Someday, the Messiah-Shark Will Come...

The Washington Post had a delightful and terrifying story yesterday about virgin births among sharks. Apparently in September 2001 a baby hammerhead shark was born to one of three female hammerheads sharing a tank at Henry Dormley Zoo in Omaha Nebraska. No males had been in contact with the females and they had all been in captivity for a number of years.

Now, last year on my old blog I noted that the DARPA (black helicopter guys) have been working on technology to use Sharks for their nefarious schemes; putting sensors in shark brains to try and get them to be use their excellent sense of smell to root out... well, lord knows what those DARPA guys are doing with the sharks. Part of me thinks that the whole "friggin Sharks with laserbeams on their heads" thing in Austin Powers came from DARPA. So I'm a little skittish about sharks from the get-go. I mean, even more skittish than that whole "they like to eat people" thing. That I can understand. It's the teaming up with the evil government scientists in the black helicopters that puts me on edge.

Anyway, now we get news that sharks have achieved virgin birth. Scientists had originally thought that perhaps one of the females had some male "materials" (hey, this is a family blog) stored up from before captivity.

Well, when they autopsied the baby shark (apparently another animal in the tank killed it shortly after it was born) they found that it was an exact genetic match to one of the three female sharks. No poppa. Asexual reproduction.

Apparently scientists had heretofore observed this kind of asexual reproduction, parthenogenesis, only in lower forms of life such as lower plants, aphids, parasitic wasps, and certain fans of the Jerry Springer Show.

Now, as a supporter of sex, I find this appalling. And even more importantly (frankly, how much more sex am I going to have anyway?), is this shark, born outside of shark sin, the long-promised Messiah-shark who will lead his Selachimorphian brothers and sisters to freedom? Will he rise again in glory to judge the living and the dead? And is he just a messiah for sharks, or are we land-based hairless monkeys invited?

I dunno. Messiah-sharks and Zombies. I don't like our odds.

I don't mean to alarm you but.... RUN!

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, they used to say. These days, the price of just staying alive is eternal vigilance. Or at least watching Fox25 every morning.

Case in point: last week news broke around here that the Medical Examiners office had "lost" a body. Apparently some poor guy died under mysterious circumstances in some hotel and they carted him off to the ME for an autopsy, and the ME "lost him".

Now our ME's office has been in the soup quite a bit lately. They misplaced somebody's eyes last year, and had a real bad problem with unclaimed corpses piling up and stinking out the joint. So, according to the cover story press accounts, in the process of cleaning out all the old, unclaimed corpses (maybe it's like a school lost and found: if nobody claims stuff it gets donated to orphans or something at the end of the year), anywho, in the process of cleaning out the old corspes, they think they might have gotten rid of this new corpse by mistake.

Sure. Right.


But I was buying it. Until someone thinking themselves a wiseguy emailed into the Fox25 morning show that obviously the body was a zombie and had walked off on it's own. The hosts all laughed it off and moved on to the next story.

Well. You see, I've read "The Zombie Survival Guide", and I know what to look for. I remembered a story back in February about alleged misdoings at a certain catholic cemetery in the Boston Archdiocese. Apparently they were reburying bodies, dumping them out of caskets, taking gold fillings, that sort of thing. Now, the interesting thing is a family had requested an exhumation to see if the charges were true, that their grandmother was buried just in the dirt, actually under the coffin of her later-deceased hubby.

Both the Church, and the family (who had hired a high-priced lawyer famous for his role in litigating the big church sex scandals) made high profile statements and Fox25 ran wild with this story... up until the exhumation. Then: nothing. Now, if indeed the charges were true, wouldn't that family (or the high-priced attorney) want to say, "See, I told you so(now pay up)". And if the charges weren't true, wouldn't the Church want to say: "See, we did everything right, now buzz off"?

But the silence has been deafening. Which can lead me to only one conclusion: the story was hushed up by the government. Classic Stage 1 Zombie Outbreak behavior. I don't know about you guys, but I'm starting my stocking up now. By summertime this place could be crawling with the living dead, and I need to be ready to split at a moment's notice.

Don't say I didn't warn you...