Zombie Research News

Seems like zombies are just about everywhere these days. With the release of Brad Pitt’s summer blockbuster “World War Z” just around the corner, reanimated, cannibalistic corpses are once again in the news. Perhaps not coincidentally, a newly published study, “Zombies; Serious Threat or Delusional Bullshit”, undertaken by Dr. Wang Chung Chu of the State University of California at Rancho Cucamonga and Dr. Vern Angstvorstern of the Technical Institute of Basel, explores the scientific basis for carnivorous corpses and conjectures how such a plague might begin and eventually wipe out mankind. The nine and one-half page report, published in the June edition of The Journal of Armenian Homeopathic Practice, examines the biological basis for zombies and the epidemiology of a possible zombie outbreak.

Dr. Chu, who holds a PhD. in industrial psychology from Case Western Reserve University, first became interested in the potential for real life zombies when he was bitten by an apparently homeless man on Rue de Chartres in New Orleans while attending the Super Bowl in 2002, which was won by the Patriots on a late Adam Vinatieri field goal. Says Dr. Chu, “this guy was super grody and the bite hurt like hell. He didn’t break the skin because his few remaining teeth were pretty loose, but I had to ask myself what would have happened if this guy had been dead and ripped a big chunk out of my hand. I would have been in some serious trouble.” After this experience, Dr. Chu began to read all the scientific literature he could find on the living dead. “I couldn’t find any scientific literature on the living dead,” says Dr. Chu, “so I thought I should probably write some.”

With the aid of a grant from The National Science Foundation and UNESCO, Dr. Chu assembled his research team. Realizing he needed someone with a credible background in microbiology and cellular mechanics, he contacted Dr. Vern Angstvorstern, a chemist with extensive experience in the reflective optics of industrial coatings. “Dr. Angstvorstern was just the man we needed,” recalls Dr. Chu; “he was neurotically meticulous with an obsessive eye for detail and he owned a boat on Lake Lucerne.” Dr. Angstvorstern recalls their first conversation on the proposed study, “I had just completed a research project in which we had attempted to find a coating for the hulls of large vessels such as oil tankers which would prevent barnacles from attaching themselves. The research was largely unsuccessful and I really needed some money. The grant funding sounded interesting, so I joined the team.”

Chu and Angstvorstern began by assessing the supposedly fictional representations of zombies in popular culture. “We must have watched 200 zombie movies,” says Chu; “most of them were pretty shitty. The plots made no sense, the editing was incoherent and the cinematography was awful. Whoever thought this crap was marketable entertainment escapes me.” Angstvorstern echoed Chu’s sentiments, “I’ve seen Bangladeshi porn with better production values than most of this manure,” Nonetheless, after hundreds of hours of viewing, the team was able to establish the basic rules of reanimation of the dead and the forces that drive them to seek human flesh. “Your guess is as good as mine,” says Chu; “it’s either a virus or radiation or a curse or a chemical the military made or a medical experiment gone sadly off track.” As to the craving for human flesh, Angstvorstern puts it more succinctly; “well, some zombies seem to only want brains, while others will eat intestines and some even eat bugs and raccoons.”

As to whether there is any real chance that a zombie apocalypse will befall the world in the future, Chu and Angstvorstern are decidedly noncommittal. “There’s no way any of this shit could ever happen,” says Chu; “dead people can’t get up and walk around. That’s complete foolishness.” Adds Angstvorstern, “If you have ever tried to keep barnacles off a boat, you know what a challenge it can be, but human progress will defeat even the barnacle one day.” Despite remaining unanswered questions, the work of Chu and Angstvorstern has expanded the frontiers of scientific knowledge and provided a solid basis for audiences all over the world to judge the scientific accuracy of zombie films like World War Z. Angstvorstern sums it up, “the Dawn of the Dead remake was pretty good, but I didn’t get paid enough to watch most of that wretched mess.”

Mr. Cthulhu, Your Table is Ready

Animal Planet just aired a program about the “Man-Eating Super Squid”. This was part of its “Monster Week” line-up of supposedly frightening creatures. For my part, the “monsters” in Monster Week are like the “news” in Fox News, but I digress. My initial expectation was that I would see a squid, possibly wearing a red cape, shooting lasers out of its perfectly round, soulless eyes while slaughtering boatloads of hapless Haitian refugees or snatching healthy, buxom possibly under-aged young girls from the surf, but instead there was a collection of sailor’s tales (which are especially known for their uncanny accuracy) and video of some smallish but excitable squid doing what smallish but excitable squid do.

For the record, there are presently around 300 species of squid lurking in the world’s oceans apparently patiently waiting for the opportunity to dine upon succulent human flesh. They range from the very tiny (around one-quarter of an inch) to giant, colossal and stupendous (about 45 feet long). They have been around for 60 million years, give or take, and inhabit virtually every corner of the globe. The best known of all squid is perhaps Squidward, who lives next door to Sponge Bob, but he sadly is missing a couple of tentacles and is not a good candidate for being a man eater. When they are not gleefully eating people, squids enjoy a diet of fish, crabs and each other. They are also eaten by quite a few residents of the ocean and slaughtered sperm whales are well known for having bellies full of the indigestible beaks of large squid, which must leave them feeling bloated and irritable, perhaps explaining why they often try to smash the boats of the whalers who are attempting to slaughter them.

Here would perhaps be a good point at which to address the on-going controversy as to the plural of the word “squid”. Merriam-Webster’s on-line dictionary says that it can be either “squid” or “squids”. Why we are given a choice of a very clear usage and an ambiguous and potentially confusing one, I do not know. If, for example, someone said “the squid ate my mother”, we would have no idea whether there was one culprit or several. This could lead to some issues at the eulogy when the preachers says Mrs. So-and-so was eaten by “the squid”. Some mourners might note that Mrs. So-and-so was a large woman and then inappropriately extrapolate the required size of the offending squid (singular), when in reality it was dozens of smaller squid that skeletonized her in four feet of water off Cocoa Beach. Words do matter.

In the program, Animal Planet shows us a couple of guys who went diving in the Sea of Cortez where large groups of the Humboldt Squid are known to hang out. These guys got pestered and ultimately assaulted by a number of the squid. The Humboldt Squid can grow as large as six feet in length and weight up to 100 pounds. Apparently they are very curious and don’t like to be bothered when eating. The divers in the video say the squid punched them, bit them and pulled them down into the murky depths with hostile intent, perhaps to eat them, maybe sexually assault them, or possibly just to kill them because they were boring. Who can say? When the divers were released by the squid(s), the playful cephalopods flashed various colors, perhaps to say “quit being such a cry-baby, we were just fucking with you”. In any event, I was disappointed to see that there were no partially eaten neoprene-clad corpses pulled dramatically from the ocean with blank, empty eye sockets staring accusingly at the cameras.

So anyway, what struck me most about the whole program was the implication of evil intent on the part of our clever mollusk cousins and the seemingly genuine hurt feelings of these guys who got harassed. A squid is just a freakily mutated snail with great eye-sight and enough intelligence to be concerned about what the fuck a human is doing swimming around in its ocean. In my opinion, hippies and other unrealistic people should not go in the ocean, because the idea that they may gently commune with the peaceful denizens of this primitive world is a hash induced fantasy. I am really sorry these guys got beat up by the squids, but they asked for it. Animals do not like you or dislike you; they only want to know if they can safely eat you, are you going to try to eat them and what your fat ass is doing taking up space in the territory necessary to their survival. We create our gods and our fears in our own image, but squids and the rest of the world’s carnivores don’t have the emotional capacity or the idle time to wish us harm. As usual, the only real monsters are the Homo sapiens who harvest the oceans to the point of exhaustion, dump garbage and sewerage into the squid’s habitat and eat calamari while watching Animal Planet and shuddering at the thought of being grasped by a powerful, sinewy tentacle and dragged off to face the same cold indifference that we claim as our birth right.