"Do you like The Zombies" — a random text from my younger son at 6:31 today.

These are all headlines on the front page of the Washington Post website right now. Did I put them in the right order?

"Craving brains and hangry: Zombie behavior demystified by scientists."

"The sun was ‘smiling’ in a NASA photo. It might be a warning for Earth."

"Don’t blame ‘both sides.’ The right is driving political violence."

"Assault of Paul Pelosi was attack on democracy. The risks keep growing."

May I present a helping of Sunday-morning class politics — edgy but light and humorous, the way you like it, no?

I know it's tough for you because the Yale Club's guest rooms are closed until Labor Day, but you can ask your billionaire funder, Peter Thiel, if you can stay at his Park Avenue apartment. Seems like it has a nice view, just the thing for a down-to-Earth fella like yourself. pic.twitter.com/foJnFEhra9

— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) July 11, 2021

Brains.

 

In 1793, Rousseau had been dead for fifteen years.

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) March 20, 2021

Rousseau wanted to eat the rich’s braaaaaains

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) March 20, 2021

ADDED: Turley took down the tweet Kruse mocked. He's reposted like this, so that it no longer depicts Rousseau as speaking of "eating the rich" in 1793.

For identity politics, there is no surer bet than attacking the “super rich.” Since philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau spoke of “eating the rich” before the Reign of Terror, politicians have had an insatiable appetite for class warfare politics.https://t.co/nBIE0zW0iJ

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) March 20, 2021

"In fact, Trump killed the old Republican Party and now he alone animates the zombie party that lurched forward after its death."

Writes Charles M. Blow in "Donald Trump, Life of a Zombie Party/And an army is blindly following" (NYT).

Yes, Blow is always against Trump, but it's a good line. It fits within a concept I've been tracking under the tag "what Trump did to the GOP."

Radiohead, Janet Jackson, Stevie Nicks, Def Leppard, The Cure, Roxy Music and the Zombies...

... are the new inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

It's just annual nonsense, but I've got to say I love The Zombies. I've loved them since their first single played on the radio long ago, and we saw them here in Madison in 2017. Here are my "Notes from the Zombies concert at the Barrymore."

Why weren't they already in?! From the first link above (Rolling Stone):

For Colin Blunstone of the Zombies – who have been eligible since 1989 and have appeared on three previous ballots – this was the result of incredible patience and persistence. “You do start to doubt that it could happen,” he tells Rolling Stone. “I’ve tried to be fairly philosophical about it and tell myself that if we don’t get inducted, it’s just a bit of fun. Don’t take it too seriously. But of course when you’re actually inducted, everything changes. You think, ‘This is a career-defining [and] life-defining moment.'”

His longtime bandmate Rod Argent echoed Blunstone’s sentiment. “I know it’s fashionable in some circles to say, ‘I don’t mind whether I get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or not,'” he tells Rolling Stone. “But that is not how I’ve ever felt. When we were first nominated, that felt like a huge honor in its own right. And this time to turn the corner and get inducted, feels fantastic … I’m just so delighted.”

Notes from the Zombies concert at the Barrymore.

After last night's concert, wet from the rain and up past my bedtime, I wrote this list in my iPad to prompt me to remember things I might blog about. I didn't number the list, but now I see there are 9 items. Would have stretched for a 10th if I'd noticed. Since I'm getting a late start blogging, I'll give you the list for its enigmatic value and update item by item as I explain (or attempt to remember) the meaning:

Head high, glow sticks, no
Mansplainer lists jimi etc
Curly headed guy reeks, anosmia
Iphones
Diaries
Rain
Fifty years, first album
Whitest crowd
Standing os

Head high, glow sticks, no — Before the concert a woman came around to foist glow sticks on us. I said "no" approximately 10 times, with added protestations about not wanting the responsibility and concern about the potential for toxic leakage. But she would not take "no" for an answer. I ended up with a glow stick and instructions to break it to light it up and wave it around during "Hold Your Head Up." After she left, I said to Meade: "Whatever happened to no means no? If this were a rape trial, she'd be guilty."

The woman was not an employee of the theater, just a big fan, she said. A big fan of Argent, I guess. "Hold Your Head Up" is not a Zombies song, but the biggest hit of the band the Zombies' keyboard player Rod Argent formed after The Zombies. I did not follow Argent — it's prog rock — but I have heard the song on the radio enough to find it catchily familiar. It lends itself to glow-stick foolery in the chorus, which has a triumphant "Hold your head up WOMAN/Hold your head up WOMAN." You can stab the stick up and forward in a Heil, Argent salute on the "WOMAN." And trust me, the word is "woman," not "WHOA!" Rod Argent explained that to us.

Mansplainer lists jimi etc — Since it was general admission, you get there early and once you get that seat you want, you're going to have to sit in it for a good 40 minutes before the music starts. What to do with your time? You could talk, or you could try to read while the man in back of you talks. Who he talked to, I don't know, because he did all the talking. He was suffering from the delusion that his seatmate would admire him if he told her, one by one, about every concert he attended approximately half a century ago, complete with quotes from his father — "I don't care who the hell is playing" — can you imagine? Jimi was playing. One story like that, fine. But the man had an endless list, the next story always cued up and ready to stop the other person from offering the slightest contribution. At one point, I nudged Meade and started to lean over to whisper something like "That guy's concertsplaining" but Meade's slight smile and nod was enough to communicate to me that he and I were thinking exactly the same thing. You can't eavesdrop on Althouse and Meade doing mental telepathy in Row H.

Curly headed guy reeks, anosmia. That seat I was hoping would stay empty, the one right in front of me, between 2 couples, got filled at the last minute by a late-sixies-ish — in more ways than one — man with a big head of curly gray hair. Oh, no, he's sitting in front of me and he has big hair. Why'd I have to get the big hair guy? My problem was merely visual. (And, really, he only blocked my view of a large black box, which looked like the same box that temporarily deafened me in the right ear when I saw The Ramones play The Barrymore on May 27, 1995, just 3 weeks after we'd seen Mike Watt and The Foo Fighters.) But I'm differently abled. I have anosmia. Meade is more olfactorily aware. After the concert, Meade said: "That guy reeked of weed."

Iphones. Speaking of visuals. So distracting. Put them away, people. I considered getting my phone out to get one picture, but I thought it was too selfish, this idea that I should get one too. But it wasn't that everyone in the theater felt entitled and inclined to take one picture. It was that about 2% of the people thought it was okay to hold up their phone and video an entire segment. The screen looks very bright in the dark audience and it points back at everyone behind you. And maybe it's just me — the screen addict — but when I see the lit screen, I have to look at it. It's just riveting, even though it's nothing but an annoyance.

Diaries. There was no opening act, just 2 parts to The Zombies' performance. (The first set was a variety of things, including the aforementioned "Hold Your Head Up" and The Zombies' big hits "Tell Her No" and "She's Not There," and the second half was a second-by-second, live reproduction of the highly admired, influential studio album "Odessey and Oracle." (The spelling error on "Odyssey" is in the original.))

Between sets, I was reading on my iPhone. Arts & Letters Daily sent me to a review of a couple of books about graphomaniacs, including a woman who had written a diary that consisted of 148 volumes. The diarist, we're told, "never improves, never grows into art," because "She is deafened by solipsism." And: "Hers is probably the longest diary in history."

The next thing I go to read to pass the intermission time is the David Sedaris piece in The New Yorker, which I'd blogged but hadn't yet read in its entirety. The first thing I see when I click through is:

David Sedaris has kept a diary for forty years, during which he has filled a hundred and fifty-three handmade notebooks. The following entries, which document Sedaris’s years in Chicago, have been taken from the forthcoming book “Theft by Finding: Diaries (1977–2002),” which is out on May 30th from Little, Brown.

153?! That's more than 148, the number of volumes in "probably the longest diary in history." Kind of surreal to find that statement refuted numerically in the very next thing I read. And then there's the whole idea that the graphomania of the diarist is inherently limiting. People who write obsessively like that are solipsists, going nowhere. The career of David Sedaris tells a different story.

Rain. When the concert let out, it was raining and the car was 5 blocks away. No umbrellas or rain gear. It's funny how you can go years and years without getting soaked in rain. We're pretty good at avoiding getting caught in the rain, and I could have avoided it last night too by accepting Meade's offer to wait under the marquee...



... while he got the car, but I wanted to be with him. Enjoyed driving home with the rain on the street lengthening the lights...



... into glow sticks.

Fifty years, first album. The Zombies first album — which made up much of the first set — was an important part of the record collection that mattered so much to me in the mid-60s, when I was a teenager. The album came out in 1965, when I was 14. It was strange to think of being that teenager half a century ago, listening to that album on a record player something like this...



... and now to be so much older and to be hearing the band live, and they're older too but they sound just the same. One of the original Zombies has died, but the rest, along with me, are still living in the world, still enjoying the same songs, played the same way.

What would the person of the past — the me in the bedroom with the record player — have thought if she were to know that she'll get to see The Zombies live, but it will be 50 years from now, and it will be these songs — "Tell Her No," "She's Not There" — sounding just about exactly like this record she's playing over and over?

I think she would have found it very weird. In 1965, 50 years ago was 1915. No one was excited about songs from 1915 in 1965. My parents were still clinging to songs from 20 years ago, from 1945, and I thought they were hopelessly stuck in the past. In 1965, everything seemed to be changing every year. Just 2 or 3 years ago seemed very different and already replaced by much more advanced material. Ah, but no, in 50 years, you'll still be in love with the mid-60s music, and you won't be home alone — like you are now — with records. You'll be out in a theater jam-packed with people who feel the same way.

Whitest crowd. I said it to Meade as we were standing in line and I said it again as we were in our seats waiting for the show to start: "This is the whitest crowd I have ever been in."

Standing os. Standing ovations. I have never experienced so many standing ovations. The Zombies got a huge standing ovation just for walking out on the stage. For both sets. And they got a standing ovation after every song. And they got at least a partial standing ovation in the middle of some songs. At first, I could appreciate all the love, but after a while, I was getting cynical. All right. Settle down. Or even despairing: Now, mere clapping will seem like an expression of hatred.

I did some research. Are there too many standing ovations? Here's Ben Brantley in the NYT:

I would like to make the case, officially and urgently, for the return of the sitting ovation. Because we really have reached the point at which a standing ovation doesn’t mean a thing....

The S.O. (if I may so refer to a phenomenon that no longer warrants the respect of its full name) has become a reflexive social gesture, like shaking hands with the host at the end of a party.

Or, to put it in cruder and more extreme terms, it’s like having sex with someone on the first date, whether you like the person or not, because you think it’s expected.

And here's the English point of view, from Michael Henderson in The Telegraph:

Although the standing ovation purports to honour the performer, it is usually about the person who stands. It is, more often than not, a gesture of self-reward, or self-congratulation. It is a way of saying: “I have paid a few bob for this ticket, and I have got my money’s worth.”...

But this canker in our theatre-going is also rooted in a narcissism that has spread through all parts of life. ...  It is about letting it all hang out, without embarrassment – or, as some pop psychologist put it after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, it’s “emotional literacy.” Ah yes, of course.

At cricket matches, the cameras love to linger on those odd folk who dress up as Saracens and cavemen. Even at the rugby, a game played and watched by manly chaps, every try offers an excuse to let off rockets, metaphorically and sometimes literally. And to think they used to shake hands and say: “Jolly well done, sir!”

Ah, I wonder what The Zombies thought of us Americans, us Madisonians. We, most of us, must have thought, flattering ourselves, that we were showering them with love, rousing them to higher an higher heights. So eternally youthful, so bursting with energy. That's what the standing o-ers seem to think of ourselves. But perhaps The Zombies, being English, are more like Henderson in The Telegraph, and they'd prefer a more modest response. As John Lennon once said:

"The province of Ontario swooped in and took them from their parents, declaring that they had to be protected from exploitation."

"Then it exhibited the children three times a day in a human zoo called Quintland, to be raised as a sort of science experiment. Three million visitors came in the 1930s.... Little is left of the playground where the 'Quints' were displayed to thousands of paying customers who peered through wire mesh from elevated walkways. Though they still resent the way the government exploited them, Annette and Cécile smile at the mention of Quintland. 'Paradise,' Annette said of the compound. 'Was it ever,' Cécile agreed. The mesh kept them from seeing the spectators, but both sisters said they could certainly hear them, and often played the crowd for laughs. 'It wasn’t good for the children to be like that, to be shown like that, playing naturally and knowing that other people were looking,' Cécile said. 'It was sort of theft from us.'"

From "2 Survivors of Canada’s First Quintuplet Clan Reluctantly Re-emerge." The re-emergence is on the occasion of a pending decision by the North Bay city council whether to move the log house where the Dionne quintuplets were born to a fairground 45 minutes away. Annette and Cécile didn't want the house moved, and the city council voted last night not to move it. From the second link:

Shortly after their birth, the province of Ontario took them away from their parents, making them “wards of the king,” saying it was necessary to prevent their exploitation. The province soon built a human zoo in which they were exhibited to about 6,000 sightseers a day until the age of 9.

Here's a picture of the premier of Ontario — whose idea it was to take the children away — posing with the babies:



Nice outfit, ghoul.

ADDED: That was the second time in the 13-year history of this blog that I have used the word "ghoul." The other time was in 2005, soon after John Roberts joined the Supreme Court and a lightbulb happened to burst over his head. Not a metaphorical lightbulb, and actual lightbulb. And it was Halloween....

The NYT, perhaps, found it "unfit to print" a transition that would have connected the trauma of William Rehnquist's death to the Halloween lightbulb burst and the new Chief Justice dressed as a zany comedian. Surely, it must have been tempting to write that it was the ghost of the old Chief that burst the bulb and that the new Chief's costume speaks of lighthearted happiness, while the dying old Chief, traumatizing everyone, by contrast seemed a ghoul.

The word "ghoul" has appeared 4 other times, and 3 of them are from the same source, a Scalia opinion that analogizes a doctrine called the Lemon test to a movie monster that won't die. ("[L]ike some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad after being repeatedly killed and buried....") The 4th one was just last week, a reference to an effort to name a baby Ghoul Nipple.

"Ghoul" comes from the Arabic word "ghoul," which means "to seize," and the OED defines it as "An evil spirit supposed (in Muslim countries) to rob graves and prey on human corpses." So Scalia kind of got the word wrong, didn't he? He should have written "zombie." Influenced by Scalia, I got it wrong too.

Apathy in The New Yorker.

1. April 3, 2017: "In Sweden, hundreds of refugee children have fallen unconscious after being informed that their families will be expelled from the country."

Georgi was given a diagnosis of uppgivenhetssyndrom, or resignation syndrome, an illness that is said to exist only in Sweden, and only among refugees. The patients have no underlying physical or neurological disease, but they seem to have lost the will to live. The Swedish refer to them as de apatiska, the apathetic. “I think it is a form of protection, this coma they are in,” Hultcrantz said. “They are like Snow White. They just fall away from the world.”

2. March 27, 2017: "'Get Out' and the Death of White Racial Innocence."

“I’m terrified at the moral apathy—the death of the heart—which is happening in my country,” [said James Baldwin in 1968]. In his mordant telling, Americans are consumer zombies struck by an “emotional poverty so bottomless and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct and on black-white relations. If [white] Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have become so dependent on what they call the Negro Problem.”

3. March 9, 2017: "Parquet Courts and the Uncertain Future of Indie/The Brooklyn-based band on the struggle to be yourself in an age of reinvention."

When Parquet Courts toured Europe this fall, the band found itself delivering a nightly diatribe against Trump, lest anyone mistake its inward vibe for political apathy. “Being sentimental for that time when rock music was thought of as the most legitimate music, when it was at the core of the culture—it doesn’t make sense to try and go back to that. You’re never going to succeed.”

4. March 8, 2017: "The writers of a recent New Yorker article on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election respond to reader questions":

Do you think democracy will survive? I see very little keeping us from becoming like Putin’s Russia. Where should we put our energy to be most effective? How can we stop the apathy and get those in power to choose democracy over personal interest? How can I help? —Kayde Kat Martin

For the first time I can remember, daily conversation has become infused with questions about the basic strength of our democracy, a far-reaching anxiety about whether the political and digital technology of our time are strong and resilient enough to bear the pressures of the moment. It’s easy to dismiss this as little more than Democrats hyperventilating—liberal “snowflakes” who were undone by the results of the election searching for a way to challenge its legitimacy....

5. February 5, 2017: "Life Under Alternative Facts":

There was no real cognitive dissonance existing in the minds of most people in the Soviet Union of the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Everyone knew that everything said on the radio or on television, everything (with the exception of weather reports or sports results) was a blatant lie...

Being exposed to constant, relentless irradiation by that funhouse reality, forever aswim in a sea of lies, had made people lethargic and apathetic, cynical and fatalistic, dumbfounded into mute infantilism, drunkenness, and helpless rage in the meagreness of their tiny private, personal worlds. Their worlds were small and filled with sameness. People lived their lives in a state of permanent shell shock, like dynamite-blasted fish still somehow capable of swimming.

"December 1, we'll probably start climbing out from the smoking ruin and say, 'anybody else alive around here?'"

"It'll be like The Walking Dead, right? We're going to try to come up with bands of people and walk across the country, and just not get ourselves killed or eaten, and hook up with people we think are not insane or horrible or in some way murderous. That's exactly what it's going to be like."

Post-election anxiety about putting the ruined party back together.

Imagined, pre-election, by a Republican.

I'm listening to the podcast of the episode of "This American Life" that aired on October 28th. The quote above is an answer to the question framed by host Ira Glass: "This is the big question for all these guys — what's their party going to be after November 8? What's it going to stand for?"  All these guys were "center-right" Republicans — "basically Reagan Republicans," guys with "old school conservative ideals." The guy answering the question is Rob Long of the podcast "Ricochet."

It's funny listening to the show now, because without saying as much, it's obviously premised on the assumption that Donald Trump is going to lose. I know "funny" isn't the word many people would use to describe the period of American life that began on Election Day night, and I'm sorry if I'm a bad person for finding it very funny. It's not that I'm happy with Trump. I wasn't a Trump supporter, but I couldn't stand Hillary either. I'm just experiencing a lot of the aftermath of the election as very funny. Like, why did we just spend the weekend talking about "Hamilton"?

The first "Saturday Night Live" after the election — I was expecting something great... what a disappointment!

"Alec Baldwin will have to be on," I said, eagerly awaiting the opening sketch and wanting to see what the show would do with the kick-in-the-head Trump victory.

The show opened with Kate McKinnon's Hillary Clinton playing somber chords on the piano...

... I recognize the chords — there's no secret — it's "Hallelujah." They're combining the election story with the story of the death of Leonard Cohen. How's that going to work?

"Oh, she's doing this in earnest," Meade says, and he turns out to be right. Kate McKinnon sang the song in a somber tone, an earnest expression of sadness about the election (and perhaps also about the death of Leonard Cohen). No Alec-Baldwin-as-Donald-Trump ever bursts in. She completes the song, then turns to us and says, earnestly, her eyes glistening with tears, "I'm not giving up and neither should you."

The rest of the show was under-written and flat. I'm sure they knew that, since in one segment, they resorted to the gimmick of going meta, stopping a sketch mid-scene and switching to the actors analyzing what went wrong with the sketch, and the meta part was also under-written and flat.

The host was Dave Chappelle, who was making a big comeback. His opening monologue seemed be the result of a decision to just let him go on however he wanted for as long as he wanted. Many of his lines were garbled, and nearly all of it was some sort of racial analysis of what just happened in the election, with the main idea being that black people have always known that white people are racist. The most memorable joke was that he's staying in a Trump hotel and he likes it because: "Housekeeper comes in in the morning and cleans my room and I'm just 'Hey, good morning, housekeeper!' grab a handful of pussy, say, you know, 'Boss said it was okay.'"

There were some humiliating, cringe-inducing sketches. 2 were based on pathetic couples getting sex — "Last Call with Dave Chappelle" and "Love and Leslie" — and one was about a grown man (Chappelle) breastfeeding on his mother (Leslie Jones). There was a long, unfunny impersonation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. There was a passable sketch about young white people watching the election returns with their black friend, played by Chappelle, who, I'm thinking, the show's decisionmakers deemed insufficiently energetically funny, since midway through the sketch, Chris Rock shows up to play the role of the white people's other black friend. There was an elaborately produced "Walking Dead" segment that gave Chappelle a chance to bring back a lot of characters that some people may remember from his old TV show. I don't know "Walking Dead" and I didn't watch much of the old Chappelle TV show, so I found this segment very hard to watch. It was one black man forcing a group of black men down on their knees and threatening them with violence. When the violence finally comes — at 3:23 — it gets surreal, and you might enjoy this part if you can endure the n-word and decapitation.

The severed head does some comical things. At 4:10 it talks about the nation "beginning to heal, through laughing again": "Because even though our country feels irrevocably severed like a man from his head, let my example prove that we should continue to move forward." The head asks us "to see ourselves in one another," and the special effects put this talking head in various places, including on the body of Donald Trump ("I am every man") and Hillary Clinton ("I am every woman").

The severed head was the best thing on the show. But then, I like optimism and surrealism. Mostly, I think the show just couldn't get it together to digest the news enough to make it into comedy. It was a real test of comic skill, nerve, and endurance, and they didn't have what it took. I guess it would have been easy to celebrate a Hillary victory, to gloat and mock, but they got their comeuppance, and it showed.

"She's Not There"... the great old Zombies song... is playing out of my computer...

... and Meade asks "Is that about Hillary?" (He imagined someone had cranked out a comic take on Hillary's failure to make it back to the debate stage on time last night.)

I said: "No, it's a Chanel ad. I'm just putting up with it so I can watch the new Bill Cunningham video...."



Here's the Bill Cunningham. He's observing the color white this week — white, as a pre-Christmas phenomenon, in store windows, ladies' coats, and the spats of Tom Wolfe.

Here's Hillary returning late to the stage, which we found very funny — the disruption, even as she tries to be inconspicuous; the applause, like it's an achievement (or relief that she's okay); and the utterly minimal "sorry" (which we replayed 10 times and laughed every time).



ADDED: The ad is excellent, connecting perfume to the memory of a woman who is not there. A woman — in white — tosses the perfume bottle to the man and walks toward him, and then a woman in black crosses her path and the woman in white dissipates and disappears. Pretty impressive ad placement, considering that the Cunningham video is about the color white.

AND: Speaking of Hillary and fashion, can anyone explain the extremely frumpy knee-length coat she wore last night?

I'm especially curious about the big patch pockets at belly level. I understand that's something a woman might choose as an alternative to carrying a purse, but Hillary has people to hold her things for her, and the pockets are so crude — huge and stuck on and bulgy. If I had to guess, I'd say she wears clothes as a deflection of attention from her body. Don't even look at it. I'm only a head.

It made me think of The Little King:

"Imagine creating the best work of your life, some of the best music of its day, and no one cares."

"Now imagine playing those songs 47 years later to a screaming and loving bunch of fans and getting what seems like a hero's welcome. That's part of the story of The Zombies, who played the classic 1968 album Odessey and Oracle, along with a set of other hits and brand new songs, live in Washington, D.C. last month. Now we have their nearly note-for-note live reproduction of Odessey and Oracle for you here."

Bernie Sanders was appalled by "the mass of hot dazed humanity heading uptown" for another day of "moron work, monotonous work."

"'The years come and go,' Mr. Sanders wrote, in all apparent seriousness. 'Suicide, nervous breakdown, cancer, sexual deadness, heart attack, alcoholism, senility at 50. Slow death, fast death. DEATH.'"

From a NYT article — linked today at Drudge — titled "Bernie Sanders’s Revolutionary Roots Were Nurtured in ’60s Vermont." I love the photo. I'm sure I would have had a crush on him back then. It was very typical for younger people of that time to regard ordinary middle-class people going to work as shuffling, horrifying zombies.

"The Russian government has blacklisted the California-based Wayback Machine, a comprehensive archive of the Internet..."

"... over an Islamist video available on the website."

The video, called "The Clang of Swords," by the notorious terrorist group Islamic State, was declared extremist by a court in Russia's southern Stavropol region in July.

The state communications watchdog Roskomnadzor said on its website Friday that it had found 400 online copies of the video and requested their removal.

A handful of sites, including Wayback Machine's domain Archive.org, did not comply, leading to their blacklisting.

I'm impressed that the Wayback Machine lasted as long as it did. I'm sure it gets you too all sorts of things the Russian government would prefer its people not to read.

In other freedom-of-speech news from the Moscow Times:

A notoriously outspoken Russian actor and former Orthodox priest who suggested last week that Ebola victims were coming back from the dead as zombies has been banned from entering Latvia over earlier incendiary comments he made about gay people.

In December 2013, [Ivan] Okhlobystin said that all homosexuals should be burned alive because they represent a "living danger" to his children. 

So his comments were literally incendiary.

Last week he suggested that some victims of the Ebola virus were turning into zombies, explaining that he had heard of many cases in which those who died from the virus were mysteriously resurrected several days later. In case there was any doubt, the actor added that he "was not joking" and that he had purchased a crossbow, "just in case."

A crossbow? On a zombie? Does that even work?

Kids playing "Humans Versus Zombies" with Nerf guns are criticized by the police for wasting "police resources"...

... after somebody called in to report an automatic weapon on campus. The police are informed in advance that the game is going on, and hundreds of students have had fun with this...

But with heightened suspicions after the Boston bombings, poison sent to the White House, and a concerning powder found at a Beloit health clinic, police will consider whether to allow "Humans Versus Zombies" to continue in the future, [Marc Lovicott, a UW Police spokesman said].

On campus, about a dozen students wearing orange bandannas played outside Sterling Hall on Thursday afternoon.

"I wouldn't think that any of the Nerf blasters would confuse anyone for a real weapon, because most of the new ones are bright yellow or blue," said Steven Brandt, a UW freshman on the zombie team.

"Most school shootings happen from people who are isolated and on their own," he said. "With 'Humans Versus Zombies,' I've made a whole bunch of friends -- it brings people together."

Yes, before you end "Humans Versus Zombies" based on a completely nonexistent threat, consider whether "Humans Versus Zombies" might be saving lives — drawing erstwhile loners into the group and transforming their aggressive ideation through play.

I was walking to school the other day and saw some teenage boys running along after each other wielding bright-colored plastic guns. I commented at the time, nostalgically, about how back in the 1950s there were always lots of kids running around the neighborhood shooting toy guns at each other. It was great to see something like that again. Our guns, back in the 1950s, were real metal and loaded with red paper rolls of caps.

Shutting down the whole game because of a couple stupid calls to the police? Ridiculous. As if all of life must be toned down so nobody ever "wastes" the police's time. This is Madison, Wisconsin, where the police are also intent on ending an early-May block party that's been a big tradition here since 1969... right about the time when terrorists bombed the above-mentioned Sterling Hall.

MEANWHILE, in Boston: Maybe no one is ever supposed to go outside again.

Man shoots his girlfriend in an argument about the possibility of a zombie apocalypse.

"He felt very adamant there could be a military mishap that would result in some sort of virus being released that could cause terrible things to happen," said the cop. “She felt it was ridiculous. He’s passionate about it. And it escalated from there."

Looking for the soul of Missoula.

"Victim of Canadian porn star cannibal is Chinese gay lover as police reveal 'murderer' is on the run in France... dressed as a woman."

A Daily Mail headline. Are you having trouble keeping your cannibals in the news straight? (No pun intended!) I mean there's the porn-related-gay-Chinese-on-the-lam-transvestite guy...

Luka Magnotta, who is suspected of cannibalism, flew from Canada to France a day after placing gruesome footage of the murder on the internet.

Flew? Vampire or zombie? You decide. Anyway, there's that one. There's the naked-in-broad-daylight face-eater. That's Rudy Eugene, not on the lam. Shot dead by the police. And then there's the other one:

Authorities say Alex Kinyua, 21, admitted using a knife to kill and carve up Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, 37, before eating his heart and parts of his brain....

In February, Kinyua posted a question on Facebook, asking fellow students at historically black colleges and universities if they were "strong enough to endure ritual HBCU mass human sacrifices around the country and still be able to function as human beings?"

He referred to the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech and "other past university killings around the country" and warned "ethnic cleansing is the policy, strategy and tactics that will affect you, directly or indirectly in the coming months"....

I wonder if the sane people who engage in racial politics bear some responsibility for the paranoia that arises in weak minds? In fact, I wonder if the people who delight in japing about a zombie uprising bear some responsibility for the crazy people who actually do try to eat brains?

I'm thinking back to the clumsy efforts to assign blame for the Tucson massacre. Some people are insane. But why do they act out their insanity in the particular way that they do? What signals do they pick up and distort? You can't really blame the sane people who talk and distort and lie about things as they operate more or less competently in this place called reality that most of us inhabit. And yet... why are we hearing so much about cannibals these days?

ADDED: I crossed out "Chinese" in the first paragraph of this post. The headline had a few too many words in it for me to absorb. The victim was Chinese, not the cannibal.

"[B]asically hallucinating... he kind of reached out to me, kind of in a zombie-like fashion."

"At that point, there’s not a lot you can do for somebody that’s dying and frozen to death."

On Mount Everest, last Saturday, it was a "traffic jam" as 150 people tried to take advantage of a window of good weather. With the crowding, it took longer, and they hadn't carried enough oxygen. 4 died.