This Just In!

We’re not quite sure why this is news. The only reasonable conclusion to
come to is that this headline was supposed to read “after she died.”
Because that would be news.

Zombie Apocalypse Lurches Another Step Closer to Reality

“It’s alive—or at least it’s twitching a lot!
That’s good enough for, like, a B-plus!”

If the venerable Victor Frankenstein were alive today—and also real, instead of a figment of Mary Shelley’s imagination—he would be pleased to learn that human society has come one step closer to recreating the most spine-tingling and exciting of his many crimes against nature: the reanimation of dead tissue.

Gotham is lucky the Joker
didn’t realize that zombies are
even cheaper than gasoline.

The eminent Swiss alchemist would be surprised and a bit confused, though, to learn that despite mad scientists’ long history of advancement and achievement in a broad array of scientific endeavors, zombie technology’s recent stagger forward was made not by an evil supergenius bent on world domination, a misunderstood loner with a grudge against the society that rejected him, or even a psychotic clown with no backstory who embodies chaos itself.

No, this latest offense against God has come from a far more mundane and surprising source—an acolyte of the culinary arts. A cook. A chef. We may never know this chef’s name, or what dark moment of his (or her) twisted, hellish life pumped her (or his) giant floppy hat so full of amoral, destructive hubris, but when the surface of the Earth is teeming with the living dead, we’ll certainly curse that unknown name for all we’re worth with our dying breaths.

Perhaps more shocking to the poor fictitious Dr. Frankenstein (who was, incidentally, no doctor at all, but a college dropout) is how this mysterious chef has been creating these profane proto-zombies. Eschewing the time-honored and traditional methods of harnessed German lightning, the Umbrella Corporation’s T-virus, voodoo, an alien asteroid hovering above the South Pole, the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, or even rage-infested monkeys, this master chef/madman has been dragging the dead back from beyond the grave using a far more commonplace and insidious ingredient:

Soy sauce.

Zombie squid: approximately fifty times more terrifying than live squid.

Yes, you read that right:

Soy sauce. For the love of God, SOY SAUCE.

The following video is not recommended for the faint of heart, the weak of stomach, or those who believe that squid deserve to live despite being both delicious and very, very ugly. Or, for that matter, those who live in fear of ordering a dinner that’s capable of making a quick getaway. If you do not count yourself among the above, please review the video below and realize that for today, all you’re watching is a relatively harmless, headless squid thrashing around on a bed of what appears to be caviar and possibly egg noodles, but someday—someday soon, perhaps sooner than you think—that soy-drenched living corpse lurching its way toward your boarded-up windows as you huddle in fear in the cellar, your ammunition nearly spent, may well be the moldering, shambling remains of somebody you once knew, thirsting for human brains. And you won’t be able to say you weren’t warned.

NOTE

We realize that Frankenstein’s monster, given its ability to think, reason, and know right from wrong, doesn’t fit the traditional definition of zombie. For our purposes here, though, it’s close enough.

Regrets and Missed Opportunities

It’s almost certainly impossible to live an entire life without regrets. It’s debatable whether it’s brave and clear-sighted or foolish and obtuse even to try. And it probably goes without saying that those thousands of minutes spent writing silly, pointless commentary on the internet—instead of, say, reading a book, breathing fresh air, or engaging real flesh-and-blood humans in conversation—are such ripe sources for a flood of regrets that any single missed opportunity is hardly worth mentioning.

One or our most stinging regrets, however, is that we finished writing a zombie-themed post about Eddie Van Halen only days before being shown this picture of Al Davis, owner of the National Football League’s Oakland Raiders and soulless demon of a million children’s darkest dreams:

We don’t know where this image came from or whether it’s been manipulated in Photoshop, because we’re a little too freaked out by it to look very closely. But our job here is not to uncover the truth about creepy photos; our job is to make dumb jokes about sad people who look like the undead, and, frankly, we blew it by running with the Van Halen thing instead of waiting just a bit longer for Al Davis to lunge at us out of the shadows, grasping at our throats with his papery fingers. We think it’s true that “Regret is insight that comes a day too late”¹—in this case, two days. 

NOTES

1. Northrop Frye, influential literary critic and theorist who we’d never heard of before today, 1912–1991.

Eddie Van Halen’s Body Celebrates Another Year of Roaming the Earth

“I’m just a normal jerk who happens to make music. As long as
my brain and fingers work, I’m cool.” Sadly, zombies ate most of his
brain and fingers. 

 
The body of Eddie Van Halen, the flashy and innovative guitarist whose eponymous band dominated the American rock scene in the late 1970s and much of the 1980s, celebrated its fifty-sixth year of existence today by lurching through its hometown’s darkened, abandoned streets in search of human flesh.

Van Halen on turning fifty-six: “Brains? Braaaaaains.”

Van Halen’s body currently spends its days aimlessly wandering throughout Studio City, California, with a look of vacant sadness on its face—its stiffened fingers absently thudding against the wood of the fabled Frankenstrat guitar in a perverse sign of a lingering memory of its past existence—as it shambles past boarded-up houses, silent movie theaters, and shadowed Red Line entrances, occasionally bumping clumsily against handrails and tumbling violently down subway stairs only to land on its feet.

Don’t even pretend this isn’t scary.

The guitarist’s creative output slowed considerably after being bitten by the reanimated corpse of Mick Jagger in early 1999, and after several trying months of transition, exhibited dedication to its new lifestyle by devouring not only three lead singers but also original bassist Michael Anthony. On rare occasions it wanders far from home, partially regurgitating David Lee Roth to fulfill touring needs and thus revealing a shadowy semblance of human financial acumen.

Despite his death more than a decade ago, Van Halen is still considered to be more musically gifted than the Insane Clown Posse, a more interesting conversationalist than Courtney Love, and more likely to produce an essential new album than the Rolling Stones.