Zombie-pourri

They're Baaaaaaaaaaacck!

Season 6 Promotional Poster

Today is going to be special for me because AMC's excellent series The Walking Dead has its Season 6 premiere tonight. For a Zombie Apocalypse aficionado like me, this is like Christmas morning!



It isn't easy to explain my fondness for this type of storytelling to non-zombie fans, but I have really missed my weekly fix of ZA goodness...

"That is SO sweet! We missed you, too!"

Fans' appetites (pun intended, always) for the upcoming season were whetted by the trailer promoting the 6th season which AMC released at this year's Comic Con in San Diego back in July:

"I like to eat the ants before they can turn zombie."

Uh...okay...

Pigskin Saturday

"This is NOT going well."

It wasn't a great Saturday for me, as my beloved Missouri Tigers couldn't do much offensively and lost to Florida 21-3 at Faurot Field. The Tigers are now 1-2 in conference play and can forget about winning the SEC East title for a third consecutive season.


A bowl game of any kind is not assured at this point, so the Tigers will have to step it up the rest of the season...

There were a few other results that were okay, though. Notre Dame won, my best friend's alma mater Penn State won at home against Indiana (which pleased me greatly, as the Hoosiers upset my Tigers in Columbia last season), Nebraska lost on a last-second field goal in Lincoln (I was fortunate enough to tune in just in time to cheer the kick breaking the Husker faithfuls' hearts), and the detested Kansas Jayhawks got bombed on their home field 66-7 by Baylor. Iowa State lost, unfortunately, but those other results cheered me up some.

Now if my beloved Kansas City Chiefs can just pick up a much-needed win today at Arrowhead Stadium against the Chicago Bears...

Bite Me

So, in last night's playoff game between the visiting New York Mets and the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Dodgers trailed 2-1 in the bottom of the 7th inning when this happened...

The New York sports media is losing its collective mind, not even attempting to be objective about the play (check out the headline in the New York Daily News game summary, for instance).

All of the New York media outrage has a familiar ring to it for Kansas City Royals fans. In Game Two of the 1977 American League playoffs, the Royals' Hal McRae slid hard into Yankees second baseman Willie Randolph...

 ...and the New York sportswriters predictably threw a fit, even though Randolph was not injured on the play. The next thing you know, we've got the so-called "McRae Rule" in place. But, in the end, how you feel about the take-out slide at any given time will depend on whether your team is on the giving or receiving end of such a slide.

Whether Utley's slide was or wasn't "dirty" will be endlessly debated in the days ahead (because a New York player got hurt, and New York sportswriters dominate the media outlets), but Utley wasn't called out under the "McRae Rule," and when a replay showed that Tejada hadn't made contact with second base at any point (which ruled out the "neighborhood" call that bugs so many fans), Utley was ruled safe, and scored the go-ahead run in the decisive Dodgers rally.

Funny how these same sportswriters weren't screaming bloody murder on this play from earlier in the season...

Of course, it's different when a non-New York player gets hurt. That's just "the way the game was meant to be played."

You'll forgive me if I don't join in the lynch-Utley pity party Mets fans are having. Suck it up, buttercups. And as for you hysterical Big Apple sports media types? Re-read this section's heading...

Good One

If you're not old enough to get this joke, here you go. And if you're inclined to dismiss this sort of thing as non-existent (i.e., you're a Democrat), here YOU go...

"You really enjoy pissing off Democrats more than is healthy, I think."

I'll be the judge of that...

Until Next Time...

One of the many pleasures of The Walking Dead is the show's skillful use of music to enhance the storytelling. Composer Bear McCreary's incidental music is always evocative, and occasionally haunting. Here he is talking about the process by which he created the show's famous opening theme...

In addition to the music he composes for each episode, McCreary also selects actual songs by other artists as well, depending on the needs of a specific scene and the emotions he wants to evoke. I have an entire iTunes playlist of such songs, including some which aren't on Volume 1 or Volume 2 of the soundtrack albums AMC has released (which I own, of course). There are several artists whose music I would never have discovered had they not been featured on the show, so I am grateful to McCreary for that as well as for his own music.

Today's send-off is a music video of one of the more memorable songs he used in this way, "Oats in the Water," by Ben Howard. It appeared in the Season Four episode "Internment," and is associated with the popular Hershel Greene character. Enjoy...