You Might Be a Zombie . . . (11 page)

The larvae themselves pass through the stomach undigested, sometimes surviving long enough to breed in the intestine, where they attempt to bore through the wall s, causing vomiting and bloody diarrhea.

Wait, it gets worse . . .

This cheese is a delicacy in Sardinia, where it is il egal. Yep. It is il egal in the only place where people actually want to eat it. If this does not communicate a very clear message, perhaps the larvae will , as they leap desperately toward your face to escape the putrescent horror of the only home they have ever known. Even the cheese itself is ashamed; when prodded, it weeps an odorous liquid called
lagrima
, Italian for “tears.”

Danger of this turning up in America

If the cheese companies have a lot of maggot stock in the back of their warehouses that they’d like to get rid of, why not? Self-loathing is a powerful force in this economy (see the diet section of your local supermarket).

4. ESCAMOLES

From: Mexico

What the hell is it?

Escamoles
are the eggs of a giant black ant (
Liometopum apiculatum
) that makes its home in the root systems of maguey and agave plants. Col ecting the eggs is a uniquely unpleasant job, since the ants are highly venomous and apparently have some sort of grudge against human orifices.

The eggs have the consistency of cottage cheese. The most popular way to eat them is in a taco with guacamole, while insane.

Wait, it gets worse . . .

Escamoles
have a surprisingly pleasant taste: buttery and slightly nutty. This hugely increases the chances that, while in Mexico, you could eat them without realizing you are eating a taco ful of ant eggs.

Danger of this turning up in America

How wel do you really know what’s in that burrito? Americans have proven that they’l eat anything if you dress it up in some kind of friendly sounding, pseudo-Mexican name. Taco Bel sold a soft taco called the Gordita, which means “fat little girl” in Spanish. Cal them Zesty Rancho Antcheros, and we’d all be stuffing our faces with ant eggs.

3. LUTEFISK

From: Norway

What the hell is it?

Ahhh, lutefisk. After the larvae-ridden cheese, it’s a blessed relief to sample a clean, down-to-earth Scandinavian recipe.

A little too clean.

Lutefisk is a traditional Norwegian dish featuring cod that has been steeped for many days in a solution of lye, until its flesh is caustic enough to dissolve silver cutlery.

Wait, it gets worse . . .

For those of you who don’t know, lye (potassium hydroxide/ sodium hydroxide) is a powerful industrial chemical used for cleaning drains, kil ing plants, debudding cow horns, powering batteries, and by Santiago “the Stewmaker” Meza Lopez, dissolving over three hundred victims of his drug cartel.

Contact with lye can cause chemical burns, permanent scarring, blindness, or if you live in Norway, total deliciousness, assuming you’re able to pour it onto a herring without getting any on your face.

Danger of this turning up in America

It’s already here!
Shit! Lutefisk is already gaining popularity in America, presumably among the underserved serial kil er population looking to make sure they don’t waste an ounce of their latest victim.

2. PACHA

From: Iraq

What the hell is it?

Of all the dishes, this is the one most likely to be mistaken for a threatening message from the mob. It’s a sheep’s head. Boiled.

Wait, it gets worse . . .

Pacha
only reveals its terror gradual y. Sure, maybe you can get around the fact that you’re eating something with a face. But the more you eat it, the more bone is revealed, until you give a final burp and set your cutlery down beside a grinning ivory skul , its hol ow eye sockets staring back at you with a look of grim damnation.

No wonder Iraqis keep blowing themselves up. If every evening meal was a haunting festival of death, wouldn’t you?

Danger of this turning up in America

Tel people that sheep’s head contains some kind of enzyme that boosts your metabolism, and it’l be everywhere.

1. BALUT

From: the Philippines

What the hell is it?

Our journey of horror reaches its destination.
Balut
are duck eggs that have been incubated, often until the fetus is all feathery and beaky, and then boiled alive. The bones give the eggs a uniquely crunchy texture.

They are enjoyed in Cambodia, the Philippines, and the fifth and seventh circles of hell. They are typical y sold by street vendors at night, out of buckets of warm sand. You can spot the vendors because of their glowing red eyes and the faint, otherworldly sound of children screaming.

Wait, it gets worse . . .

Because you’re never going to look at an egg the same way. Every time you crack open an egg after experiencing
balut
, you will be half expecting a leathery wad of bird to come flopping out into the skil et.

Balut
is upsetting on about a half-dozen levels. Sure, all meat eaters know that the delicious chop used to belong to something cute and fluffy, which gamboled in the sun during the brief spring of its life. Most of the time, it’s easy not to give a shit. But when you’re biting into something that hasn’t even had a chance to see its mother’s face, it’s . . . different.

Danger of this turning up in America

If you live in the vicinity of a metropolitan area with a large Filipino population, it’s already here. Folks in central California can go to the Metzer Farms website and order up some “jumbo”
balut
for a dol ar a pop. If marketed properly, these eggs could be a damn good motivator. When you’ve looked death in the face at breakfast time, what the hel else can the day throw at you?

NOW
that it’s over, the cold war seems like a pretty anticlimactic conflict. No big public scares, no major disasters—but behind the scenes the shit was apparently hitting the fan so hard we half suspect the fan was the shit’s ungrateful stepchild. It’s hard to even count the many times we were within seconds of a nuclear holocaust, but we can certainly list off the five times when it was for the most retarded reasons.

5. THE CASE OF THE NUCLEAR “SUNBEAMS” VS. THE IRON-BALLED RUSSIAN

You are Stanislav Petrov, a Russian lieutenant colonel in command of your country’s early warning system. You’re sitting in your impenetrable bunker one evening when,
bam!
all your computers scream that America just went nuclear on you. Every protocol and years of training demand that in the event of a verifiable missile launch the commander in charge has to launch a counterattack.

A lesser man might’ve panicked, picked up the phone, and screamed,
“F**k America with missiles!”
but Petrov and his cast-iron bal s had other ideas.

How come we’re still alive?

Petrov had a “gut feeling” that the alert was a computer error and ordered the counterattack delayed. As he waited, more missiles appeared, enough to trigger an automatic alert to control. Headquarters called and begged Petrov to launch the counterstrike. He refused and simply waited as the blips came closer. Because you’re not reading this etched on the skin of a supermutant, you can probably guess the outcome: Petrov was right. It turns out that early warning satel ites had mistaken glare from the sun for missile exhaust plumes. Thanks to the hunch of one Russian with cojones like col apsed stars, that’s all now a moot point. His reward? A tiny pension, discharge, and a total cover-up. Sure that sounds shitty now, but keep in mind that back then Russians had to stand in line for four hours just for a kick in the junk; Petrov probably came away feeling whatever the Soviet equivalent of happy was. Unctuous?

4. THE CASE OF THE TEST SWITCH AND THE MISSING JIMMY

Aside from the ever-looming specter of nuclear holocaust, being an operator at NORAD was like any other boring security job. But November 9, 1979, was a bad day for the NORAD office. You know the kind—starts when somebody drinks the last of the coffee without starting a new pot and ends when the nuclear-death sirens go off, the shit-your-pants lights flash, and your boss panics so hard he completely forgets how radiation works and barricades the doors to “keep out the atoms, for Christ’s sake!”

On November 9, the computers at NORAD suddenly began to register dozens of incoming missiles. The attack was taken so seriously that the White House launched the Doomsday Plane (the 747 that serves as the pentagon’s mobile office in case of attack)
without
President Carter on board!

How come we’re still alive?

Common sense. After ten minutes of hand-wringing, someone final y had the idea to check the raw data coming straight from the satel ites themselves.

Sure enough, no missiles showed up. The strange part was that these fictional missiles weren’t just the random blips typical y associated with computer failure, they were
perfectly organized
, like textbook tactical . . . And that’s when it dawned on them: Some idiot from the previous shift loaded a “simulated attack” training tape into the computers and forgot to set the switch to “test.” The result was a terrifying missile scare at every Minuteman silo in the nation, the United States coming within moments of a nuclear strike, and Jimmy Carter’s sad realization that when shit really goes down, he gets left behind harder than the kid in
Home Alone
.

3. THE CASE OF THE BROKEN NUCLEAR ANSWERING MACHINE

During the cold war, the most likely source of an American first strike against Russia was a submarine in the waters near Norway, because a single nuke, detonated that far north of Soviet territory would blind the radar to the doomsday barrage launched from the continental United States. So you can forgive the Russian radar station that detected a missile launch from Norway on January 25, 1985, for getting just a smidge nukey. Things got an awful lot nukier once they saw it separate into what appeared to be several warheads, as is standard on Trident missiles. A missile from Norway would only take about ten minutes to hit Russia.

Ten minutes.

In the time it takes most of us to decide what to watch on TV, the Russians had to decide whether or not to end the entire world over a possible glitch.

The operators scrambled desperately to verify the information, and it came back as accurate. When they realized they were definitely seeing a real projectile, they sent an emergency signal to President Yeltsin’s “nuclear briefcase,” which is like getting to third base for Armageddon.

The cal went out and all forces stood at alert for the counterstrike. With only two minutes left to ground zero, the warheads suddenly dropped into the sea and disappeared.

How come we’re still alive?

Unlike the other instances, this was no computer glitch—it was an actual missile . . . just not a nuclear one; it was a scientific research rocket.

NASA had organized a rocket launch to study the northern lights.

And while it might seem a bit suicidal y reckless to launch a rocket from the most dangerous watch point on earth in the direction of a nuclear superpower in the midst of the cold war, it should be noted that NASA did warn everyone of their plans several weeks earlier. But what was Russia supposed to do? Write that shit down? Have you
seen
Russian writing?

How are we still alive?!

2. THE CASE OF THE NUCLEAR PLAYDATE

On November 2, 1983, a ten-day NATO war games exercise named Able Archer 83 began, and it was quite possibly the closest mankind has ever come to nuclear annihilation. That was also the year pop-metal band Europe raced up the charts with the hit single “The Final Countdown,” thereby proving that the people of 1983 were both ready for, and richly deserving of, complete obliteration.