Pop Rocks

Garbage Pail Kids? Total nerd rite of passage. Helped us realize recess was meant for chanting, “Got, got, need, got, ooh! Oozy Suzy!” I thought those halcyon days were dead and gone. Undead more like, because Topps Trading Cards have burst from the grave with a new collection: Hollywood Zombies. The 72-card collection renders all your favorite celebrities with bits falling off and insects crawling out of their gaping sockets. Paris Hellton makes an appearance, as do Scary-Kate and Ghastly, alongside my personal fave rave-from-the-grave Sanjaya Malakarcass. This is one of those ideas that’s so good, it’s hard to believe no one thought of it sooner. Hollywood is already full of drooling, semidecomposed automata whose fetid corpses are held together only with botox, silicon, corsets and masking tape, yet it takes comics cards aimed at kids to make us see these shambling cretins for what they are: zombies. Ghouls. Worthless, brain-eating, maggot-infested parasites. Eighteenth-century England had the satirists William Hogarth and Jonathan Swift to point out the grotesque ugliness of its celebrity class. The Weimar Republic had George Grosz. We’ve got Topps. Go figure. Past Topps card series were made into movies—Garbage Pail Kids, of course, but also Mars Attacks! Is it too early to start hoping for A-List of the Dead? Graar. (Tom Cowell)

“D.A.N.C.E.”

That Justice album—the dance record of the summer—finally dropped after what felt like months of spastic, hip-thrusting buildup to the reigning single “D.A.N.C.E.” It hijacked every DJ night in the entire city, as well as my sanity. Not since OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” has a song so singularly ensnarled itself in the psyche as best song ever. And most annoying. The prepubescent playground chant “do the D.A.N.C.E.” pogos around disco beats as earnest and sticky-thighed as Sandra Dee, and as hard as we try to resist its instructions to “stick to the B.E.A.T.,” we can’t. We’re powerless against the spasmodic, saccharine charm of the original and its countless remixes, most of which are totally superfluous. They’re not like Patrick Wolf’s desperately necessary reinterpretation of Mika’s “Love Today,” (which gives the cotton-candied snotface the bloody-nose treatment it deserves). “D.A.N.C.E.” is just perfect as originally crafted by those crazy Frenchmen. And in 20 years, when you’re still shakin’ it like a Polaroid picture, all us PYTs will be doing the D.A.N.C.E., easy as A-B-C, 1-2-3-4-fight! (Caralyn Green)

Garotting Mobsters on Nintendo Wii

Although Wii is best known for its sports games controller, it’s also a great murder simulator. In The Godfather I killed more than 100 mobsters with a garrote wire by mimicking strangulation with the Wii controller. (I was also able to assassinate Don Barzini and contradict the movie’s canon. Sorry, Al Neri.) I played the “what if Tony Montana survived?” Scarface video game and slaughtered Sosa’s minions attacking my palatial estate. But the recently released Wii version of Resident Evil 4 might top them all. Like all good games, it begins with: “Warning. This game contains strong language and explicit scenes of violence and gore.” Yes, it’s better to express your violent tendencies on screen, and no, it isn’t likely to spill over into real life. Unless I suddenly get attacked by real-life zombie dogs. Then all bets are off. Where does one get a chainsaw, anyway? Home Depot? Are they expensive? (Daniel McQuade)

Soul Food at Bob and Barbara’s

Sundays make me hungry. Come to think of it, so do Wednesdays. We should totally hang at Bob and Barbara’s for bouncer grub. Known as the “Best Bouncer in Town,” B&B’s resident chucker-outer Lucky (“It’s just Lucky”) likes to flex his culinary muscle twice weekly when he produces some of the tenderest barbecue you’ve ever tasted. Wednesdays are fun—what with the bingo and all—but Sundays rule. For less than $10 you’ll rock a plate of barbecue chicken, ribs or fish and a few kickass sides to boot while a trio of old dudes lay down serious jazz cuts. (Joshua Valocchi) >> Every Wed. and Sun., 7pm. $4-$6. Bob and Barbara’s, 1509 South St. 215.545.4511

Blackminton

Unless you’re a British schoolgirl, you probably don’t play a lot of badminton. That’s understandable. The game requires great physical fitness, flexibility and the ability to look good in tight white shorts: all deal-breakers for most Philadelphians. But a mutant badminton is sweeping Europe, a version that’s less about exercise and more about dressing up like a cyberpunk-rocker and pretending to be in the movie Tron. It’s called Blackminton—part rave, part sport. The rules differ little. Blackminton’s soul is in the aesthetics. Players set up a black light in a dark room, daub themselves in fluorescent body paint and run around attempting to hit their “speeder” into their opponents’ “star court.” But judging from YouTube videos of actual Blackminton competitions, rules take a back seat to sprinting about like an electrified lunatic and looking really cool doing it. For a helpful image, think of the street gangs from The Warriors playing laser tag with squash rackets. This is the answer to America’s obesity crisis. When gym class is as intense, luminous and cyberpunky as Blackminton, we’ll have the buffest kids in the world. (T.C.)