Team Deathstar Holiday Chalets

Molly Brown's a cool British writer friend of mine (well, we've never met, but you know how the internetz are). Out of the blue, I got an email from her directing me to YouTube to see a short film she'd written. Which immediately impressed me, since not only have I never had so much as a short film produced, I've never so much as written a script of that particular nature. I'll let Molly give the intro in her own words:

What happened was, I got roped into being on a team competing in the Sci-Fi London 48 hour challenge. (In case you don't know how a 48 hour challenge works, they assign each team a title, a line of dialogue, and a prop. You then have 48 hours to get a completed film incorporating all of your assigned criteria back to them.)

Our assigned title was: "THIS IS..." Required line of Dialogue: "The floor dropped away from me before I started to follow it." Required prop: a map of Europe with three red circles drawn on it.

And it was *my* job to write the script.

I have to admit, they had me at "Zombies." Change the setting to Austin and they'd have had an Oscar contender.

If you need more, Molly also send along a link to their "Zombie Jam." Pure bliss. Oh, and she's the woman wearing rubber gloves.

Welcome to the party

Well over a week since our own Chris Nakashima-Brown alerted the world to the zombie menace in Austin, MSNBC wades into the fray. Cutting-edge, those folks are. The latest insightful contribution from corporate mediadom: "Pranks with electronic road signs stir worry." Uh, right. If the AP starts holding a contest for "most uninspired headline writer" my money's on this guy.

COLLINSVILLE, Illinois - Hackers are messing with electronic road signs in some U.S. states, warning of zombies and raptors down the road. Traffic safety officials aren't amused.

The latest breach came during Tuesday morning's rush hour near Collinsville, Illinois, east of St. Louis. That's where hackers changed a sign along southbound Interstate 255 to read, "DAILY LANE CLOSURES DUE TO ZOMBIES."

Seeing as how these zombies are local to Collinsville, one can only assume (hope) that they're Native American zombies, rising up from the nearby Cahokia Mounds, which was once a thriving city of some 20,000 inhabitants at a time when London and Paris were muddy, disease-riddled bumps in the road. Seriously, who wouldn't want to see an army of Native zombies cross the river and scale the Gateway Arch?

Austin infects Austen with zombieism?

Be warned, people! The streets of Austin are not the only places you must be on guard lest shambling undead corpses attempt to devour your brains. Now comes word that not even proper British comedy-of-manners novels are safe havens:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.

Is there any doubt that Austin, a proudly bookish city with such landmark literary institutions as Book People is the city that infected Austen (merely one letter apart--clearly a case of the zombie virus mutating and "making the jump" if ever there were one)? Now that this virulent plague has leapt from the living world to the literary one, where will the horror end? Certainly, some writings will fare better than others. On the genre front, Starship Troopers and Zombies I can't imagine being much different at all, but Flowers for Algernon and Zombies promises to be very painful, indeed. Thank goodness William Hjortsberg's 1971 tour-de-force Gray Matters remains safely out of print. Can you imagine the unending carnage were zombies to gain access to four billion brains in jars?