Hussein decided to take advantage of the disorder and started the Iran-Iraq War. Iran pushed back and then sought to expand the Iranian Revolution (or Islamic Revolution) into Iraq. The US backed Saddam Hussein (and sold some weapons to Iran as well, what the hey.) Eventually there was a UN mediated truce.

Thanks to our medaling, there is now a government in Iran devoted to eliminating outside influences.

In 1979, as a part of our Cold War strategy, we began having a war by proxy with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. When we “won” in Afghanistan, we lost interest in the country leaving it’s war ravaged corpse for the warlords to fight over.

Many Muslims from other countries volunteered to assist various mujahideen groups in Afghanistan, and gained significant experience in guerrilla warfare. Organized religious students formed into an armed movement, were backed by Pakistan, funded by the U.S, defeated most of the militias and took control of Afghanistan. “Students” by the way is the English translation of the Pashto word “Taliban”.

One of the mujahideen groups was al-Qaeda, formed by bin Laden. They fought against the Soviets and then Bin Laden went from being a hero of jihad in Saudi Arabia to being an enemy of the Saudi monarchy for his opposition to non-Muslim troops in Saudi Arabia (that would be the U.S. during the first Gulf War.) Bin Laden hates the U.S., socialism, communism, democracy, Israel, and pretty much anything outside of his particular code of Islam (including music.) He believes in an all out war against everything he hates and any innocents that are killed (there’s probably no such thing as an innocent infidel in his book) are justified martyrs in the jihad. I don’t believe we’re responsible for the creation of a monster like Bin Laden, but we are responsible or at least complicit, for creating an environment in which he could thrive.

Oh, and an “Atheist” to Bin Laden would be everyone not his particular brand of Muslim.

In one of the Bin Laden videos, he says,

“It has become clear that the West in general and America in particular have an unspeakable hatred for Islam. We have witnessed the true crimes of those who call themselves humanists and claim to be defenders of freedom. Those who lived under continuous US raids for the past months are aware of it. How many villages have been destroyed and how many millions have been pushed out in the freezing cold? These men, women and children who have been damned and now live under tents in Pakistan, have committed no sin. They are innocent. But on a mere suspicion, the United States has launched this fierce campaign.”

I don’t know about you, but if I’m living in poverty, in a country that’s being ripped apart by war, hearing about villages that are getting bombed by those U.S. devils, I’m going to think this Bin Laden guy is right. And if I live in a country that has a history of the those U.S. devils interfering with my government because they want my country’s oil and they start making air-strikes against my country, I’m not going to think I’m being liberated. The U.S. practically pushes people into terrorist training camps.

This entry has gone on way longer than I expected to and I didn’t even get into our debacle in Iraq. But really it’s all just the same shit in a different country. We mess around in other people’s business, piss people off, kill people, meddle in their governments, destroy people’s lives, and then wonder why nobody likes us. We need to learn to mind our own damn business.