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It is a William Shatner World

16 Nov

from November 9, 2008

Born, I dunno, sometime in the 20th century, somewhere way up north, like Canada or Alaska or Santa’s Workshop, the man known to the world as William Barack Shatner has, improbably, become an American icon. And while it is debatable if the previous sentence is a run-on, it cannot be denied that I shouldn’t have started this sentence with “and.”

William Shatner started his career as a cabinet maker in Saskatoon. In the early 1960’s, he found fame throughout the Northwest Territories for his amazingly smooth sanding ability. In fact, not a single report of anyone getting a splinter from one of his custom cabinets has ever surfaced. No one knew the secret of his amazing sanding skills until he shook the hand of a lumberjack, Charles LeFleur, who recoiled in disgust, yanked his hand out of Shatner’s, and exclaimed “that’s gross, man! You’ve got six fingers!” Yes, it was that sixth finger of his right hand which allowed him the extra-accurate, pinpoint control over any piece of sandpaper and thus made his cabinets so beloved. And smooth.

Shatner changed careers when a freak accident in an Ontario nightclub caused him to lose the extra digit. Finding that the decreased manual dexterity caused him to make inferior cabinets, he quit the business altogether rather than put out low quality products. He decided to become an actor. At this time he also allowed doctors to remove the extra thumb on his left hand as it might make film roles difficult to come by.

From there, his rise to fame has been well documented in every school child’s textbook. We all know his famous roles, as Dr. Robert Hansen in Kingdom of the Spiders, as Mark Preston in The Devil’s Rain, as Tony Gold in Li’l Pimp, and the role that made him famous,  the murderous Fielding Chase in the 1993 Columbo TV movie Butterfly in Shades of Grey.

Therefore it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me when, in professional settings, he came up in three unrelated conversations with three unrelated people (yes, none of them were from the same family) in one week.

On Monday, I was having a conversation with an English teacher about all the books we own. This teacher is an older woman of 55 or so. (That’s older than me so yes, she’s an older woman. Don’t bug me about how 55 isn’t old.) As we spoke she said that she had just moved all of her Star Trek novels to the attic. Her husband wanted them thrown out “but,” she said, “he’s not as big a William Shatner fan as I am.” We’d talked about Edgar Allan Poe collections, about old copies of To Kill a Mockingbird she donated, we discussed Stephen King, but it was Shatner she idolized the most. I can’t blame her. Seen his wig lately? He has a better head of hair than she does.

On Thursday I was at CSI with a group of English teachers and we were discussing authors when a very quiet teacher, who usually didn’t add much to the conversations weighed in. “I really liked the first two TekWar novels, but I think Shatner’s new stuff isn’t as good.” He was serious.

On Friday I took a small class to the computer room. Taking advantage of the empty computers, a teacher sat down and surfed the net. I soon heard a bad midi version of the Star Trek theme wafting around the room like smog and saw a bad fan painting of William Shatner on her screen. She was on a William Shatner fan site. God, I hope she wasn’t running it.

Three times in educational settings William Shatner reared his head. Not literally but you get the idea. William Shatner has infiltrated the highest levels of our educational system. How long until you buy Shatner O’s Cereal at the grocery store? Use Shat Paper in your bathroom? Even Captain Kirk Condoms? Mark my words. It is a William Shatner world and we are just living in it.

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My Review of Night of The Living Dead starring Barack Obama

16 Nov

from October 30, 2008

Night of The Living Dead came out in 1968. It was in glorious black and white because George A. Romero was color blind. He thought he had bought six rolls of high quality color film but in reality he was ripped of and shot the feature on grainy Super 8 film stock.

Set chiefly in the Department of Motor Vehicles, Night of The Living Dead opens with Tom and Barbra, two siblings visiting their parents graves on the absolute worst night of the year. Ten years ago, their parents died in a freak accident involving two grapefruits and a grain elevator. Their dying wish was to be buried in the most desolate, abandoned graveyard in America.

Tom and Barbra never really loved their parents. In fact, the only reason they ever went was so that Barbra could stop at a little roadside stand and buy tomatoes. As they paid their respects by laying plastic flowers on the graves, a zombie, whose brain was “switched on” by radiation from a passing satellite (that’s what the movie said) lurched over to them. You see, newly reanimated corpses have, since Odysseus first ventured to Hades, been out to eat your brains. There is nothing sweeter to a zombie than a juicy brain. The problem is, for them, that they are very slow and sort of lurch with a herky-jerky gait. Oh, and this particular zombie’s pants were for some reason missing their entire back.

The semi-pantsless zombie managed to get the jump on Tom, not a hard thing to do since he was drunk on moonshine. Barbra managed to get away while the zombie munched on Tom’s short-term memory and found refuge in a small town Department of Motor Vehicles. Immediately, she passed out on a bench and had no more lines for almost half an hour. Good thing too, as actress Judith O’Dea’s resume includes exactly eight credits in the forty years since this movie came out. A thespian she is not.

Barbra wasn’t alone in the DMV. There were six people waiting in line to renew their licenses for over four hours and never noticed anything amiss. When the guy behind the counter died and came back as a brain eating zombie it looked like any other normal day at the DMV.

Among the human survivors in the DMV were a family of rednecks and a black guy named Ben. Unbelievably, the redneck had less of a problem with undead white guys than a live black guy. But the joke was on him. Even if he shot the black guy he’d just come back from the dead anyway. I suppose that is some Southern idea of Hell..

Ben was played by a young Barack Obama. When the zombies surrounded the DMV, Barack decided, rather than to fight, to talk to them. Try as he might, he couldn’t get a straight answer from the zombies. It was hard to talk with their mouths full of cerebellum. Eventually, after watching a few women and children get eaten alive, he realized that the zombies would be able to live in peace as citizens of the world if only they had food. No wonder they were angry- America had so much food and they only represented a fraction of the world’s undead. He decided to “redistribute the wealth” by giving some of the survivor’s food to the zombies. Despite the fact that the zombies chowed down on people, Barack, after twice rethinking his position, decided that he’d give the redneck’s left leg and the wife’s right arm to the zombies. The redneck refused. He pointed out, rightly, that Barack’s plan would cost an arm and a leg and would only, at best, be a short term solution to the zombie problem. Plus it amounted to little more than socialized welfare.

Seeing how the wind was blowing, Barack changed his position and said that they should all hide in the basement. In fact, he claimed, he never stated that he’d give anything at all to the zombies, and now he’d only tax those with extra limbs. After all, he said, those had more to give up should do more. It would be patriotic to give extra limbs to the zombies.

Hearing all he could stand of Barack, the redneck shot him and threw him to the zombies. The zombies, not caring how many times he voted “present” on important Congressional issues, ate him.

Eventually the zombies broke into the DMV where they were mistaken for city employees.

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