Neil Marshall (known for the horror films "Dog Soldiers" and "The Descent") has a new film out today, which I’ve written about a couple of times: the appropriately named “Doomsday”.

In 2037, thirty years after Scotland was sealed off to contain a plague, Bob Hoskins sends Rhona Mitra back into Scotland in order to try to find the cure, as the disease has recurred outside. In the process she encounters Malcolm McDowell, doing a turn as Colonel Kurtz (but not o be too obvious, his character is named “Kane” instead of “Kurtz”).

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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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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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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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When the world ends, what skills will you have that will make other people want to keep you around?

Can you build things? Weld? Heal people? Cook? Grow food? Are you a sharp-shooter? Will you merely be the pregnant one, who people will keep around because you’ll be the mother to the new race of surviving humans, assuming that you don’t give birth to some kind of zombie monster baby?

Or are you destined for the soup pot?

The Post-Apocalyptic Workout is one unemployed (presumably striking) TV writer’s attempt to get herself into survivability shape.
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Phil Plait at the Bad Astronomy Blog has a great new word: “Cosmortology”. The word comes up in relation to recent reports that observing dark energy might shorten the life of the universe; it would mean causing the death of the universe, or studying the death of the universe.

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Most people probably hadn’t heard of sarin gas before the 1994 and 1995 attacks in Japan by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

Sarin is an odorless, colorless gas which damages your nervous system if you inhale it or get it on your skin. It inhibits the mechanism by which your body allows its muscles to relax, leading to convulsions and a loss of bodily control, inability to breath and likely death.

The only good thing about sarin is that it doesn’t store well, which makes it difficult to stockpile for use as a weapon.

“Aum Shinrikyo” used sarin in two terrorist attacks in Japan, in 1994 and 1995, killing a total of 19 people.

WFMU describes Aum Shinrikyo’s beliefs as “a wild mixture of Buddhism, Hinduism, Nostradamus, and the Book of Revelations” - something which I normally would respond to as “you can’t get there from here” - but apparently you can.

Informed by everything from buddhism and anime to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, they started out studying yogic meditation (the Wikipedia article on them uses another unlikely combination of words, “elite meditation boutique”), they became more militant over time, driving around in an armored Mercedes, until finally they involved themselves in terrorist attacks, kidnapping and microwave incineration.

In a Buckaroo Banzai-like twist, their mostly blind leader, Shoko Asahara, not only masterminded their transformation from meditators to terrorists, but also recorded music.

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I enjoy Gizmodo, but they’re not the place I usually go for apocalyptic info… so I was surprised to see their recent report on the British Ministry of Defense’s predictions, which include EMP generators, neutron weapons, brain implants and flashmob-terrorists.

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Phil Plait, author of “Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing “Hoax”" is now working on his second book, “Death from the Skies”, due out in spring of 2008. “Death from the Skies” concerns all the ways that the universe can kill you - in an astronomical sense, rather than personal. Gamma ray bursts, asteroids, comets; I’m pulling for the earth being ripped apart by a black hole, myself. Or being invaded by aliens who die when they come in contact with water.

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