The next thing you know, the dang things will start sparkling.

For those of you that don't know, the Hillwig household is a zombie household.  My husband Jamin has been a ginormous fan of the original "Night of the Living Dead" ever since he was a kid, and we've met nearly every surviving member of the main cast (we almost met George Romero too, but he had to bow out of a con at the last minute, so he's still on the "wanted" list).  We also tend check out anything and everything zombie-related, usually finding some new treasure along the way (World War Z, The Walking Dead, Shaun of the Dead, etc.).  Heck, as I type this, Jamin's playing "Left 4 Dead" on XBox360 and giggling like crazy as he blows the crap outta corpses.  Suffice it to say, we both know the genre pretty darn good and have a healthy respect for it...which might be why this struck me as so weird.

A few weeks ago, I'm bringing in the mail, and as I pass Jamin on the couch, he points at a flier on the bottom of the pile and says, "What the heck is that?"  I turn it over to see this:

It's a furniture ad.  Featuring a zombie.  In mid-June.  Now, this isn't the first time I've seen a zombie in a non-Halloween ad (there's one for Starburst as well as that new Honda Civic campaign), but in those ads, the companies in question are trying to be hip or edgy so they can appeal to the younger consumers with disposable income, therefore it makes sense for them to use such imagery, while the use of zombies here just comes off as kinda pathetic.  It's freakin' Gardner-White Furniture!  What's hip or edgy about a mattress sale?  Are there scads of males in the 18-34 range out there going, "Hmm, I really need a Serta Perfect Sleeper, but who should I buy it from?  Hey, these guys put zombies in their ad!  They're the store for me!"

Zombies are the "in" thing right now, I get it.  But we're getting so over-saturated that, last month, I watched a National Geographic special that focused on Romero-style zombies and how they could (hypothetically) happen in real life.  It was a good program, but seriously...NatGeo's cashing in on this?  I feel like the zombie phenomenon is approaching the point that Dracula and Frankenstein and all the other Universal monsters hit in the 1940s when they became fodder for Abbott & Costello movies:

Familiarity breeds contempt, as the old saying goes.  Or maybe it just breeds slapstick comedy.  Take your pick.