Zombie Survival Guide

Here at Familiar To Few HQ, there is an undeniable sense of dread tonight. As well as the obvious menace of spine-chilling children, requesting confectionery every five minutes (little do they know, that jar of Haribo on the side is at least six years past it’s sell by date), and ingeniously drunk students dressed as condoms haunting every nook and cranny in town, there is one even more drastic threat to making this day even less bearable than usual. Zombies.

Like every mystic Star Wars hero, I have a bad feeling about this evening. The uneasiness may be stemming from that Wetherspoon’s bacteria filled Sunday Roast, slowly churning through my digestive system, or it could just be the copious amount of alcohol I consumed last night, But my intuition tells me that this Halloween will be generally more apocalyptic than most.

Having completed Left 4 Dead several times, I’m fairly confident I could endure the average Zombie attack, but of course it makes sense for me to help keep the Zombie count as low as possible. So to keep numbers of the living high I’ve devised a few tips and hints, in order to assist any of the lesser prepared amongst you.

1) Pray them Mother Fuckers can’t run.

These Zombies are fucking Hacking man!

God I hate it when they do. Look Zombies are recently animated corpses, so logic states that there movements will be quite slow and sluggish – around a one mph average speed would be a fair estimate. Now consider the average Human being walks at about three mph, than this should already make it relatively unfair on the walking dead. So as long as people just keep about their business in an orderly way, than we should have nothing to worry about . In fact anyone who is stupid enough to find themselves in a situation where they have actually become encircled by Zombies, then they deserve to die, then come back to life again, only to scoff on brains, if you get what I mean.

On the other hand, if this outbreak is more avant-garde themed (i.e. even the morbidly obese Zombies make Usain Bolt look like a sloth), then this makes things slightly more difficult. In which case find someone with a shotgun, make lots of Molotov Cocktails, and prepare yourself for the biggest gore fest since Battle Royale.

2) Leave the “less able”, they’ll only slow you down.

Do indirectly help others however.

This means say goodbye to grandma, forget wasting your time with the crippled neighbours, and don’t bother feeding Ziggy the Hamster. All of the given examples and many more are only going to hinder your progress through the waves of phantoms. Please refuse to be the hero; grandma will think slippers are suitable running attire, the cripples will get their walking sticks stuck in a roadside drain, and carrying Ziggy means less limbs for wielding weapons. They are all going to die in a slow and painful manner, but don’t worry though they’ll be utterly shit Zombies so you won’t have to worry yourself with them instigating vengeance.

3) Commandeer a vehicle (preferably sealed).

Having access to a Car, Tractor, or a Tank will greatly improve your chances of surviving a Halloween rise of the dead. Anything with more than two wheels will be advantageous by (a) greatly improving your rate of movement (Even a 1.0l Daewoo is slightly faster than walking), (b) become a highly effective killing tool (Tank vs Zombie, Tank wins), (c) make your encounter with the undead a lot more comfortable and generally more enjoyable (imagine mauling clusters of ghouls with AC/DC blaring out of the nearest speaker).

 

Not a suitable get-away vehicle.

Please don’t try to be clever. Driving around on a motorbike whilst swinging a machete around your head will not end up well.

 

The extra fortunate amongst you, may have access to a Helicopter, Plane, Balloon, or other air faring machine. The same can be said for people who have the opportunity to use Boats, Surfboards, and Lilos. These are all extra inventive escape routes and luckily for you no Zombie has ever been recorded Flying or Swimming.

4) If the situation looks bleak, reach for the Medicine cabinet.

I can imagine life as one of the living dead becomes very monotonous in a very short space of time. Eating chunks out of loved ones is not how I’d like to spend the rest of eternity/until I get carved in two by a insane recluse with a Chainsaw. If the battle appears to be turning against you, it’s better for not only others, but yourself, if you just end it all. This can be done by an overdose of anything found in a bathroom cupboard such as; sleeping pills, Listerine, and Viagra. Alternatively just impale your face on the pointy tips of any Topman branded shoe.

However try and be as imaginative as you wish, and try and take a couple of Zombies with you.

Value booze ahoy!

Online Banking is often a mixed bag. Sure you can conveniently pay your landlord without having to desperately seek out stamps and envelopes, like a Premiership star trying to find the get out clause in his contract, when things stop going their way. But on the other hand, you can sometimes get caught off guard once the dire situation of your bank balance comes to light. The man who invented the overdraft, deserved to be named a saint by The Pope this week.

It’s during these pressing moments in time that a University student has two choices. Option A) Avoid all social contact with the outside world for the remainder of the term; this way one shan’t be tempted in divulging into evenings away from home, which usually involve large amounts of cash being diverted to the bar, money can then be rationed for more important things like food, and DVDs of the WWF ‘Attitude’ era. Or Option B) Reach for the red and blue stripey alcohol!

As well as selling cigarettes and the worlds hottest chillies, Tesco offer a variety of bargain booze, under their ‘Value’ banner. And when some of it is cheaper than water, why should we refuse it?

Tesco Value Lager.

Gazza fixes everything with Tesco Value.

So we begin with this classy little number from the supermarket giants. It looks like beer, it smells like beer, but that’s where the similarities end I’m afraid. Weighing in at a feeble 2%, you’d have to down about twenty of them before you started to find your second cousin vaguely attractive. The good news is that buying twenty of them won’t be a problem, seeing as they cost around 25 pence a can, making it one of the cheapest drinks available in Tescos. Sure you either have to be twelve or need the body mass of Victoria Beckham for it to make you even remotely tipsy. Sure it tastes like sink water. Sure you’ll be committing social suicide just to be seen drinking it. But you still want to try it. Don’t you?

Tesco Value Cider.

Warning: may cause extremely abnormal belly growth in women.

Moving onto a beverage slightly more honorable; Tesco also have stripy dry cider for your pleasure. It’s devlivered in a rather unspectacular plastic bottle, with an small silhouette on the back of a pregnant women drinking, what I assume is, the product in question. This woman appears with a large cross over her face and bulge, which could be signifying her misery at being pregnant, but is more likely telling us that drinking this will almost certainly lead to your unborn child becoming an alcoholic in their later life. In all seriousness though I highly recommend (not the whole drinking whilst pregnant thing) the 4.2% drink of the gods. This stuff is brilliant with some Tesco Value blackcurrant squash, and drinking a whole £1.30, two litre bottle, will almost certainly get you pissed.

Tesco Value Wine

It’s the blood of Christ, at £3 a liter. What more could you want?

Disclaimer: May not be actual branding for Tesco Value Wine.

Tesco Value Vodka

Lets be honest. Vodka has never been a drink that anyone has bought for taste. It was invented by a group of Estonians, probably at the center of a tragic conflict, who wanted to get shit faced as quickly and cheaply as humanly possible. Tesco carry on this strong Vodka tradition with this outing. Working out at around £8 per 70cl, it’s not significantly cheaper than branded vodkas like Red Square, but at the same time you will be able to spend them extra pennies on some mixer to make this stuff drinkable. The thing is, Tesco Value Vodka tastes no worse than the likes of Smirnoff, Eristoff, or Lenin’s own blood, and yet still remains at a barley legal 37.5%. On the down side however, It probably is a causative agent for Pancreas Inflammation.

The world would be a better place with a shot of Vodka in every students’ cereal, and a crate of Beer in place of every offices’ water cooler. Remember drinking responsibly is for squares.

Why I should not be allowed to be a parent.

It’s early September, which before I was 18 was a time of great annoyance. September used to bring the start of a long school year; ten months of worrying about exams, eating terrible school dinners, falling asleep during Geography and getting beaten to a pulp. Once the supposedly difficult and stressful exam period in ones lives is out the way however, September calls fourth a new age of excitement and a sense of prosperity, for September is the beginning of a fresh year of University living (unless you sucked in your exams of course). September now ushers the dawn of ten months of dossing off, whilst ‘meeting new people’ (which to any parents reading, is code for getting plastered on a bi-weekly basis).

However this September is different to all those bygone years, which all now quiet frankly feel irrelevant. Because this September is the beginning of an end. September is the inception of my third and final year of university. Ten months of worrying what the hell to do with my life once this experience is over. Now I don’t mean to get over impassioned, I may by all means decide to prolong this undertaking of responsibility by committing another year of my life to do a masters degree, but there is no escaping the inevitable future of dreaded maturity.

Thinking is something we do best, as a species I mean. It’s what separates us from the animals, insects and Emile Heskeys of the world. Over this summer I’ve had a lot of time to do just that; think about what to do after university is over, think about what Countries I would like to visit, think about what spices best go into a Prawn curry. At one point over the summer I even found myself in deep, drunken conversation with my father, when the question ‘Do I want children when I am older?’ materialized.

*Insert statement which is derogatory to Emile Heskey's intelligence here*

I didn’t give a straight answer at the time, but after much deliberation I’ve concluded that yes I would like children when I’m older. However it’s probably best that I don’t.

I deduced that I could not be a good parent. I will rationally blame the modern time we live in for my lack of fatherly skills, living in the world of advanced technology (but not as advanced as tomorrow’s world) brings some handicaps that have affected me more than most. From the age of four I played Super Mario World at a time when most kids where playing football or stuffing popping candy up their nose. As soon as my innocent little hands took grip of the overly uncomfortable SNES controller, my life drastically shifted course. Even though I do now have the reactions of a African Gazelle and the deciphering ability of Sherlock Holmes, I currently find myself with the attention span of a Goldfish with Attention Deficit Disorder.

It’s not just the video games that have caused it, but the internet as well. In a time when someone can find out the capital of Armenia in seconds (which is actually Yerevan, if anyone was interested) or purchase land on Venus in minutes, who wants to be left behind on this concord of Science. Anyone who is used to everything being this fast, would simply not have the patience to persevere through the many years of hard work that is needed to develop an infant. Thanks to my upbringing (which I’m not blaming on my parents in a kind of “FUCK YOU MUM AND DAD, NOW SASQUATCH CAN PLAY HALO” kind of way) I would expect my young one to explain Einstein’s theory of relativity, before they reached year two and demand that they were playing Premiership football before the age of Eight.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d be great at every other aspect of parenting; I’m energetic, I love reading, I can cook and I’m not scared of spiders, but just like those bastards from the Dragon’s Den, I’d want a quick return on my invested time and money. Because isn’t that the whole point of having children: having a soul to look after and care for you when you’re aged, forgetting anything prior the past hour and pissing yourself. If I were to see my kids through three years university, I’d expect them to be jetting me around the world, free of charge, withing the same time period.

Which is kind of where I’m at with my parents now: because within three years of next June, they are planning to be cruising around the Indian Ocean, sipping Cocktails, whilst receiving a full body massage and being entertained by Tom Jones; all courtesy of yours truly.

Saturday Night Fever.

How my mind remembers the evening.

Alas, another weekend has passed us by and for me it was the usual blurry haze of people dancing around me, before I take a step outside to puke my guts up and see the remnants of, what was 7 hours earlier, beans on toast. I consider myself a healthy individual, but my one flaw is that I drink far too much alcohol. Last night seemed to be a specially over exuberant one for me however, because this morning I woke up after nine hours sleep, feeling worse than a recovering heroin addict and with about as much life as a donkey in a coma. I felt brilliant at about 2am last night, them rotten beans can surely be the only culprit for my condition.

After coming vaguely to my senses however, I realised that it was probably the copious amount of Corona I drank yesterevening, the only way I’d be able to do something vaguely productive with the day would be from divine intervention, or a quick hangover remedy. I queasily lunged for my Mac book, entered ‘hangover cures’ into Google and hoped for the best. Here are some of my favourite suggestions.

Honey – I was advised to take “2-6 teaspoonfuls of honey every twenty minutes upon awaking, depending on the severity of the hangover. Continue with the honey until you start to feel better, then take four teaspoonfuls with your first meal.” By the end of the end of the first hour I felt even worse, this much of anything Tesco Value could have no benefit for my health. I could feel the spots from Acne I previously suffered from, screaming back to life from the abundant sugar levels in my blood stream and I had a desire to just run for an extended period of time, don’t even get me started on the low I had later.

What I would have done for a Smithers this morning.

Scalp Stimulation – I really had nothing to lose from simply massaging my own skull, apart from if someone walked in on me doing it. Trying to explain to someone that I was trying to bring blood to the back of my head in order to relieve myself of a headache sent by the demons of hell itself, probably wasn’t something I could pull off in my state. You never know though, they might have felt obliged to join in, grasping my head in a Mr Smithers pleasuring Monty Burns kind of way (I couldn’t think of a better way of putting it). Anyway, it didn’t work and just made a bit of hair fall out.

Peppermint – I’m not the kind of person who keeps many herbs around the house, but I am a man who likes to keep a pack of Polos on him from time to time. Being the next logical thing to Peppermint, I quickly downed about half a packet in less then ten minutes. There was no effect apart from I was complemented for my very fresh and minty breath.

At least I decided against that trip to Thorpe Park.

Exercise – I really wanted to skip this suggestion, but I was assured that exercise “will help get rid of your hangover by helping the body rid itself of toxins. The increased circulation gets blood and oxygen to your oxygen-starved brain.” So with much hesitation I decided to go for a brisk walk in the sun. After 10 minutes I decided that I wasn’t feeling a great deal better, maybe a more intense work out was in order. My stroll turned into a run, then a sprint then another session of puking more than Paris Hilton does when she indulges in a carrot. Another failure.

Kudzu extract – I didn’t know what this was, so I decided against endeavoring into the unknown.

Kidney Dialysis – A solution put forward by the BBC website. Possibly the most extreme hangover cure imaginable short of dissecting your brain for comfortable numbness. Sure this is a proven method but with two major flaws for the common student. First of all funding becomes an issue when trying to attempt this method and I doubt that even if I had hit the Lottery Rollover jackpot last night, that Dialysis machines can be readily bought from Argos. I’m not entirely sure if the NHS has a 24 hour Dialysis clinic either.

So in conclusion here’s my top tip. Just don’t drink.