The Walking Dead S2E4 "Cherokee Rose" (11/6/11)

Everyone finally reconvenes at Herschel's farmhouse: Darryl, Dale and Carol drive up in the gang's vehicles; Carl wakes up, asking if Sophia is okay.  They do a memorial service for Otis, piling up a big cairn of rocks.  Herschel asks Shane to say a few words, seeing how he was with Otis when he died.  Shane doesn't want to because, you know, he's the one who killed Otis, but he does, lying about how Otis gave him his backpack and told him to run ahead while he (Otis) covered Shane's back.  Everyone seems to buy the story, except maybe Dale who possibly looks disbelieving but may in fact just be shocked at the tale of Otis's self sacrifice.

Afterwards, the gang wants to grid the area using Herschel's maps and do a proper search for Sophia, but Herschel tells Rick and Shane that they're not to go hiking around in the heat what with their respective being down three units of blood and having a sprained ankle.  Darryl is feeling fidgety and goes off to search on his own.  The farmhouse is running short on antibiotics and other medical supplies, so Maggie says she'll do a run to a nearby pharmacy and Rick volunteers Glen to go with her.  In the meantime, Herschel says that he's not comfortable with the gang packing heat all over his property and Rick says his group will lay aside their weapons for the duration.  Andrea is not at all happy about this, so Shane distracts her by showing her how to clean her gun.  Herschel takes Rick aside and tells him that once Carl is fit to travel, he expects Rick to take his people and leave the farm.  Rick looks gobsmacked.

Dale and T-Dog go to one of the farm's five wells to fill some water jugs and they find a swollen, waterlogged zombie splashing around down in the well.  It is a particularly loathesome specimen.  They don't want to shoot it because its blood and/or brains could contaminate the well, so they try to lure it into a noose using a canned ham on a string.  The zombie isn't interested in the canned ham - because as T-Dog points out, canned hams don't kick and scream - and Andrea mutters that they'll need to use live bait.  Everyone looks at Glen.  They tie him to a rope and lower him down so he can try to get the noose over the zombie, who perks up considerably with real food dangling overhead.  The rope slips and Glen drops, screaming.  They catch hold of the rope (they being Shane, Lori, Dale, T-Dog, Andrea and Maggie, and maybe Carol too) and pull poor Glen out before he gets bitten.  "Back to the drawing board," groans Dale but Glen tells him to speak for himself and hands him the other rope.  The lassoed zombie thrashes around on the other end.  They pull the zombie up out of the well, slowly, because it is really fat.  It gets caught at the lip of the well though and when they pull harder, they wind up ripping the damn thing right in half. TOTALLY GROSS.  Blood and guts pour out and the bottom half of the zombie ends up falling back down into the well.  Oops.  T-Dog beats the half-zombie's head in, causing Maggie to turn away in disgust since she's never seen one killed so close before - but the rest of the gang just watches dispassionately.  Dale muses that they should probably just seal up this well so no one drinks from it.

Darryl finds an old abandoned house and checks it out.  He doesn't find anyone inside, but he does find a recently eaten sardine tin and what looks like a little nest of blankets in a cupboard.  He goes outside, calling for Sophia, only pausing when he sees a wild white rose at the edge of the yard.  Meanwhile, Shane, Carol and Andrea go back to the highway to see if Sophia has picked up any of the supplies they left for her (she hasn't - is this lost little girl storyline almost done?) and then go off for some target practice.  Shane ends up talking a little too much and it looks as though Andrea is able to read between the lines and figure out that Otis's death maybe wasn't so much a self-sacrifice as just a sacrifice.

Maggie and Glen ride the farm's horses to the pharmacy.  While she heads into the back, looking for antibiotics, he goes to the feminine hygiene section and picks up a pregnancy test which Lori asked him to get for her - discreetly.  Maggie surprises him and he grabs a package of condoms to cover for why he's in that aisle.  She teases him, saying that he's pretty confident, and he stammers and stutters, totally out of his depth, until she tells him that she'll have sex with him - she's lonely too.  They take off their clothes and do it.

Back at the farm, Rick asks Herschel to reconsider asking them to leave - he doesn't know how horrible it is out there.  Herschel tells him that there are aspects of the situation that he can't and won't discuss (??) but if Rick's people agree to live by his rules, he'll consider letting them stay.

When Darryl returns, he finds Carol in the RV.  He gives her the flower - a "Cherokee rose," so named because the fable goes that it sprung up along the Trail of Tears when the Cherokee women cried for their lost children.  He says he figures no flower is blooming for his brother Meryl, but maybe this one's for Sophia.  You know, they're making Darryl into a very sympathetic character.  They better not kill him off!

That night, Lori sneaks off into a field and pees on her pregnancy test.  It comes up positive, of course, and she bows her head and cries.

Previously on The Walking Dead / next time on The Walking Dead

Mini book review: Zombies Vs. Unicorns

This book attempts to answer that age-old question - which is better, zombies or unicorns? - via short stories.  Compiled by Justine Larbalestier (Team Zombie, author of How to Ditch your Fairy, among other books) and Holly Black (Team Unicorn, author of the Spiderwick Chronicle series plus more), Zombies Vs. Unicorns contains twelve short stories by different authors, six zombie stories/six unicorn tales, and leaves it up to the reader to decide.

• "The Highest Justice" by Garth Nix - the most fairytale-ish of the lot and which actually has a zombie in it, despite being a unicorn story
• "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Alaya Dawn Johnson - which asks if really good New Wave music is enough to sustain the love between the dead and the living
• "Purity Test" by Naomi Novik - in which a unicorn and a not-virgin have to rescue kidnapped baby unicorns from a nasty wizard in NYC
• "Bougainvillea" by Carrie Ryan - you think you're safe from the inevitable zombie apocalypse by living on an island, but then you have to deal with pirates as well as the lurchers
• "A Thousand Flowers" by Margo Lanagan - an odd story where the first person narrator keeps switching without warning.  Plus bestiality.
• "The Children of the Revolution" by Maureen Johnson - I always knew there was something off about Angelina Jolie
• "The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn" by Diana Peterfreund - unicorns in this story's universe are vicious, poisonous, man-eating creatures, although the baby ones are still adorable
• "Inoculata" by Scott Westerfeld - and a little child shall lead them, especially if that little child does not entirely succumb to a zombie bite
• "Princess Prettypants" by Meg Cabot - the titular unicorn does indeed glitter and sparkle and fart honeysucked-scented rainbows but you still shouldn't piss her off
• "Cold Hands" by Cassandra Clare - just because one of you is dead doesn't mean you have to break up
• "The Third Virgin" by Kathleen Duey - a grim tale about a very twisted unicorn
• "Prom Night" by Libba Bray - with all the adults gone, it's up to the surviving kids to police themselves

The stories in Zombies Vs. Unicorns are uniformly decent, some better than others, none of them awful, each of them just long enough to read at breakfast before work.  I was on Team Zombie before I started reading, and I'm still on Team Zombie now that I'm done with the book, but the unicorn stories hold their own.  Plus I now have a listing of a whole bunch of new fantasy/urban fantasy authors to explore!

Some Walking Dead thoughts

My old friend Joe and I had a recent, brief email chat about The Walking Dead where Joe brought up some very good points and I told him I was going to steal his points and put them up here.  So here's me doing that, with my further thoughts included.  Joe is in green.

How many brand new RVs are sitting in lots at dealerships?  Why would you risk running around in a broke ass Winnebago?

Is penicillin that hard to find?  Really?

Guns have silencers, so why not get some or make one?  Ammo shouldn't be that hard to come by either - stop in at most hardware stores or a Cabela's.  There.  Enough to wipe out an entire zombie herd.

How long do zombies survive without food?  With no fresh humans, what are they eating besides the random deer?  They really aren't smart enough to hunt.

The fact that the survivors are so ill-prepared really doesn't make sense what with all the everything lying around for the taking everywhere.  I realize that at the outset of the zombie apocalypse people were maybe too shocked to stock up, but it's been long enough now that they should be getting their acts together.  I can believe that food is a real issue, what with spoilage and inability to grow anything fresh, but if they got themselves some decent vehicles (someone driving a tow truck would be a good idea, to help clear the wrecks from the road (I got that idea right from Stephen King's The Stand, btw)), they could carry enough clothing, equipment and weaponry to last a while.  And it seems like several survivors with automatic/semi-automatic guns could fell a whole herd - and you got 'em all, it wouldn't matter how noisy it was, and your spiffy new RV and tow truck could take you away before the next herd shows up.

I read a zombie novel this summer, My Life as a White Trash Zombie, about this girl who got zombified.  If she ate enough brains, she could maintain her human appearance and composure.  But three days without and her skin started to rot and crack off and she started to smell bad, and it just got worse from there.  If a zombie in that novel went for three weeks without brains, they basically turned into a dried-up, lurching skeleton with no higher function other than feeding.  I think the zombies in The Walking Dead should be somewhat similar with no food: they're never going to die of starvation since technically they're already dead, but they should shrivel and dry up and maybe move a little slower - but they'd still move, animated by their hunger.

The Second Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series - Movie #9: Piranha

So sad: this is the final movie in this year's Scarelicious October Movie Series!  I got off to a slow start, I'm afraid, and just didn't get to nearly as many horror flicks as I would have liked to (and Mr. Mouse is champing at the bit, saying it's high time I got a movie he wants to watch too and enough with this horror bullshit).  I'll get to Red State soon, but it'll definitely be in November so it doesn't count.  And yes, it is still October 31 out here in Utah whilst I post this, so even tho' Blogger's datestamp will say November 1st, Piranha was actually watched - and enjoyed - on Halloween.

So, Alexandre Aja's Piranha - what can be said about it?  Bountiful bouncy bare boobs and buckets of blood, and lots of ugly fishies with really nasty teeth, that's Piranha in a nutshell.  It's hilarious and, as I understand it, a callback to Aja's favorite creature features, winking but offering up enough true gore and scares to be a real horror flick in and of itself.  The plot is bare bones: "Lake Victoria," in Arizona, is the site of a rowdy spring break crowd.  The little town is bursting with 20,000 mostly naked college students, swimming, wake-boarding, drinking, etc.  The local sheriff's son, Jake, gets asked by the sleazy Girls Gone Wild-esque director (played with smarmy glee by Jerry O'Connell) to be their location scout for the porno-lite he's filming with two chickies.  Unbeknownst to everyone, a recent earthquake has opened a fissure underneath the lake, freeing thousands of prehistoric piranhas.  Shortly thereafter, mayhem ensues.

I can't decide what was my favorite part: the snickety-snickety noise the piranha teeth made; Jerry O'Connell's piscine penisectomy; Eli Roth's head getting smushed between a couple of boat hulls; Ving Rhames laying waste with an outboard motor; or simply the creative and exceedingly nasty ways Aja showed a person's stripped limbs post-piranha attack.  The cast was impressive too.  In addition to the previously mentioned folks, we've got Elisabeth Shue as the embattled sheriff, Jessica Szohr (Gossip Girl) as Jake's crush, Christopher Lloyd as a pet shop owner, Adam Scott as a seismologist (so much fun to see Adam Scott get to be almost an action hero! at least for a little while) and, in a wonderful cameo shoutout to Jaws, Richard Dreyfuss as a hapless fisherman.  There's no great acting being done here but everyone committed to their roles and everyone looked like they were having a helluva a lot of fun.  Unless they were being systematically stripped of their flesh by those hideous fish.

Piranha was just fun.  Gruesome, gory, gratuitously nude fun - everything a B creature feature should be.  I've never seen Joe Dante's original 1978 cult classic Piranha (which is supposed to be a ripoff of Jaws), but now I don't think I need too.  Non CGI fish would be better, of course, but I'm pretty happy with what I just saw.

The Walking Dead S2E3 "Save the Last One" (10/30/11)

In the farmhouse bathroom, Shane shaves off all his hair.

Flashback: Shane and Otis run through the halls of the high school, the drooling hordes of zombies lurching along behind them, as Rick, in a voiceover, tells Lori some story about Shane's high school derring-do.  Rick and Lori are sitting by Carl's bedside.  Their son is still comatose.  At the RV, Darryl and Andrea can't sleep and decide to walk down the road a bit, looking for Sophia.  Darryl is thinking positively: he thinks that kids are resourceful and Sophia will make her way back to them.  Shane and Otis split up, Shane slipping through a small window in the gym while Otis flees through the locker room to find another way out - he's too fat to fit through the gym windows.  Glen and T-Dog finally arrive at the farmhouse (seriously - what took them so long?) to learn that poor Carl is really not doing well.  Lori tells Rick that maybe it would be for the better if Carl were to die, getting free of this hell on earth in which they live.  This thinking tears Rick up considerably.

Shane and Otis meet back up, but they are out of rifle ammo and only have their pistols.  More staggering and running away from the high school zombies.  Some time later, back at the farmhouse, Carl wakes up and starts to tell his mom about the beautiful deer he saw.  Then, suddenly, horribly, he starts to seize.  When the seizure has passed, Herschel says it's because his brain needs more blood.  Rick rolls up his sleeve to provide another transfusion, even though he's given too much already.

Out in the woods, Darryl and Andrea come across a campsite with a zombie swinging by the neck from a nearby tree.  They read the handwritten sign: the guy got bitten and when the fever kicked in, decided to kill himself rather than become a zombie.  But instead of shooting himself in the head, he hung himself ... which meant that he zombified after all.  Andrea upchucks when Darryl points out that the hanging zombie's legs have been stripped of their flesh by other zombies.  She asks him to kill the zombie but he doesn't want to waste an arrow, so he says he'll do it if she tells him if she wants to live now or not.  She answers that she doesn't really know and even though Darryl doesn't think that's much of an answer, he puts an arrow through the zombie's skull, silencing it.

Shane and Otis keep trying to outrun the high school zombies.  They're down to their last two bullets.

Back at the farmhouse, Herschel tells Rick and Lori that they either try to operate now, without the medical equipment Shane and Otis went to fetch, or Carl will die for sure.  Rick looks at his wife and she, realizing that what Carl remembered from the day was the deer and not the horrors, says okay, let's try it.  Just as Herschel is about to make the first incision, Shane drives up, without Otis but with the equipment.  As Herschel rushes inside to operate, Shane stands there, twitchy and shell-shocked.

When Darryl and Andrea get back to the RV (without little Sophia), Dale returns her gun to her and asks her forgiveness for not letting her kill herself as she wishes.  She tells him she's trying but she's not there yet.  After the surgery, Herschel comes out and says that Carl seems to have stabilized.  Lori goes in to see her son while Rick goes with Herschel to tell Patricia that her husband is dead.  Shane stands in the front hallway and twitches.  When he looks in on Carl, Lori asks him not to leave.  He nods without saying anything and backs out of the room.  Herschel's daughter gives him some clean clothes (formerly belonging to Otis) and shows him where he can shower.

Flashback to Shane and Otis lurching along, barely staying ahead of the high school zombies.  Shane turns to Otis and says, "I'm sorry, man," and then shoots him in the leg, dropping him.  He yanks the pack off Otis's back and Otis grabs him.  They tussle, Otis ripping out a big hunk of Shane's hair, before Shane can manage to get away from him.  Shane runs back to the truck, clutching the two packs, while behind him the herd of zombies has descended upon poor Otis, messily devouring him while he shrieks, letting Shane get away.

In the farmhouse bathroom, Shane shaves off all his hair.

Previously on The Walking Dead / next time on The Walking Dead

'Tis the season

Just to get y'all in the mood for Halloween:

The Second Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series - Movie #8: Quarantine

Quarantine is the American remake of the very excellent Spanish horror film, [REC].  It's a pretty faithful retelling too:

Set in Los Angeles instead of Barcelona, [and I'm allowed to copy from my [REC] review because this is my blog] a cute little television reporter (Angela) and her cameraman (Scott), shooting a puff-piece on L.A.'s firemen, tag along with two of said firemen on a call to help an elderly woman trapped in her apartment.  When they get to the apartment building, the other tenants are milling about in the lobby, disturbed by the screaming coming from the old woman's flat.  Two policemen take the firemen and the t.v. crew up to the apartment and when they break the door down, all hell breaks loose.  The old lady, fat, foaming at the mouth, nuts and wearing nothing but a blood-covered slip, attacks the rescue party, chewing a hole in one policeman's neck.  Leaving one of the firemen behind to deal with the now-restrained old lady, the rest of them drag the wounded police officer down to the lobby, only to find out that the health department has sealed the building, allowing no-one out for any reason.  Then the formerly upstairs firefighter plummets down the stairwell with a splat, face nearly chewed off.  And now the screaming starts.  The sickness spreads quickly, picking off the trapped people one by one.  There is a lot of screaming - things get very tense very quickly.  This is all shown as a real time POV movie, filmed on Scott's camera and narrated by Angela as they first hope to bring word to the world of what is happening in the building; later, when the power is shut off to the building, the filming is incidental as Angela and Scott make use of the camera's light, and then night vision scope when the light is broken.  Towards the end, the only things we see are what little is illuminated by the camera's light, and then its night vision.

I had my doubts that Quarantine could be as good as [REC] - it very nearly is, and if I hadn't seen the original Spanish movie, this one would have been very scary indeed.  The remake has made a few changes - what is possessing the apartment building's tenants is a particularly virulent, contagious and fast-acting form of rabies, and the editing is a little more frantic, making it difficult to figure out the action at times - but by and large sticks to the original plan.  I knew what was coming but that didn't stop me from watching through my fingers a couple of times.

Another point in Quarantine's favor is its cast, including Jennifer Carpenter (Dexter) as Angela, Steve Harris (The Practice) as Scott, Jay Hernandez and Johnathon Schaech as the firefighters, and, as some of the tenants/fodder (undeveloped for the most part), Greg Germann (Ally McBeal), Dania Ramirez ("Maya" on Heroes), Denis O'Hare (True Blood and American Horror Story) and Rade Serbedziji ("Boris the Blade" from Snatch).  While I think Spanish Angela was braver as a character, kudos to Jennifer Carpenter for friggin' knocking it out of the park in this movie.  I seriously don't think I've ever seen an actor do "terrified" quite so well, even if the never-ending hysteria was wearying towards the end - I was getting a little concerned for Carpenter that she might pass out from all the hyperventilating.

I would still recommend [REC] to everyone but for folks who are unwilling to deal with subtitles, Quarantine will do you fine in its stead.

Next on the list: Piranha or maybe eXistenZ (Mr. Mouse is hoping October ends soon so I will rent a movie he would also enjoy watching).

The Second Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series - Movie #7: Nadja

Well, ... that was weird.  Nadja is an arthouse vampire flick, filmed in black and white with some truly striking shots interspersed with fuzzy-focused vampire-vision scenes.  A post-modern revisiting of Dracula, this strange little movie has Romanian twin siblings Nadja (definitely a vampire) and Edgar (maybe a vampire) Dracul trying to come to terms with their lives in the wake of their despised father's death in 1990s New York City.  Edgar is in love with Cassandra, his caretaker, and living the reclusive invalid's life in Brooklyn, while Nadja, her enthralled young Irish Renfield doting on her every whim, tries to find meaning by going on dates and dancing in clubs and picking up Lucy, a depressed young woman currently estranged from her husband Jim.  Oh, and Jim's paranoid uncle, the one and only Van Helsing (a tripped-out Peter Fonda) is trying to kill the Dracul twins, just like he killed their father.

Nadja is not for everyone.  I'm not sure it was for me as it is abstract and moody, very slow-paced, dreamy in spots, with lots of talking about the emptiness of life (although there is a fair amount of black humor too) and only a little soft-focus vampire violence.  But for folks who prefer their vampire films sleek and stylish with a side of weird - the movie was produced by David Lynch, who has a cameo as a morgue guard - Nadja is perfect.

Next in line: Quarantine - we'll see how the American remake holds up.

The Walking Dead S2E2 (10/23/11) "Bloodletting"

We begin with a flashback to before the zombie apocalypse, with Laurie confiding to a friend that she's not sure she loves Rick anymore, and being interrupted when Shane comes up to tell her that Rick has been shot.  Cut to now, with Rick running across a field, Carl in his arms, Shane and a fat guy, Otis, the hunter who accidentally shot Carl, following behind.  At the farmhouse where Otis lives, the patriarch, Herschel, takes charge immediately, hooking Carl up to an IV, arranging for Rick to provide blood for a transfusion (he and Carl are both A+).  From Herschel's examination, the bullet has broken into fragments which will need to be removed.

The remainder of the search party is still making their way back to the RV, while at the RV, Dale checks T-Dog's arm and sees that he's got a bad infection.  They search the nearby vehicles again, hoping for some antibiotics they might have missed before.

Herschel manages to remove one of the bullet fragments from Carl's belly, but the boy is shrieking and crying from the pain.  Finally he passes out.  Herschel says that the other fragments are in even deeper, plus it looks like there's some internal bleeding, so they need to anesthetize Carl, and put him on a respirator, and open him up.  They'll need additional equipment and supplies for that.  There's a high school about five miles away that had a FEMA shelter set up there - they should have the supplies, but last time they looked, it was overrun with zombies.  Rick wants to go but Shane says no, he needs to stay here with his son.  Shane and Otis volunteer to go and Herschel gives them a list.  One of Herschel's daughters says she'll go find Laurie and bring her back to the farmhouse.

The infection has caused a high fever and T-Dog starts to rant, paranoid, alarming Dale.  As the rest of the group nears the highway, a zombie attacks Andrea as she wanders away from the group.  Before it can munch on her, Herschel's daughter rides up on a horse, bludgeons the zombie with a baseball bat and tells Laurie that she needs to come with her to Carl.  Darryl thinks that's a bad idea since they don't know this girl, but she shouts directions to the farmhouse over her shoulder as she rides off with Laurie.  When the group reaches the RV, it is decided that Dale, Darryl and Andrea will wait overnight at the RV in case little Sophia shows up, and make a sign for her telling her how to get to the farmhouse, while the rest of them will go now to the farmhouse.  When he hears about T-Dog's blood infection, Darryl pulls a baggie of medicine out of his motorcycle saddlebags - Merle's stash, which includes crystal meth, painkillers ... and penicillin.  He hands over the antibiotics to Dale at once.

As they wait at the farmhouse, Rick and Herschel talk.  Herschel is hopeful about the future and finding a cure but Rick is pretty despondent.  When Laurie gets there, Rick takes her in to see their son.  A little later, she questions Herschel about how many times he's done this surgery and it comes out that he's a veterinarian, not a people doctor.  She is not happy about that: "Aren't you over your head?"  Herschel, calmly: "Ma'am, aren't we all?"

When Shane and Otis get to the high school, it is indeed overrun with zombies.  They wait until nightfall and then distract the walkers with flares found in an abandoned police car.  They get inside the FEMA trailer and collect everything on Herschel's list but they've taken too long and when they exit the trailer, the zombies see them.  After quite a bit of running around, fat Otis amazingly able to keep up with the fit Shane, they take refuge inside the high school, barricading themselves behind a metal gate.  The innumerable zombies growl and moan and reach for them through the gate (wouldn't you move out of their line of sight in hopes that they'd forget about you if they couldn't see you, instead of standing there in full view?)  That gate isn't going to last long against all that dead weight.

Previously on The Walking Dead / next time on The Walking Dead

The Second Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series - Movie #6: I Sell the Dead

I Sell the Dead is a funny-ish little (85 minutes) horror-ish movie about two 18th century grave-robbers who, finding their vocation not quite ghoulish enough, end up snatching undead bodies as well as dead ones.  The story is framed as Arthur Blake (Dominic Monaghan, a/k/a Charlie from Lost, a/k/a one of the LoTR hobbits who wasn't Frodo) has been arrested for murder and grave-robbing.  His partner and mentor, Willie, has already been executed for those crimes; when the movie opens, Arthur is telling his tale to Father Duffy (a misused Ron Perlman).

There are a lot of loose ends in IStD, a lot of false starts where you think something is going to lead somewhere and never does.  For example: Willie and Arthur were accused of murder by a trail of body parts leading to each of their abodes.  Arthur says he was framed, yet nothing comes of this - who left the body parts?  I think I know, but it's never mentioned again.  Willie and Arthur are hired by a creepy doctor who needs lots and lots and lots of corpses, the fresher the better - but why?  We never see what he's doing with them or why he needs so many, so what's the point?  When Willie and Arthur begin collecting and selling the undead (vampires, zombies and, very strangely, an alien), we're told that this is much more lucrative work but we don't know who wants these beings or why.  And so on.

There's a little violence and gore but not much and the movie really isn't scary.  There's an awful lot of just talking (and talking and talking - I may have nodded off for a couple of minutes) and while some of Monaghan's line readings are funny but the movie isn't a farce or satire or even just funny enough to be a black comedy.  I give it a resounding "meh."  I seem to be giving those out a lot lately.

Next time (for sure, after TWD):  Nadja.