John Sears | February 12, 2015
We hate to sound like a broken record here at the ZRC, and new science is always fun, but the Zombie Community does not benefit from labeling every scary behavior in the animal kingdom as ‘zombie’, or even zombie-like. Latest example in a long chain: The green-eyed wasp Dinocampus coccinellae turns ladybugs into zombie babysitters. [...]
John Sears | November 16, 2013
The Zombie Rights Campaign largely stayed out of commenting on the political arena this year, but we would like to, now that the campaign season has cooled down, issue a word of caution about a trend we are observing: Protesting as Zombies. In other words, dressing up as Zombies, not to protest on behalf of [...]
John Sears | May 25, 2013
Is eating bone a Zombie behavior now? Per se? When I think about bone-gnoshing, I think hyenas or some such. I’ve never seen Zombies stereotyped as like to eat bone itself. Usually bone-chewing only comes up in the context of crunching into a skull to get at the supposedly quite tasty brain (we don’t judge). [...]
John Sears | March 9, 2013
Automaker Subaru is recalling 50,000 cars for a defect that involves one of those remote activation keyfobs many cars come with these days; basically, theirs can go off without a button being pressed, turning the car on when you don’t mean to. Sounds simple enough. Obviously something you should fix. But the media spin is, [...]
John Sears | January 9, 2013
In a fairly benign example of ‘Don’t Use the Zed Word’, the well-documented phenomenon of calling everything under the sun ‘Zombie’ lately, Undead or not, we have now a ‘Zombie planet’: Fomalhaut b is a giant alien planet that is nearly three times the mass of Jupiter. It was the first alien planet ever directly [...]
John Sears | August 21, 2012
The practice of calling things you don’t like ‘Zombie’ has long bothered the ZRC. Recently there has been a veritable epidemic of such namecalling about the study of our sickly honeybee population; bees wander off and die, for various reasons. Obviously this is a bad thing, at least if you like honey or eating fruits [...]
John Sears | August 9, 2012
I think that no one thing shows the Anti-Zombie bias of the press quite as vividly as their penchant for labeling any negative phenomenon ‘Zombie’ of late. Case in point, and a new one on the ZRC: ‘Zombie Debt Collections’, referring to debt being collected, seemingly erroneously, on behalf of a company that doesn’t exist [...]
John Sears | May 30, 2012
We’ve gotten a lot of tips about a recent Miami case involving a man whose face was, err, chewed off by his assailant. The assailant then resisted police even to the point of requiring several gunshots to finally subdue: According to police sources, a road ranger saw a naked man chewing on another man’s face [...]
John Sears | May 9, 2012
This seems like another case of Don’t Use the Zed Word to me, but it unintentionally makes Zombies sound pretty awesome: FRAMINGHAM — World-traveling author Tim Ward will recount meeting “zombies” while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro with his son, Josh, Thursday evening at REI Framingham. The author of six critically-acclaimed books, he will discuss his new [...]
John Sears | May 5, 2012
Sigh. The mainstream press really won’t let up with this ‘call anything we don’t like or find creepy a Zombie’ routine. Case in point, the ‘Zombie ant’ saga continues as researchers find that the previous, allegedly ‘Zombie’ making fungus is itself parasitized by another fungus: For the first time, researchers have discovered how an ant [...]