Tagged: A Zombified Meme

Zombie author Kim Paffenroth meme-tagged me and I don't have the heart to let him down. It's a pretty standard "Tell Six Random Interesting Things About Yourself" setup, but I figure that if this journal is going to keep up the pretense of being a zombie blog, they should be six random interesting zombie things.

THE RULES (for this game of tag):
1) LINK TO THE PERSON WHO TAGGED YOU.
2) POST THE RULES ON YOUR BLOG.
3) WRITE SIX RANDOM THINGS ABOUT YOURSELF.
4) TAG SIX PEOPLE AT THE END OF YOUR POST AND LINK TO THEM.
5) LET EACH PERSON KNOW THEY ARE TAGGED AND LEAVE A COMMENT ON THEIR BLOG.
6) LET THE TAGGER KNOW WHEN YOUR ENTRY IS UP.
7) DON’T BREAK THE CHAIN (not actually a rule).

SIX ZOMBIE THINGS ABOUT JULIA

1) Savini's 1990 Night of the Living Dead remake, while derided or ignored by the majority of fandom, is one of my top five favorite zombie movies. I first rented it in about fifth grade because the chick on the back (Tallman) looked like my aunt. That was my first real exposure to zombies after "Thriller".

2) My favorite zombie ever is probably Dr. Tongue from Day of the Dead. I could stare at him all day.

3) When we worked as scenic artists at Six Flags Jazzland in New Orleans, RJ and I used liquid latex and greasepaint to dress up as zombies during their lead-up to halloween. Lacking explicit permission, we staggered all through the midway terrorizing people. I was dressed a little on the skimpy side, I guess, in a really flimsy low cut tank top, so the patron reaction was... mixed. I didn't realize and become embarrassed about it until later. I put cold cream in my hair to make it greasy and it didn't come out for a week. The hardened latex deeply exacerbated the wrinkles in my forehead, which to this day have not smoothed out.

4) I've written a few dozen stories in my life, and the only two ever to have been published are zombie stories. (Thin Them Out and "The Shunned" in Bits of the Dead)

5) I'm no longer very fond of Romero as a director. I think his early works seem to imply genius but are ultimately simple, potent messages whose shoestring production gave them an accidentally great look that fans mistake for style. When Romero has a real budget, he goes insane and the result is not nearly as effective. Also, I think he's bought the hype about the early films being intentionally loaded with rich, well-developed sociological commentary, so he's taken it upon himself to stuff bags of this crap into every film, with awful, hamfisted results in Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead.

6) I probably would not survive an undead apocalypse. I own no weapons, I can't run very fast for long and my immune system is nothing to write home about. (Come to think of it, the G1 Megatron figure that RJ keeps locked into disguise mode to wave at home intruders probably wouldn't help him much against the undead, so I guess I'll have company.)

And I'm not tagging anybody. Perhaps because I'm a mav'rick? (Perhaps because I only know like two of you on a first-name basis.)