This is just a heads-up to those of you who may have missed the trailer for this upcoming milestone in unbearable scientifiction horror.

Click the pic for the iFilm version.

A more hi-res trailer is available on Apple’s site, but requires Quicktime, which not everyone loads.

The movie was filmed in New Zealand, with special effects by Weta Workshop, of LOTR fame.

The premier date is June 22, 2007. I may take off work for this one!

Bugs and high fashion. One of these things is not like the other.
Except when scientists at the University of Florida use louse DNA to come up with a theory of when humans started wearing clothes. Not just a tiger-skin tossed casually over the shoulders to denote hunter-status or keep off the rain, but actual tailoring. It has to do with lice.

Though humans may long have worn loose garments like animal skin cloaks, the first tailored clothing would have been close-fitting enough to tempt the head louse to expand its territory. It evolved a new variety, the body louse, with claws adapted for clinging to fabric, not hairs.

And since the body louse appears to evolved from the head louse about 107,000 years ago, that means that “tailored” clothing is probably only a little older than that — little as evolutionary science defines little, anyway. And “tailored” as evolutionary science defines tailored, too; I doubt Beau Brummel would have used the term. And once we started making clothes, other forces took over. Clothing is shelter, class marker, amusement, sexual stimulant. Humans have been in the clothing business for a hundred millenia or so, and we’ve been very inventive. I just find it kind of piquing that the impulse that gave us the Wonderbra, the bustle, the cod-piece and the J Peterman leather duster was responsible for the divergence and origin of lice species.

You can’t make this stuff up. Or I couldn’t, anyway.