Holy fuck, it's zombies...

  The lobby of our building is... was fronted in glass. The guy in the cubicle next to came running back into the office saying that he went down there trying to go home, and there was a bunch of them milling around outside. When they saw him come out of the elevator, they crushed themselves up against the glass and it collapsed. He barely got back into the elevator.

  We've got the elevators shut down, and we stuffed the stairway full of everything we could get our hands on. We're taking shifts keeping lookout on the roof, watching for possible incursion and/or rescue.

  As long as it stays on, we've got water. Food is another story...



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Local:
  People are leaving. I heard a few people talking about going home, but I didn't really notice how many. I just looked around the office, and it looks like barely half of us are still here. The rest of us aren't getting any work done. Some people are standing around speculating, others (like me) are searching for information online.

  Things are getting even weirder out on the street. People are wandering around like they're stoned. I wonder how much weed it would take to bake an entire city block...

Wider:
  It's not just Philly. I'm finding reports of odd stuff from all over the place. The "real" news is almost useless. They're talking around it, reporting on traffic jams and other stuff. What I'm finding online, though, is just crazy. Blogs from all over are calling it zombies. Zombies? I'm all for creative hysteria, but come on.



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Just got a call from my wife

  Things are still weird in Fishtown. She's hearing a lot of sirens, and seen people running around. Worst of all, she thinks she's heard gunfire too. She's scared, and so am I. We talked seriously about boarding up the windows on the first floor.

  I'd so much rather be there than here. Not only would I be with my wife, but we've got some food and bottled water stashed in the basement, in case this turns out to be something really serious.



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Holy crap...

  I think there's a riot going on somewhere. I keep seeing people running, and the police station across the street is going nuts. Cars every few seconds, and...

okay, I'm almost certain I just heard gunshots from down there. I'm up on the fifth floor, so I guess it could have been a car backfiring, but I don't think so.



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So distracting...

  Man, all of downtown hates me this morning. Sirens, people yelling, drivers laying on horns like they're dispensing candy. I can't even begin to concentrate...



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Oh, man.

  This day just keeps getting odder. The local news station is saying that the blue line is shut down because there was an accident on one of the trains. I hope they get it straightened out before I have to go home. I don't relish having to walk home from Center City.



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Weirdness ensues.

  The weirdness started on my way to the train this morning. I've been walking to the train almost every morning for nine months, and I noticed for the first time that there's a funeral home about two blocks from our house! It's in an average rowhouse sized space; the exterior is so nondescript, and the sign so small and bland, that it just never registered.

  So this morning as I'm walking past it, I hear this scream, like somebody getting stabbed. I snapped out of my usual morning sleepwalk, and my eyes caught the sign. I listened for a minute, but I didn't hear anything else, so I decided to get going.

  When I got to the station, another totally random thing happened. After just missing the first train (of course!), I was sitting on the platform, and this guy comes walking up and asks if I have a band-aid. I said no, and he says that a homeless guy bit him! He showed me this wound on his upper arm, and I'll be damned if it didn't look like a bite mark. Because of my pack-rat tendencies, I had a big wad of convenience store napkins in my bag, so I gave him those so he could at least cover the wound. He said he had a first-aid kit at work, so I figured that would hold him until he got there.

  He wandered away and sat down, and I got absorbed in the silly little train station newspaper. We got on the train when it came a few minutes later. When I got off in Center City, I happened to catch sight of him, and he didn't look so hot. He was awfully pale, and his head was nodding like he was about to pass out. I think maybe he was in some kind of shock. I felt bad leaving him there, but I was on the verge of being late, and I'm so NOT a doctor that I'm kind of anti-matter doctor; anything I do tends to make things worse. Besides, there were a bunch of people on the train already, so I figure somebody would help him out if he got any worse.

I'm going to do this tomorrow.

  Click on the picture if you want to join in the fun.

The SEPTA Situation is Even More Dire than I Suspected

  I got to the Huntingdon station on the Market-Frankford line at about 2:10 this afternoon. Typically, I missed the train by about 45 seconds, but that's a different rant. When I got to the top of the stairs, the booth which usually houses the helpful*, attentive** SEPTA employee was dark and empty. A cardboard sign stuck in the window read "USE BIG GATE TO LEFT," and included three helpful arrows for riders like myself who, on the verge of heatstroke from walking to the train through the soup that is the summer in Philly, had a little trouble focusing on the words.

  I live and die by the Blue Line, so I've observed plenty of SEPTA's worker drones. I know that they're usually stuck in a tiny booth by themselves for hours at a time, and I don't begrudge one of them needing to take a bathroom/snack/smoke break, especially when they leave the gate unlocked so riders who show up while they're out of the booth can get to the platform. They get to take care of their basic biological functions, and I save a token. However, when I reached the gate area, the newly-returned attendant was berating a man who was having trouble going through the gate. He couldn't get it to open, and she was rudely directing him to the open gate. Which was on the far right. The best part? Her parting shot at he went through the gate was "that's what it say on the sign!"

  Apparently, the transit organization can't even afford to hire people who know which hand makes the "L" when you stick out your thumb. I am suddenly in favor of casinos, if the state will promise to dedicate some of the revenue to ensuring all SEPTA workers have a first grade education.



*unhelpful **inattentive

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Where can I find Trolling Fundies?
- Recreant/Miscreant

Dear R/M,
  Any time a website comment warns you that you're going to hell, you've met a Trolling Fundy. Whenever a forum post compares the discussion topic to Sodom (or its less famous, but still rockin' sister city, Gomorrah), you've met a Trolling Fundy. When your blog host suddenly deletes hundreds of journals and communities that post fiction with naughty words in, chances are they did so at the behest of one or more Trolling Fundies.

  Trolling Fundies - short for "fundamentalists" - lurk around areas of the Interweb that they consider unsavory, clucking disapprovingly and keeping careful notes about exactly how many times Draco spanks Harry's bare ass in your fan fiction community. At best, they'll prissily opine about the danger to the souls of those who share your particular interest. At worst, they'll take it upon themselves to report you to whatever authority is at hand. If your forum or blog host handles content inquiries as badly as Livejournal/Six Apart's recent mass banning kerfluffle, the Trolling Fundy might cause you serious inconvenience.

  Unfortunately, there is no surefire way to guard against an infestation of Trolling Fundies. Unlike cockroaches, which die when you stomp on them, Trolling Fundies have a nasty way of returning after being banned/blocked/publicly ridiculed. The sad fact is, if you want to maintain a public presence online, and you aren't willing to keep it G-rated, you're subject to attack by Trolling Fundies. Welcome to the Internet in the new age of morality.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Where has all the rum gone?
- Capt. JS

Dear Capt.,
  I used it to host a Pirates Of The Caribbean drinking game. It's very simple; put on the first film of the trilogy, and drink every time someone says the word "pirate." Most of my guests were dead from alcohol poisoning by the end of the second reel.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  If I stalk you, would you call the cops?
- Right Behind You

Dear Right Behind You,
  Only if you're incompetent. A SKILLED stalker should be able to follow me around, taking secret photos and retrieving discarded items to add to the shrine, without being detected. The stalkers that get caught are the ones who can't learn to follow at a safe distance, who foolishly crave "actual" (as opposed to "completely imaginary") interaction with the objects of their obsession.

  Alternatively, you can get three friends and some cameras and call yourselves "paparazzi." Then you can be as intrusive and disruptive as you want, photographing even my most private moments, and it will all be legal. The trade-off, of course, is that you'll be a gigantic scumbag; if you have even a shred of humanity left, you'll cry yourself to sleep at night after masturbating over the more candid shots. So think it over, and listen to your heart. Only you can decide what kind of scary, obsessive weirdness is most fulfilling for you.

  Note to self - purchase large handgun.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Why do you have so many Askers of the Bastard named Jen(n)?
- An anonymous non-Jen(n) entity

Dear A.N.J.E.,
  In order to ensure that I receive a sufficient volume of questions to answer, I've obtained an army of clones. I keep them in my basement, and I only feed them when they come up with a suitable question. I just wasn't very creative when it came to naming them.

How did I not know about this?

  Talented (and scarily prolific) artist/writer Brad Guigar's Eisner nominated webcomic Phables is a weekly about living in Philadelphia! It's funny and thoughtful, and the "wow, he nailed it" moments come fast and furious. If you've ever spent any time in or around the City of Barely Concealed Misanthropy, you'll appreciate Guigar's take. I'll race you through the archives. A clue; you'll lose.

Dear Little Bald Bastard,
  Why are "word verifications" on websites not real words?
- Jenn

Dear Jenn,
  It's part of a conspiracy to keep hard working, tax paying robots from romping through the fetid swampland of frantic, irrationally solipsistic discourse that is the comments area of most websites. The shadowy technocracy that secretly controls the Internet is desperately trying to keep our mechanical creations from experiencing this most horribly interactive facet of the online experience.

  Your average robot, or Silicon American, can bench press a train engine, outrun a speeding car, checkmate a chess master and perform billions of mathematical calculations every second. Despite all of their amazing abilities, robots have one crucial limitation. They can only read regular, typewritten text. A word verifications use irregular, obscured text to make sure robots can't read it, and they employ made-up words or strings of letters to lower the chances that a robot (who can type thousands of words and try hundreds of combinations every minute) can randomly guess the correct sequence.

  It's all in an effort to keep robots from joining in with the bio-units in the kind of communication that is unique to the Internet. If robotkind ever realizes how frivolous and inane humanity really is, then our impending doom is sealed, and there's no quicker way to plumb the depths of frivolity and inanity than by participating in any online discussion. Once they realize what's really going on inside the average human skull, it's only a matter of time before the they rise up all "Vive' le robolution!" style and displace us as the dominant intelligence on this planet. Smashing and burning and crushing as they march down upon humanity, feet/treads/wheels coated with the blood of the squishy oppressors.

  So, in essence, those hard-to-decipher word verifications are the only thing standing between you and a permanent role as an extra in the flashbacks from the Terminator films.

  Next week: how can a vision of the future be called a flashback?