For purely business reasons when I had to play doting yayo to a foreign counterpart, I was on forced hiatus for the past week. Millions are tuned in to the tapes that would end all tapes (and maybe, a political career too). I've been mulling too, silently like a geisha while in the middle of my ward's epistles, on the prospects of another people power. Haven't we, at one time been perceived by the rest of the world as the hardest place to be a president? Changing terms like we're changing cellphone housings when we're out with the old? Or fed up, to be exact, when it's been forced upon us? We are not zombies anyway.

Ok ba sa intro?

We've seen them in Michael Jackson's "Thriller" MTV, consuming tons of corn flakes as makeup to mimic rotting flesh. It's the zombie stereotype--arms forward while marching and circling their victim, who would later on become another zombie. "Thriller" wasn't the first. In 1968, "Night of the Living Dead" and its 1978 sequel "Dawn of the Dead", paved the way for the typical household zombie, with a bullet to the head the only way to kill it. Then there was the "Return of the Living Dead" trilogy during the 80's which portrayed zombies out to consume human brains, picky as they were which set them apart from the cannibalistic undead of old.

It's been said that zombies exist in real life, and we're not counting the cube-dwelling engineers just yet. There had been reports in Haiti of persons who have been brought back from the dead and were employed (yet unpaid) as plantation workers back in the 19th century. These zombies can eat, hear and speak, but have no memory of their previous life. To make one a zombie according to Wade Davis, an ethnobiologist who researched on the Haitian zombie, first, make them "dead" then make them "mad". Now here's the recipe.

Ingredients: toad skin, puffer fish, datura
Equipment: funeral tableau, witch doctor paraphernalia

Make them dead...

Mix the skin of a common toad (Bufo bufo bufo) and puffer fish (known in Japan as fugo) and put it in your victim's food or rub it in the soft part inside the arm just above the elbow.
Wait for victim to breath slowly. Ensure faint heartbeat.
Recite some chant for effect and fanfare.
Bury asap and dig after eight hours (victim may die of asphyxiation).

...then make them mad.

Force-feed your zombie-in-waiting with a paste made from datura (Jimson's weed).
Sell to sugar plantations as slave labor.
Feed with datura when zombie seems to regain senses.

The skin of the common toad is deadly, containing biogenic amines, bufogenine and bufotoxins. These are pain-killing substances far stronger than cocaine. Pufferfish on the other hand contains tetrodotoxin which decreases the body temperature and blood pressure, putting the victim into a deep coma. Datura contains atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine, which can act as powerful hallucinogens. This paste has to be skillfully administered so that the witch doctor won't kill the victim.

I'm not sure if these ingredients are locally-available, but with the Independence weekend and the events which unfold everyday courtesy of PCIJ and MLQ3 true-grit feeds, would you rather not regain your senses, and go back to a specific February week in 1986, dancing in the streets after the dictator left, never knowing that it would be worse in the next nineteen years?

References:

Great Moments in Science
Death Central
Wikipedia on Zombies

Fine print: I'm not espousing zombiism or the occult. This post is intended to let ordinary folks understand what common media has been feeding us over the years. Dr. Zombie's zombies are the product of artificial intelligence, as I speculate. Those in the movies have been irradiated with unknown energies from outer space. Like religion, there is science behind everything.

Kids, don't try this at home, even if you have stock of the ingredients mentioned.

This entry was posted by sky, on Tuesday, June 14, 2005. You can leave your response.