Contingency Plans

Today's header is a small collection of my favorite British people (from l to r): David Tennant as Doctor Who, Gemma Atkinson as her fine sexy self, Matt Bellamy as the virtuoso he is, and Winston Churchill as the old man longing for his schoolyard days as MC Church.



There is something simply fascinating about contigency plans for near-impossible, horrific situations.

Zombies, for example. I know several people who have a plan for exactly what they'll do when the dead walk the earth once more, myself among them. Most of them have to do with raiding the local gun store and loading up on every caliber ever. The problem with that is that people have been hardwired to believe that Zombie apocalypses require high levels of gunfire and ultimately going down in a blaze of glory. All of them, actually.

The psychological reason for this is because if you kill a zombie, you're essentially murdering people without consequence. You can't open up on a crowd of people with a .50cal machine gun and expect to get away with it. If you do the same to a crowd of zombies, however, you're a good samaritan.

So if everyone goes to the gun store to loot all the ammo they can, and it's very likely that no one is going to be willing to share, it's a large group of people trapped in the small confines of a store surrounded by zombies. Tell me if you know where that plan goes wrong.

Regardless, it's still fascinating to have all of these plans made up in your head. You take society as it is, take out a norm here and there, and you have a situation that presents you with a unique challenge.

I usually use this mind-exercise to get through boring bits of my day. Walking through a supermarket, for example (the next place people would go after the gun shop). What if there was some huge explosion outside that forced us to live the rest of our days within the store? That cute girl that works in the bakery? Well, at some point we're going to have to rebuild the human race through the first two parts of the acronym 'TLC'. When that time comes, I've already called dibs.

She may not even speak English (as that's a problem nowadays) or agree with just about anything I have to say, but I know this: she's my soulmate. I don't have a good history with people that work in bakeries, but that doesn't matter. Besides, it was either her or Ms. Pack-a-day Jane that works behind the customer service counter.

That's part of the fascination as well. You're put into close contact with people in a new society where the old rules don't apply. Where there are people in close contact and an understanding that there are no rules, there are people taking full advantage of the facts. The first few days would likely be hell. People, panicked by their new circumsatnces, would drink their way out of their soon-to-be permanent depression, gorge themselves on shitty food, and on top of that breed like rabbits.

Sex. A rapid, constant stream of sex.

That's basically why people love the idea of these stories, stories that are horrific and hopeless when you look at them on the base level: there's lots of violence and, eventually, a helluva lot of sex.

We're a funny little race aren't we?