I feel bad doing Monday books because it’s hard to get some books these days and I don’t want someone trying to go out. We will go back to them when the libraries reopen, or if the book can be guaranteed online.

Meanwhile, time for a true confession; post-apocalyptic movies are my secret guilty pleasure. When I despair over the state of the world, or my place in it, I watch actors try to battle off giant invaders, figure out how to make engines from rusty nails, etc. It’s fun. Because it isn’t real life.

Now that our lives are a little weirder than normal, and online games have become quite the rage, how many disaster movies can you find in our present situation? Here’s a list to get you started; play along in comments.

Perfect Sense – losing taste and smell as the most evident symptom that something is going wrong

World War Z – US government response is to manufacture and push fake cures as national health, ignoring actual problem

How it Ends – no one can pin down how it started but sure would like to find someone to blame

A Quiet Place – people send up flares to communicate they’re still here – we have Facebook

Containment – the slow erosion of social norms due to hoarding inside a cordon sanitaire – a phrase everybody just LOVES to keep saying

Outbreak – media hyping already tense situations to make it even more fun!!

Zoo – some asshole reports a tiger has COVID and gets a whole bunch of pets killed with his irresponsible conflating of cat coronaviruses (they are COMMON) and human coronaviruses (we don’t catch them from each other)

I Am Legend – the cure is worse than the illness

Left Behind- I got nothing on this one; anyone?

Shawn of the Dead – yes, people can be that stupid in real life. Been on Facebook?

Rollover – the world economy goes belly up but the really pretty people survive (Jane Fonda and Kris Kristofferson, namely)

28 Days Later – I literally had a colleague (his name was not Jim, though) backpacking in New Zealand who walked back into civilization intending to catch his plane on to India and … say what now?

Think of this as one of those picture puzzles online. How many movies can you spot in the way we live now? :]