She went in for knee surgery in July and came out with pneumonia. While taking an X-ray of her lungs, they found a suspicious mass. It turned out to be cancer. The surgery to remove it went successfully but she again contracted pneumonia and one thing led to another.

The doctors’ said she had a fighting chance to beat it.

My sister held the phone to Mom’s ear and I told her I loved her and I appreciated everything she had ever done for me and that I looked forward to seeing her soon. She’d been sedated for days while on a ventilator so I don’t know how much she heard me. My sister said Mom nodded her chin slightly as I spoke. Recovery was expected to take weeks and my plan was to go down later.

But it was not to be. Around dawn, her blood pressure and vitals sank. Right before she took her last breath she opened her blue eyes and looked at her husband. Then she was gone.

Ewww! It’s like Snakes on a Plane only with maggots!

Foreign Policy magazine examines how different types of governments would handle a zombie outbreak.

From a public-policy perspective, zombies surely merit greater interest than other paranormal phenomena such as aliens, vampires, wizards, hobbits, mummies, werewolves, and superheroes. Zombie stories end in one of two ways — the elimination/subjugation of all zombies, or the eradication of humanity from the face of the Earth. If popular culture is to be believed, the peaceful coexistence of ghouls and humans is but a remote possibility — outside of Shaun of the Dead, at least. Such extreme all-or-nothing outcomes are far less common in the vampire and wizard canons. Indeed, recent literary tropes suggest that vampires can peacefully coexist with ordinary teens in many of the world’s high schools, provided they are sufficiently hunky. Zombies, not so much. If it is true that “popular culture makes world politics what it currently is,” as a recent article in Politics argued, then the international relations community needs to think about armies of the undead in a more urgent manner.

What follows is an attempt to satiate the ever-growing hunger for knowledge about how zombies will influence the future shape of the world. But this is a difficult exercise: Looking at the state of international relations theory, one quickly realizes the absence of consensus about the best way to think about global politics. There are multiple paradigms that attempt to explain international relations, and each has a different take on how political actors can be expected to respond to the living dead.

A fascinating article from both a zombie and political perspective.

How would the introduction of flesh-eating ghouls affect world politics? The realist answer is simple if surprising: International relations would be largely unaffected. Although some would see in a zombie invasion a new existential threat to the human condition, realists would be unimpressed by the claim that the zombies’ arrival would lead to any radical change in human behavior. To them, a plague of the undead would merely echo older plagues, from the Black Death of the 14th century to the 1918 influenza pandemic. To paraphrase Thucydides, the realpolitik of zombies is that the strong will do what they can and the weak must suffer devouring by reanimated, ravenous corpses.

Recently I began dating a mad scientist who conducts bizarre experiments on human brains for the military and she is equipped with chains, torture devices and dangerously sharp weapons. This sounds like fiction, but it’s strangely true.

Those little gremlins haunt my house too.

Remember that lost tribe that sounded like something from a Robert E. Howard story that was found in the desert north of Tibet? Turns out they may have really revered sex. A lot.

This really, really sucks:

Biologists have found what they believe is the first evidence that Maryland bats are now infected with white nose syndrome, a deadly fungal disease that has killed more than a million hibernating bats since 2006, devastating colonies from New England to Virginia.

A state biologist conducting a bat survey Friday found dead and weakened bats in a cave on private property near Cumberland, the Department of Natural Resources reported Wednesday.

About three-quarters of the winged mammals had the telltale white fungus on their muzzles and other exposed skin.

“It’s likely going to kill a majority of them before spring,” said Dan Feller, the western region DNR biologist who found them. Typically, once the disease is established in a colony, 90 percent of the bats are gone by the second year.

If it’s in Maryland it’s in my neck of the woods too.

Actor Corey Haim, who starred in Lost Boys, is dead at 38.

The City Paper of Washington has an interesting tale about the life and gruesome death of a local goth legend.

This would make a good setting for a post apocalyptic tale.