Sharing the World with the Undead

How about a border planter box?

In the background, Albert is listening to the news. I’m not sure why he wants to do this, but a small group of well-dressed pundits are debating problems with the border wall. How will we pay for the wall? We are beginning to have doubts about our Mexican benefactors, I fear. We are beginning to realize that fences are damn expensive. Even a white picket fence would pick lots of voters’ pockets. Peter Piper picked a peck of pissed-off Hispanic expatriates…

I say forget the wall. We’ll put in laser beams. We can put Skynet in charge. We’ll build an army of cyborgs to manage the beams and arm them with additional light sabers. Nobody will get through. Nobody will dare challenge our cyberwall.

Everybody will be afraid to get near the United States. Or northern Mexico. Or Arizona.  Or New Mexico. The Texans have cajones and I think they will manage to hold their ground, maybe even finally fly their own flag again. Under my plan we should be able to shift a great deal of the far southern population to the North, while solving the Southern border problem once and for all.

Shall I tweet the POTUS? My plan’s as good as his plan right now. Better, except for the fact that Skynet is a fictional corporation. But as he himself would agree — there’s a lot of fiction floating around out there.

Zombie Phrase for the Day:  Where is the Play-Doh?

Weehhhrrrzzzz uhhh baayyyy-dohhh? (Note that those without lips will not be able to include the “b” sound. )

A sign that this country’s educational system needs some serious work:

The phone menu cannot understand me, so the software passes me to a human at Walgreens. She sounds friendly, if a bit confused.  She does not have an accent. I explain my mission, starting with do we have medications ready to pick up. She is struggling to discover whether or not my husband has prescriptions in the bins. She wants to know his birthdate, then says, no, his address. She decides she needs both. I have no problem with this. I wonder if she is new.

We ended the conversation when she tried to put his name into the computer and asked, “Is that Turner with two Ns?” I told her not to worry, I still had to put in a prescription of my own and I’d call later.

Where do the Ns go? I wonder. Tnurner? Turnner? Turnern?

Was she a pharmacy tech? Is she filling bottles of pills?

I offer this scary thought, for readers who call Walgreens and somehow find themselves in the Twilight Zone.

Zombie phrase for the day: How do I spell my name?

Owwwdddduhhhh ayhhhh beehhhhbuhhh daybbbuhh?

Slow disaster created something fun, linked below.

At this point, being an aging crone, I’ll violate a cardinal precept of fandom and question a choice of favorites:  Why do people always want to make life tough? Are you Sherlock? Find John Watson. Find someone who will appreciate you for you, who will bring you toast and tea.  But this world seems to be full of Sherlocks looking for their Moriarties.

Zombie phrase for the day: I want drama in my relationships.

Ahhhhvvahhhnddd aahhhhbaahh di buyyy aaayduhhhihhh.

Biojar admin: To each their own, I guess. As the years go by, I am becoming a tea and toast girl. But I thought this vid nailed it.

I look out the window at the white, wooden board sitting on the sidewalk outside LePeep Restaurant. In black print, I see specials and blurs that must be prices. I squint. I change angles. I move my multifocal glasses.  I am stopped at a light directly across from that board. Instantly, I realize a large, new problem exists.  I can’t even guess at these prices.

“Albert,” I say, “my glasses have gone bad. I can’t see the prices.”

He laughs.

I point out that glass is considered a liquid due to the fact that its molecules slowly descend over time. Obviously the glass has been running downhill.

Albert appears to doubt my explanation.

Being a rational person, I discount the possibility that LePeep deliberately smeared out all of its prices.

Trouble. I fear I will have to see Dr. Beckerman again. Once glasses have gone bad, only a new pair will fix the problem.

Yrs from the blue room where we see things differently.

I tried to determine where my “waist” might be located this morning.  Ominous sources tell us that we are doomed to suffer an early demise if our waist runs over thirty-six inches. * Alas, one more peril to manage. I decided to do a threat assessment.

But where is my waist?

Some sources put this invisible line at belly-button level, a distorted vesica piscis horizontal to the Earth, bisecting the belly-button. But expert opinion varies! Other sources suggest the true waist to be an arbitrary inch above that belly-button. The functional definition requires a woman to bend sideways. The natural fold-line that results becomes the height of the waist. But I am so pear-shaped. Whether I like them or not, I have big hips and I cannot lie. So that fold comes up near my ribcage. Ummm… that seems a little high. Of course, the fold is lower if I bend toward the other direction.

Since the difference in waist measurement between the belly button and lower fold is about four inches, my choice of waistline matters. I decide to go higher where the measuring tape comes in lower. I am fine and getting better as I head toward my ribs.

But this just reminds me of all the silly numbers out there.  Not to mention how one can squander minutes on the internet trying to nail down questions of alleged “fact.” Forget fake news for a minute. Even real news cannot be trusted, not when educated personal trainers can all start their own websites.

My wisdom for the day: Always go with the number you like best.  I guess we can make this the zombie phrase for the day as well.

Zombie Phrase for the Day:  Ahhhhzzzz guhhhhddd uuuhhmbuhhh oooohhh aygghhh ehdd.

*The number may be different for guys. Men will have to do their own research, although if you actually read this post you may justifiably decide not to bother.

So the oatmeal was taking forever.  I figured five or ten more minutes might be needed to mush the stuff up right. Too long.  I poured Cocoa Puffs into a bowl. I added extra Reese’s Puffs. The problem of the oatmeal was solved, with the addition of a little almond milk.

Then I went to the Blue Room. The education blog was running over five-hundred visits a day. The password problem remained unsolved. I made a list, trying to get a fix on what I needed to do.

In the meantime, silently in  the background, cooking went on. The oatmeal perked away on low single burner.  And perked. And perked.  And perked.

I think I made a cookie. I’m not sure what it is. If I had known I was making a cookie, I would have thrown in chocolate chips. It’s not burnt. Like the planet Mercury, it’s just a little short of water. I will try to solve this problem tomorrow.

Cooking in the land of the ADHD.

Zombie Phrase for the Day: Use the low burner. Ooooozeduhhh ohhhddurdner.

 

 

O.K. I have five numbers and five symbols. Not good enough. I throw in some letters. Weak, I am told. Hell, nobody could remember this combination for more than 5 minutes. By the time I get to strong, I had better have the damn thing recorded. Because a million monkeys plunking keys for a million years may never hit on that combination.

Then I have to tell the security sites behind the site what I have done. I don’t even know why the last one stopped working. I mean, I wrote the bastard down. Did I create a new one and leave no record of that effort? If so, I did it in the last day or two, a sobering thought. But I don’t think so.

I have decided the Prozac nation wants to make sure I am taking my Prozac like a good girl. Faceless foes inside the pharmaceutical industry are gaslighting me. But their latest clever attempt to drive me insane will fail. If teaching in a school taken over by the incredibly competent State of Illinois did not drive me insane, I am probably sane for life. Or I slipped over the edge and I’ll never know.

But, damn, I hate passwords. I also hate those patronizing programmers who think I need between eight and fourteen digits-symbols-numbers-letters-etc. to get my password right. I promise not to use my dog’s name, but can we please let me take a few chances in life? It’s my life.

Or it ought to be.

Zombie Phrase for the Day:  Where did I put my purse? Aehhrrrrduh uhhhhhhhbuhdddbuhh buhrrzzzz?

 

(Please don’t sue  me Potterverse. I don’t actually know where I got this picture. If I ever get more than a few hundred readers a day, I’ll replace it. But it’s perfect.)

Can we take the humans out of the equation? Yes, we can.  But in the end, cars fail, like toasters and refrigerators fail — and they fail a good deal more often. The damn things are filled with parts, and parts, readers, are trouble. Suddenly, a flashing engine light makes you spend hundreds of dollars to find out you have a broken flashing engine light. Or the gas gauge says empty when you know the tank is full.

I know from experience and my parent’s car that a plucky human can keep barreling down the road without gas and with that pesky engine light warning of impending doom, a doom years in the coming that still has not arrived. Like Penny, I just put the key in the slot and dare fate.  Somebody told dad not to worry unless the engine light turned from yellow to red.

He is planning to fix the car — again! – shortly.

But let’s forget engine-light car.  Let’s remember ancient Sable.  Ancient Sable needed four alternators, if memory serves me, and kept depositing me by the side of the road or in a random parking lot until I finally switched to Japanese cars for life.

We cannot put our cars in their own driver’s seats.  When cars go bad, there’s no turning back.  Bammm!! Suddenly, we have one less tree to make oxygen for us all, one more air bag exploding in our faces, and what have we gained from our latest attempt to work less? Most likely a lesson in human hubris.

Just because you can does not mean you should.

Eventually, all toasters fail. This morning, look at your toaster. Then go look under the hood of your car. Ask yourself how much you want to trust technology.

A Public Service Announcement from the Blue Room.

P.S. If you want to buy that car that warns you when other cars are too close, absolutely go for it. Just be sure to listen and look outside — and not just at the screen.  With enough time and treachery, I could put zombies on that screen. Think about your past auto repair bills, too.

 

Zombie fiction at its best raises ambiguities to ponder. Is the CDC our friend? In a worst case scenario, will the CDC be our friend? How will America respond to a crisis? Will America respond to a crisis?

In our PC times, how much trouble can we get into for coming down on the wrong side of the equation? I want to take a moment to pose an important zombie question: Are we too damn dumb to sustain a necessary quarantine? When the virus takes hold, will we try to put borders around that virus? Or, as my mom said when I told her I needed to vacuum, will we say, “Oh, no, dear. Just open the door and let the breezes in.”

???

Let’s be clear: The POTUS has created a porous and peculiar attempt at a quarantine with his travel ban. It reminds me of an Israeli official describing U.S. airport security measures after 9/11: “The Americans haven’t made travel safe. They have made it annoying.” The travel ban’s too steeped in politics and prejudice, I’d say.

But a little big-picture thinking might be useful here. What will we do if the POTUS has to impose a quarantine due to a broken vial of smallpox and some random judge in Seattle or Hawaii declares his action to be legally inadequate, shutting down that quarantine? If the best answer we can come up with is “Die with our Civil Rights intact!” we might want to pause a bit.  Someone has to be able to say, “Shut down the roads into Cleveland.” That someone logically should be the POTUS. We could hand the responsibility to the CDC, but I’d guess they are already pretty thoroughly embedded in the loop. Also, military structures of command exist because someone must take charge in an emergency.

I am sure readers are thinking, “But this is not an emergency!” I hear you out here. But what if it were? When judges all across America can stop putative emergency measures, we had better hope the dead don’t rise. Or the vial doesn’t fall. Or some crazy guy in North Korea can’t get his missile across the ocean. Or his emissary with the bottle of who-knows-what-nerve-agent doesn’t reach Chicago’s water supply.

Just because you are paranoid, doesn’t mean they are not out to get you. Just because you not even worried most of the time doesn’t mean they are not out to get you, either. We are a wild and diverse species, and we should not underestimate our ability to screw feral pooches.

Coming to you from Zombieland in the Blue Room, where reality penetrates at the oddest times in the oddest ways. Just food for thought.

This post was going to be about unionism.       Something went wrong.

The best thing about retirement is a sense of “done.” Done has a feel. Done has a texture. The cake is baked, the zombie has been dismembered and burned.

I can read in peace. I can ignore the news. I can write silly haikus about cooking shows. I can write dialogs with Shasta the Invisible Slug. If I don’t tap that button the commits me to sub, I can read through the middle of the night and turn off all the alarms.

More importantly, when technology decides to act like the Russians diabolically hacked it for no reason, I have TIME. I can recreate the stupid password.  I can google solutions for my latest quandary.  I can try to get organized — and then decide that organization, a forever work in progress, can be postponed again.

I have been too busy for too long. My parents had the right idea. Bourbon and Seven-Up in the backyard with friends. Walking around lakes with friends. Reading useless stories where the plucky humans kinda-sorta survive the zombie apocalypse.

Zombie phrase for the day: You have to believe in yourself.

Oooohaahbbbuhweeve uhnn uhhhelllll.