02 November 2010

Cannibal apocolypse on Sunday nights at ten, and everyone's invited.


Probably, some of you are sort of like me. On Halloween night, enjoy the traditional holiday feast of a million fun size Snickers bars and pizza. The baseball ends, and then it's time to watch Breaking Bad, Sunday night at 10.

I know. I am a total loser. But if you're like me, then so are you.

Except then it's not even Breaking Bad on anymore. Our favorite meth dealers are still on hiatus, and while you are mourning where did Walter White go and Jesse sometimes a Mormon on Big Love but now rehabbed meth cooker with a heart of gold, it has turned into Mad Men. So you try to follow the Don Draper story and of course you love Sally and hate Pete and actually you sure do hate an awful lot of them which is the point as well as those low hanging, fluorescent panel ceilings.

And then, Don Draper is drying out for the season, and guess what 10pm family dad gone bad story we get now?


Zombies.

Not just any zombies. It is cannibal apocalypse on Sunday nights at 10pm and you're all invited! It's about time!

If you have a small dogs like mine, you are used to protecting them. From big dogs. Getting swept out into the surf. Falling off the SHEER CLIFF underneath where you just posed them on a log. And, if they're like Gustavo, from dead people. Or the undead. So zombies, even though they're so 2008, are actually a big part of my life over here in Team Small Dog land, and it's nice to finally have a tv show dedicated to their killing. By smashing their brains. You got to get the brains.

In case you missed the first episode of The Walking Dead Halloween night, because you actually have a life and were out there in the Halloween fray, drinking under the flooodlights of the cop choppers that were patrolling all night in my neighborhood, let me get you up to speed.


So it starts out the same as Emergency Squad 51. Randolph Mantooth and Kevin Tighe are teamed up again, and yes. Randolph Mantooth has a special necklace. Although not soaked in titanium which I thought was surprising but anyways. They are cops now, living in, you guessed it, Kentucky. Really, these days, it all boils down to Kentucky. They are good buddy partners and talk about their feelings.

And then Kevin Tighe gets shot while filming an episode of Smokey and the Bandit and goes into a coma and when he wakes up, cannibal apocolypse has occurred, right outside his hospital room! Luckily, being in a coma for, I am going to say 2 weeks, he was so quiet that the zombies somehow missed him and when he snaps out of his coma and finds out that he's really at a haunted tuberculosis sanitorium, bodies strewn willy nilly galore and boy is he confused.

If you do not like flesh eating, blood spattering heads, and so forth, you may not like this show. You can probably stop reading this now.


After a perplexing underwear shambling romp through post cannibal apocalypse undead corpses to his pre cannibal apocalypse neighborhood which I am pretty sure has been featured on House Hunters, the soothing real estate show you could watch on a neighboring channel if you don't like flesh eating, Kevin meets Walt from Lost, not to be confused with Walter White from Breaking Bad. Walt from Lost is black and is a shovel wielding kid, and Walt's dad becomes Kevin's buddy for a while and educates him to the world of zombies, known here as Walkers. It would behoove you to drop that nineteenth tiny Snicker's bar and pay attention at this point. These are somewhat different than some of the regular zombies that you're used to. There can be a zombie fever. And one of the walkers is even Tara's mom from True Blood. Which you can also watch on Sunday nights, if you get HBO. We don't. So there's no conflicts here.


Kevin Tighe turns into Dennis Weaver and McClouds his way to Atlanta to look for his family with a whole duffel bag of assault weapons. Because he's a dad gone bad since it's Sunday night. But it's not really his fault. Sort of like when Walter White got cancer. There's not a lot you can do to combat zombie apocalypse. During his journey, through the magic of tv, we see that Randolph Mantooth is alive and well in a zombie-free homeless camp and has now turned into one of those Jersey Shore guys and has glamoured Kevin's wife who, even during cannibal apocalypse has managed to totally wear cute boots.


Unfortunately, Kevin Tighe doesn't know about the trailer park yet and has ended up in totally Zombie infested Atlanta. His horse gets completely flesh eaten by zombies. You hear crunchy munching. Luckily for Kevin, yet unlucky for the entire army which has also been cannibalized or zombieized, there's a spare tank he can take refuge in, and this is where the camera leaves us. A slow pan up to a helicopter, of a zombie swarm like maggots, trying to make their way into the tank and reducing that poor sweet Appy to bones.


Help us all.

7 comments:

KristineD said...

O...M...G... I used to love, Love, LOVE Emergency Squad 51. I had a huge crush on those guys, even though I was only 7. I haven't thought about them in ages!

I think Gage and DeSoto are way cooler than Ponch and Jon from CHiPs.

Anonymous said...

i can so feel your pain. i have a small dog, who sees, not zombies, more like evil machines that will eat her. these machines are in the shape of a teeter, which is also her favorite thing to do when it is not an evil machine. the way she can tell it's evil is by running to it with enthusiasm, then touching the plank. no machine, run it. machine, run away, tuck tail and run. nothing like prairie dogs, which are run and catch. apparently the teeter is a shape shifter. not always, though. days, weeks even, can pass without the evil transformation. rhymes and reasons not visible to the naked eye.
i also have a dog who loves to run anywhere, any time. she sets the fun bar pretty high for me.
what did i do? well, this is tough medicine to swallow.
i gave up, and i run the one who loves to run always.
did i quit on my small dog? no way. do we train? you bet. i just gave up my expectations. she is who she is. she has her own special gifts. is agility one of them? i dunno. she's definitely fast, but that doesn't mean she is destined to run agility. do i expect to compete with her? maybe, if she proves she can't live without it. she travels to the beat of the proverbial different drum, but i'm setting the bar high for her, too. she deserves it.
of course all this goes against good training, setting goals, expecting the best...
whoa, is this, like, therapy? i'd best shut up now and go train.
valpig

Elf said...

I'm thinking about this. I have a slight history of slowing my dogs down by letting them know too much [for them] when they make mistakes. I try to convince them that they're never making mistakes, but there are some things that are more rewarding than others. (I don't always succeed at that, but I try.) You know who's good at always looking positive with the dogs? Sarah Johnson. I haven't seen her in training, though, but no matter whose dog she's running, they always think they're the fastest, cleverest dogs on the course no matter what they do and, as a result, they are.

(And the dogs can be self-correcting, too, without much of an effort on your part. And just like people, different dogs have different tolerance for failure. Sounds like G has very low tolerance for the slightest failure in his mind. Anyway, I'm thinking about this.)

Elf said...

Here's an interesting article I just found out about this morning. Basically: It takes energy to obey commands, and it takes energy to keep on trying to accomplish something. Maybe gustavo needs more food before and during training?

Elf said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Elf said...

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=dog-tired

team small dog said...

Gustavo just has his ups and downs. He has good weeks and bad weeks. This was one of those bad weeks. He had a walk where he couldn't even look at me or take a treat. We had a rough practice on zombie day where he's just bolt off occassionally. He had a rough powerpaws class last night where he had a couple meltdowns over one particular border collie, and a couple zombie bolts across the field when I made an error again.

Some weeks he just regresses. This is one of those weeks.

The food theory is interesting, that's been suggested to me before. Last night we did go to class straight from work and the dogs were hungry. But the day before we practiced in the morning after breakfast and he was pretty much the same. And some days, he won't even take food from me when he gets wound up. Other times, he eats tons while he's training.

I dunno. Gustavo is Gustavo. I wish he only had good weeks. But maybe if I can learn to be a better handler, we'll have fewer errors and more successes.