My Three Best Qualities!
Yes yes yes, I have derided logic in the past, once again, whose blog is it? I can change opinion as swiftly as a weathervane, deal with it.
Okay, I am now going to turn the (jaundiced and cynical) eye of Conrad upon the opening scenes of "Day Of The Dead", because I watched it by accident on Friday evening. Art!
Googling for this is a bit of a faff, as you get lots of returns about the Mexican festival, with lots of pictures of skeletons in fan
ANYWAY at the very beginning we see a helicopter flying around Florida, with a mixed bag of crew and passengers. Art!
Ignore Terry! Ignore Terry!
At 1:23 we get an overhead shot to show how lifeless and deserted the city is - Art!
You can tell from the light that this was shot very early in the day, before any traffic was moving, and congrats to the director, there aren't any moving vehicles here. Our vaguely-Irish accented radio-operator bemoans the lack of any radio signal, and The Strong Independent Woman Who Is Also A Scientist decides they're going to set the chopper down and use a 'bullhorn'.
HELLO! They're flying a helicopter at low altitude over a city empty of humans. Basically, it's a FLYING ZOMBIE DINNER BELL!
Although there is a certain redundancy at work here as the sheer decibel count of the helicopter will bring zombies a-shambling to them BUT, by the same token, said sonic profile will catch the attention of any survivors. Art!
Strong Independent Woman and Disposable Boyfriend
Here is where we apply Conrad's sense of logic and hair-splitting pedantry.
Imagine, if you will, that you are a surviving community, isolated, barricaded, alone, having no contact with the outside world. You have been radio-silent for these many months (it's unclear how long after the Zombie Apocalypse SOTD is set), because you don't have anyone present who is skilled in radio comms. You exist partly on wits, barricades and a low profile.
SUDDENLY! a helicopter flies overhead.
Do you immediately drop all the protocols that have kept you alive and intact to this date and make your presence known? Even if you want to, do you have the signal-kit either ready or at hand? Remember in "Day Of The Triffids" Susan fired the lumber-pile with a flamethrower to attract the attention of a helicopter. Art!
Also, why do these people assume that any surviving communities WANT to communicate with other survivors? It's a lot easier to kill and rob others than it is to make it on your own (though this only works in the short run). As the series above showed, Hom. Sap. are often a bigger threat than an acre of the ravening undead. Art!
Ignore Pasquale! Ignore Pasquale!0
Yeah, about trying to communicate via radio. Broadcast and reception requires a lot of technology at both ends. If neither technology intermeshes then there is no integration or communication. There are also technical limitations due to wavelength, power, atmospherics and terrain, all of which militate against anyone communicating via radio. To be sure that you're attempting communication in a meaningful manner, you'd need a three-person team working twenty-four seven, going up and down frequencies for weeks non-stop. Otherwise, just squawking into the ether for an hour a day is pointless. We never get to see the radio equipment that VIARO states has been rusting since the Second Unpleasantness, either. Art!
Probably a matte
The human voice can be heard at a maximum of 330 yards, and we'll credit the Horn Of Bull with the capacity to double that. Anyone beyond that voice range, presuming that they also failed to hear the VERY LOUD helicopter cannot hear them. Assuming that the circle they are calling into is 330 yards radius, that's about 340,000 square yards, which sounds like a lot but is only about one-tenth of a square mile. They do this stunt once and once only, in a city the size of say, O, Tallahassee, which covers over one hundred and sixty square miles. You can tell they didn't have a Conrad on their planning team, can't you? Art!
Ignore Salah! Ignore Salah!
Also, bear in mind that this Banging The Zombie Chow Bell brings all the shambling undead onto the streets, attempting to congregate on the sonic source, so if there were any survivors out there, Congratulations! there is now a zombie horde between them and any attempt to Get To Ze Choppah. Art!
Props to George
Aha! This skeleton gives us a bit of a time-line, as the process takes between four to six months; given the state of the derelict and abandoned cars, more like six months plus. Art!
There's no great emphasis on this short scene, I just wanted to highlight either a very well-trained alligator or a very brave stuntman, or a combination of the two. More appositely, this demonstrates that shouting loudly at ground level will INEVITABLY attract zombies, so why don't they use silent visual means of communication? Again, in "Day Of The Triffids" the cluster of survivors at the University used a light signal at night to attract the attention of sighted survivors.
What they ought to be doing is dropping, or landing to set up, interactive signs with contact data, possibly having a movable part that cannot be changed by weather, such as a riveted arrow pointing up or down. If they come back and the arrow direction has changed - congrats, you've found survivors!
Of course, I could be overthinking this...
"The War Illustrated"
Time for more time-critical photography. Art!
D-Day begins to feature in the magazine's pages at last. Those ugly vehicles at top are Morris 'Quad's, an artillery towing vehicle that was usually dragging a 25-pounder field gun and a limber full of shells. At port you can see Ike chatting to a group of British American soldiers (Canuckistanians to you), and at bottom are a few small dumps of artillery ammunition to be used shortly to make the Teuton's day more miserable.
You can't read the text, but it includes a blatant lie from Winnie, that the D-Day landings were only the first of a series of such that were going to be repeated elsewhere. Utter bosh, of course, but we can't have the Teutons knowing the truth, can we?
"City In The Sky"
The Doctor has arrived in the murdered community of Forrest, looking to judge what really happened in what was plainly (to him) not a bush fire.
The shuttlecraft windows were gone, melted
and puddled on the craft’s exterior, and spatters of solidified metal sat under
the hull, where the alloys had run when molten.
The interior was blackened and rancid; the Doctor didn’t bother to give
it more than a passing glance. When he
walked around the hull, the ground crunched underfoot. Stooping to examine, he discovered a ring of
earth burned almost to glass about the Dart.
‘Interesting,’ he mused, rubbing his chin.
Walking back across the sole main street, he noticed another anomaly:
looking back towards the crest he’d originally been looking from, the rear of
the burned buildings were significantly less damaged than their fronts. A tangle of carbon sticks proved, on closer
inspection, to be the friable, broken remains of a horse, still in harness.
Forming a clearer idea of what happened, he walked to the burned brush
that surrounded the graveyard town, standing on tiptoe to look eastwards, then
wet a finger and held it up to test wind strength and direction. He carefully walked along the perimeter of
sooty stumps, checking growth patterns until the sun began to settle.
He's clearly onto something. But what?
Enough text! More pictures!
That List Of Kit To Be Dissed
I am now able to get the page to load again, so have at it, Art!
The review is quite rightfully scornful about this ridiculous piece of kit. Yeah, the pancakes it makes are cool and groovy, except how many are you going to make and eat? To get your money's worth out of it you'll be eating three helpings of arty pancakes five times a day. For people with too much money and too little common sense.
Finally -
Time to put my Skechers on and hike into Lesser Sodom to see what remaindered goodies the Co-Op has, and to get a few special ingredients for a Secret Plan ...
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