I'm in that holiday mood once again

Yep. Halloween, that major religious holiday here in Oklahoma is creeping up on the sly. Oh, sure, the cicadas are singing their brains out, and it's still a hundred and forty-leven degrees outside with a relative humidity to match. The skeeters carried off one of the neighborhood kids. And ticks deflated our dog.

But I'm getting into that holiday mood, lemme tell ya.

Mary and I were in the library this afternoon, when the great god Yog Sothoth chose to leave a book from the children's section lying provocatively on the table where I sat. It was a young adult's book on zombies. And it fell open to this page, a still taken from the movie "Shaun of the Dead."


At first, I wondered if this was really just a documentary photo or one from a news magazine depicting a bunch of people waiting for the latest iPhone, perhaps. But no, they're zombies.

Then this little detail caught my eye.


What's this? There's a guy wearing cycling gloves, a cycling cap, and a jersey with some odd stripes on it. Odd stripes? Why, those are world championship stripes! These guys are trying to imply that ALL cyclists, regardless of their competition level, are a bunch of zombies! I won't have it I tell you! This has gone entirely too far!

We're called rude names by passing motorists. We endure the cold, the rain, and the wind because we love to travel on two wheels. We get little or no respect from the media, and now, we're being compared to zombies. It's simply too much. We are not flesh-eating brainless zombies!

I'm going to write a stiffly worded letter of complaint to both of our Senators from Oklahoma, despite the fast that they're both, um, brainless, and um, may be zombies too.

On second thought, who writes a kids book on zombies?