Monday! A good day to learn how to make a zombie =) See bottom of page for socially acceptable recipe.
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Monday:
BadKitties
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ejoanna
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Caedy
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art ah zen
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FloridaSNMOM
Saturday:
Dave in Northridge
Sunday:
loggersbrat
Are zombies real? Not exactly. The flesh- or brain-eating creatures of fiction are not. However, it IS perhaps possible to "zombify" a person by chemical means.
Toads, worms and human remains
Vodou priests known as bokor create a white, powdery compound called coupe poudre, according to numerous reports. The ingredients in this powder allegedly can turn a person into a zombie. In the 1980s, Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis traveled to Haiti to investigate zombies and "zombie powder."
Though different bokor used different ingredients in their powders, Davis found that "there are five constant animal ingredients: burned and ground-up human remains [usually bone], a small tree frog, a polychaete [segmented] worm, a large New World toad, and one or more species of pufferfish. The most potent ingredients are the pufferfish, which contain deadly nerve toxins known as tetrodotoxin," Davis wrote in Harper's Magazine.
Some in the scientific community have criticized Davis' research — his investigation was published in 1983 in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology — but his identification of tetrodotoxin as the active ingredient in zombie powder has considerable scientific merit.
Source
High doses of tetrodotoxin will cause death by respiratory failure within minutes. However, miniscule doses can possibly leave a person in a state of suspended animation. Respiration is shallow and barely detectable, and the heart rate drops to near zero. The person will remain conscious, but speechless. This is a vegetative state.
Since bodies are usually buried within 24 hours in Haiti, it is possible for someone who has been exposed to coupe poudre to be buried while in this vegetative state. The bokor will then exhume the body, which is most likely suffering from apoxia due to limited oxygen within a coffin, and "animate" it by administering a drug derived from the jimson weed plant. This derivative is a psychoactive drug that is capable of producing extreme passivity after repeated administrations. The person is not capable of thinking on their own, apparently. They are also supposedly fed a salt-free diet. In a climate such as Haiti's, this would make a person extremely weak.
Clairvius Narcisse
A very strange story....
Clairvius Narcisse
Narcisse was buried. Throughout this, he (later) said, he could hear everything that was happening around him; he just couldn’t respond. He could hear his sister Angelina weeping at his bedside, and his whole funeral procession. He could feel the nail that went through his casket, and would later develop a scar on his forehead from it. A priest of the vodun religion, along with many others came to his grave site, took his body out of coffin, and beat him profusely, then tied him up, and carried him miles away from his home.
He was taken somewhere where he joined semi-stupefied people like him, and worked day and night on a large farm. There he was given some kind of concoction everyday, so that he could never regain his common sense. Eventually though, one of his fellow “zombies” beat the captor with hoe, and they all escaped. Narcisse, who had been on the plantation for two years, learned at one point that his brother was the one who had gotten him poisoned over a property dispute, so after his escape he avoided his hometown—fearing his brother—though apparently he kept close contact with people would keep him informed of the happenings in his town. In the meantime, he wandered around near the vicinity of his home, as a mandyan (a (sometimes) homeless person who begs passers-by for food and change), until he learned that his brother had died.
The fact that Narcisse was indeed the Narcisse that had died years ago, was confirmed by Lamarque Douyon, a Haitian psychiatrist. Douyon formulated a questionnaire series and Narcisse answered them all correctly to the letter. Douyon also got about 200 witnesses including friends and family members to confirm his identity. What’s more, when Narcisse had initially approached his sister in the open air market, he had used a nickname for himself that the family had for him, in his early childhood that only they would have known.
Much more about Mr. Narcisse and zombies
It seems likely that reported cases of zombification have multiple causes. -snip-
So where does that leave us? The actual manufacture of a zombie has never been documented. (Needless to say, such an act would be a serious crime in Haiti, or anywhere else in the world for that matter.) But these facts seem beyond dispute:
Belief in zombies is almost universal in Haiti
The zombie powder always contains puffer fish
The flesh of the puffer fish at least some of the time contains medically significant quantities of tetrodotoxin, and
Tetrodotoxin can induce a state of suspended animation almost indistinguishable from death.
These facts, along with the facts of the case of Clairvius Narcisse, may not add up to proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but the smart money is on Davis’s thesis, even if zombification is not an everyday event – a fact that Davis himself took pains to emphasize: “I’ve never said there is some kind of assembly line producing zombies in Haiti [9]” Indeed, it may be that zombification is no longer practiced in Haiti, and if this be the case, it may be that Davis deserves the credit for exposing the reality behind this cruel practice. If so, then the defilement of the grave of one child (who obviously never knew about it) seems well worth the trade-off.
One question remains: why is it that Japanese diners who ingest too much tetrodotoxin do not turn into zombies? The answer lies in what Davis calls the “set and setting” of any drug experience – “set” being the individual’s expectation of what the drug will do to him, and setting being the environment, including the matrix of beliefs in which an individual is embedded. Imagine, if you will, what Narcisse must have gone through. Isolated from his community by his actions, he found himself growing sicker and weaker. In desperation, he entered the alien environment of the western hospital, where he actually heard himself pronounced dead by his doctors. Unable to move or speak, he felt the sheet being pulled up over his face, heard his coffin lid being nailed shut. No doubt he felt that his worst nightmares were coming true. And remember that he came from a culture in which belief in zombies – and in the efficacy of the bokor’s powers – is universal. In the end, it wasn’t the bokor’s poisons that did Narcisse in – it was his own mind.
Well. Uh. How about a drink recipe?
Zombie #4 recipe
1 1/2 oz gold rum
3 tsp lime juice
1 tbsp Jamaican dark rum
1 tbsp white rum
1 tbsp pineapple juice
1 tbsp papaya juice
1 1/2 tsp sugar syrup
1 tsp 151 proof rum
1 pineapple stick
1 pinch powdered sugar
Shake all ingredients (except the high-proof rum) over ice, the pineapple stick and the sugar. Strain and add ice. Garnish with pineapple and a cherry. Float the high-proof rum on top and sprinkle a little sugar over it.
25% (50 proof)
Serve in: Collins Glass
Read more: Zombie drink recipes http://www.drinksmixer.com/...
Hope that YOU are not feeling like a zombie this Monday =)