• Zombie Foreign Policy
• Branding a Nation
• Wainwright/Cohen Baby
• Onion TV on TV
• Oscar's Highs and Lows
• Why Libya Isn't Egypt
• Mad Magazine and the Oscars
• Oscar Pool

This week on Day 6 we're building models of foreign policy paradigms and international relations based on...

HEY! WAKE UP! I PROMISE IT'S NOT GOING TO BE BORING!

OK? We are talking ideology-based foreign policy, which sounds drier than the Libyan desert, but the context we're using is pretty awesome: zombies.

Question: If the marauding staggering undead were to amass in a globally threatening situation, which foreign policy model presents the best defence against the zombie army?

Daniel W. Drezner has  written a book called Theories of International Politics and Zombies and he, ummm... reanimates foreign policy theory using examples like George Romero's revered Dawn of the Dead or the rom-com-zom film Shaun of the Dead.

He's funny. And brainy. (Brains!)

Libya shares a border with Tunisia to the west, Egypt to the east but when Libya had their uprising, it unfolded nothing like the mostly non-violent revolutions next door.

In Libya Moammar Qadafi is using lethal force against his own people. The country has fragmented violently. Coming confrontations promise more blood.

What are the conditions that led Libyan protesters to such starkly different ends than their Egyptian or Tunisian counterparts? We speak to Marc Ginsberg, former US Ambassador to Morocco.

In the annual ranking of nations, measured by such factors as economy, crime, political stability, Canada usually finishes in the top 10 often swapping places with Australia.

The big European players are usually in the same group. Nation branding is serious business and eyebrows were raised last year when Canada slipped from 4th to 7th place in one of the higher profile reports.

Most Middle Eastern countries don't make it into the top 50, but Egypt does. I ask one of the researches who builds the index if democratic reform will nudge Egypt up a few rungs. He says it won't.

So let's find out why not.

When I was a kid I loved MAD magazine. It was stuffed with fantastic artwork, cheeky jokes, social and political satire. In the reactionary 1970's MAD actually seemed radical and anti-establishment. It was really just anti-everything, a wise-ass tween's idea of rebellion.

But MAD did awesome movie parodies.

Many of the artists and writers who wrote for MAD in the early days of the mag, like pre-1965, are still in the business and still cranking out the schtick.

(Schtick! I learned that word from MAD.)  We called them up and let them loose on the 2011 Oscars.

The Social Nutwork! Oy Story 3!  Brilliant!

If your dad was Rufus Wainwright and your grandfather was Leonard Cohen, you'd be some kind of Montreal royalty.

I mean, not everyone likes the way those guys sing, so maybe you weren't born with a golden voice. But you could write songs like a mad genius. You'd be several stories higher than dad and grandpa in the Tower of Song.

Viva Katherine Wainwright Cohen was born on Groundhog Day and is indeed the daughter of Rufus and the granddaughter of Leonard. Mike Balazo has assessed the collaboration and says: Viva Viva!

The Oscars are rocketing toward us like Jon Voight in Runaway Train.

The porcine TV broadcast is usually worth watching because we hope something will happen: an upset, a tantrum, a non-stage managed scandal. A trainwreck. It doesn't always deliver, but when it does it's fun to see it live.

We talk to a film historian about some of Oscar's lowest points - like Marlon Brando's snub for The Godfather - and those finer moments worthy of the dream machine of Hollywood.

So you have mere hours left to enter our Oscar pool. Go here and make your choices.

Do it. You'll need the practice when we go to the polls in the Spring.

Maybe.

Have a glittering weekend.

 
Brent Bambury @CBCDay6

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