Zombie Dogs

Zombie Dogs:

I think for the most part the picture says it all, but if a picture on its own is worth a thousand words then my assumption is that for every word associated with a picture the formula ought to be:

Picture X # of words = Total description value

Thus if you pair a picture with 200 words then the equation would read:

1000 X 200 = 200,000

This may of course be inaccurate, as at some point the number of words will stop adding to the descriptive value. However, I have yet to properly determine what that number is, as I believe that it varies picture to picture and context to context. Perhaps some day a man or women of greater mathematical intellect than I will waste a significant portion of their lives designing a matrix, which will answer this question… Until then:

This story takes place on a hot and sunny afternoon in the town of Arusha. Having just walked clear across town to purchase shuttle tickets to Moshi for later that afternoon, we backtracked a short distance in search of lunch. Along the side of the road there are usually some kind of dirt paths, be they the shoulder of the road or separate. This particular path was elevated and away from the road a slight distance and led us under the pleasant shade of several trees. Tanzanians seem to be quite excellent at collecting the random detritus along the roadside into neat piles, presumably to either burn, decompose, or at some unknown future date be collected and taken away. You tend to grow quite used to these piles quite quickly, not really paying them heed and often simply walking over them without a second glance. This day Amy made the mistake of taking a second glance.

Despite being quite decomposed in some areas this beastly cadaver somehow managed to retain a significantly lifelike appearance. The eyes were intact, and the face held such an expression; something feral, dark and angry, as though he were crying out in anger against the evil that had felled him. It was so easy to picture him stirring from his repose and rising in his skeletal state to take awful revenge against the world that had robbed him of his life.

Amy screamed and jumped about like a girl and in a perfectly scripted show of gender solidarity Carmen joined her. Being the stoic gentleman I am, I approached the situation with all of the somber detachment one would expect from a coroner or mortician. Ok actually I laughed at them, no one is perfect. The whole experience and mental picture of the corpse reanimating itself brought to mind an interesting query, however. In today’s world there are few who are not educated on least basic zombie survival techniques. The number of movies, books and television shows dealing with the topic, is only surpassed by the recent rash of ‘art’, which has managed to romanticize vampires. Man but the vamps must be loving that. I mean talk about easy prey, girls all over the world practically begging to be bitten… but I digress. The point is that while many of us have a good handle on the basics of surviving the eventual zombie apocalypse when it comes to human zombies, I think we are woefully underprepared for animal zombies. I mean think about it. Undead humans aren’t all that well suited to biting you and yet still pose formidable foes. But at least they are large, generally slow moving targets with small mouth to head ratios. Dogs and other animals, however, are practically all mouth; mouths with big nasty sharp teeth. And to make matters worse they move faster and they are closer to ground making it harder for us to fight them. I mean think about it. Would you rather be attacked by a normal human or a normal dog… assuming no weapons or advanced combat training, and assuming we are not talking about a corky or some other tiny excuse for a dog that ought to be put down regardless of its undead status? I personally would rather fight the human any day. Now just imagine that same scenario but with zombies…

One more thought. Zombie Mosquitoes!! Good luck with that one…