Our usual weekend ritual involves
waking up to National Public Radio---NPR.
Elaine and I both enjoy the Sunday puzzle featuring Will Shortz. This past Sunday morning’s potpourri of NPR reportage included
a segment from Los Angeles on actors training for potential roles in haunted
houses, which is timely for impending Halloween. One subgroup was learning how to portray
zombies, currently very “in” given the tremendous popularity of TV shows like
“The Living Dead”. That segment got me
to thinking (I free associate a lot) about some of the practicalities of life
(do I mean un-life here?) as a zombie.
OK, let’s cut to the chase
here. I was wondering about zombie
flatulence. Do they or don’t they? On the positive side, we know zombies are
supposed to smell bad. But that could
just be because of death and decay, so isn’t definitive. On the negative side, they’re dead, aren’t
they? Well, that’s ambiguous too. So, it seemed a good time to analyze the
biochemistry and physiology of the undead to see what the answer should
be. This turns out to be surprisingly
easy to do while lying in bed half asleep trying to tune out the “inside the
beltway” analysis of current events that NPR tends to favor. Or the discussion of sports by a know-nothing
NPR reporter from a second tier Ivy League college who doesn’t understand sports are frequently played west of the
Mississippi River. But I digress from
the main point here.
