Here come the zombies and/or global pandemic

Scientists Make HIV Strain That Can Infect Monkeys
Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Scientists have created a strain of the human AIDS virus able to infect and multiply in monkeys in a step toward testing future vaccines in monkeys before trying them in people, according to a new study.

Dude. While I fully support the search for an AIDS vaccine, I have definitely seen enough movies to know how this story ends.

A tribute to William Sanderson

Do you know who William Sanderson is? Of course you do!

As J.F Sebastian in Blade Runner:


As E. B. Farnum in Deadwood:

And, most recently, as the sheriff in True Blood.

(And, lest I forget--he was also Larry in Newhart. You know, "I'm Larry, and this is my brother Darryl, and my other brother Darryl.")

Sanderson is one of the unsung heroes of the screen...a really great character actor who labors in semi-obscurity. And a Tennesseean to boot, which makes him extra cool.

I was sad to see that there are no William Sanderson tribute pages on the internet. So it was the least I could do to put up this post in appreciation for his work.

"All of this has happened before..."

Excellent.

Antigravitas congratulates Captain Sulu on his marriage

George Takei is the coolest.

New X-Files movie coming out in July...

Excellent! Just last night I was at the new, scary Best Buy in Columbia Heights slobbering over the full X-Files DVD collector's edition ($275; my birthday is May 21 in case you were wondering). It has been way too long since the end of the series and the first X-Files movie.

"It has struck me over the last several years talking to college-age kids that a lot of them really don't know the show or haven't seen it," [show creator Chris] Carter said. "If you're 20 years old now, the show started when you were 4.... "

Holy crap, is that true? I guess it is.

What I really wonder is: will X-Files themes resonate with people in the Aughts the way they did in the pre-millenial late '90s? I wonder if anyone wants to see fiction about conspiracy theories any more, or paranoid speculations about the consolidation of political and economic power. "Trust no one" still holds, not so sure about "the truth is out there."

Can't. Frakkin. Wait.

OMG, OMG, only 2 hours until the Battlestar Galactica season 4 premiere! Please, don't let it suck.
I was talking with some friends about The Wire the other day (I know, rare occurrence) when we decided that premium TV dramas are the narrative art form of this era. Think about The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under...they speak to us in ways only great novels and cycles of novels used to. And thanks to DVDs and other forms of digital storage, we can visit and re-visit them just like we would our favorite literary trilogies.

It's a dark day... in your friend's parents' basement

It's the end of an era. Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has slipped this mortal coil. (AP via CNN)

"It really meant a lot to him to hear from people from over the years about how he helped them become a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, what he gave them," [Gygax's wife] said. "He really enjoyed that."

[I realize that this post does not exactly fit the "sci-fi" tag, so I am hereby creating a new and much-needed one: "geekdom."]

Which Battlestar Galactica character are you?

Entertaining* quiz here.

My results:

Created by BuddyTV

*well, entertaining for some of us geektards anyway

Probably the last good sci-fi movie of the summer. Sigh.

Fie on the critics who called the third X-Men movie, X-Men: The Last Stand flawed.

It delivers everything you loved about the previous two X-Men films:

• Awesome visual effects.
• Teenagery outsider/rebel angst. Loved the tatooed, gothy mutants in Magneto's army. The rebel mutant convergence space looked like an anti-globalization protest in Seattle.
  
• Allusions to social and political battles over race, sexual orientation, and other xenophobic concerns that would seem heavy-handed if not delivered via a live action comic book. ("Yeah, I remember that conversation," said a gay friend of mine as we watched the scene in X-Men United when Bobby comes out as a mutant to his parents.)
• Patrick Stewart.

The problem is that movie critics rarely seem to take comic book adaptations in the spirit in which they are intended.