Someone on NPR was talking about the Benjamin Button movie, and said that it was the first movie to get over the zombie effect in the portrayal of Brad Pitt through the ages. "People would rather look at robots than zombies" he said, I thought of this as I took some money out of my possibly zombie bank, and walked around a zombie like feeling Soho last week. This is turning out to be the Year of the zombie. Highway signs warn of zombie crossings, the Sunday NYT's article about needing to build a new Internet mentioned millions of zombie computers, you can come home and read about Jane Austen as a zombie hunter, the media industry is looking like a zombie as is almost everything else. Zombie's are usually controlled by a sorcerer, they have no speech or free will. Has Obama vanquished Cheney, the evil sorcerer, and has his departure suddenly awakened us into our current state of realizing that everything may look fairly normal but just isn't? We are surrounded by Zombies. Never fear the Portland Mercury, publish a guide to killing them. One thing though is that you get just one shot, if you miss you'll end up a zombie. So much for learning from failure.