Somewhere Different Now

My mother likes sending me links to silly things online.  Imagine my surprise when one day she sent me a link leading to An Archive of Our Own (AO3)!  Had she discovered my fanfiction habit?  Was she coming out of the closet about a fanfic habit of her own?  No on both counts, thank heavens.  The link was for Wait Wait Don't Eat Me, a fic about NPR's news quiz show, Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me*, reporting on the zombie apocalypse.  Let me say that again:  National Public Radio fanfic, with zombies.  It's utterly hilarious!  The voices for all of the hosts and panelists are exactly right, and I cracked up at the news about what various politicians and other famous people were doing in response to the zombie hordes.  A zombie calls in to be a listener contestant.  The consequences of giving too little on the pledge drive are revealed. 

Still curious about where on Earth my mother located this, I checked the Wait Wait website and found that they had linked to the fic on their twitter feed.  I know that my mother uses Twitter to follow some people (our phone conversations frequently include discussing the latest news from Neil Gaiman as if he were a family friend), so I am choosing to assume that she found the story through that tweet. 

God, I love the Internet!  (Other awesome and COMPLETELY unrelated internet stuff:  DW writer Paul Cornell's blog post the other day denouncing the perception encouraged by the media that to be Christian is to be homophobic.  Well said, Paul!  It bothers me that the most hateful strand of the Christian faith is so often the loudest, and it bothers me that the media discourse just amplifies these strident voices who do NOT speak for the Jesus I see in the Bible, nor do they speak for me.  Like Paul, I'm a person of faith, and I am in favor of GLBT rights.  Passionately so.  I know many other Christians of various sorts who feel the same.  As a more or less Quaker person, I might worship quietly, but I refuse to be silent in standing up for the rights of others.  I don't feel the need to talk about my faith a whole lot in the secular world, but I do get tired of hearing atheists and agnostics who are allies on the political and social issues I care about assuming that intelligence, logic, compassion, open-mindedness, and progressivism are antithetical to belief in a higher power.  Stop with the pigeonholing, people.)

*For those of you who aren't in the US or aren't public radio listeners, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me is a weekly news quiz comedy show with a combination of listeners phoning in, regular panelists, and celebrity guests.  It's well worth checking out the podcast if you aren't in an area where you can hear it broadcast.  Even without zombie apocalpyse, it makes me laugh out loud every week.  It helps that Peter Sagal, the host, is apparently a huge geek.