Zombie quest- how one race looks to the future to try and make sense of the present

As my descent into my 30s slowly treads onward, like a parade of lemmings following the Pied Piper, I realize that I'm starting to lose touch with what is 'cool' and 'hip'.  I'm not quite to the stage where I sit on my porch with my shotgun loaded with GET OFF MY LAWN YOU LITTLE BASTARDS!!!!  I am, however, most certainly at a place where I don't know if people take this whole zombie apocalypse thing seriously or not.

It's certainly not a trivial issue- a real-life zombie apocalypse would be even scarier than that scene in Howard the Duck when Jeffery Jones stuck his Dark-Overlord-tongue out in the truck.

Or this scene where Marty McFly's mom tried to do it...with a duck.  You know, it's amazing that that this movie didn't wipe Hollywood out of existence

Excuse me while I take a break to practice some head shots.

Whether or not a zombie outbreak will ever happen, there is one thing that is certain- the recent  outbreak of crazy people doing crazy things (and the connect-the-dots reporting that basically linked any weird act involving blood and/or human dismemberment to zombie-ism), simply reaffirms the universal truth that people who are encountered with life events (from boring mundaneness to the Canadian gay-porn-star-dissecting-necrophiliac) will use their worldview to help those events to make sense- or at least to fit into some sort of manageable category.  Also, it shows some interesting things about the power of media to influence perceptions- or at least how they attempt to influence perceptions by laying the bread crumb trail down, down the rabbit hole.  And for those of you scoring at home, I have now referenced the Pied Piper, Hansel and Gretel, Alice in Wonderland, and Howard the Duck, all in the same blog post.  Boom.

Pictured: A boom.

PIC- Howard the Duck- http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1343/3168251251_c34ac83d4f.jpg