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In This Issue

• Inside Look at Madrid Train Bombing
• On Keenspace, Funnies Go Super-Mega Sweet
• Stop Aborting Our Lord and Savior!
• The Passion 2: The Resurrection
• A Trip to the Britney Spears Museum
• Mail Order Brides Reviewed
• Letters to the Feditor
• Boccaccio's Decameron Gets Zombie-fied
• Campus Tradition of Blood Wrestling Continues
• Fed Fun Book of Zombie Lore!
• Wacky Fun Skeletons
• Crane Droppings on Sharon
• Marauding Interviewer: Back to the Seventh Grade
• Meta-Marauding Interviewer: Does Kate Eat Babies?
• They Watch

Now I know the title sounds like the preface to yet another whine of: "Boy it sure is hard being a freshman in Lit Hum, pretending to read and discuss long-dead instruments of the patriarchy." But hear me out, and I promise to give you Italian zombies. My thesis: Giovanni Boccaccio, bourgeois fable-compiler that he was, passed up potentially the greatest plot of all time to write a hundred soul-suckingly boring little yarns.

What plot, you ask? You ought to pay more attention to movie masterpieces of decades past. In 1978, horror film-maker George Romero followed up his breakthrough "Night of the Living Dead" with a zombie masterpiece called "Dawn of the Dead." The film takes place during an apocalyptic worldwide zombie epidemic. Four people flee the dangers of The City (the film's budget was too low to say which one) and take refuge in a giant suburban shopping mall. They raid the gun shop, clear out the few zombies still looking for discounts on nylon pantsuits, and indulge in their greatest consumerist fantasies, decorating their storage room bungalow with the height of seventies fashion.

But you can't even keep the zombies from shopping, now can you? Hordes and hordes of zombies from all different walks of life (zombie nuns, football player zombies, zombie Buddhist monks, zombie babies, nurse zombies, and a lot of zombie male ballerinas, for some reason) eventually force their way back inside to wreak flesh-eating havoc on the last remnants of humanity.

Now unless someone's eaten your brain (pun-diddley!), you see already see where I'm going. Boccaccio had basically the same scenario in the introduction to Decameron; just replace zombieness with Europe's medieval black plague, and you have the greatest literary achievement of all time. Mid-fourteenth century Florence, Italy, was overrun by gasping, foot-sliding, plague-infested half-men, and it doesn't take much of an authorial leap of imagination to imagine that those folks, in their last few days as serfs or dung shovelers, might have wanted to gorge on a noble's meaty upper thigh here and there.

With that subtle plot shift, the Decameron can really take off. In the first scene, the seven fair young ladies praying for the mercy of an uncaring God now face a battle with the screaming undead banging on the church doors. Then they head out with those three suitor guys to the countryside, but the Monster Men from Beyond Hell are shuffling at their heels. Locked inside a palatial estate surrounded by encroaching death, the ten begin to adapt to their apocalyptic age. Thus, their stories can take on special significance as they make last grasps at memories of the world they once knew. Plus, instead of just parroting the classist, sexist biases of Boccaccio's time (hey, c'mon,I needed some complaint to justify writing about kick-ass zombies), they all start to drift into depravity as civilization crumbles around them. No more singing in gardens or sitting in circles wearing crowns made of garlands; The Earth's Final Ten would abandon social repression and finally reveal humanity's true nature. Specifically, they would be eager to drift into sexual experimentation... seven hot girls and three ripped guys...you know you hoped for it - followed inevitably by psychological breakdowns and extensive cannibalism.

In between their little preschool story-times, the characters would have to combat the ex-peasant zombie farmers, Harbingers of the Black Death. This need would lead to combat specialization; Pampinea would become a sword master; Fiammetta would know judo; Filomena would eat pizza and say "cowabunga" in Italian; and Emilia would master the chainsaw-shotgun combo attack. The three male characters would eventually try to impose patriarchal, dehumanizing stereotypes on the ladies, so the Seven Sisters of Doom would castrate them, make them wear girdles and bake muffins, and then throw those chumps down into the zombie moshpit outside the laser-equipped fortifications. Then the women would couple off with the servants to give birth to a generation without class divisions, creating lights of hope for a World of Infinite Night. The end.

That's way better than some idyllic delusion full of patronizing misogyny and lame sex metaphors ("putting the devil back in hell"...as a Fed writer, I find that offensive). Whatever, just go see the Dawn of the Dead remake. It has Ving Rhames, and more zombies than The Passion!