Things I learned from Doomsday and Hitman

Today was my birthday, so I took off work and treated myself to lunch at a favorite local drugstore diner and then an afternoon matinee of a bad movie, Doomsday. In the evening, a small group of us gathered for dinner, another bad movie (Hitman), and dessert; we'll do a bigger, more typical birthday party when more of our extended family are in town. I learned many useful things from these two films, including the following:

* Should a viral epidemic wipe out most of a country, the survivors will segregate into two camps: punk city-dwellers heavily into tattoos and body mod, with shirtless, muscular men and hot women prone to wearing only underwear and fishnet, and SCA lifers, with the men constantly donning armor and fighting for fun and the women sporting astonishly clean peasant dresses.

* Though hundreds of city survivors can hide from satellite surveillance for decades despite throwing evening bonfires, three idiots will eventually manage to make enough light to be noticed.

* No matter how bad the apocalypse in an area, there's always enough gas to power Road Warrior-style cars.

* If you're the military, you can store a car in a box for 32 years, then start it up and drive it without an issue. For the rest of us, of course, the parts will have corroded, all the seals, hoses, and gaskets will be gone, the tires will be flat, and so on, but the military has that special tech, doncha know.

* If you're a woman in Russia and it's cold enough that all the men are wearing suits and overcoats, your best clothing choice is a mini-dress so sheer we can measure the width of your thong.

* The best way for a hit man to vanish in a crowd is to be ghostly white, tall, bald, tattooed with a bar code on the back of the head, and in a dark suit with a white shirt and a red tie. Cops can find anyone else, but this guy is invisible.

* A yellow bathtub rubber ducky can turn menacing if you tie a black noose around its head.

I learned all this and much more, but I think that's a big enough sample to give you a feel for the treasure troves of knowledge available to viewers of these works.

Despite this accumulation of wisdom and what it may imply about the movies, I was able to suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy both of them.. That probably says something bad about me, but so it goes.

Back to Overthrowing Heaven, where the words are ever so slowly piling up.