Bad Chili

If Degsy Happens To Read This -
Don't worry, it's not an indictment of the dish you made last night.  I am, of course - obviously! - referring to the fourth in Joe R. Lansdale's series of Hap Collins and Leonard Pine novels, which has that title.  Art?

The edition I have

      I don't want to put any spoilers up, just to say that Hap finally gets the gal and, while he doesn't fall into any bodies of water, he does end up in a bathtub, for many hours.  Ol' Joe also manages to work in more of East Texas, which is the green and growing bit of Texas rather than the arid deserts we are more familiar with.  In "Two-Bear Mambo" we got the appalling East Texas winter weather, and in BC we end up with a tornado.  Lends a certain verisimilitude to things.  And, yes, there is indeed some bad chili.
     Conrad being a thorough/completist/anal-retentive (delete where applicable), I already have the fifth and sixth novels in the series all ready to read.  Art?
                          

     The thing is, Conrad has no inner monitor or sense of regulation and if I crack open No. 5, I will not put it down until I've finished it.  This would be bad, as I still have a Cryptic, a Codeword and a Skeleton crossword to complete.
     
Once Upon A Time
This will make more sense later.  Anyway, Conrad has the kind of retentive memory that will throw up odd things ten years after the fact, or even thirty.  For instance, that one-hit wonder Tiffany is now 48 and hasn't exactly set the music world on fire since "I Think We're Alone Now" back in 1987.
     Anyway, that has nothing to do with what I wanted to crack on about, which was the magazine SFX, which you may have seen on the news-stands, with a cover that always has something obscuring the bottom of the "F" so the publishers hope passers-by will think it's a magazine about SEX and thus buy it.  A cheap trick.

See what I mean?

     I recall a long time ago, when they were not long on the market, and they had a writing competition.  Readers had to send in a story of no longer than 2,000 words or thereabouts, and the winner would get their contribution turned into a short film.
     Needless to say, Conrad's entry did not win.  It was quite appealing, IIRC, about how dull and boring extraterrestrial life really was, and how the agencies prosecuting such life-form exploration had to ginger up aliens to make the process seem a lot more interesting and appealing than it really was.

Plus, scenery: it was set in the Outer Hebrides

     This is where my memory comes in (I think).  The winner was some fantastical farce called "Cut Price Gravity" about gravity not behaving itself in someone's front room.  The thing is, I cannot find any trace of either the story or the film on the internet.  All I get are Youtube tutorials on Halloween make-up, Gravity the power supplier or "Gravity" the film.  Did CPG ever get made?  If so, is it so obscure that it vanished without a ripple in time?  Or was it so rubbish an effort that, again, people have made sure it never existed in the first place?*
     I would like some closure on this, as once a subject surfaces from the depths of my memory, it tends to persist.

No, Art.  But we'll keep this.
(All together now: "A screaming comes across the sky -")

Time, I feel, to go put the oven on.  Pizza, don't you know.

Zombies And Physics
No!  Nothing to do with "Love and Rockets", nor "Dinosaurs and Spaceships" (though I may have invented that last one).  This one is to do with Brownian motion, which again is nothing to do with Acts of Parliament, just to be clear.  
     Okay, Robert Brown was a Scottish botanist who described and explained the apparently random motion of particles visible in a fluid.  This was the result of molecules  of that same fluid hitting the particles and shoving them about.  Art?

Quite literally all over the place

     Now, it occurred to Your Humble Scribe that there would appear to be a fruitful analogy here with the movement of zombies.  For this model we will assume these are the classic slow type of zombies, not the Olympic sprinters on speed and steroids of recent iterations.
     "But Conrad!" I hear you cavil.  "Zombies are bigger than microscopic particles.  Consequently they have more mass, and are harder to shove around."

"Would you like to respond to that, sir?  Sir?"

     I said it was an analogy, not the same as (thank you analogy, every author's go-to cop out concept).  So, what random environmental influences are there upon the shambling undead hordes?
     Sound, for one thing.  The wind makes a sound that would distract and divert the zeds, not to mention doing things like rustling leaves and grasses and branches: all potential attractors of the massed meatbags.  
   Rain impacting on the ground and other surfaces would also confuse the rotting retards, as it would both constitute a noise source and impact upon their horrid rotting bodies, so they wouldn't know which way to turn.

Welcome to Manchester, zombie-confusing capital of the North

     Thunder and lightning would constitute a sound and light source, too.  We don't have tornadoes in the Allotment of Eden**, though South Canada does and you can imagine swarms of hordes of zeds gamely staggering towards, if not into, a tornado funnel.  Where they would probably get torn to shreds, especially by the sharks, and then you'd have Sharknado #12: Zombie Sharknado!
     Sorry, got a bit off-track there.  Where were we?

Oh yes.

     It's doubtful that the teeming zeds would follow the Sun, as it moves too slowly.
     Well, there you go, a scientific explanation of why zombies move in random patterns until Hom. Sap. turn up, driving a car and loosing off shots, instead of which they might as well simply sound the Zombie Dinner Gong.

And with that, we are done!




*  I like this last theory the best.
**  Yet.  But give global warming a decade or two ...