As much as I love the Japanese movie Nosutoradamusu no daiyogen, the prophecies of Nostradamus have always given my trouble. Back in the days after 9/11, the same HR professional who would repeatedly leave Bibles at my desk with Post-Its telling me about how I was going to hell went on a chain email spree sending notes to everyone at the ad agency about the predictions of Nostradamus.

What she did not realize was that the copywriter who upset her with his book collection and desk full of strange toys and black t-shirts was as close to an expert on the weirdness of this world except he had no degree in it.

In fact, I knew that the the quatrains she’d been sending around about the end of the world weren’t even Nostradamus. They didn’t have his writing style, no matter the translation. This was a horrible time to be in this office. There was one guy who was non-stop watching footage of people jumping from the Twin Towers at full volume. There was the constant uncertainty of anthrax and war and more terrorism. And then there were these emails.

I couldn’t do anything about anything in this world but use how weird I am to make it a slightly better place. I replied all to her email — which went to everyone in our company — about how God was bringing his final judgement and explained how Nostradamus’ 942 poetic quatrains weren’t seen as prophetic — he refused the title of prophet — in his lifetime. I’ve always considered myself if not an admirer of James Randi, who believed that he was actually a really bad fortune teller who got his reputation by using vaguye words. He also believed that people studied his work and mistranslated it for their own ends. In fact, like this HR person, he believed that anyone who supported the idea of Nostradamus as a soothsayer have figured out ways to make things that have happened or will definitely happen match his words. Randi referred to this as retroactive clairvoyance.

My mistake was saying that it was stupidity in my email. In my defense, people were literally falling apart atheir desks. I said that life is chaos, that we have no predetermined paths and that free will is the greatest thing that exists. Conspiracy theory — and Nostradamus — is an attempt to try and make some sense out of a life that has no sense, random inexplicable good and bad events that all happen seemingly at the same time. And it’s when people try to make people worried that it gets stupid.

Yeah, that word.

What happened next, well, was I got brought in a room by the entire HR department and told I would be fired for calling someone stupid in a chain email to the entire company. Never mind that I had been thanked by everyone, including people much higher up than her. But her feelings were hurt, damaged by that same strange longhaired writer who obviously was a knight in Satan’s service.

To keep my job, I had to apologize. And I refused. I was young. I barely had a mortgage. And I figured that my dignity meant more than my career, I guess. Somehow, one of my bosses spoke up and I ended up staying, but I always felt like I sold out staying around.

Anyways.

The whole reason for this movie is a prediction by Nostradamus that gained traction in the even more connected and conspirital world of 2021.

“Few young people: half-dead to give a start. Dead through spite, he will cause the others to shine, And in an exalted place some great evils to occur: Sad concepts will come to harm each one, Temporal dignified, the Mass to succeed. Fathers and mothers dead of infinite sorrows, Women in mourning, the pestilent she-monster: The Great One to be no more, all the world to end.”

It was all over social media. And the big claim was that the CDC already had a zombie guide.

They did.

It was all a joke.

But man, we live in an even weirder and — that word again — stupider world than twenty years ago.

And look, I spent years joking that I was prepping for a zombie apocalypse. But when you do that, you’re really prepping for any end of the world situation, even the dumbest apocalypse that we have all lived through.

This movie is filled with experts on surviving a zombie event. I wonder how this can be, seeing as how so many of them are influencers and, well, zombies like they’re discussing only exist in movies. Sure, there’s some science about how cat feces can become parasitic in the bodies of mice, but we’re not here for science. We’re here for zombies.

So you get a lot of the kind of advice that works for any situation: stick to bladed weapons. Chainsaws don’t work like in the movies. Prep your food. Grow a garden. You should know all these things. You may or may not be entertained by this movie, but you can get even more survival knowlege from watching Dawn of the Dead.

You can watch this on Tubi.