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The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Zombies
Zombie survival guides are a blood-stained dime a dozen, but won’t somebody please 
think of the zombies? It’s a hard “life,” full of unending hunger, long monotonous stretches of boredom, a homogenous diet, and unceasing drool. Plus, you never get to change into a clean pair of underwear, and that’s just bad luck.
Well, I’m somebody—a yummy body to the zombies—and I’m happy to oblige. It seems fitting that I, man of alterity and otherness, would be considerate of the needs of zombies. You don’t get much more otherwise than they. So without further moaning, zombie-walk ado, I present seven habits of highly effective zombies.
- Get Involved in a Community – The lone wolf or isolated zombie is easily seen, easily avoided, and easily whacked. Join a mass of your fellow flesh-eaters and stay hidden. It offers you safety, strength in numbers, and a better chance of surrounding and getting your mouth on some of that living meat you so excitedly crave.
- Be Patient – Aristotle taught that virtue is a mean between excess and defect. When you’re in a group advancing on your prey, don’t rush to the front where you’ll be the first to fall, and don’t meander at the very back where you’ll never get your hands on even a multiply-stomped-on strip of intestine. You want to be close to the front, but biding your time. Wait for the frontline zombies to wear down the food. When it’s your turn to strike, your meal will be exhausted, out of bullets, and primed for you, the walking abattoir.
- Have Foresight – This habit is also important before you become a zombie. If you know you’re doomed to be dinner and maybe to life as a zombie, try to get bitten on a part of your body that won’t slow you down or handicap you later. Avoid bites on the leg. You’ll want mobility. The face is fine, but make sure you still have a working jaw. You can get by without an arm, but you’ll be a much more effective killer with all your appendages intact. I recommend guiding the gnawing jaw of a zombie to your chest or back.
- Keep Your Moaning to a Minimum – No sense in announcing your presence. If your voice box alerts your prey, rip it out. You’re a zombie; you can take the biblical injunction literally.
- Eat on the Run – Some zombies like to sit or crouch down to relax and enjoy their food. This is usually unwise. The living may be lurking, looking for distracted zombies to bash in the head. If you must sit, have your back against a wall, and eat with your head up and your eyes peeled. By the way, peeled eye is quite succulent if you can get your hands on some.
- Attack the Unarmed – This may seem a no brainer, but that’s part of your problem, isn’t it? Stay away from humans with guns, blades, bats, and other weapons. You may want to focus on anyone unarmed who could conceivably obtain a weapon and appears to have the knowhow to use it, but this approach obviously has its risks.
- Stalk Close Friends and Family – No one wants to shoot a spouse, parent, child, or good friend in the head. Take advantage of this momentary hesitation to go in for the kill. Beloved celebrities like Justin Bieber or Katy Perry should stalk their once adoring now delicious fans. On the flip side, avoid your enemies, and, if you were a horrible boss, your former employees. People lose their moral compass during a zombie apocalypse and won’t hesitate the blow the brains out of people they really hated if presented with the mere possibility that they’ve become zombies. In The Simpsons, Zombie Flanders learned this the hard way when approaching his neighbor Homer, who, after shooting his undead foe, remarked, “He was a zombie?”
So there you have it. Happy effective hunting!
ZOMBIE OUTBREAK? – Are Zombie Bees Infiltrating Your Neighborhood?
Parasite zombie flies and a honeybee; courtesy of John Hafernik/SF State University
Zombie bees are not science fiction. They are real—and real threat to already-threatened U.S. honeybee populations.
Honeybees (Apis mellifera) in California and South Dakota have been observed acting zombielike, wandering away from their hives at night and crawling around blindly in circles.
These insects have been rendered insensate by a parasitizing fly that lays eggs in the bees’ bodies. After the bee dies a lonesome death, pupae crawl out and grow to adult flies that seek new bodies to infect.
Such a sight startled John Hafernik, a professor of biology at San Francisco State University, when he looked at dead honey bees he had collected on campus. He soon started noticing clumps of dead bees under light fixtures in the area. He and his colleagues found that this bizarre bee behavior was the result of the fly Apocephalus borealis (they described their findings in January in the journal PLoS ONE). After sampling hives around the Bay Area, they found that, disturbingly, more than three quarters were infected with this parasite.
Honeybee colonies have been collapsing at an alarming rate in the U.S. for the past several years. And without these important pollinators, many of our favorite foods, from almonds to zucchini would be difficult to produce. Scientists have implicated viruses, fungi, mites and other invaders in colony collapse disorder, but Hafernik suspects this parasite is a new villain on the scene. “Honeybees are among the best-studied insects,” he said in a prepared statement in January. “We would expect that if this has been a long-term parasite of honeybees, we would have noticed.”
How do you catch a zombie bee? A “ZomBee” trap; courtesy of John Hafernik/SF State University
Now, to see how far the zombified bee problem has spread, he and his colleagues are enlisting the help of the whole continent. They have launched ZomBeeWatch.org, a citizen science project that allows people to help them track suspicious bee behavior and collect specimens. Through the project, which launches in full today, they are hoping to find “if this parasitism is distributed widely across North America,” Hafernik said in a new statement.
To help out, you can sign up to collect sick-looking or dead bee specimens and observe them to see if parasite fly pupae emerge. Industrious citizen scientists can build light traps to attract any parasitized bees in their area (full instructions are on their site). And the researchers promise that even bees that do not turn out to be true “ZomBees” are important to report in an effort to better understand contributors to colony collapse.
“If we can enlist a dedicated group of citizen scientists to help us, together we can answer important questions and help honeybees at the same time,” Hafernik said.
Not sure what a zombie bee looks like? Here’s a video clip of a sick bee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs32DCaxU1U&feature=youtu.be (Read more about parasites that make their hosts act like zombies in the article “Zombie Creatures.”)
In case you’re wondering what we’ve been wondering—ahem, what else can these zombie flies infect?—ZomBee Watch has an answer: “The zombie fly only parasitizes insects and does not lay eggs on or in humans,” according to its website. “As far as we know, it does not transmit any diseases that are contractible by humans.” As far as we know…
10 Essentials for Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse: A Practical Guide
In many ways, vampires and zombies are two sides to the same coin. Both are undead. Both spread their condition through bites. Both have specific methods in which they can be killed. But vampires are the patricians of the undead with fussy European accents, bright sparkly skin, cheerleader girlfriends, tailored suits, and slinky party dresses. Zombies, on the other hand, are strictly blue-collar and, I daresay, typically American. They roam the streets, disheveled, dispossessed, homeless. They are the middle class, marginalized into oblivion.
Taken singly, zombies are slow, idiotic, and relatively easy to kill. Laughable, even, with their witless drive and ungainly movements. One zombie? Destroy the brain, drop the shambler. But collectively, zombies are an inexorable force, knocking down chain-link fences, busting through windows, treating your neighbors like bowls of spinach dip. They’re the ultimate union. And their collective bargaining powers can’t be legislated away.
To survive the zombie apocalypse, you’re going to need a plan. Survival means you’re going to have to accept the blue-collar ethos that the zombies embody. Time to roll up your sleeves, put on your best Mike Rowe face, and get ready to do some dirty work. In no particular order, here are 10 essential items for surviving the zombie apocalypse. For a more in depth exploration into zombie apocalypse survival techniques and items, feel free to check out This Dark Earth, my zombie survival treatise-cum-novel. Wait. Not a cum-novel. Strike that last bit. Sheesh, you people.
Headknockers come in a variety of shapes and sizes. You can find one in every garage, every toolbox in America. A hammer, a hatchet, a crowbar, a two-by-four. A Louisville slugger. Destroy the brain and you’re good to go. Big plus: relatively quiet and no need to reload.
Any more zombies than two, your best bet is hunching over in a protective ball, placing your head between your legs and giving your gluteus maximus one last smooch in thanks for all the good times.
If you have Kevlar motorcycle gear, in addition to looking cool, you’re freaking gold, hombre.
Unless you’re into the weird stuff.
ZOMBIE THEME PARK – COOLEST THING EVER
Why wait for the zombie apocalypse? One man wants customers to experience the terror now.
With soaring budget deficits and population on the decline, Detroit has become a laboratory for testing out creative solutions for cities, like urban farming and pedestrian-friendly greenway trails.
Mark Siwak says he has his own idea for bettering the city — a live-action zombie theme park set in one of Detroit’s abandoned neighborhoods.
Paying customers would be chased by a growing horde of zombies (all professionals) through a cordoned-off, desolate section of the city, seeking shelter in abandoned homes and factories and businesses.
Z World creator Siwak, who has launched a fundraiser on IndieGoGo (he’s raised $2,200 of the $140,000 needed to meet his goal), says that the city of Detroit needs to consider creative solutions to areas of urban blight.
Mayor Dave Bing’s long-touted campaign promise was the implementation of theDetroit Works Project, which could ultimately relocate residents from blighted districts to more populated areas in an attempt to centralize city services. Spread across 140 square miles, Detroit proper is so large that the entire cities of San Francisco and Boston, plus the borough of Manhattan, can fit inside its borders.
And Siwak says, with all that land, there’s room in the Motor City for a zombie theme park. He even compares his idea to the city’s famed Heidelberg Project, in which artist Tyree Guyton transformed the empty homes of his neighborhood into a large-scale art installation.
But some critics have shrugged off “Z World” as an exploitative and insensitive ploy to profit off the glamorization of Detroit’s problems. Curbed Detroit blogger Sarah Cox wrote that Siwak’s plan “sounds a lot like all that fun we had during the 1960s race riots. It is nice to know that Z Land is finally going to capitalize on our love of adrenaline rushes and nostalgia. Now even visitors from the ‘burbs can ‘wonder if they will make it through the night.'”
Siwak told CBS Detroit that “the city can only have so many urban farms or similar uses for vacant plots.’
And while he’s far away from his funding goals, not to mention permission from the City of Detroit, he says he’s already getting resumes from Detroiters who’d like their next 9-to-5 to focus on eating brains and staggering through the streets.
On his site, Siwak assured, “while zombies are great, the real neat thing about this project is the potential to inject some life into a forgotten neighborhood – with the opportunity to work with neighborhood groups and organization.”
This wouldn’t be the world’s first live-action zombie role-play game, though Detroit’s proposal is almost certainly the most expansive. In Atlanta, thrill-seekers wielding paint ball guns will pay as much as $30 to play hide-and-seek with undead zombies in a formerly abandoned truck stop rechristened as the Atlanta Zombie Apocalypse, opening Sept. 28. Over on the other side of the pond, wish.co.uk offers zombie combat mission experiences with training from military veterans and movie-grade special effects.
Man Eats Dog: High On Synthetic Cannabis, Waco Man Consumes Family Canine
A 22-year-old Texas man was arrested yesterday for allegedly attacking a neighbor 
and eating his family’s dog alive.
Michael Terron Daniel was allegedly high on a designer drug known as K2 at the time and was said to be “going crazy.”
Witnesses say Daniel informed residents at the Waco home where the incident took place that he was “on a bad trip from ingesting K-2″ — a type of synthetic cannabisknown to exacerbate existing psychoses — before getting down on his hands and knees and “chas[ing] a neighbor while barking and growling like a dog.”
He then proceeded to beat and strangle the family dog before biting into it, “ripping pieces of flesh away.” The dog was later pronounced dead at the scene.
According to Waco police Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton, officers arrived to find Daniel on the porch covered in blood. He asked the officers to fight him or use the stun gun “to help him get off his bad trip.”
Daniel was charged with felony cruelty to a non-livestock animal and booked into McLennan County Jail where he remains.