Hornady ZMAX ammo

Hornady® Zombie Max ammunition make DEAD PERMANENT!
Disclaimer: Hornady® Zombie Max ammunition is NOT a toy (IT IS LIVE AMMUNITION), but is intended only to be used on ZOMBIES, also known as the living dead, undead, etc. No human being, plant, animal, vegetable or mineral should ever be shot with Hornady® Zombie Max ammunition. Again, we repeat, Hornady® Zombie Max ammunition is for use on ZOMBIES ONLY, and that’s not a nickname, phrase or cute way of referring to anybody, place or thing. When we say Zombies, we mean ZOMBIES!

At Midsouth Shooters. Video ad at the link.

Jumpy today...

I was working in a nice, quiet neighborhood today when a tiny terrier-looking dog ran up behind me and yapped. Like my mother sometimes says, "I nearly came unglued." I mean my hair stood up so straight that I almost lost my hat. I started to swing my hook in a reflex I've developed from being jumped from behind by dogs, and managed to swing it a little too high at the last moment so I wouldn't take off that poor little guy's head.

Afterwards, I got to wondering why I was so jumpy. And then it came to me...


I watched Quarantine last night. Man, if we ever have a zombie apocalypse like that, forget about fighting back. It's over.

Don't call them zombies anymore

Not Zombies: Differently Alive.

In a move that almost stopped the collective hearts of the world, a spokesman for the differently alive came forward today to announce their presence among us.

“You know us as Zombies,” said the spokesman, who used the moniker “Reg Shoe” after the zombie in the Terry Pratchett novel. “But we consider that a derogatory term. It conjures up images of shambling, mindless creatures in search of brains. We prefer the term differently alive.”

Funny. But I take exception to this:

When asked if other differently alive creatures such as vampires or werewolves might exist, Shoe was silent on the subject.

“I can’t speak for our undead brethren,” he said. “If such creatures do or do not exist, it is up to them to come out of the coffin.”

I don't know how many times I'll have to explain this, but werewolves are not undead. And they have nothing to do with coffins, except that their victims usually end up in one.

Zombies are undead. Except possibly in that one movie where the Responsible Guy With Job dies without actually dying. But still, in the end he is an animated dead guy. Undead.

A vampire must also die to become a vampire. Ignore all the TV shows about "getting close to death" and that nonsense. A victim must be (eventually) killed by a vampire before coming back to "life" and becoming a vampire himself. Animated dead. Undead.

A werewolf must be created by being attacked or scratched by another werewolf, or created by a curse, or possibly just by sleeping outside under a full moon. If a werewolf kills someone, that victim remains dead. Only a surviving victim of a werewolf can become a werewolf. A living person who has become changed. Not undead.

This is an important distinction.

Now stop calling them undead. It only angries them up.

Zombies in Austin

Some traffic signs were hacked in Austin.


Funny comment:

The state wants to hide all of the zombie activity. It’s time to teach the controversy. The Texas Board of Education does not want you to know about the zombies wandering our state. We need some disclaimers in our biology textbooks that let us know that the “strengths and weaknesses of the scientific theories only apply to living organisms, and tell us little about the undead.”

More pix at No Fear of the Future.

Zombie Vampires and the futility of war

I just wanted to make sure no one missed this dinosaur comics.

Brains online

Some brains are just naturally better, juicier, and formerly smarter than others, and we've got them here at Brains4Zombies.com. We sell only the highest quality fresh brains, delivered straight to your door. We do the dirty deed so you can spend more time... well... doing whatever the hell it is you zombies do when you're not ripping open people's heads.

I'm not (yet) willing to say how I got there, but I just discovered an amusing parody site that looks like Amazon but is more zombie-focused: Brains4Zombies.com.

The quick dead

Simon Pegg (of Shaun of the Dead) argues for a return to traditional zombie portrayals.

Simon Pegg on why the undead should never be allowed to run

I know it is absurd to debate the rules of a reality that does not exist, but this genuinely irks me. You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can't fly; zombies do not run. It's a misconception, a bastardisation that diminishes a classic movie monster. The best phantasmagoria uses reality to render the inconceivable conceivable. The speedy zombie seems implausible to me, even within the fantastic realm it inhabits. A biological agent, I'll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It's hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.

More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.

Lost Zombies

Our goal at Lost Zombies is to gather definitive proof that zombies are real and to compile that proof into a feature length documentary film. We are asking the general public to assist us by submitting any proof of zombies they may have. We believe as a community we can educate the world’s population of the reality of zombies and the potential, if not, imminent zombie apocalypse.

Heh heh. Just kidding.

You’re expected to suspend your disbelief while in the public areas. What the hell does that mean? It means, for example, that when you are in an outbreak area you are expected to behave as though the information in that area is factual. We realize some of you don’t believe in zombies and you think this site is a silly place to have some fun. Fine. But please behave as though it is real and maybe, just maybe, when you realize the truth, all this role playing might just save your life. Beware the zombie outbreak.

Lost Zombies is "A Community Generated Zombie Documentary." And they have some cool stickers.


I can think of several places where those would be perfect.

More movies

A few that I forgot to list in the last post.

Haunted Honeymoon -- Not Gene Wilder's funniest, but still funny enough to keep.

Return of the Living Dead -- A total splatterfest. Super zombies this time that can't be killed by simply destroying the brain, and smart enough to use an improvised block & tackle to open a barred door. Conspiratorial in-references that the original movie didn't tell the whole story. I have "the original movie," Night of the Living Dead on tape. A double-feature tape with Reefer Madness, it was a Christmas gift from a co-worker many years ago. "I saw that tape, and knew it would be perfect for you," she said.

Waiting for Guffman -- Have not seen it yet, but I've been wanting to. I also want to catch A Mighty Wind when I get the chance. For that matter, Spinal Tap would be a good catch, too.

And three that I captured since the last post.

Meet the Robinsons -- Recommended to me by (of all people) my 7-year-old son. It turned out to be a pretty cool movie.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre -- The original!

To Hell and Back -- I had this one on tape, but thought I'd get a DVD capture of it for posterity. I've seen it three or four times, and will undoubtedly watch it again.

A Zombie Tale

Not the campy, movie-type zombie, but a tale that is both creepy and heartbreaking, from the traditional folklore of New Orleans: Violette. Don't skip over the ending.

"That thing is LOOSE!" An excellent early-morning's read, indeed.

Zombie Memery

Seen at South Park Pundit:

It’s Dawn of the Dead. You’re in a mall. You have one weapon, one song, one famous person to fight alongside you. Weapon can be real or fictional, with endless ammo if applicable.

You'd think there would be a music store in a mall that would supply you with more than one song. Anywho...

Weapon: The plasma rifle from Doom.
Famous Person: Annie Oakley. Oh wait, she would probably be on the other side. Okay then, Jesse Ventura with that chain gun from Predator. Uh...or Charlie Sheen with that machine gun from Hot Shots.

Song: "Nemesis" by Shriekback.

In a jungle of the senses
Tinkerbell and Jack the ripper
Love has no meaning, not where they come from
But we know pleasure is not that simple
Very little fruit is forbidden
Sometimes we wobble, sometimes we're strong
But you know evil is an exact science
Being carefully correctly wrong

Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
Big Black Nemesis, parthenogenesis
No one move a muscle as the dead come home

We feel like Greeks, we feel like Romans
Centaurs and monkeys just cluster round us
We drink elixirs that we refine
from the juices of the dying
We are no monsters, we're moral people
and yet we have the strength to do this
This is the splendour of our achievement
Call in the airstrike with a poison kiss

Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
Big black nemesis, parthenogenesis
No one move a muscle as the dead come home

How bad it gets, you can't imagine
the burning wax, the breath of reptiles
god is not mocked, he knows our business
Karma could take us at any moment
Cover him up.....I think we're finished
You know it's never been so exotic
but I don't know, my dreams are visions
We could still end up with the great big fishes

Priests and cannibals, prehistoric animals
Everybody happy as the dead come home
Big black nemesis, parthenogenesis
No one move a muscle as the dead come home

Zombie Killing Music

Seen this everywhere. My take:

Load up everything by Skinny Puppy. Keep playing it until all the zombies are dead.

Once they're all dead, follow up with Husker Du's "New Day Rising."

Zombie roaches and their wasp masters

Zombie roaches at National Geographic:

The venom blocks a chemical substance called octopamine in the cockroach's brain that controls its motivation to walk, the study found.

Unable to fight back, the "zombie" cockroach can be pulled into the wasp's underground lair, where an egg is laid in its abdomen. The larva later hatches and eats the still living but incapacitated cockroach from the inside out.

"The whole thing takes about seven to eight days, during which the meat has to be fresh," said study co-author and neurobiologist Frederic Libersat of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be'ér Sheva, Israel.

"If you kill a cockroach, it rots within a day."

The mature wasp emerges from the bug victim's body after about a month.

More Zombie News

5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen at Cracked.

Read the whole thing, and don't say you weren't warned.

Zombie Pumpkins

Yesterday my son was drawing pictures of jack-o-lanterns. He starts celebrating Halloween early, which I can understand.

So up he came, walking one of these paper pumpkins across the desk like a kid does, and making some kind of weird roaring monster noise.

"Look, Daddy! It's a zombie pumpkin!"

"A zombie pumpkin?"

"Yeah, see--he's missin' a eye!"

A weird kid after my own heart.

Zombies, Schmombies

Don't miss the most recent zombie apocalypse edition of the Carnival of Cordite. The possibility of an upcoming zombielypse (it's copyrighted, if you want to use it for a movie title, you're gonna have to pay me for it) seems a subject that is often on the minds of some gunbloggers. Take Josh, for example.

But really, when the stars are right, you're gonna wish you were fighting zombie hordes.

It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined - nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way - would be in any way comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw - or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream - flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating - urging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal ... and some were strangely robed ... and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.

But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be - for was not the memory of the evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design - living and horrible - and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction.

Fighting zombie hordes will be like a quiet walk in the park compared to what must eventually happen. And when it does, just try not to wake up the big guy...

Somebody's list of the top 10 zombie movies

I am not endorsing this list, just mentioning it. As far as I'm concerned, the list is invalid because "Thriller" was listed, which is a music video and not a movie. But it is nice to see he mentioned Re-Animator. (And it was adapted from only one HPL story, Chuckles).

Top 10 brain-eating flicks:

To start, let's agree that zombie movies aren't for everyone.

They're wall-to-wall with corpses, for one thing, and involve gory depictions of spilled intestines, devoured brains, exploding heads and other not-so-niceties.

But they can also run a lot deeper than they're given credit for, and the best serve as commentaries on cultural divides, disease-related paranoia, and mankind's unflappable survival instinct.

I don't know why I've been coming up with so many zombie posts lately. I'm not even really looking for them, they just kind of keep turning up. Hmmm...

Zombie Research (no, really!)

A view from the mushroom... provides us with this creepifying information:

The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity.

But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock.

Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year, according to the Safar Centre.

(roll SAN loss 1d6/0)

H.P. Lovecraft and Zombie guns

Chaos over at Whiskey Tango Foxtrot posted a couple of things this week which interested me. The first was his observation that many gun folks are also Lovecraft fans. I think this is more owing to the universality of Lovecraft's writings than to anything else. Just about everyone, regardless of political/social/religious leanings, provided they have something of an imagination, can appreciate the fear stimulus invoked by these tales of the unknown. That's my theory, anyway. Chaos has also been posting a few of his favorite HPL quotes, so I thought I would jump on the bandwagon and post a couple. Tonight's quote is from The Festival. This is one of my favorite stories, although it is not really considered one of his "major" tales like The Call of Cthulhu or The Shadow Over Innsmouth. This tale has an excellent example of how Lovecraft could describe something by not describing it:

"...there flopped rhythmically a horde of tamed, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall."

There are plenty of stories which result in the death (or fate worse than death) of the protagonist, and sure, those are scary. But to me, the truly haunting tale is the one in which the protagonist survives more or less intact, but leaves the reader with the knowledge that the he will be haunted by memories/dreams/visions of his experience forever afterward. This may be why Lovecraft's writings were always better--to me--than some other writers. There is almost always someone who survives but will be forever after psychologically scarred by the experience.

---

Chaos' other post that struck a chord in me was his question of what would be one's preferred zombie gun. I should begin by the disclaimer that the article he referenced was, according to Snopes, an April Fools Day spoof. However, this does not invalidate his question. Perhaps this also struck me strangely because (since I usually have lots of opportunity for my mind to wander while working--yes, it is quite easy for one part of the brain to read meters, watch for hazardous obstacles, and keep an eye out for dogs while another part thinks of something else entirely) I found myself this week wondering what would be the best handgun to have on hand if one were to encounter a small horde of Deep Ones. This question is especially problematic because my preferred caliber, the .357 Magnum, wasn't introduced until 1935. Most of Lovecraft's stories were set before this, so I found myself contemplating only calibers and handguns that were more widely available in his time. (This question becomes even more pertinent when thinking in terms of playing the Call of Cthulhu game). My only conclusion could be: the M1911 in .45 ACP, or if necessary, one of the early revolver variants that used this round such as the M1917 Army revolver (or any revolver that fired the .45 Long Colt, for that matter). A Thompson submachine gun would probably also not be a bad idea, if one were allowed something other than a handgun. I would also not mind too terribly if I had a couple of good friends backing me up with a couple of 12-gauges loaded with heavy buckshot. Of course, if the horde is of any respectable size at all, I think the best bet would be to do as the main character of The Shadow Over Innsmouth did: hide and hope they don't find you (which turned out to be irrevlevant in the end).

But back to the original question of zombies. They kind of zombie I am most familiar with is that portrayed in Night of the Living Dead and various sequels. These zombies required massive destruction of the brain in order to be destroyed. Shotguns may be good for this, but it seems to me that buckshot would be better against monsters which could be stopped by torso shots. So in handgun terms, I think anything with plenty of power and a decent number of shots before reloading would work. I would recommend the .357, .44 Magnum, or even the .50 AE. One of the lever-actions in .357, a camp carbine in .45, or a Ruger carbine in .40 would probably all be great for blasting zombie brains.

Pop the Zombie

I guess I would be remiss if I didn't mention Deanimator, a simple online zombie-shooting game. It isn't really Lovecraftian, except that the name of it is a play on Re-Animator, of course. All I can say is, that poor guy must be stuck with a 32 S&W Long or something, it just don't have any stoppin' power. And he sure isn't in a hurry to reload.

Of course, during the time when HPL's stories were set, they didn't yet have the .357 Magnum. But they did have the .45 ACP (or even .45 Long Colt). Gosh!