Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: adding much-needed zombies to the Austen classic

Posted by Cory Doctorow



I don't often give books mixed reviews here on Boing Boing. If I don't like a book enough to wholeheartedly recommend it, I generally pass on it -- after all, there's no shortage of books that I love, so why make note of the flawed ones?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is the exception to the rule, because there's so much to like about this book, even if it didn't actually do it for me.

Here's the pitch: Seth Grahame-Smith has taken Jane Austen's classic, beloved novel Pride and Prejudice and, by means of cunning textual insertions and deletions, changed the story so that it takes place in the midst of a Regency England that has been plunged into chaos by a plague of the living dead. It takes surprisingly little work to do this, and the book ends up feeling substantially like the classic mannered novel that so many adore. Except with zombie mayhem. The execution is flawless, often hilarious, and just plain clever.

So, what's the problem? Well, the problem is Jane Austen.

Can't stand her.

Never successfully read Pride and Prejudice. Bored to tears by it. I'm not proud of the fact. Plenty of smart people have the utmost respect for the book, and I'm perfectly willing to stipulate that the problem is with me, not with Austen.

But P&P&Z has just too much Austen and not enough zombies. I found myself skimming, skipping larger and larger chunks of text to get to the zombie sequences, desperate to escape the claustrophobic drawing-room chatter of Austen's characters with a little beheading, disemboweling and derring-do.

I couldn't finish it. But I expect if you were the kind of person who loves both Austen and zombies, this book would just plain knock your socks off. And Quirk Books, the publisher of P&P&Z, was kind enough to give us an exclusive link to the first three chapters online for free, so you can make up your own mind. I understand they're planning on doing more books on these lines, and I'm really looking forward to them. It's a great way to celebrate the public domain, to bring classics to a new audience, and to undermine the gravitas with which we often approach "difficult literature." Which Quirk book would you like to see?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!

First three chapters of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Bacon Candy Bar:

Posted by David Pescovitz, boing boing

Vosges Haut-Chocolate offers a milk chocolate bar laced with smoked Applewood bacon bits. From the product description:

Crisp, buttery, compulsively irresistible bacon and milk chocolate combination has long been a favorite of mine. I started playing with this combination at the tender age of six while eating chocolate chip pancakes drenched in maple syrup. Beside my chocolate-laden cakes laid three strips of fried bacon, just barely touching a sweet pool of maple syrup. Just a bite of the bacon was too salty and yearned for the sweet kiss of chocolate syrup. In retrospect, perhaps this was a turning point, for on that plate something magical happened: the beginnings of a combination so ethereal and delicious that it would haunt my thoughts until I found the medium to express it--chocolate.

LINK

LOL Bible:

Posted by Cory Doctorow, boingboing:

Eric sez, "Finally! I have been waiting all my life for this (OK, a few months). This site is translating the Bible into LOLcat and it's a wiki!"

1. In teh beginnin Invisible Man was invisible, and he maded the skiez and da earths, but he did not eated it.

2. The earths wus witout shapez and wus dark and scary and stuffs, and he rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3. And Invisible Man sayz, i can has light, and teh light wuz...

18. And Invisible Man sawed it wus the goodz, so wai.

LINK

John Waters Interview:

Posted by David Pescovitz, boingboing


Just before John Waters gave a recent talk at Duke University, the Independent Weekly ran an article featuring the filmmaker's hysterical and brilliant take on such topics as gay culture and Britney Spears. In my opinion, Waters is at his best when he's commenting on the absurdity in everyday life, like in his amazing 1995 autobiography Shock Value.

From the Independent Weekly:

While the over-the-top camp of Waters' films still holds up, the writer-director admits that the "mainstreaming" of gay culture in recent years has made it harder to be shocking. "I had more fun when it was illegal to be gay," says Waters, who adds that he's also "anti-separatist." "I don't want to get married and I don't want to go into the army and all that stuff, though I understand people's right to want that. I am for gay trouble. I like gay troublemakers. I am most gay when I am in a voting booth...."

LINK to Independent Weekly.

Zombie Amoeba Eats Brains:

It sounds like science fiction but it's true: A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die.

Even though encounters with the microscopic bug are extraordinarily rare, it's killed six boys and young men this year. The spike in cases has health officials concerned, and they are predicting more cases in the future.

LINK

Scopolamine: Zombie Drug & Astronaut Anti-Puke Helper:

Posted by Xeni Jardin, boingboing
VBS.TV recently did a story on Scopolamine, a substance commonly referred to as "Devils Breath" in Colombia, where it is a common street drug.

This stuff is as close to pure evil as it gets, a tiny amount of the powder administered to the victim causes one of two effects, a) death, or b) complete loss of free will. Criminals are usually hoping for the latter, as it enables them to tell victims to empty their bank accounts, give away their car, perform sex acts, basically whatever the criminal dictates.

This is where Scopolamine has got its reputation as the "zombie drug", victims appear completely sober and rational, but they're really just automatons.

Video Link to VBS.tv story, which documents contributor Ryan Duffy's scopolamine investigation in 9 parts (Flash 9 required). Here's a CNN followup piece.

I'm more familiar with scopolamine as an anti-motion sickness remedy. It's half of a legal drug cocktail known as "ScopeDex" (Scopolamine + Dexedrine), sometimes taken by astronauts and those in training to prevent nausea and vomiting in altered gravity environments. For instance, on "vomit comet" flights. When I flew on an inaugural Zero-G flight for press and celebs a few years ago, ScopeDex was recommended as one way to avoid puking during the flight. I didn't do it, because anything that comes from jimson weed (and other datura relatives) has gotta be evil. But others who've done zero gravity flights (with NASA and otherwise) teased me for passing it up, and joked that scopedex was like a "legal speedball," and not to be missed.

Scopolamine recently popped up in the news as a treatment for bipolar disorder and depression: Link. The drug also has history as a sort of truth serum administered in interrogation environments -- it was used by the CIA in the 1960s, during the MKULTRA program. Woohoo, good times!

Whose Tits Are They Anyway?

A woman who isn't able to establish boundaries allows her eight-year-old daughter to breastfeed and allows both daughters access to her breasts and allows them to obsess over them. Visit Link To See This Sick Fuck Of A Woman BREAST FEED Her Almost-Teenage Kids.

OhMyFuckingGod, Slap This Woman!
Child Services should step in and bitch-slap this insane Neanderthal woman into next week!
Holy Retarded 1810 Thinking, Batman!

Witchcraft Practitioner Wins Mega Millions Lottery:

Posted by Xeni Jardin,boingboing

Dude, talk about blessed be. Meet Elwood "Bunky" Bartlett, teacher of Wicca, winner of gajillions:

He and his wife, Denise, were on their way to the shop where he occasionally teaches Wicca and Reiki healing when they stopped at a liquor store and bought two $5 Mega Millions tickets for Friday night's estimated $330 million jackpot.

On Sunday, he said one of his tickets was a winner.

"If it wasn't for this place I wouldn't have won the lottery," Bartlett said Sunday at Mystickal Voyage, the New Age shop.

Bartlett, an accountant from Dundalk, said he made a bargain with the multiple gods associated with his Wiccan beliefs: "You let me win the lottery and I'll teach." Both tickets he purchased had numbers chosen randomly from the computer.

CNN News Link. If you'd like to up your mojo before buying your next lottery ticket, you may want to visit Mystickal Voyage yourself -- it's in the Walther Shopping Center mini-mall in Nottingham, Maryland, kinda next door to the Food Lion. Mystickal Voyage Link.

Anatomically Correct Knee Socks:

Posted by Cory Doctorow, boingboing
Loving these anatomically correct knee-socks -- they remind me of Grade Six Halloween skeleton costumes.
Link
(via Neatorama)

How Much Paper Would It Take To Print Out Wikipedia?

Posted by Cory Doctorow,
(boingboing)


An intrepid Wikipedian named Nikola Smolenski has calculated how much paper it would take to print out the English entries in Wikipedia and produced this handy chart showing the relative sizes of the pile of paper and an adult male. This doesn't include the History or Discuss pages, which would make it a lot less useful than electronic Wikipedia (nevermind the lack of a search interface!). I think that Wikipedia is one of those documents that is inherently electronic.

Here's Nikola's assumptions: "Using volumes 25cm high and 5cm thick (some 400 leaves), each page having two columns, each columns having 80 rows, and each row having 50 characters, ≈ 6MB per volume. As English Wikipedia has 4.4GB of text (October 2006) ≈ 750 volumes. Note that this is conservative estimate, as it doesn't include images, tables etc. which take up more surface than the text which describes them."
Link

(via Digg)

Greening Burning Man:

Over at Worldchanging, Micki Krimmel has written a comprehensive roundup of what individuals, camps and the Burning Man organization are doing to make this year's festival more ecologically responsible: Link. See also the Burning Man environmental blog: Link.

Image: Burning Man playa tableau, with lots of bikes and a tripped out mannequin. Xeni Jardin, 2003.

posted by Xeni Jardin

Sandwich Art:

This gallery of artistic sandwiches features many gems -- this one bears a striking resemblance to a damned soul in a Bosch painting!

Link to JibJab

(via IZ Reloaded)

posted by Cory Doctorow: BOING BOINGpermalink

Short Links Roundup:

9/11-themed machinima terror-rotica: Link, another Link. Flesh, by Edouard Salier. (mildly NSFW, some stylized CGI nudity) I don't know that I'm a fan of it, or not, just fascinated that it exists and evidently floats some people's boats.

Foot and mouth disease outbreak in the UK probably originated with viruses "that escaped somehow from a pair of veterinary laboratories where vaccines are made." Link (NYT)

Monsoon rains this year in India, Bangladesh and Nepal are causing some of the worst floods in decades. 19 million people have been displaced, roughly the entire population of NY state, or nearly the entire population of Sri Lanka. By comparison: Hurricane Katrina scattered about a million Americans, and that was the largest US population displacement in 150 years. Ennis Singh Mutinywale at Sepia Mutiny has more: Link.

On August 28, a colorful eclipse of the full moon will occur. Link.

After a teen was arrested for recording a 20-second clip of Transformers in a movie theater (to share with a family member, for personal use), many are now calling for a boycott of Regal Cinemas: Link.

8-foot-tall man made out of Legos washes up on a beach in Amsterdam: Link.

Hurry, hide your cats. Google Street View vehicles are now surveilling and snapping in four new cities: San Diego (high-res), Los Angeles, Houston and Orlando: Link.

Geeksugar takes a peek inside the newly renovated video-game-themed hotel in San Francisco's Japantown district, Hotel Tomo. Link to review.

(thanks, Siege, Dave Markland, Callum!)

Short Links From BoingBoing:

Short links

Colette McNamara's photoshopped images of her teddy bear, Scribbles, floating in space and slumped on the Moon.

Flyer's Rights, created by a woman who was stuck on a grounded AA plane for nine hours.

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Half of a Yellow Sun) says, "Madonna's not our saviour."

Reports of "sustained inflation" in China's illegally-exhumed corpse market.

New Zealand woman making breakfast cracks open egg, finds a smaller egg within it.

Support for childhood goat trauma victims.

Pieces of the hated Mickey wand from Spaceship Earth at Epcot appear on eBay.

Tuna shortage caused by overharvesting leads to horse sushi.

Science in the Simpsons Movie.

Podcast with Jimmy Carter about his 1969 UFO sighting.

1982 video game: Communist Mutants from Space. More.

The American Direct Mail offices in Burbank have "No Solicitors" signs on their doors.

(Thanks, Ingo, Wayne, Charles, M. Tai, Iain, Jeff Jones, vikingdiplomat, Nathan Torkington, Emeka Okafor, Sean Bonner)