Title: “The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead”

Author: Max Brooks

Rank: 59

Blurb: “100 line drawings.”

Review: “The information given might as well have been in bullet points.”

Customers Also Bought: “Dismember-Me 12″ Plush Zombie,” by ThinkGeek

Footnote: It’s our first Stinque Book Club rerun! Yes, it’s a slow week in the Amazon Top 100. But it was last holiday season when this showed up, and we’re fascinated by the idea of a zombie book as a Christmas perennial.

The Zombie Survival Guide [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon kickback link]

A San Francisco transgendered woman has filed a damages claim against the California DMV after a clerk at my local office told her when she was trying to change her name and gender on her driver’s license in October that she was going to go to hell for her acts of homosexuality.

Oh, and then he sent a threatening letter to her home four days later begging her not to change her gender, and gave her address to a wackadoodle church that sent her DVDs warning of eternal damnation for homosexuality.

The punchline? He’s been suspended with pay since October.

The second punchline? This is the second time he’s done this in two years.

[SF Chronicle: DMV Clerk Suspended for Sex Change Admonition]

A few capitulations ago — honestly, we’ve lost track — the question on the table was whether Obamacare, with three legs lopped off, still had a leg to stand on: Whether the final bill, awful as it was, was still better than the status quo.

Yes, we ultimately — and very unhappily — decided. Although we were likely to be among the uninsured folks screwed over by “reform”, we were convinced by arguments saying the bill would still help millions of Americans. We were willing to take one for the team, as long as the team could still put some points on the board.

The Grand Tax Compromise raises a similar question — although this time, we’ll personally benefit if the appeasement succeeds.

Problem is, many others won’t. Many, many others.

Read more »

Damn, that was fast. We should have programming ready for something like this.

Is Bernie Sanders still talking? [via StarterWife]

Photo: Steve Lambert

While you’re enjoying the filibuster, a look back at a recent Bernie Sanders claim:

“Mr. President, in the year 2007, the top 1 percent of all income earners in the United States made 23.5 percent of all income,” Sanders said. “The top 1 percent earned 23.5 percent of all income — more than the entire bottom 50 percent. That is apparently not enough. The percentage of income going to the top 1 percent has nearly tripled since the 1970s. In the mid-1970s, the top 1 percent earned about 8 percent of all income. In the 1980s, that figure jumped to 14 percent. In the late 1990s, that 1 percent earned about 19 percent.”

And the Truth-o-Meter scores it… True.

Bernie Sanders, in viral speech, says top 1 percent earn more than 23 percent of U.S. income [PolitiFact, via Gen JC Christian]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmlzklHPgNM

So we had a clever premise in mind — “Suspicious Activities at Walmart” — but as we sat down to compose a list of hilarious! entries, we encountered an Insurmountable Problem:

We’ve only been to a Walmart once in our life.

And really, Greeter gags will only get you so far.

Homeland Security deploys video to Walmarts [Salon/early-warning credit to Jamie Sommers]