Zombie survival plan

First things first, you have to know your enemy. Zombies come in two flavors: fast and slow. Fast are definitely cool, but you’ll need more than a baseball bat and a pair of running sneakers to survive that zombie attack. Slow zombies – well why the heck would anyone die from a slow zombie? If you can’t get away from a slow zombie, you earned dismemberment.

Let’s suppose that you made it through the first 10 minutes of the zombie-fest, and while most of your town are looking for live flesh to feast on, you’re wondering how to hot-wire a car and get out of town. You need a plan of action…

 

Preparation
I’m assuming the reader isn’t currently experiencing a zombie outbreak. If you are, skip down to the next section.

Preparing now for zombiedom is a good idea. Remember what the TV preacher said, “When hell is full, the dead will walk the earth.” So it’s bound to happen sooner or later. Since it would look wierd if you started bricking up your windows and stockpiling rifles, you have to be smart about this.

First, get to know the guy in town who bought a pallet of Spam to survive Y2K. He probably still has a ton of that stuff around, and knows all the good hiding places.

Next, scout out all the big box retailers that carry ammo and food. Not too many eh? Tough luck, blue-stater. Someplace like WalMart is ideal, especially with the Garden Center for seed and stuff for longterm survival. A big bonus would be a nearby Home Depot or some such place so you can get plenty of lumber and quick-mix concrete for fortification.

While you’re preparing, always keep in mind locations where people congregate – you’re likely to find lots of zombies there when things turn ugly. Highways, malls, and schools are especially bad. You also might want to mention to your friends and family in passing how well your hiding place could be defended, etc. That way, when the zombies come, they’ll remember you said that and come help you. I don’t recommend telling them you’re preparing for a zombie invasion.

First, the Fun Stuff
After your initial panic, it’s important to remember that a significant component of your surivival is the demise of the ghouls trying to get your tasty brains. Despite some reports to the contrary, the only way to permanently un-animate a zombie is to destroy its brain. This isn’t rocket science (although that would be a cool way to do it). A gunshot to the head is the most direct way to disable a zombie, but not the only way. Decapitation also works, although the head will probably still function so don’t let it bite you.

If you survive long enough, and society collapses along with any hope of rescue, you’ll need to develop some means of skull penetration that doesn’t involve guns – a professional bowhunting setup works if you can get it. You might be squeamish at first, taking out your neighbors; with time this will pass, you might even adopt a gleeful hangman’s sense of humor in your executions.

Run or Hide
This is a no-brainer. You gotta hole up somewhere eventually, but pick carefully. Let’s say that the outbreak is localized to your city, but you know that the neighboring town is zombie-free. Flee to the neighboring town. I know this sounds obvious, but don’t sit around waiting for grandma to bite you. Get to the safe town, find a gun store, and join the Minuteman Militia.

But that isn’t much fun, so let’s think about what you’d do if the whole country is overrun. Since you already did your prep work, make a bee line for the WalMart you picked out earlier. Hot Tip: Pick a new WalMart if you can. Zombies tend try to do the things they were doing when they were alive, so they’re gonna head to the mall, or WalMart, or school… you get the idea. And since we’re on the subject, malls are a bad place to hole up in. Too many entrances, and not enough goodies for long term survival.

In short, pick a new general merchandise or grocery big box store. You get lots of canned food to eat, and only one or two large entrances to guard.

Use the Buddy System
Don’t be a dummy. If your buddy is bitten by a zombie, shoot him in the head and get it over with. Otherwise, gather the refugees, Rambo, and lead them to safety. People will follow anyone who acts like they know what they’re doing, and you need the manpower to subdue the throngs at WalMart.

Not to mention that a good zombie attack needs plenty of extras.
Since the average WalMart has enough food to keep a few thousand people fed for a week or more, you should have enough staples to get by for a few months if you limit your group to around 100 or so. There’s a trade-off here between having enough people to defend your fort, and enough food to keep them fed. I don’t know if zombies are edible, but that’s a possibility if things get rough. It’s not really cannibalism, is it?

The basic idea to get from this section is, have enough people to root out the zombies and block the entrances, but not so many people that you have to ration the food heavily. Also, make sure you have some girls. Preferably hot chicks, but in the absence of those some tough biker babes would work.

Zen and the Art of Fortification
How lame is this… you and a few buddies are holed up in a mall, with who knows how many entrances, and instead of bricking up the glass you eat hot dogs on the fine china?

First, you aren’t going to do that, because you already picked out the big box retailer you’re taking over. Second, you’re going to spend the first day sealing all entrances. If you chose wisely, you have a store with some kind of concrete mix in it, or a home building center nearby. As soon as you’ve cleared the store of zombies, and maybe even before, you need to brick up the glass entrances. You can worry about the others later, they’re smaller and harder to open from the outside anyway.

Be generous and thorough with your fortification. A few pieces of lumber nailed up is OK for an emergency start, but don’t forget to make it permanent. You might consider some kind of buttress design as well, since I’m not sure what kind of force thousands of zombies could put on an amateur brickwork.

Finally, don’t make the mistake of assuming your fortifications will hold. Check them everyday, measuring the wall to make sure it hasn’t moved. You also might consider building a second wall in case the first gets broken through.

T-Shirts aren’t Bite Proof
This is one I’ve never figured out. Zombification occurs shortly after being bit by a zombie. So why are people running around in t-shirts for days and weeks after Z-Day? Get some freakin armor! Thick leather will work in the short term. Later on, get some aluminum siding or something else metallic and affix it to your clothes. Even zombies can’t bite through that stuff. Important areas to protect include the forearms, neck, and legs. Just make sure it’s flexible enough to give you some freedom of movement. Helmets are a good idea too, but anything other than motorcycle helmets would look dorky, and I’d rather be a zombie than a dork with a pail on my head.

Long Term Survival
Let’s recap: you’ve survived the initial zombie invasion, banded together a few dozen survivors, and fortified a big box retail store with plenty of food and goodies. So what’s your long term prognosis? Not good.

You’ll eventually run out of water, canned food, and fuel for the generator. In fact, you’ll be in the dark in a day or two, and the water will be gone shortly after that. Unless, of course, you don’t panic, and plan ahead. Don’t worry, I’ll help you out.

If you took a WalMart like I told you, you don’t need to worry too much about lighting. The skylights do a fair job of illumination during the day, and battery powered flashlights will be OK at night time. But if you’re brave, you can venture outside to get fuel from filling station. And if you’re lucky, you’ll find a tanker truck to drive back to home base. Personally, I’d rather live in the dark. It might be a good idea to keep a CB radio in your car for just this type of event, and try to get a trucker to bring the tanker to your fort when Z-Day arrives.

For water and food, I can help you out there. The first thing to do after securing your fort is fill every container in the store with tap water. You might have a few days of water available, but I wouldn’t count on it. Electricity, water, and sewage will disappear soon, so you want all the drinking water you can get.

Now that you’ve got that straightened out, you’re going to become a farmer. Lucky for you, the Garden Center has lots of seeds and soil, and the store has a big roof for planting. This is a good time to learn the art of composting and water filtration – your alternative to the toilet. I’d place that on the roof too, otherwise things could get smelly inside.

So now you are set. You’ve butressed the walls to protect against the press of the zombies, you have a few dozen armed followers, and enough veggies to keep everyone fed. You can hold out here for years.

Epilogue
What happens next depends on a lot of variables. Are there any other survivors? I can imagine a naval fleet having no problems defending itself from zombies. Nuclear powered submarines should be especially safe, they can run for decades. Maybe enough people survived somewhere to come rescue you. If everyone else is zombied, well that would suck.

How long will zombies “live”? This has never been addressed, to my knowledge. Even though they’re dead, they still maintain some kind of metabolism and thought process. You’d think that eventually they’ll cease activity and it will be safe enough to venture out. Then again, they might be immortal, in which case you are screwed. It’s kinda hard to kill 6 billion zombies with just a few 22s and a shotgun.

In any case, I hope I’ve helped you in formulating your own zombie survival plan.

Technorati Tags: zombies,fun,survival,brains

My birthday goal

Call me a masochist if you want to, but I plan to be able to fit my butt into a rather small and unforgiving black dress when I celebrate my next birthday. To achieve this I need to burn 686 more calories than I consume.

Heh.

Right.

I’ll do it. Piece of cake.

Sigh.

I do, however have a secret weapon:

I’ll do it. Piece of cake.

Politics

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), is a proposed U.S. federal law that would prohibit discrimination against employees on the basis of sexual orientation. Currently, there are two versions of the bill:

H.R. 2015, introduced on April 24, 2007 by Representatives Barney Frank, Chris Shays, Tammy Baldwin, and Deborah Pryce, does include gender identity within its protections; and H.R. 3685, introduced by Representative Frank on September 27, 2007 and passed by the Education and Labor Committee on October 18, does not include gender identity within its scope. On November 7, 2007, H.R. 3685 was passed by the House of Representatives by a vote of 235 to 184 (14 members did not vote) – the bill no longer includes language regarding protections for transgender people.

Those who argue that ENDA should move forward with sexual orientation only, with another bill to be introduced on the subject of gender identity, say that there is a grave risk if the inclusive bill fails in the House. It will make it almost impossible to pass any form of ENDA in the near future because members of Congress would be concerned about charges of flip-flopping if they vote against it now and vote in favor of it later on. Furthermore, they note that creating a sexual-orientation-only bill is not a slight against transgender people, but rather, recognition of a political reality that the bill cannot pass with gender identity included.

Section 3 (a) (6) GENDER IDENTITY- The term ‘gender identity’ means the gender-related identity, appearance, or mannerisms or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, with or without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth.

This is a complicated issue; however, it is one that will be decided on a state by state basis, creating further disparities in the rights of people throughout United States. It’s both sad and disgusting that the rights of people will be decided and protected by money and publicity.

In 2004, after working as an Army Special Forces commander, a man named David Schroer applied for a job as the senior terrorism analyst at the Library of Congress. All seemed to be going well and Schroer seemed like a shoe-in, but things got more complicated when David said he planned on becoming Diane. The Library didn’t seem to approve, because Schroer was told he couldn’t have the job. The Library did not deny that it discriminated against Schroer because she was transgendered. The trouble for Schroer is that it’s not explicitly illegal to discriminate against the transgendered, because no federal law prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity. A federal court ruled that the Library did, in fact, discriminate against Schroer because she transitioned genders.

Time presented an interesting view of Schroers case:

 

Charlotte Preece wanted a cigarette. She was freaking out, and she needed a moment outside her Capitol Hill building in Washington to think about the odd turn her life had taken that day, Dec. 20, 2004. Preece, who was 51 at the time, worked then — as she does now — for the Library of Congress, where she helps make hiring decisions for the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the U.S. Congress’s analysis agency. She had decided to recommend an ex–Special Forces colonel named David Schroer to be CRS’s terrorism specialist. Schroer was a dream candidate, a guy out of a Tom Clancy novel: he had jumped from airplanes, undergone grueling combat training in extreme heat and cold, commanded hundreds of soldiers, helped run Haiti during the U.S. intervention in the ’90s — and since 9/11, he had been intimately involved in secret counterterrorism planning at the highest levels of the Pentagon. He had been selected to organize and run a new, classified antiterrorism organization, and in that position he had routinely briefed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He had also briefed Vice President Dick Cheney more than once. Schroer had been an action hero, but he also had the contacts and intellectual dexterity to make him an ideal congressional analyst.

But now, about three weeks before Schroer was to begin work at CRS, he told Preece over a Chinese lunch that he had a personal matter to reveal: after years of cross-dressing in private, he was preparing to start living full time as a woman. He would also probably have sex-reassignment surgery. And so he planned to start at CRS as Diane Jacqueline Schroer, not David John Schroer.

The first thing Preece remembers blurting out at the time was something along the lines of “Why would you want to do that?” Later she stood outside her office, lit another cigarette and thought, I can’t believe this is happening to me.

Schroer did not get the job. Working with some other Library of Congress officials the next morning, Preece drafted a brief script and then telephoned Schroer. She told him that the Library worried his transition could imperil his top-secret security clearance; that his appearance in women’s clothing could make his contacts in the government less willing to cooperate with him; and that his impending surgeries (facial surgery to make him appear more feminine, possible genital surgeries in the future) could distract him from his job. She thanked Schroer for his honesty and said goodbye.

What Preece did that day became, not surprisingly, the subject of a lawsuit, one that was tried in August in federal court. Judge James Robertson, a Clinton appointee, is expected to rule any day. In deciding whether the Library unlawfully discriminated against Schroer, Robertson will have to rule on a much bigger and more elemental issue: How, if at all, is sex different from gender? And if you discriminate against a transsexual, is it “sex” discrimination under federal law?

Diane Schroer is a polite and engaging woman, and her outward appearance is convincingly feminine — a testament to the advances in plastic surgery and to Schroer’s willingness to pay tens of thousands of dollars to have herself rebuilt to reflect her mental gender. On the hot summer day I met Schroer at her Alexandria, Va., home, she was wearing shorts, and her legs appeared so smooth that it seemed rough masculine hair had never grown on them.

In the years since losing the job offer at the Congressional Research Service to a man who was the Library’s second choice, Schroer has started her own security consultancy. Schroer still has powerful allies in the government. One who testified for her at last month’s trial is Kalev Sepp, a deputy assistant secretary of defense and a former member of the Iraq Study Group. Sepp told the court that Schroer is “a person of integrity and complete honesty.” He said her transition from male to female should have been of little or no consequence in the CRS’s hiring decision.

But Schroer’s honesty was called into question in this case, for the simple reason that she presented herself as male during the interview and then — at the last minute — revealed that she was becoming a woman. Did she lie?

Yes and no. Transitioning from one gender to another is a long process, one governed by standards of care that nearly all American medical and psychological professionals follow. If you want to undergo sex-reassignment surgery in the U.S., you must first live for a year as a member of the other gender — dressing and acting as though you had been born with the other genitalia. This one-year “real-life experience,” which is overseen by a psychotherapist, is designed to ensure that dilettantes give up before having their bodies permanently changed. In October 2004, when Schroer went for his Library interview, he had not yet begun his real-life experience — he and his therapist had planned for him to start Jan. 1, 2005 — which is why he wore a sport coat and tie.

But Schroer also said nothing in his hours of interviews about the plans to begin his real-life experience. In court, Diane Schroer explained that she thought such personal information was irrelevant to an interview exploring her professional credentials. But Schroer obviously knew that showing up to work in women’s clothes would surprise fellow workers.

Preece felt as though she had been taken advantage of. She also wondered how a man in a dress would be perceived by members of Congress. Would Diane-née-David be taken seriously by people in the conservative antiterrorism community?

It’s a good question. But Preece apparently failed to make any inquiries to learn the answer. She did not ask Schroer’s references for their reaction to his impending gender transition; if she had, she might have discovered that colleagues like Sepp said they respected Schroer no matter her outward appearance. Nor did Preece consult a Pentagon contractor for whom Schroer had recently worked — a contractor who, as it happens, knew about Schroer’s plans to transition to female and says he had no problem with it. Though Preece may well have found many people in the antiterrorism community who would have been unsettled by Schroer’s decision to transition, the fact that she did not even try to investigate suggests that she had already made up her mind after her lunch with Schroer.

Indeed, the Library does not deny that it discriminated against Schroer because she was transgendered. The trouble for Schroer is that it’s not explicitly illegal to discriminate against the transgendered, because no federal law prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity.

And yet Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act makes employment discrimination because of sex illegal. Could that statute help Schroer? Does one’s “sex” include being transgendered? At the trial last month, Schroer’s expert witness, a University of Minnesota psychologist named Walter Bockting — the incoming president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health — testified that sex is a multifaceted notion composed of several elements, one of which is one’s mental gender identity. Part of his evidence was that thousands of babies are born each year with uncertain sex. They have XY chromosomes but no visible male sex organs. Or they have XX chromosomes but do not appear, outwardly, to be normal girls. Or they have even more complicated chromosomal constructions — XXY, for instance — which render their sex entirely indeterminate.

These individuals, who are called intersexed, are usually assigned a gender by the obstetricians who deliver them. As intersexed children grow up, they and their parents must decide whether they agree with the sex assigned to them at birth. That’s an understandable, if fraught, policy, but if intersexed people can decide what their sex is, why can’t the rest of us? What, precisely, is sex?

The commonly accepted definition is whether you have a penis or a vagina. But then there are those thousands of intersexed kids, as well as thousands of transgendered people who feel that their outward morphology doesn’t accurately represent their mental conception of themselves. It seems likely that sex is some combination of chromosomes, psychology and environment. Even the Library of Congress’s expert witness acknowledged this: during the trial, Johns Hopkins physician Chester Schmidt said that after all the research is completed, he believes “there will be some biologic, some psychologic, some combination of psychological etiologies” that lead to gender identity in the transgendered. Sex, in other words, is not just what you have between your legs; it is what you have between your ears.

David Schroer was not hired on the basis of sex — on the basis of his sex being strange and unusual to Charlotte Preece and her colleagues. In the past few years, gay activists have argued that we need a new statute to outlaw discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders. But there is a compelling argument to be made in this case that at least with respect to transgenders, the current statute already applies. Schroer’s attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union argue that Title VII already prohibits discrimination against transgendered people. Although their sex may be more complicated than the composition of their chromosomes, that is no reason people like Diane Schroer cannot do their jobs.

Tasty tasty

If you live on Vancouver Island you might consider Island Farms cottage cheese to be just another item in the dairy department.

Heresy.

I love cottage cheese as it is tasty and a good source of nutritional stuff. Heh.

Anyhow – while Ontario has a firm stranglehold on yummy cheese curds, the cottage cheese sucks. Oh… it is awful stuff.

So…

Imagine me in Victoria, at a Thrifty Foods store, in the dairy department, paying homage to Island Farms 1% cottage cheese. Oh baby – food lust.

Yum.

A Victoria moment

This instalment is brought to you by 431 Squadron

Up in the air, Junior Birdmen…

Captain Jenny. Go Jenny Go!

 

Looking towards Port Angeles and the rest of the team