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 | October 12, 2013
Yes, ‘The Walking Dead’ will be back on Sunday, showcasing the latest and ‘greatest’ in Anti-Zombie violence from the frankly disturbing mind of Robert Kirkman. This leads to a lot of breathlessly happy reporting on the season debut, and tragically stereotyped reporting on the Differently Animated. From Discovery News to CNN, it is a media [...]
John Sears | June 17, 2013
Perhaps unsurprisingly, we can admit that the ZRC are occasional Straight Dope readers. It’s nice to have someone out there debunking myths and urban legends and outright zany-ness (is that a word)? But when it comes to Zombies, I think that Cecil of Straight Dope fame is more than a bit misguided himself. Particularly unfair [...]
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 11, 2013
(Naturally, the ZRC does not mean to condemn all Kansans for the actions of a distasteful few; the title is a reference to the famous and hotly-debated political work, ‘What’s the Matter with Kansas’ by Thomas Frank) A story came into the ZRC’s inbox a while back about an Anti-Zombie militia in Kansas and it [...]
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 | July 30, 2012
You know, Zombies catch an awful lot of flack from the usual suspects in the press: stereotypes about brain-devouring, Living-slaughtering and a (supposed) lack of intelligence and humanity. But, I’ll have you point out, they don’t go around picketing funerals, like the, ahem, people from the Westboro Baptist Church. Who’ve become justifiably infamous as, well, [...]
John Sears | July 26, 2012
We mentioned the Zombie Rights March to be held at this year’s ComicCon, and it appears it was a great success. FEARnet’s reporter on the scene starts off from a very classic Anti-Zombie position but the earnestness, diversity and friendliness of the marchers makes a big impact, and the resulting piece illustrates beautifully why the [...]
John Sears | July 16, 2012
Really, we’ve come to expect a lot of shallow, uninteresting bashing of the Undead, often simply by using words for Undead individuals (like, and most commonly, ‘Zombie’) to describe anything and everything you don’t personally care for. Latest example, more ‘Zombie’ lies/mistruths/distortions in politics. This time about Medicaid, apparently. I’m not hugely interested, for ZRC [...]