[all photos: S. Gibson]
I had a fun weekend camping with my son’s Boy Scout troop at Fairfax Rod and Gun Club,where my friend Steve is a member and sponsored the event. 25 scouts and 15 adults participated. I worked as a supervisor for the rifle range activity, where every scout passed the accuracy requirement for Rifle merit badge, including Gar who put five up and five down three times in a row. I was very impressed with how quickly he took to the rifle and I think he is showing some aptitude for it. Unfortunately he didn’t have enough time to qualify on the Shotgun range, 0ur time being restricted there. I am told by those who would know that we shot off 5200 rounds of 22 long rifle ammunition. The boys all learned the part of a rifle and what comprises a cartridge.
Dinner was a sort-of-stew that the boys put together– hamburger, macaroni, cheese and some chopped up peppers and onions, covered with cheese. It actually was pretty good, and reasonably filling. We had a great fire Saturday night and we played two games of Werewolf, a favorite party game. I led the first one and Allen Eisenburg led the second one. We had a blast. I froze in my tent overnight, even with a pad down and a 40 degree bag. Lessons learned.. bring a bag liner or blanket next time and a danged pillow. I’m sore today.
Fortunately, since I couldn’t sleep, I did have my Ipod touch with me, and I watched DEAD SNOW and the FOURTH KIND to while away the hours. Blessedly coffee was ready in the morning and the lads enthusiastically made pancakes and bacon.
What a great weekend… pancakes, boomsticks, bacon and werewolves.
Third Point of Singularity 
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Zombies and Werewolves. Is that what we call them now? My my– how times change. So tell me Walt. If I use an 8″ howitzer on the Zombies does it still count if I blow them apart and knock all sorts of important parts off them?
I really can’t get into this one-on-one crap– I much prefer mass slaughter and destruction.
By the way, you’re the Zombie guru…
1. Do Zombies burn? If so they seem to hide out in cities so if we just glassed the cities with about 200 megatons that should take are of them right? I mean if their dead corpses are reduced to ash that means their heads are reduced to ash as well right?
2. If a building collapses on zombies does it kill them? Even if they are just immobilized they’ll eventually starve without any live people to eat right?
3. If a Vegan gets turned into a zombie does he still remain a vegetarian?
4, If you kill a Zombie, why doesn’t he just become a Zombie’s Zombie– I mean he should come back to life right?
Inquiring minds want to know the answers to these questions.
Otto
Hullo, Otto:
Well, I suppose what kills a zombie depends on if you are a traditionalist (like me) who prefers legions of slow zombies, Romero style, and not a heretic who thinks Zombies should run pell mell after someone. One element of commonality indicates that the headshot ALWAYS kills the zombie, or to be more accurate, destroys its motive power center.
So an artillery piece or a nuclear weapons would certainly do the trick, albeit in an overkill fashion.
There’s no definitive source on the life cycle of zombiedom, although Max Brooks’ ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE comes pretty close. He posits that a group of zombies trapped in a cellar (or otherwise deprived of human meat to eat) would gradually lose all sources of energy (e.g., humans), continue to decompose until the animated connective tissue (ligaments and etc) decays to the point of implosion. This is borne out in cinema evidence in 28 DAYS LATER, where the zombie-like “Rage Victims” are seen still moving around three months later after epidemic outbreak, but not managing anything but a week, trembly crawl. In the same film, the Major has a zombie chained outside his compound, which he observes daily. He says at one point. “You may not credit it, but this fellow is communicating with me. He’s telling me how long it takes a zombie to starve to death, right now.”
One supposes that every system, including a reanimated corpse, requires some form of motive energy to exist.
To be a Vegan (or Buhhdist, or Communist, or Goth, or whatever) is a conscience decision of the human intellect, which I rather doubt zombes possess. So no, a dead reanimated Vegan would lust for the flesh of the living as much as a dead omnivorous type.
A Zombie’s Zombie doesn’t really work in the context you mean. There is no “second death” for the undead. One simply blasts the nerve centers that keep the system moving until everything falls apart. Shoot a zombie anywhere else, it doesn’t fall apart, it keeps living.