Tag: zombie apocalypse

Epic mountain bike deserves new owner; are you worthy?

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Prepping for the zombie apocalypse, the alien invasion, or rising sea levels–aka, the prophecy known as WATERWORLD?

This is the vehicle you’re looking for, because anything powered by guzzleline or electricity will quickly stop being a thing. It will never run out of power because it’s powered by YOU.

And yes, this calls back to my first post ever. It’s called nostalgia, or a remix, and all the hip artists do this when they’re not busy dropping diss tracks all over Drake’s noggin.

Back to the mountain bike: this is what you want, because it’s a Minnesota Framed 2.0 Fat Tire monster, which laughs at mud, snow, gravel, or sand. Try to take one of those carbon-fiber racing bikes with itty bitty thin tires through some mud, snow, or anything other than a smooth road. See how well each $5,000 wheel performs. Yeah, singular. Each wheel is $5k.

You could buy one of these Minnesota fat tire bikes for all your friends for the price of that racing bike. Plus a used Honda Civic and enough left over cash to take the whole crew to Chipotle and get your burritos on.

Bike nerds will want to details, while preppers want to know how tough this thing is.

Here we go on both counts.

Bike nerds

This thing has 26″ wheels, and you also probably want to know how many gears it has. This many.

And it has Tiny Little Helper Gears in the back that do some kind of technical support job.

(Yes, those are derailers, but that sounds pornographic, I’m not calling them by that name. They are hereby and forever Tiny Little Helper Gears.)

As for brakes, these aren’t those rubber breaks that squeak, or the “brakes” on your first bike where you just went backwards on the pedal and somehow that stopped the bike. No. These are fancy disc brakes made of unobtanium and they work 5 bazillion times better than the rubber squeaky nonsense.

Preppers

This sucker isn’t build Ford tough. It’s far tougher than that, and sturdy as hell. The frame is aluminum, so it won’t rust and is lighter than steel, but not silly like carbon fiber, which would be impossible to fix during any flavor of apocalypse. What are you gonna do, hop on down to the carbon fiber store and ask the zombie clerk to hook you up?

Aluminum is common. Pick up some Diet Coke cans on the side of the road, cook those things, and smelt yourself some molten aluminum. Go wild.

Condition: Like new. As in, I only rode this a half-dozen times. Did not abuse it, crash it, or set up a wooden ramp to see how much air I could get before getting a compound fracture.

Price

$400 or best offer, and I’ll take U.S. dollars, euros, or rupees. Will also consider trades for a Tikka 3X in 6.5mm Creedmoor or a pallet of machetes.

Are you worthy?

Post a comment here or click on the Get in Touch tab for the emails and such. I’m putting this on Facebook Marketplace, too, whatever that is, mostly to see how many people lowball me by offering $200 or attempting trades involving a broken Xbox and a saggy couch they found on the side of the road.

Parasite fungus creates zombie insects, who become ‘flying salt shakers of death’

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If you like zombie movies, or are busy preparing for a zombie apocalypse despite the real apocalypse happening RIGHT NOW with a global pandemic, then you have to ask yourself: Are zombies even possible?

You know, before you write a $400,000 check for that bunker in your backyard, maybe think about whether zombies are a thing.

Just a thought.

While the chance of humans rising from the dead to walk again is 0.00001 percent, with the apparent exception of Herman Cain (what the hell, Twitter?), there are a couple of kinda-sorta plausible scientific paths to living zombies. We’re still talking microscopic, and I stand by my earlier posts about practical tips for the apocalypse.

Read the first post here. DO IT NOW.

But yeah, there’s real science on this. Different species of fungus attack insects, taking over their brains to make them do silly, suicidal things that benefit the fungus. We knew about the fungus that takes over ants.

This is so horribly great it was the premise of a great novel–THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS–which they turned into a movie.

Now comes word of a fungus that commandeers the brains of cicadas, and yes, the scientist actually says in this story that the fungus turns the insects into “flying salt shakers of death.”

You can’t beat that line.

There are other parasites out there which are total nightmare fuel, like the five billion species of evil monsters that sneak into the gills of fish, eat their tongue, then stick around as the fish’s replacement tongue. Oh hi, don’t mind me.

This thing belongs in STARSHIP TROOPERS 2: THE BUGS INVADE OUR OCEAN.

But yeah, the fungus zombie thing is crazy. And if you dig deeper, there are more examples of this. A microbe that makes rats lose their fear of cats, because that helps the mouse get eaten and spread more of the microbe. (Humans can get infected by this, too.) Wasps that sting spiders with mind-control drugs, then lay eggs inside the spider so the little baby wasps can eat the spider while it builds a web to protect the little wasps before it dies.

Jeff Goldblum told us life always finds a way.

Nobody said it would always be pretty.

DECAY, a zombie movie made by real scientists

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Not just any old scientists playing with beakers in the lab or whatever. No.

Brilliant boffins who work at the world’s greatest superconducting super-collider made this zombie movie, using the creepy tunnel parts of their fancy machine as movie sets.

I would actually watch this thing.

Not too shabby, scientist peoples of CERN — keep on making these things.

THE WALKING DEAD walks into Dumb Movie Land

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Movies make people dumb.

Not the people watching movies, unless that movie happens to be TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN PART 5 or whatever, in which case yes, your LSAT scores will never be the same.

No, I’m talking about characters in movies.

Characters in books sometimes do stupid things, but not usually. Put that same character in a movie and they turn into absolute idiots.

This is true for romantic comedies (bumbling fools in love!), action movies (no henchman can shoot, and no heroine or sidekick can avoid getting kidnapped by the villain) and especially horror movies, which deserve a post all their own.

If a person with a functioning brain cell rattling around their skull wouldn’t go into the spooky abandoned house where people keep disappearing, you can bet the movie character will march right in. Does the hot young teenager know that a serial killer is chasing down and killing hot young teenagers? Well, she should definitely wear high heels and fall down six times while the psycho chases her.

There are websites dedicated to listing the stupid things that movie characters do.

However: I want to pick on THE WALKING DEAD, a zombie shebang that’s on the Glowing Tube.

As a fan of zombies, I am aware of this show, and though I haven’t watched every flipping episode, I kinda keep track of things by recaps and reviews and such. It’s a good show and not at all stupid.

So why did a smart show have their characters get so idiotic in the big series finale?

Here’s the setup: the non-zombie hero peoples are holed up at some farm, and the big finale is a battle that happens when the zombies show up, en masse.

What made me want to throw things at the YouTube clip is how the zombies happily marched across the fields and surrounded the farmhouse.

No, no, no.

If you or I are hanging around a farmhouse during the zombie apocalypse, the zombies won’t ever march up on us from every direction. Why? Because we’ll get busy, real quick, using all the tools and equipment that any decent farm has the second we arrive there and take inventory of the place.

First thing we do is fire up the tractor or backhoe and dig a long ditch around the farm.

Second thing we do shove the dirt we dug up into a berm, a rough wall. So they fall in the ditch, and if by some zombie magic one of the undead gets out of the ditch, he’s gotta climb a wall.

Third thing we do is put a barbed wire fence on top of that berm.

Fourth thing we do is find some fuel and make Molotov cocktails.

If there’s a working tractor, this sort of thing takes a day or two.

And it’s worth it, because now a single Farmer Joe type with a flipping .22 rifle can stand on top of that berm and pick off zombies all day while he sips moonshine. Because there’s no way a horde of zombies is magically getting past the ditch, the wall and the barbed wire. It’s not happening.

Zombies can’t climb.

Instead, the heroes of THE WALKING DEAD go on foot (to get nom-nom-nommed) and drive around in cars trying to blow away zombies. Which isn’t smart, either. Shooting from a moving vehicle may look cool, but you have a much better chance of hitting a moving target when you’re not bouncing around, too.

Bottom line: If you really want to survive a horror movie / zombie apocalypse, please use your noggin first and your trigger finger second.

Survival Sunday: Concrete Canvas Shelters of the Apocalypse

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The First Rule of the Zombie Apocalypse: You will NOT be staying in your home.

There’ll be no electricity, no water, no cable, no internets and no guarantee that your house is remotely zombie-proof.

The Second Rule of the Zombie Apocalypse: Find a defensible shelter.

Sleeping under the stars is a good way to get nom-nom-nommed. Even if there are not walking dead around to eat your brains, other survivors will happily steal your stuff and leave you for dead.

Here’s a great little shelter from the British, who have glorious accents, making anything they say or invent ten times the awesome.

It’s an inflatable shelter made from canvas impregnated with cement*. Blow it up, spray water on it and bam, instant bomb shelter.

This is military grade stuff. Pile dirt around it and you’ve got an instant bunker that’s safe from small arms fire, mortars and the undead.

*Yes, the video says “concrete.” Cement is actually the right term. Concrete is cement mixed with rocks and whatnot.