brautigan's toothbrush

Imagine you’ve been deployed to the Middle East, for longer than anyone dreamed would be possible when the war started. You’re finally getting to go home. It’s emergency duty in New York City, but it’s still home. There’s an epidemic. It’s everything the swine flu was feared to be and then some – extremely contagious and up to 5% lethality. There is no vaccine, which is unfortunate as some of the sick experience symptoms much like rabies – dementia, paranoia. They become … dangerous.

That’s the nightmare in which Charlie Company’s Second Platoon find themselves in Craig DiLouie’s 2010 novel Tooth and Nail. It’s a gritty take on the zombie apocalypse, fought on the streets of New York. The military framework is a natural – where else would you want to be during a zombie war than in the best funded military on Earth?

The characters aren’t cookie-cutter cannon fodder or stereotypical power-crazed officers. They react in spectrum of ways – selfish, loyal, craven, implacable. They have to contend with the tension between following orders and the prospect of having to fight other Americans that have been infected by the virus. They also face rapid breakdown in services, lack of supplies and medicine, and a public that is demanding, self-centered, and terrified. And then there are the sick people. The “Mad Dogs,” as they become known.

Zombie stories have a reputation for metaphor, and this one is no exception. It can be seen as an intense take on the morality of combat in a civilian zone, where the line between civilian and non-combatant and soldier, regular or guerrilla, erodes.

The main character is the Army itself – the culture, language, rituals, rules and tools. The individual cast members are embedded in this matrix, to such a degree that sometimes they stand out sharply, but their features sometimes fade and they move as gears in the military machine. DiLouie’s Army is detailed and believable. The reader feels as if she is there with the soldiers, often with grim humor, as they struggle to fulfill their orders amid chaos and panic.

I won’t be surprised when I hear this book has been picked up for a movie. It would be a welcome addition to the genre – an inside view of a powerful army faced with defeat from a foe that fights with tooth and nail.

Recently Facebook has made changes without telling users in advance, changes that leave personal information open without advance warning.

Want to see what Facebook is revealing about you? If your account name is easy to guess, it might be a lot. Did you ‘like’ the restaurant down the street? Did you ‘like’ the local bowling team or your neighborhood gardening crew?

Here’s how to find out some of what Facebook is revealing: Log in to your Facebook account and click your name in the top left column. Look up at the address bar of your browser – there will be a URL. Mine is http://www.facebook.com/#!/pris.sears. My Facebook identifier is pris.sears

Now log out of Facebook.

Go to http://zesty.ca/facebook/ and you will see an empty box you can type into. Put your Facebook identifier in the box. There will be a list of links, check all of them.

Even more disturbing: don’t click any Facebook icons on a news site. You might end up showing up on their front page as “liking” the most repellent murder. Don’t think that would happen? I was pretty surprised to see my name and a link to my ‘private’ Facebook page on the front page of the ABC News web site as “Liking” a story about a violent murder.  I’d clicked on the story from friend of mine’s Facebook update, and then clicked a Facebook icon on the ABC site. I was dismayed to see that rather than taking me back to the Facebook site, clicking that icon made my name appear on the front page of the ABC web site, linked as “Liking” this awful story. There is no way to remove the ‘like’ link or, take my name off. I wrote an email to the help address provided on the ABC page asking to be removed, but only got a robo-answer.

How to look like a ghoul in one easy click

After my name had been on the front of the ABC site for a couple of days, I changed my Facebook name. After a couple of tries, the Facebook filters allowed me a new name. “Post Script” is my new name, but my Facebook URL remains the same, http://www.facebook.com/#!/pris.sears. ABC didn’t remove my “like” but it did update automatically update my Facebook name so that now it reads “Post Script” likes the story instead of “Pris Sears.” That might seem like some kind of progress, but I am pretty sure it’s automated and to this point, very few humans have been involved in this incident beyond myself and the thousands of people that have looked at news stories anywhere on ABC’s web site. The fact that my Facebook name is still up six days after I sent an email begging them to take it down doesn’t really make me feel confident about this new cross-pollination between ABC and Facebook.