Some of the teams culling birds in India in the bird flu outbreak that I mentioned a couple of days ago are now quitting because of corruption in the villages. They report that local politicians are trying to force them to report ten times as many cullings as are done, so that villages can be paid more compensation by the national government, which the politicians will then pocket.

Some of the teams have also stopped working due to exhaustion.
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Just in case you were wondering, an asteroid did not crash into the Earth last night and the world did not end.

Asteroid 2007 TU24 came near to the Earth - that is, about 1.5 times as far from the Earth as the moon is, which in terms of astronomical distances is “near” but in terms of catastrophic collisions is “a complete miss”. Some doomsayers were predicting that TU24 was going to go all Hulk on our asses and smash the planet, but astronomers were comfortable for, oh, ever since they started talking about it coming near the Earth, that it wouldn’t hit the planet.

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There hasn’t been much bird flu news recently, and I’m just as happy about that as it’s more fun to be writing about “I Am Legend” than it is about actual plagues that are killing actual birds (and sometimes humans).

However, there is unfortunately some new bird flu news. India is seeing a significant outbreak of bird flu, affecting 13 of West Bengal’s 19 districts. The government says that more than 2.5 million birds will have to be put to death.

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The first two seasons of Jericho have gained an afterlife on the SciFi Channel. Jericho season one will begin airing with a four-episode marathon on February 11th at 7PM. After that it will air weekly at 10PM on Mondays.

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And I don’t mean the kind you hitch to your car (although that could be pretty cool).

No, this is the theatrical trailer for Neil Marshall’s new film “Doomsday”. Marshall’s previous credits are “Dog Soldiers” and “The Descent”

The story goes that in 2008 a plague spreads rapidly in Scotland; to save the world, Scotland is quarantined and basically written off as dead; forgotten about. 25 years later the plague reappears outside of Scotland. Because we know that there are survivors in there, Bob Hoskins sends Rhona Mitra in it find the cure (isn’t that what you’d do?) and return with it. In the process she finds Malcolm McDowell playing (what else?) an evil genius who’s holed up in a Scottish castle taking a Colonel Kurtz-like turn.

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Looking for good property values in the post-apocalyptic world? Florida beaches will probably be gone, so you’ll need to head further north - way north, according to Dan Bloom, whose concept is to build “Polar Cities”.

Look for the first to open in Norway in 2012 - yes, that should be a ding for all you 2012 enthusiasts, because that makes as much sense as any other 2012-doomsaying.

But… will they have Starbucks?
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We’re in Santiago, Chile for a few days, on our way home from a trip to see Easter Island - not a particularly apocalyptic thing although it might be a good place to ride out a zombie attack if you need to. I can’t remember if it was mentioned in “World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” or not. The island is one of the most remote, and the ocean floor drops off sharply near it, possibly making it difficult for underwater zombies to reach land.

But I digress.

We took a break from sight-seeing and all the empanadas and ham-and-cheese sandwiches to see “Soy Leyenda” yesterday, which I’d been interested in seeing in the US but didn’t have time to catch before we left. The film was in English with Spanish subtitles… there are several places in the film where you can barely hear lines, and it’s odd to see them clearly (in Spanish) in the subtitles. Given how weak my Spanish is, I could barely understand the subtitles, too.

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I usually expect that The History Channel will run shows about… you know… history… things that have come before. But honestly, I couldn’t tell you the last time I watched something on it, so for all I know it’s running shows about stuff that hasn’t happened yet all the time.

In this case, it’s running a 2 hour special called “Life After People”, which is about what happens to the world if all the people are gone. Which, last I checked, hadn’t happened yet, so that’s why I’m making comments about things that haven’t happened yet.

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There’s finally an “exclusive” trailer out for George A. Romero’s new zombie film, “Diary of the Dead”. The trailer starts with an intro from Romero himself, promoting a contest to include a select short horror film on the DVD release of his new movie.

“Diary of the Dead” is said to be more of a reboot of the classic “Night of the Living Dead” than a continuation of it. The new films depicts the start of the dead returning to life as flesh-eating zombies in a contemporary setting, documented by a student filmmaker.

The new film opens in limited release in the US on February 15. The trailer is after the cut.
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So you’re looking up at the sky one day and you see something and you’re not sure what it is…

What’s your first reaction? “Swamp gas”? “The planet… Venus”?

Apparently if you’re in California, Colorado or Texas, you’re more likely to think it’s a UFO. And by “UFO”, I don’t really mean “unidentified thing in the sky”, I mean little green men.

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