Somebody should tell this guy that no one is taking away his freedom of speech or his religion. . . I don't believe in ghosts but would happily sell my CDs to him, if he was interested. . . .
(from http://www.rawstory.com/2015/07/baptist-pastor-bans-gays-from-his-tennessee-hardware-store-no-ill-never-regret-this/)
". . . Jeff Amyx, a Baptist minister who owns Amyx Hardware & Roofing Supplies in Grainger County, said he got to thinking Monday morning, after a Supreme Court ruling in favor of marriage equality, that Christians were the victim of a double standard that allowed homosexuals to stand up for their beliefs but not religious people. “They gladly stand for what they believe in — why can’t I?” Amyx told WBLR. “They believe their way is right, I believe it’s wrong — but yet I’m going to take more persecution than them because I’m standing for what I believe in.” . . . "
OHO's "Ocean City Ditty," the CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD) OHO is Jay Graboski, David Reeve & Ray Jozwiak. Please Visit http://www.ohomusic.com
My latest solo offering, Just More Music by Ray Jozwiak, featuring original, instrumental piano music is now available at - Just More Music by Ray Jozwiak
(To Access all Ray Jozwiak - Gonzo Piano music you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/RayJozwiak)
(from Cecil Adams' The Straight Dope)
". . . Myths about the undead have been around for millennia, and the
relatively harmless automata of Haitian folklore have been getting the
Hollywood treatment for the past century. But the current popular
concept of zombies as shuffling reanimated corpses with a hunger for
humans was inarguably forged by George Romero in his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead.
For decades after, zombies were merely part of the fright-movie
pantheon, which also included slashers, aliens, and so on. Their ascent
to the top of the horror heap is quite recent. Newspaper articles in 2006 noted an upswing in zombies’ cultural
presence, but in retrospect the ball had just gotten rolling. Browsing
through Google search-term trends from 2004 to the present, we find
“zombie” and “zombies” showing sudden increases towards the end of 2008,
as does “zombie apocalypse,” with a pronounced increase in early 2011.
Meanwhile, searches for “ghost,” “witch,” “werewolf,” “demon,”
“vampire,” and variants thereof stayed relatively flat.
What accounts for the heightened fascination? Theories abound:
Decaying corpses are horrifying. Get out, all monsters are horrifying. That’s why we call them monsters.
Decaying reanimated corpses are really horrifying.
This gets closer. The scariest moment of my postcollegiate moviegoing
experience was watching the Terminator come back to life, or whatever it
is homicidal robots come back to after they’ve been to all appearances
annihilated and you’re getting ready to head for the toilets.
“Zombie narrative presents us with a postcolonial consideration of
identity and power, which allows us to challenge social and cultural
hierarchies and power structures.” Please, professor, save it for the faculty lounge.
Let me throw in my own theory: If not zombies, then what? Vampires?
Vampires have been the alpha pop-culture monster for at least 46 years.
(See Barnabas Collins, Dark Shadows, 1967.) But let’s face it,
the vampire = decadent sex metaphor, notwithstanding its ongoing
box-office success, is surely running on fumes. We need zombies because
they are relatively fresh.
Another hypothesis is that zombie films are more common when the U.S.
faces war or societal upheaval. My assistant Una has charted 492 zombie
films by year of release from 1910 to the present; she finds modest
annual production until a spike of 15 zombie flicks in 1973, followed by
fluctuating but fairly high output till 2003, when zombie filmmaking
went through the roof. The 1973 jump coincides with Watergate, and I
suppose 2003 might be a delayed reaction to 9/11, but more precisely
it’s the year we invaded Iraq. Not to harp on this, but was there ever a
time when we were more desperately in need of brains?
Paging through the scholarly journals, we find claims that zombies are a
Marxist metaphor for the human face of capitalist monstrosity, or tap
into a latent desire for racial violence, or somehow are connected with
Hurricane Katrina. . ."
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