Say Ah

By good fortune rather than by good habits, my health has been pretty robust throughout my life (to date) with two exceptions, and the two may be related. When I was an infant I picked up a serious respiratory infection from some visitor to the household and was treated with the new wonder antibiotic of the day: tetracycline. It did the trick, but there are side effects which weren’t known until a generation had grown up with them. Tetracycline given to anyone under the age of 8 can stain the permanent teeth and might (or might not – the early illnesses themselves could be the culprit) be associated with other dental problems. Whether there is a connection or not, since that first bad resp-infection, my dentists have been the only health practitioners to drain my wallet. Against expectation, given all the work done in my mouth, I’ve so far kept all 32 teeth, but only thanks to a quantity of silver, gold, and porcelain that presently exceeds my remaining natural enamel. No year goes by without drills, filling(s), and/or a cap. Yesterday, I had another old favorite: the root canal.

If bioengineering gets a lot better, let me suggest importing into humans whatever shark genes are responsible for letting sharks grow new replacement teeth throughout their lives. This seems a more elegant solution than trying to make our choppers last 80 years when they rarely (without significant intervention) are good for 40. Of course, that would mean we’d always be teething. No wonder sharks are cranky.

In modern dentistry, the biggest pain comes at the checkout desk when one is handed the bill. To the refrain, “Do you have insurance?” which I’ve heard at the desk for decades, my answer was and is that I don’t. Individual dental policies cost as much as paying the dentist directly (naturally enough – insurance companies are for-profit institutions), and, since I am self-employed, any employer-provided coverage still would be paid entirely by… well, me. Historically, though, the pain delivered by the profession was more than financial. It’s only in the past century that effective local anesthetics have been available.

By and large, Paleolithic skeletons have very good teeth. So do modern hunter-gatherers – at least the ones who are primarily carnivorous. Eskimos who persist in a traditional diet of virtually all meat generally have superb teeth. Evidence of tooth decay soars in skeletons younger than 10,000 years old, the time when agriculture began. Whatever benefits the rise of farming may have brought to ancient people, the switch to a grain diet proved very hard on the teeth. Dentistry appeared quickly thereafter. Nine 9000-year-old skulls from Pakistan have been found with perfectly drilled teeth. We even know the tool used (see picture below) because a flint drill bit was found at one of the sites. We don’t know what was used to fill the holes, but (much later) ancient Mayans used gold and gems. Unlike the Mayans, however, the ancient Pakistani dentists drilled into molars, so it’s doubtful that ornament was the point. The oldest discovered intact filling is in the left top canine tooth of a 6,500-year-old skull found in Slovenia; the tooth was filled with beeswax, which I imagine had to be topped up regularly. The teeth of ancient Egyptians were terrible. Not only were caries a problem from the high-carb diet, but ancient remains show severe enamel attrition, possibly from grit, sand, and straw mixed in with the grain. Unsurprisingly, the Egyptians from an early date had skilled dentists who filled cavities and wired in bridges. Full dentures (made from human and animal teeth) date back at least to 700 BC in Etruria.

These Novocain-free ancient treatments sound distinctly unpleasant. Did the dentists tie their patients down for some of these procedures? Somehow I’m feeling a little less grumpy about the hole in my checkbook now.

Flint Drill

Perhaps ancient dentists had patients like Jack Nicholson. Scene from Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

Decrypt the Light Fantastic

Since my last full packet of pocket reviews in March, more DVDs have sneaked their way into my player to be bathed by laser light. This time, for a change, I’ll post a list of 10, none of which made me lament the lost time. Oh, I’ve seen more than 10 (not all of them purchases, fortunately) since March: some were of the “so bad it’s good” variety (e.g. Milk Money), but others were of the “so bad it’s still bad” (e.g. the unmemorable Total Recall remake). All of the following, however, are at least OK – a few are no more than OK, but they at least are that. A few are gems, including the first two on the list.

Employee of the Month (2004)

This film often is compared to Office Space, but it is not nearly so good natured – and that is all to its benefit. A bank employee (Matt Dillon) has a terrible day. He gets fired from his job and then his fiancé (Christina Applegate) dumps him. From there, things get very much worse. It doesn’t help that his best friend is a ne’er-do-well who works for the coroner’s office and supplements his income by robbing the bodies he picks up. One betrayal follows another in this twisted and enjoyable comedy.

Waitress (2007)

Jenna is a waitress who sublimates her emotional turmoil into an uncanny talent for baking creative and delicious pies.  The source of much of that turmoil is Earl, who, if not the worst husband on the planet, is at the very least the worst in town. Jenna dreams of winning a pie contest and using the money to leave her husband and open her own pie shop. Her plans suddenly are jeopardized when she discovers she is pregnant. Like so many of us, she feels trapped by circumstances. This might sound depressing, but in fact there is a dark humor to the film, and a message that traps of our own making can be unmade by us, too. The film left me hungry for pie. Regrettably, this was director/actress Adrienne Shelley’s last movie: shortly before its theatrical release she was murdered in her NYC apartment by a neighborhood man who botched an attempt to make her death look like suicide.

One for the Money (2012)

The appealing Katherine Heigl is better than most of her movies. A few have been commercial successes (e.g. Knocked Up), it is true, but that doesn’t make them any less dreadful. In One for the Money she has a half-decent script. She does a creditable job in her role as divorced, unemployed, and broke Stephanie Plum who goes to work for her bail bondsman cousin as a newbie bounty hunter in Trenton, NJ. She makes rookie mistakes that are more alarming than amusing. The film mixes suspense, drama, and an obligatory dollop of romance (this is a Katherine Heigl movie, after all) without going over the top. This is not a great movie by any means, nor is it one you’ll want to see again, but it isn’t actually bad. Sometimes that’s all we ask.

Closer (2004)

Unlike Waitress, this really was depressing despite the “thumbs way up” from Roger Ebert and other professional critics. I don’t disagree with Roger: this is a well written, well acted, well shot film. Just don’t come to it looking for happy endings. Closer is a prime example of the modern cynicism about life and love about which I wrote in my last blog. Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, and Clive Owen all play disagreeable characters (the young stripper Alice, played by Natalie, is the closest to being likable) who, over the course of four years, betray each other in very human but utterly awful ways. Sometimes the ways are verbal. None of the four takes to heart Mark Twain’s comment that truth is a valuable commodity with which it is useful to be economical. Sometimes telling or demanding the whole truth serves only to cause pointless hurt; other times, causing hurt is very much the intended point. Mostly, the characters succeed in making themselves unhappy. The one ultimately to prevail in ways satisfying to himself is Larry (Clive Owen). It is hard to imagine a more civilized profession than that of a London dermatologist, yet Larry refers to himself as a “cave man,” and with good reason. Larry’s simple primate nature raises hackles but prevails over time. Yet we don’t feel glad for him, nor do we feel sad for the others. If anything we feel sad for ourselves, in case, as is likely, we are no better than these people. Director Norman Jewison famously called his 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair “a love story between two shits.” In Closer, director Mike Nichols has given us four. It is truly a love story for the 21^st century.

Ruby Sparks (2012)

In Svengali (1931), the mesmerist Svengali puts the girl he loves into a trance and has her say she loves him; he then sadly releases her from the trance because “it is only Svengali talking to himself again.” In Ruby Sparks, former wunderkind author Calvin has never duplicated the success of the first novel he wrote at age 19. Furthermore, he suffers from a major case of writer’s block until he is inspired by a dream about a girl. He begins a new novel with his dream girl as the prime character. He names her Ruby. In a variation on the Pygmalion myth, somehow his imagination conjures her into reality. When he descends the stairs one morning, Ruby is in his kitchen scrambling eggs. At first she is exactly as he wrote her, but, having become a real person, she begins to develop her own independent mind, and to drift away from him. He can readjust her to suit himself, however, just by adding more words to a page. For a long time he can’t resist doing this in order to keep his hold on her, but eventually he has a Svengali moment. He realizes that whatever relationship they have means nothing unless she is free – including free to leave. Otherwise, it is just Calvin in love with himself.

The Man from Earth (2007)

This appears to have been intended originally as a stage play, since it is entirely dialogue on a single set. Plot: a professor, who is about to leave his post after 10 years, reveals to his colleagues that he is a 14,000-year-old Cro-Magnon. He says he always moves on when his lack of aging becomes noticeable. He has no explanation for his longevity, which none of his offspring ever inherited. The philosophy offered up is dubious and the emotional reactions overwrought, but at least this is different from the usual fx-heavy science fiction. If you liked Waking Life (a 2001 animated flick similarly heavy on pop philosophy), you'll probably like this, too.

Jack Reacher (2012)

Based on Lee Childs’ novel One Shot (which, by pure happenstance, I read a couple years ago, though I’m not a regular Lee Childs follower), this is a solid crime/suspense/action flick with Tom Cruise in the title role. Jack Reacher is a former detective in the military police, but is now a civilian who prefers to live under the radar. When a mass shooting takes place in Pittsburgh, all the evidence points to a former army sniper named Barr, who, as Reacher knows, once got away with a similar crime while in uniform. Reacher comes to town hoping to ensure the man is punished this time for what he did, but something about the case bothers him: the evidence is so very damning that it looks staged. But if Barr didn’t do it, who did and why? He teams up with Barr’s defense attorney, who is the daughter of the prosecutor. If the crime-action genre is one you like, this film shouldn’t disappoint.

Magic Magic (2013)

This odd movie is categorized by IMDB as a “thriller.” I’m not sure that’s right, but it is close enough. Whether from good luck or good judgment, the hardworking young actress Juno Temple more often than not chooses films that offer something different and interesting. Alicia (Juno) is a young woman with some mental health problems, but at first they don’t seem severe or in any way debilitating. We learn during the course of the movie, however, that she carries and takes a lot of pills. She arrives in Chile from California to vacation with her cousin Sarah. She stays with Sarah’s friends on an island in a Chilean lake. One of those friends is Brink (Michael Cera), a creepy character with an unwelcome interest in Alicia. Alicia feels isolated and ever more at risk with each passing day. Suffering from insomnia, Alicia grows unsure of the boundary between her dreams and reality. Are these people playing sadistic games on her or is she being paranoid? When Alicia’s mental and physical health deteriorates dangerously, will local magical folk customs and remedies help her, or will they drive her over the edge? The film achieves a spooky mood, but if you like all your questions to have neat answers, Magic Magic might not be for you. The movie reaches a conclusion of sorts, but some loose ends are left deliberately untied.

Swimming with Sharks (1994)

Hollywood loves to make movies bashing Hollywood. In this one, young man Guy (Frank Whaley) tries to get a foothold in the business by working as an assistant to studio bigshot Buddy (Kevin Spacey), who is the boss from hell. Everyone Guy meets, including his filmmaker girlfriend, is ruthlessly self-interested and manipulative. After a year of abusing Guy, Buddy hints in a phone call that he will fire him; Guy also learns his girlfriend will be meeting Buddy that night. Guy snaps, breaks into Buddy’s house and tortures him. All in all this is a wickedly funny flick. True, The Player (1992) did it even better, but this is still pretty good.

Great Balls of Fire (1989)

For a time in the 1950s, rock legend Jerry Lee Lewis was as big as Elvis. It was a short-lived equality. When news broke during Lewis’ British tour that he had married his 13-year-old cousin, his career crashed. He never recovered his popularity, though he continued to work in smaller venues and to record – and still does. Despite containing some hokey and stereotypical elements, this movie is an entertaining depiction of Lewis’ rise, fall, and survival. It stars Dennis Quaid, a young Winona Ryder, and the music of Jerry Lee Lewis. It’s hard to beat that.

Jerry Lee Lewis TV appearance (1957)

Here’s Mud in your Yi

Many recent movie critics have noted the decline of the romantic comedy (RomCom) genre, once a staple of the industry. In a blog back in April (Every Silver Lining Has a Dark Cloud) I speculated that it has run aground on contemporary cynicism. Modern audiences find it difficult to buy into  HEAs (“happily-ever-afters”). RomComs with HEA endings are still made in the 21st century, but, with few exceptions, they are pretty lousy – compare The Awful Truth (1937) to The Ugly Truth (2009). Ugly indeed. Yet, The Awful Truth couldn’t simply be remade; audiences wouldn’t credit the attitudes, values, and dialogue as realistic in the present day, even if they allow them for an earlier era. RomCom filmmakers sometimes work around this by using unrealistic characters; he’s a zombie, she’s a vampire, it’s an extraterrestrial, etc. OK, we say, maybe with a zombie things could work out. In the case of last year’s Silver Linings Playbook, one of the rare RomCom critical successes of the past decade, the characters are human enough, but they’re crazy. “Ah,” we say, “that accounts for it.” Nor are we patient when we encounter the classic plot elements of the genre. The battle of the sexes – a standard feature in RomComs – no longer much amuses us either in real life or in film; it increasingly has grown to resemble those stretches of the World War I western front in which both sides sat in their trenches and refused to engage at all.

Yet, a few interesting films have come out of the current mood. Take the indie flick Paper Heart, and the mainstream suspense film Mud.

Paper Heart was a favorite at Sundance. If you’re not familiar with the offbeat young comedian Charlyne Yi, I suggest getting acquainted, though her humor doesn’t click with everyone. Her shows are much closer to performance art than to stand-up. In 2009 she had an idea for a documentary about love and why she felt herself incapable of it. After a false start, she and Jake Johnson (for some reason calling himself Nick Jasenevec in the credits) instead created an odd hybrid film: a scripted story about Charlyne and Michael Cera is used as a framework on which to hang unscripted interviews with ordinary people from coast to coast. Michael and Charlyne already were buddies in real life at the time, but in this film they are presented as meeting for the first time. While the entire premise of Paper Heart is Charlyne’s cynicism about love, several of her interviewees plainly don’t share it. Even in such an unlikely place as an Oklahoma City biker bar she gets a lecture on true love, which shows that a “prevailing mood” is never universal. The resulting film is strangely captivating. As fair warning, customers on Amazon gave the movie almost equal numbers of 1-star and 5-star reviews. Like Yi’s routines, the movie isn’t to everyone’s taste, but I recommend giving it a shot. The trailer below is misleading; more of the film consists of her interviews than of the scripted story with Michael.

In an entirely different vein, Mud (2012) is a suspense drama starring Matthew McConaughey as Mud (yes, that’s his name) and Reese Witherspoon as Juniper. (I caught it on pay-per-view last week.) There is no skepticism at all about the existence of long-term romantic love in this film, but it certainly is made to seem like a supremely bad idea. Mud is wanted by the law for killing one of Juniper’s abusive beaus; the family of the slain man also is seeking to avenge his death. Mud and Juniper are assisted in their efforts to escape together by a starry-eyed 14-year-old boy; he idolizes the couple because they truly seem in love, unlike his parents who are getting a divorce. He eventually is disabused of his adolescent romantic notions when he realizes that neither Mud nor Juniper has the character to make anything good come out of their feelings for each other. He is left with the suspicion that maybe no one does, and that other relationships in his life (friends, family) are more important.

So, it seems modern cynicism is soil for art after all; it’s not just a poison for RomComs. Perhaps in 20 years we will enter a more hopeful and trustful era, and we’ll write about the regrettable decline of cynical cinema. “Movies are just so naïve nowadays,” we’ll complain. “They just don’t make cynical films like Mud and Paper Heart anymore.”

One Bat, No Belfry

Last night I did battle with a home invader – a bat. Fortunately, skills I’d acquired from tussling with other invaders proved transferable.

I don’t count the mice, ants, cave crickets and other commonly expected (if uninvited) guests who show up in most of our homes. I probably shouldn’t count the live squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits brought into my house by my cats over the years, since visiting my home was not these critters’ idea. (I’ve learned to check my cats for baggage before opening the door for them, but now and then I forget and they sneak something past me.) Their idea or not, some of these feline presents have eluded me as for as much as a week once in the house. The rabbits are the easiest to catch – even when physically unharmed, they’ve been through so much that they seem scarcely to give a damn. I also don’t count the animals that freely use the outside facilities, such as the deer that swim in the pool, the wild turkey that pecks at his own reflection in the glass by my front door, or the bear that got into my garbage container.

I do count the skunk who walked into my house in back of me and nosed around before walking back out. I count the raccoons who in my absence took a screen off an open dining room window, entered the house, went to the kitchen, climbed up on the countertop, opened a bag of dry cat food, dumped it into the sink, and chowed down – they were still dining when I came home. I count the owl who must have come down the chimney – the damper was still open after a fire the night before. The owl provided the experience that helped with the bat. At first, the owl, as I shooed it, simply flew from curtain rod to curtain rod, completely ignoring the front door which I had opened wide. Finally, in a passing moment of intelligence, I remembered this was a nocturnal bird. So, I waited for the evening to grow darker; then I turned on every light in the house and shooed the owl again. This time it flew straight out the front door into the dark.

So, the bat was not up against a rookie. Once again I had interior lights blazing and a door open to the dark as I flapped a table cloth at it. The Chiropteran teased me a little, swooping to within inches of my head a few times, but soon opted for the great dark outdoors.

All in all, if I have to choose among home invaders, I’d rather they have wings or four legs. They are much more reasonable than the bipedal kind. Perhaps if I lived somewhere with larger four-legged predators, I’d reconsider the preference, but, then again, probably not.

At least my visitors have been terrestrial --so far 

The Paleo Grill

Politics invades pretty much everything nowadays, and few things more than food, as the recent court decision over NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on “big gulp” sodas reaffirms. Arguments rage over GM crops, organic foods, veganism, fried foods, fat content, caffeine, junk foods, pasteurization, and so on. Many of us are not content just to follow our own preferences, so we carry the fight into the legislatures. We want to pass laws on others’ consumption because… well, because we’re right and those other people are wrong. Some are more live-and-let-live about it – even if this means, in some instances, live-and-let die – but that is a political position, too.

One of the currently fashionable food regimens – and one that faces numerous legal restrictions, especially with regard to dairy products – is the Raw Food Diet. It is pretty much what it sounds like. Cooking is out. Vegetables, milk, eggs, and meat are served raw. Some raw foodies are vegetarians, but most are not. They argue that cooking destroys nutrients, causes weight gain, introduces dangerous chemicals (notably char) into food, and “processes” food in a way that is fundamentally unnatural. Opponents of the diet cite the dangers of E. coli, salmonella, and other dangerous bugs; they say that pasteurization was adopted for a reason. They also note that some very healthy foods such as beans and lentils can’t be digested properly without cooking

There is something to both perspectives, and I’m not inclined to stop anyone who cooks or who doesn’t cook. I’d like to lift restrictions on selling raw unpasteurized milk to anyone willing to take the risk of drinking it. Nevertheless, it may be an error to consider uncooked foods more natural. They are natural, true enough. Paleo peoples ate many things raw (as we still commonly eat fruits and some veggies), but there is substantial evidence that, in human evolutionary terms, raw foods are not more natural.

Chris Organ, evolutionary biologist at Harvard: “This is part of an emerging body of science that shows that cooking itself is important for our biology; that is, we are biologically adapted for cooking food.” The oldest undisputed barbeque pit dug up by archaeologists is a mere 400,000 years old, though this still predates biologically modern humans. Harvard researchers, including Organ, reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, however, point to dental development in human ancestors as far back as 1,900,000 years ago as evidence the practice is much older. Their analysis supports an argument made by Richard Wrangham a couple years ago in his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Other apes, including our chimp cousins, spend a lot of time eating and chewing in order to extract calories from raw food. According to the researchers, chimps spend a third of the day at it. Modern human hunter-gatherers spend only 5% of their waking hours doing the same. Unsurprisingly, teeth reflect the difference, with heavy duty chimp molars and small delicate human molars. Humans also have weak jaws, small stomachs, and intestines only 60% the length of other great apes. Humans don’t need to chew so hard because cooked food is softer; our smaller simpler digestive system is more than adequate for our needs because cooked food gives up its calories far more easily. The reduction in tooth size shows up very early among our ancestors. Largely on the basis of dentition (and rib structure, which indicates gut size), Organ said, "We think that Homo erectus and Neanderthals were spending about as much of their day feeding as we do, which implies that they were both cooking." In short, cooking techniques are intertwined with hominin evolution.

This Sunday I plan to fire up the charcoal grill (a midsummer day’s scheme) with the usual suspects invited. The burgers, steaks, and corn-on-the-cob that will get tossed onto it may not be particularly healthy. But evidently they are natural – or at least as natural as raw ones would be. Homo Erectus might not have recognized the particular meats and veggies on the grill – all of them have been modified vastly from ancestral species by farmers and pastoralists in the past 10,000 years – but he would have recognized a cookout when he saw one. I like to think our conversation will be a bit more advanced than his, but perhaps it’s best not to get one’s hopes up. Also, I’ll strike a match to light the fire, rather than rub sticks the paleo way.

Quest for Fire (1981)

Salty Language

Everyday commodities are so intertwined with human events that it is possible to write history (local, regional, or world) from the perspective of any one of them. So, too, with everyday age-old technologies. I’ve read histories of spices, horse domestication, pork, astronomy (think Stonehenge), masonry, libraries, cod, rats, mapmaking, and shipbuilding, among many others.  In college, I wrote papers of my own on the role of grain, calendars, and taxes in historical events. A well written book of this sort can make it seem as though the chosen item is the key to understanding the whole human saga. Of course this never is true. The item is just one part of the whole. Nonetheless, such focused histories are valuable, because they remind us that individual parts matter. There are moments when a better map, a better ship, a crop failure, or an ill-considered tax really does make a difference. A small thing, which we take for granted most of the time, can tip the scales at critical junctures.

At present I’m reading Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky, a prime example of the genre. Salt is something we take very much for granted in the modern world. (A salt is a compound formed by a chemical reaction between an acid and a base, and Kurlansky addresses several different chemicals, but in this instance I refer only to sodium chloride, common table salt.) When we think about salt at all nowadays, it is usually just to worry we are eating too much of it. It is so cheap and plentiful that 51% of all the salt used in the US is simply thrown on roads in the wintertime. This wasn’t always the case. Though underground seams and domes of salt are plentiful, and the oceans are full of the stuff, getting at it traditionally has been a labor intensive business. There are two traditional methods of collecting salt. Both are still used, though modern equipment makes the job easier. The first is the evaporation of sea water – or of water from brine springs. (More than one town has been named Salina after its salt springs.) The other is the dangerous business of mining. Rock salt is the only rock that humans eat – well, normal humans anyway.

All animals need salt. Carnivores, including humans who eat a lot of red meat or seafood, can get what they need through their diet. Herbivores need to make a special effort to find it, which is why salt licks are popular with horses and cattle, and why all agricultural peoples (but not hunters) have produced salt. The amount needed for metabolic purposes isn’t very large, though. What turned salt production into a major industry was something else. Prior to the advent of modern refrigeration a little more than a century ago, salt was the only way to preserve food effectively. It also was a useful disinfectant. Historically, people ate huge amounts of salted fish, salt pork and salt beef, as well as vegetables and fruits pickled in brine, notably olives. Armies scarcely could move without large supplies of salted foods, which were the only ones that would keep. As late as the US Civil War, Confederate salt works were prime targets of Union raids. Said General William Tecumseh Sherman in 1862, “Salt is eminently contraband, because of its use in curing meats, without which armies cannot be subsisted.” It wasn’t just meats. The Roman habit of salting vegetables is the source of the word “salad.” Cato in De Agricultura: “If you want your cabbage chopped, washed, dried, sprinkled with salt or vinegar, there is nothing healthier.” When precious metals were scarce, Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in salt, hence the word “salary.” Salt long has had associations with sex and fertility, hence “salacious.” In ancient China, salt taxes were a major source of revenue – and of controversy. So they were also in 18^th century France, though that particular tax regimen ended badly for the royal government.

There is something pleasing about the way one can derive such a broad history from a single item. In a whimsical moment back in college, I considered writing a paper on the role of the marshmallow in history. After all, marshmallows have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, and were considered both a tasty treat and a medicine. At the time they literally were made from the marshmallow (Althaea officinalis), as they continued to be through the 19^th century. The plant extracts were replaced with gelatin in most recipes in the 20^th. I chose another topic in the end because, in those pre-internet days, the research loomed as a bit daunting for what was a minor assignment. But perhaps I’ll return to the subject yet. Who knows? Perhaps marshmallows really will prove to be the key to understanding the whole human saga.

The Salt of the Earth

World War R

Zombie movies have been a minor genre for more than 7 decades, but in the most recent decade they’ve been all the rage, sometimes as standard horror fare (e.g. Flight of the Living Dead), sometimes as comedy (Warm Bodies, Zombieland), and sometimes as adventure (World War Z, presently doing big box office). Budgets range from 0 to astronomical. They don’t do much for me, by and large, so I miss most of them. I never quite “got” them – even though the likable Kelli Maroney (Night of the Comet [1984]) was kind enough to sign a photo for me. Perhaps the issue for me is that – while plagues, in a general way, always are real and present dangers – a plague that turns humans into single-minded ravenous murderous cannibals doesn’t seem a very high risk. Never mind one that reanimates the dead.

On the other hand, I have seen and enjoyed killer robot movies, including the classic Westworld and the Terminator franchise. Arguably the genre is similar to the zombie films. Both scenarios might seem equally unlikely. Yet, strangely enough, the screenwriters are on firmer ground with the machines. The US Army wants a third of its ground combat vehicles to be unmanned within this decade. Northrop and BAE produce autonomous drones that, with little modification, could make their own decisions to fire munitions – though for the moment a human operator always makes that decision. Robot sentries guard the border of the two Koreas, and have an “automatic” option (though a human has to decide to turn it on) which allows them to identify and fire on targets on their own. Anti-missile Gatlings on warships have a similar option, because no human is fast enough to do the job. Enough people find this unsettling that a Campaign to Stop Killer Robots has attracted serious support. UN investigator Christof Heyns warns, “War without reflection is mechanical slaughter... a decision to allow machines to be deployed to kill human beings deserves a collective pause worldwide."

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Some roboticists have a different view. An Economist article on machine intelligence and robotic warfare a few years ago noted the views of one: "Dr. Arkin believes there is another reason for putting robots into battle, which is that they have the potential to act more humanely than people. Stress does not affect a robot's judgment in the way it affects a soldier's." Yes, more humanely. Oddly enough, this is credible.

The robots still need a lot of work, of course, to be truly autonomous. For one thing (and foremost), AI, while getting better, still falls far short of even a convincing simulation of consciousness. Second, machines need to be able to construct copies of themselves, as anticipated in the 1960s Berserker sci-fi stories by Fred Saberhagen. Finally, they need to be able to recharge without help – to live off the land.

Fortunately, this last problem was solved more than a decade ago. The robot Chew Chew (yes, really – look it up) has a microbial fuel cell (MFC) that breaks down biological material and converts the chemical energy into electricity. The robot was fed sugar, but the inventor, Stuart Wilkinson, notes that the ideal food for energy gain is meat. "Vegetation is not nearly as nutritious," he says.

So, there we have it. If we bring these three elements together, we can have intelligent, self-replicating, carnivorous killer robots. What could go wrong? Now there is a kind of zombie I find exciting.

[Book notes: I’m currently reading Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross, a newly released sequel to Saturn’s Children (2008). Both are set in a future in which robots have supplanted people. Humanity faded away, not because the robots ate them, but because humans didn’t see the point of biological reproduction anymore. Worth a read. I don't do many robot stories of my own, but I do have one, Going through the Motions, at http://richardbellush2.blogspot.com/2012/10/going-through-motions.html .]