Alien held out its claw and shook the empty glass gently but with obvious insistence. Predator rolled its eyes and looked at the clock. Not even 9:30. At this rate, Alien would have drunk half a case of champagne before midnight, and he was out of his alien mind if he thought Predator was going to clean up his highly toxic puke. Its corrosive qualities could burn through steel, and Predator had just gotten the brasswood floors refinished. Not to mention the danger of a repeat of last year???s egg spawning fiasco. Predator was still getting deFriendstered by people as late as August over that horrorshow.

A beeping sounded from the kitchen, and Predator rushed in to remove the stuffed mushroom caps from the oven. The tray was burning hot, but of course Predator was insensitive to the heat. He used his 18-inch long wrist blades to spear the mushroom caps onto a dish left to him by his nanna. A screeching from the living room was followed by an abrupt shift from the new Ghostface album to Daft Punk???s concert stuff. Predator hated it when Alien messed with his iPod, but it was New Years Eve, and he was the host. He had to keep reminding himself of that, and of all the duties that a host must perform in order to ensure his guests enjoy themselves. With that, he returned to the living room with the plate of mushroom caps.

The scene from Times Square playing on the TV showed a crush of humanity. Predator had tried going one year, but he hated waiting in line for the porta-potties. And it was boring. The only thing that kept him occupied the whole night was imaging a half-naked Dick Clark, running through the Peruvian jungle, as Predator hunted him, toying with the horrified aging entertainer before in a flash of reflective invisibility, he threw his spear from seemingly out of nowhere, impaling Dick Clark to the soft loam of the forest floor, right where he stood. Alien belched, and a thin haze of acid green saliva melted speckled holes in a lampshade. Predator shot him a laser-sighted glance, but Alien???s head was lolling back on his tree trunk of a neck, and Predator looked at the door wondering not just when but if his other guests would ever arrive.

By about 11:30, as predicted, Alien had gone back into the bedroom and passed out on top of all the coats, like a little baby alien. Predator got caught in a conversation with the Terminator going on and on about Sarah Conner and thought he was going to nuclear self-destruct until one of the creatures from Pitch Black came and saved him. ???Oh my God,??? said the creature from Pitch Black, ???if I were you, I would have nuclear self-destructed, talking to that guy is like talking to a robot.??? Then the creature from Pitch Black threw its head back and laughed, spitting little flecks of deviled egg. Quickly, Predator stabbed the creature from Pitch Black in the abdomen and watched him die, then ran a hand through his dreadlocks, flicking away bits of egg with disgust. Looking down at the black blood curdling up under the creature from Pitch Black???s head, the Predator knew that getting the weatherproofing on the brasswood floors had been the right choice. ???Weathproofing? indoors???? people had said. Now who was laughing? Not Predator, Predator never laughed. Someone began counting down from 10 as Predator wiped his curved blade and stowed it in a harness around his thigh.

The last guest had left by 1:30, most of them off to other parties, but Predator did not mind. He preferred to end the night as early as possible. He passed by Alien, still asleep in the guest room, little piston puffs of harsh steam blowing out of his alien nose as he moaned lightly in his alien dreams. The next day, it would be war. But for tonight, Predator pulled the door shut on his mortal enemy, went to the bathroom to brush his tusks, and set loose the Roomba to take care of the mess.

I have a recurring nightmare in which I am trying to get to the airport and/or helicopter and I can’t. Either I’m stuck in traffic, or some mom #3116 is nagging me, or I don’t even know what. I can’t do it. It’s always five minutes before the flight and I’m an hour away and obs Nickleback is playing in the background because that’s when you know it’s serious. But, you guys, two new nightmares have entered my nightbrain and I can’t decide which is worse.

New Year’s Eve at a comedy club?

Ooh, a complimentary glass of wine? For a $135.00 I should get a complimentary blow job from the Amazing Jonathan (no homo.)

That’s pretty nightmare, but what about:

TAKING A SPIN CLASS IN GRAND CENTRAL STATION?

So scary. The only thing scarier than these two mindfucks of a horrible ideas would be to combine them both with the I Am Legend Zombie Cancer. That’s right. Spin Class on New Year’s Eve in a comedy club surrounded by vampires. Oh look, it’s your boyfriend sweating off those Christmas calories!

On Dec. 17, 1957, things came to a head. Trickey was inching her way between the tables in the lunchroom.

“I was holding the tray above their heads, trying to get through the aisle,” she recalls.

Meanwhile, junior Dent Gitchel was trying to eat his lunch.

“There were some guys harassing her along the aisle,” he says. “Some people would refuse to move their chairs, and I think somebody kicked a chair at her.”

Minnijean dropped her tray, spilling chili on Gitchel.

“Pandemonium broke loose in the cafeteria at that moment,” he recalls.

Both students were ordered to the principal’s office.

“When I got to the office, the girls’ vice principal asked me if I had done it on purpose,” Trickey recalls. “And I said, ‘Accidentally on purpose.’ That’s because I really hadn’t understood it.”

The school sent Gitchel home to change his clothes. He was back in school that afternoon. Trickey was suspended for six days. Two months later, she was gone; she would finish high school in New York.

“In many ways, it was a positive thing because it opened up my mind,” he says. “It started the process of changing my attitudes on a whole lot of things.”

Gitchel went on to become a lawyer and law professor in Arkansas.Trickey says the chili incident in the lunchroom taught her this lesson: She could not be perfect, even if it meant letting down the people who needed her as a civil rights symbol, and further upsetting the racists who taunted her every day.
(NPR)

Well?

Having been elected as Zombie Apocalypse Team Leader in the past, I feel that it falls to me to address Marzipandrew’s post-I Am Legend survival discussion last night, in particular the suggestion of getting an aircraft carrier and sailing around the world with the sun, so that it is never night.

1. No.
2. No.
3. Aircraft carriers cannot actually travel fast enough to keep up with the sun, and while that may change in the future, it will not change by 2012, which is when we will need it.
4. If we get an aircraft carrier, surely it will suffice to simply keep the aircraft carrier in the ocean. If/when the zombies develop the power of swim, we will cross that Zombie bridge when we Zombie get to it.
5. Marzipandrew suggested that we travel from one refueling station to the next to keep up with the sun. I couldn’t have been elected Zombie Apocalypse Team Leader all those years ago if I couldn’t see the immediate and obvious flaw with this plan. With the elimination of the world’s telecommunication system upon the collapse of world governments/infrastructure, how do you suggest we make contact with those refueling stations, much less get them on-line and ready to service our aircraft carrier. The immense amount of fuel required to chase the sun would best be reserved for powering our on-ship generators so that we can play Wii to stave off the mind-crushing despair of everyone we know being dead.

Oh, and look, it’s your boyfriend!

Man, how about this week, you guys? What a snooze!

Fart.

Last night I was walking home from the grocery store with my groceries (I’m really into groceries), and heard a bunch of explosions. Is this it? I wondered. Is Al-Qaeda’s Cloverfield attack really happening? SPOILER ALERT: There wasn’t an attack on New York last night. It didn’t really sound like thunder, and it wasn’t raining. You know what it sounded like? It sounded like fireworks. You know what it was? It was fireworks. And not some kid putting fartbombs in a waste bin, but actual shoot up in the sky and they explode with the colors fireworks. That’s weird, right? I know that America gained independence from the Russians on December 13th, 1982, but I had always thought that war was celebrated with a special recipe donut and private weeping. Not to mention that it was really cloudy and low-hanging foggy last night, so the fireworks disappeared at the top in the inclement weather. Beautiful!

The whole thing was very reminiscent of that scene in 30 Rock when Jack orders a fireworks display in midtown. Because that is how life works, a string of half-baked references to episodes of sitcoms and then you die. I’m like the fucking Foucault of South Brooklyn (nullus). My experiences of dialectical representation as it relates to the Spectacle and the Other should have their own show. It would be called Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

(New York Times)

Ban Ki-moon: Hey!
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono: Oh, hey.
Guy on the Left: WHAT UP!
Ban Ki-moon: What’s up, you guys?
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono: Hey!
Guy on the Left: WHAT IT DO!
Ban Ki-moon: I like your shirt.
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono: I like your shirt.
Guy on the Left: Man, check out our shirts.
Ban Ki-moon: Climate change, you guys.
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono: Let’s go back to the shirts for a second.
Guy on the Left: This is my third favorite shirt out of all of my shirts.
Ban Ki-moon: That is a nice shirt, I wonder what the other two look like.
Guy on the Left: Pretty much like this, actually.
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono: It’s nice. Your shirt is also nice, Ban.
Ban Ki-moon: Oh, thank you.
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono: I’m pretty sure we would all be comfortable wearing each other’s shirts.
Ban Ki-moon: We could have some kind of shirt exchange program.
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono: That’s really a nice idea. A nice idea from a guy in a nice shirt.
Guy on the Left: No.
Ban Ki-moon: What do you mean, no?
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono: Uh-oh.
Guy on the Left: My shirts are my shirts. Hands off them.
Ban Ki-moon: Your shirts are nice, don’t be unreasonable.
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono: This is a nightmare.
Guy on the Left: Bitter divisions have been exposed.
Ban Ki-moon: Indeed.
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono: I would just like to say that I still appreciate everyone’s shirts and would only wish that the world could share in shirts such as these.
Guy on the Left: Fuck you.

Here it is:

Since everyone who reads this diary is a baby with a mom who still tucks it in at night, you probably saw the trailer for the upcoming Jumper War movie, Jumper, and thought OLD NEWS, I have already read the young adult novel by the same name because I am a shitty child.

Apparently, if you have the power to teleport, you go to a special medical clinic where they enlarge your body into the size of the Flatiron Building and replace your legs with cacti. Incidentally, why would you “jump” onto the head of the Sphinx at dawn? Shouldn’t you be in bed with a woman who you seduced through your powers of teleportation? He’s not even looking at the sunset, either. Also, his coat is too long. Bad jumper, dude. Jump yourself into heaven. You’re dead to me.

Anyhow, I don’t know about this movie. Max Silvestri seems to think it’s going to be great, but he also wanted to see Beowulf in the theater and is traditionally pretty into anything about teenage boys escaping abusive alcoholic fathers. But I feel like it demands too much pre-accepted knowledge. What’s this movie about? Oh, jumpers? Sure, but it’s going to cover the great Jumper War isn’t it? It is? Great, because Jumper Jones’ Diary’s total dismissal of the Jumper War except for a one sentence mention in a chapter about Jumping into Macy’s after it was closed was ridiculous.

Hey Jumper, jump THIS!

Anyhow, you can watch the full trailer here. But then you’ll want to rewatch this part where the jumpers steal a double decker bus from London and crash it into Samuel L. Jackson on the moon.

(double-click to play)

The man tucked the pistol into the waistband of his pants and looked out over the ash-covered asphalt. They would have to get moving soon. He looked down at the boy, cherubic lick of hair sticking up over the damp, smelling blankets, that had been covered by a thin layer of gray snow dead ash in the night. Soon it would be dawn and he would have to wake him. Not yet. Let him sleep.

They tied their shoes in plastic bags to keep out the damp. The hill-line was crested with the darkened silhouettes of what were once trees, now turned to so much burnt timber. In the flat gray waste of morning he thought of the kitchen in the half-collapsed track house on the edge of a burning town, where he and the boy had scavenged for the food, of which they???d eaten the last five days ago. He thought of the desiccated bodies he found on the second floor, their frozen rictus screams and the crushed skull of a baby, it???s head still collapsed beneath the mercy brick it???s mother had used before taking her own with the razor. He thought of that as he tried to smile for the boy. Time to go, he said. I know, the boy said.

Hours on the road, flat and gray. In places it was slippery where the snow had packed and frozen. They moved slowly. Pushing the cart through the thin, gravely snow, and dead ash was difficult work, and occasionally they would hear a sound and have to rush over the razed ground to hide in a drainage ditch, careful to tip the cart and cover it with the tarpaulin to hide it from scavenging eyes. The boy shivered at his side. Thoughts of heads on pikes filled the man???s mind???s eye, barricades of stripped bodies, their flesh long since made into fuel for the warring gangs. Are we going to die? the boy asked. No, the man said. How do you know? The man said nothing.

Already the sun had fallen and only four, maybe five miles covered. He took out the pieces of map and layed them over the tarpaulin, trying to find a world that made sense. They moved through the cold, dead grass to a copse of barren trees where they could make a fire with the hope that it would remain hidden from the road. All day he had kept his eyes on the southward-moving tracks of a truck in the dead gray ash. He wished for an impossible invisibility. The pistol???s chamber only held two bullets. Need was growing, death gnawing like a hunger, as hard as he tried to fend it off.

The orange light of the fire. The boy???s hollowed out face???by hunger and fear. The man handed him something, wrapped in an old shred of newspaper he???d found in what had once been a basement and was now a tomb. He closed his eyes against the rat eaten bodies and worse of his imagination. What is it, the boy asked, looking at the words, trying to decipher an existence he had never known. Take off the paper, the man said. The boy removed the paper carefully, his look more concerned than excited. What is it, Papa? An iPhone, the man said. Oh no shit, the boy said. Go ahead, turn it on. The boy slid his finger across the touchscreen interface and unlocked the menu panel. After surfing the wireless internet for a few minutes, checking his RSS feed for updates on his favorite blogs, he turned to look into the dirt-smeared face of the man. How many gigs, the boy asked. 8, the man said. This is awesome, Papa, he said. My only regret is that the world ended before they could make an iPhone with more memory. I mean, my iPod holds 80 gigs of music and movies, so this seems kind of like a sad joke. Oh, the man said, wait until you find all the bugs embedded in its first generation software. Is this just an over-priced piece of crap? the boy asked. The man nodded. Together they stared into the fire and no one said anything. The man would cry, but he was too dehydrated. We don???t even have Cingular, the boy said. We have Verizon. Yes, the man said, but who are you going to call anyway? Everyone is dead? The boy began to cry quietly. In his mind, the man cursed God with the most damning of curses. And also Cingular for their exclusive proprietary rights agreement with Apple. He cursed Cingular straight to hell.