Sharing the World with the Undead

There are not enough cows in this town.

Ehhrnnff gahhzznn zownnn.

Did you read the NZLB post? Did the absurdity of that post strike you? Did you see moaning, little boys and girls clutching pencils as they tried to escape from the handcuffs attaching them to their floor-bolted desks?

As the author of this blog, though, I’d like to say that that might be one of the scariest posts I’ve ever written. Under the current law, a parent who had tied up her child in blinkie lights and brought that child to school would absolutely be entitled to put that child in school. Special ed teachers, psychologists and social workers would all create an individual education plan for blinky-light child, filled with accommodations such as extra time on tests, the teacher translating and transcribing answers, a special desk away from the smell of other students, etc. We might create a whole new category of an existing certificate: The Bilingual Certificate for speakers of Zombie.

Don’t be crazy you say? Is this any crazier than handing a seventh grade special education student a 7th grade state achievement test when he can’t read? The student in question wrote “to hare” on his test for all the questions that required writing. When I pointed out the “d” on the end of “hard” he wrote “to hared.”

Why do we all need a zombie infestation plan? The nation that brought us grade-level standardized testing for all students regardless of what they actually know will never be able to handle an actual outbreak. Think about it. These are the same people who are body scanning elderly Norwegian grandmothers at the airport.

P.S. How did that student do? The student failed abysmally, of course, but no one knows that score. The test results never get back to teachers during the actual school year, making those results almost useless. If that same government were addressing an actual zombie outbreak, I’d expect them to issue the first warnings at about the same time that the lights went out in Seattle, Biloxi, New York and Cleveland. They’d probably start doing blood tests and body cavity searches on Norwegian grandmothers, too, in an effort to show they weren’t profiling.

My guess is we’d decline to select candidates for blood tests who actually looked ill on the basis that this violated The Americans with Disabilities Act.

The post before this certainly is not meant to imply that grandmas cannot be zombies. Because we tend to underestimate older women, they are likely to be some of the most effective zombies.

Not enough attempts have been made to actually communicate with the zombie. In particular, those zombies under 18 years of age need to be in school. Why aren’t they in school? I suspect it is the natural fear of their impact on schools’ standardized test scores. Their inability to hold a pencil can only bring down scores.

But since we are now having cognitively delayed students — students who can neither read nor write more than a few words — take these tests, what possible justification can there be for excluding young zombies from the testing pool? None of our schools are making No Child Left Behind targets anyway. The whole damn country is filling out plans for remediation and improvement of our failing schools, plans that we then submit to our state Departments of Education. My personal favorite: My local high school was listed as one of the top 100 in the country. It is also failing to make NCLB targets and is on Academic Warning.

Hell, let’s test the zombies. We really have nothing to lose.

“We have to believe in free-will. We’ve got no choice.”

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Maybe part of the charm of the zombie concept is an enemy that has no free will.  What if we are wrong about that?

I wish to get a cat.

Ahhshh duhh guhtahht.

I wish to get a cat.

Ahhshh duhh guhtahht.

This tidy little snippet may seem entirely ordinary and, indeed, perhaps Alexander Kinyua was simply hungry. But this story brings up a larger issue. We have already established that virtually no records exist detailing the Great Uprising of 1927 in Mississippi. We have no way of knowing what other records do not exist. A search on the word “zombie” results in many irrelevant results such as a Wikipedia article with some notable inaccuracies. (Witchcraft?) While the zombie search still can provide useful information, a good researcher knows how to go around the obvious planted misinformation.

Alternative search terms should be topped by the words cannibals and cannibalism.

Be careful: Cannabis is something else.

The majority of recent readers are from Russia. Why? What leads these Russians to zombie blogs?  Is this mere serendipity? Perhaps not.

Was it the Russian winter that stopped Napoleon and Hitler? Or something more sinister?

Yes, I visit the Centers for Disease Control often.

Ahhvzzt sssuhnt zzzyzzcuhh aahhhn.