Beach front property values suddenly decline
during California's newest war. Photo courtesy of
http://www.battlela.com/

In outer space, no one can hear you purr. . . .

Don't go see Battle: L.A. unless you're not embarrassed to have a good time. It's full of flaws in logic, plot and acting but it's a big movie in terms of action and special effects. Battle: Los Angeles breaks the mold of the usual disaster epic by going straight to the good stuff without wasting time on character development and story background. This movie is just a bunch of Marines figuring out how to kill something new and challenging. If you can't enjoy it from that viewpoint go eat a hamburger instead.

Hey, is that the guy
who . . . ? Naw, I guess not.
http://www.battlela.com/

Battle L.A. stars Aaron Eckhart as the guilt-ridden combat vet Staff Sergeant Michael Nantz; Bridget Moynahan as Michele the hot civilian chick whose sole task is to adore the heroic Nantz; Michelle Rodriguez as tough hot babe Tech Sergeant Elena Santos, the Rambella of the Air Force; and Ramon Rodriguez as 2nd Lieutenant William Martinez, victim of the most cliche'd role in military history. I recognized absolutely no one in the entire cast, although for a moment I thought I knew Eckhart from a role in Star Trek Voyager. Nope, that's not him. I immediately felt a good vibe from Eckhart/Nantz, however, since in the movie's opening minutes Nantz plows along the beach for his morning run, huffing and sweating while a group of younger Marines leaves him in the dust at a speed that allows them a normal conversation. Cripes, I hate it when that happens.

Toughest commando
a non-combat
Air Force occupa-
tional specialty
ever produced.
http://www.battlela.com/

Director Jonathan Liebesman wastes no time getting to the good part of the story. Instead of following the old Irwin Allen pattern of at least an hour of brutal introduction to characters and the reasons we're supposed to care if they live or die, Liebesman compresses that human sympathy section into about ten minutes, giving us a brief glimpse into the personal lives of modern Marines. Gosh, the Marine Corps looks like such a friendly and informal place, it's just a bunch of nice fellows and girls having fun in training. In the background we get constant updates over the local TV channels regarding the mysterious arrival of clusters of meteorites, coincidentally hitting the water offshore from the world's greatest coastal population centers.

If the human race doesn't see an attack like that coming we deserve all the hacking and slashing and blowing up that we get. In this story no one seems to realize what's happening, even after half of L.A. goes up in flames. With all the combat-ready hoopla these soldiers spout you'd think a platoon of infantry would know enough to spread out and stop talking in the combat zone, but there's none of that elementary tactical wisdom here. Along with superior firepower, the alien invaders also mastered the simpler things like ducking and taking the high ground. Our boys have to learn that through O.J.T.

Alien invaders present lucky Marines with completely
new things to break.
Photo courtesy of http://www.battlela.com/

There are so many technical issues in this movie that I will only skim a few. The basic premise for the invasion, for example, is that these interstellar invaders need liquid water to fuel their ships, and Earth is a rare jewel, twinkling through the darkness with the blue hue of mostly water. Never mind that an alien race with this sort of technology could find all the water they need in space, and probably would have figured out how to melt it by now -- everyone just accepts this pitiful explanation with a shrug and an OK. They're Marines, they kill stuff for a living, and they leave the big thinking to the guys on TV. Whoever wrote this story was in a hurry and just tossed in the water theory without much critical effort. I prefer another explanation, that these stalwart alien soldiers have arrived on Earth in search of cats, a truly abundant resource in Earth's cities but rare and precious to a culture totally lacking anything warm and cuddly that purrs.

Actually much of what happens in this movie could more easily be explained by the need for cats than by the need for water. An example is the mysterious glowing red hardware the Marines find guarding the underground command complex of the alien forces. We assume at first that these are sentry robots or proximity mines but they appear to totally disregard the Marines even though the alien soldiers went to a lot of trouble to install them. Clearly these contraptions were designed to capture cats, not battle humans.

Battle L.A. turned out to be a fun romp through a new version of the military's latest tactical training simulator -- not so much a movie as a video game someone else is playing. There's not much blood and gore and the Marines seem pretty much impervious to pain. The only real carnage you see is what's done to the aliens. Everyone else dies fairly neatly and without getting too upset. It's war as seen through the eyes of a Marine recruiting sergeant, an army of good-looking guys and gals out to save the world without getting too terribly dirty. There's no need to follow the Geneva Convention so anything goes, including ripping apart a living enemy soldier with your bare hands and punching individual internal organs into glistening goo as you discover what parts these fascinating enemies literally can't live without. Oo-rah! Buy yourself a ticket and let's go vicariously kill an unknown intelligent species! and save Earth's kitties for our own couches and alleyways.

Fresh baked bread with simple and complex carbs,
healthy fats and protein. And it tastes good.

If I have the right kind of home-baked bread I really don’t need anything else for my breakfast or lunch. By supper I’m ready for something to go with it, but if the recipe is right bread gives me everything I need. Reading about what the Tarahumara eat (and wanting to be able to do the things they do) made me reconsider my bread recipe. I’ve added some of the things the Roman Legion fed their troops, and I’m still tweaking the system. So far it’s the best bread I’ve ever eaten.

The basic recipe came off the back of a bag of Gold Medal Whole Wheat flour, and it’s called Honey-Whole Wheat Bread. I’ve changed it either a little or a lot every time I make it, but mostly by adding things and not by changing the basic plan.

The original parts I kept are as follows:

4 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
3 cups all purpose flour
3 tsp salt

2 1/2 cups warm water
1/4 cup warm water
4 1/2 tsp dry yeast

Instead of 1/4 cup butter I’ve substituted 1/4 cup spreadable vegetable margarine;
I use 1/4 cup honey mixed with either 1/4 cup dark molasses or 1/4 cup sorghum for a total of 1/2 cup, while the original recipe calls for 1/2 cup honey.

I’ve added whole grains of different types, depending on what I have on hand. I’m always using 1/4 cup of flax seed and will probably increase that amount later in the summer. I also added 1/4 cup of amaranth and 1/4 cup of teff this last time, but soy flour and sesame seeds came out pretty good, too.

The dough after the first rise.

Lately I’ve had really good results with my bread but it hasn’t always been like that. Instead of believing what I see on the yeast package I now start the yeast in warm water and honey, as this recipe recommends. Actually I’m mixing the honey and other sweetener with the margarine and the full amount of warm water, not the 1/4 cup the recipe recommends. Seems to work pretty well so I’m staying with that method.

I mix the dry ingredients together with a wire whisk, and I’m not a fancy baker so I add the liquid yeast mixture all at once and work it in by squeezing. When the dough is fairly uniform I adjust by adding a little water or a little flour and turn the dough out on the counter for kneading. After kneading until it forms a nice glutinous dough I shape it into a ball and rub a little cooking oil on it, then put it back in a covered bowl in a warm place and let it double in size.

The second rise and success nears.

This recipe makes quite a lot of bread, so I’ve been using pizza pans covered with aluminum foil. I divide the dough in two equal pieces, shape it again, and let it rise at least double on the pans. Then it goes into the oven at 375 degrees F. for 30 minutes. At 15 minutes I open the oven up and switch the top loaf to the bottom shelf and the bottom loaf to the top shelf, otherwise the top loaf will get too brown. At 30 minutes the temperature has to be reset to 350 degrees F., and the loaves bake for another 10 minutes. The crust should be hard enough that it resists a good thump.

The Romans received a daily ration of 1 1/2 kg of wheat and rye when times were good, according to what I’ve read lately. Some historians say it was less, only about two pounds. That’s still quite a lot of grain to eat in a day. The magic ingredient in Roman rations seems to be flaxseed, which is very high in beneficial fats just like the chia seed the Tarahumara eat. This bread probably has more fat and sugar in it than the old Roman rations.

Next recipe I’m substituting 1/2 cup of coconut milk for the 1/4 cup of margarine, which should come out to about the same fat content. Eventually I’ll come up with a "Roman bread" that’s sub-standard, but I sure haven’t yet. This bread is a meal by itself, just the way I like it.

Over the last few days I've watched what happened in Japan during the earthquake, tsunami, and the nuclear aftermath that still unfolds. I don't want to minimize anything that happened there, and I have nothing but respect for the people who lived through that, died in that, or are at present trying to desperately deal with that. But, it reminded me of why I do what I do. I run.

Running is basic. It's affirmation of life, the only thing we can actually do to save ourselves in basic situations. Life isn't about martial arts and being able to mysteriously defeat forces beyond our ability to control. Life is about getting out of the way. That's a very humble thing, and something many people today disregard completely. When it comes down to basics, life isn't numbers stored in a bank account or the social credibility of what job you happen to perform. Life is just how fast you run.

I don't laugh at the Japanese people who didn't run fast enough. I've never cared more. I watch the videos of people lost and I cry. I see people on the brink of death and still trying and I cheer. This is a look at all of us, not just a glimpse of Japan in hard times. It could happen in some way, anywhere, to anyone. When I see those videos, I say, Run! Run! and even if I've seen those videos before I still mean it and I still care.

I saw many heartbreaking videos of what happened in Japan and sadly, I will see many more, since the crisis continues to unfold. What impressed me the most was a short clip of what happened when the tsunami hit a northern town.

People there had warning, but not all responded to the warning. Some people lived on higher areas of the valley and since the town was protected by seawalls they didn't think there was any need to leave their home and run up the hill. When the tsunami waves breached the seawall, that suddenly changed. The valley slopes funneled the waves higher, and even the upper areas of the town were inundated.

The people living there had seconds to respond. Some didn't, and some couldn't. I'm old enough that I know how age limits response to many things. I don't fault older people for sitting and waiting. The older you get, the more sense that makes. Some people found themselves on the edge of life and death, and I saw what a few of them did. They ran.

In this particular town, the people who lived on high ground had enough time to reconsider. When the waves came, and kept coming, they ran. I watched two women from one small neighborhood try to save themselves -- not saving family, not saving countries, but just trying to stay alive. One woman had a straight course across fields, to the high ground and safety; her neighbor had to cross a fence. One woman lived, and the other woman died.

I know what some of that feels like, because I run. If you just follow the "program," you get a little tired and a little sore and you hurt for awhile. If you really run, you know how it feels to be out of air. You burn. Legs don't work any more, your heart tries to burst out of your chest, and what you really want to do is stop and puke out your guts. People who push the limits know what that feels like. There's a point you simply can't cross, no matter what the incentive might be. It all stops, because you did reach your limits.

The people I watched who tried to outrun the tsunami pushed those limits. They were not Olympic runners, just normal people who did their best. In one video I saw, one woman lived and another woman died. Both of them tried their best and no one lost. They both deserve Olympic gold medals no matter what their time was.

That's what running is about, in the final balance. It's not about how much weight you lose or how low your resting heart rate might be. It's about life and death. By running we find our limits, and sometimes we find a way past them.

After a few days on the trail, sled dogs burn nearly
100 percent fat fuel. Could people train to do this?
See "Fat Burning Secrets..." from the Smithsonian.
Photo credit: cliftonmullins from morguefile.com

A few decades ago when runners talked about "hitting the wall" it was just one of those things you expected on a long run. After about 15 miles you'd suddenly feel like crap and be so weak you'd think you were unable to continue, but then you'd dig way down if you were brave enough and find renewed strength by sheer force of will, and you'd keep going.

All that talk about reaching deep for the buried strength within you and mentally being strong enough to continue on will alone seems now to be mostly egotistical talk. When muscles reach a specific level of exhaustion the autonomic nervous system shuts them down so energy stores won't completely be used up. Will has nothing to do with that, it's biological self-preservation. If you push yourself to your limits you'll find that point. One second you'll be plugging along full of determination and the next second your body tells you, no, you won't, and you stop. After a few minutes of rest you keep going.

People in higher levels of fitness reach their limits less often, and everyone's energy cutoff point is different, but it happens to all. When you run long enough to burn up your blood sugar and muscle glycogen, you "hit the wall." Suddenly you can't put one foot reliably in front of the other or run a straight course, and then as your metabolism shifts to fat reserves you gain renewed strength and recover. If you're an egotistical person taught to believe in mind over matter, you realize you've conquered a physical weakness by an effort of will. Actually your liver just kicked in and took a moment to start processing fat.

The fuel system of the body is actually much more complicated than that simplified version, but that's enough to understand what's happening in a practical way. Exhaustion at the limits of ability is set at a cellular level. Mitochondria in cells enable us to use fat, the body most efficient fuel, and our ability to do that depends on the numbers of mitochondria in our cells. That population of tiny furnaces increases if we frequently engage in long-duration physical labor, whether it's farm work or distance running. The more mitochondria you build, the better you are at burning fat. For someone in a lower level of fitness, a food that replaces blood sugar could make the best sense; since over the short term, with a lower mitochondrial count, the body prefers to burn sugar. As conditioning improves, the best fuel choice changes to a mixture of sugars and fats.

Dr. Eric Heiden, Olympic gold medalist and orthopedic surgeon, says that a mixture of glucose and fat feeds the fires of highly conditioned athletes, and you can see that reflected in the traditional tonic foods of ancient travelers. Pemmican, the food of choice when Native Americans set out on long treks, blends dried berries with rendered animal fat -- a source of carbohydrates and fat and very little else. The Tarahumara charge up with complex carbohydrates like potato soup and corn beer, but the trail tonic they drink along the way is a mixture of chia seeds, citrus juice, and sugar -- again, carbs and fats, since chia contains a high percentage of healthy oils, similar to those found in salmon.

Chia also replaces some important minerals which the body loses through perspiration, provides protein, and contains important vitamins. Chia tonics seem like a better idea for the long run than fat with dried blueberries, but pemmican represented only part of the traditional food plan here in northern America. Travelers grazed fresh vegetables and fruits along the way, eating plants most of us would skip today.

From Europe comes another story of a traditional powerhouse food for the long-distance foot traveler -- flaxseed. The nutritional content of flax closely resembles that of chia and even exceeds it in some mineral levels and in total fat content, yielding the same healthy oils as chia. The Roman Legion, according to many historians, fed their troops bread made from wheat, rye, and flaxseed. Roman soldiers were well known for their endurance and their strength in combat, able to march long distances without exhaustion. A normal day's ration included 1.5 kilograms of whole grains including the secret ingredient, flaxseed.

Another important benefit of both chia and flaxseed is that these tonic foods counter inflammation problems -- that reduces pain and helps runners keep going.

Today most of us avoid fat in order to keep body weight down, but during heavy exertion fat doesn't go through the storage cycle. Cells use fat in the bloodstream along with blood sugar, saving the body the extra steps of storage and retrieval.

Having learned all this fairly recently from researching several fitness articles for a paying client, I find it interesting to compare my own traveling diet to what traditionalists and sports professionals recommend. I've been a hiker and runner for decades, actually quite a few decades, and I've spent my work time primarily in labor-intensive occupations. I've learned to eat what keeps me going, and if a meal's fuel doesn't last past 9 a.m. I'm not happy with it. I don't eat breakfast at Shoney's if I have work to do.

My typical breakfast is a whole grain with fruit when I'm backpacking a difficult trail. For convenience I usually eat instant brown rice -- the secret fuel of the samurai with a modern twist -- and raisins. That's a healthy mixture of long-lasting complex carbohydrates and fast-acting fruit sugar. On the trail I don't get extremely hungry during the day, but I do fuel up along the way with a Tiger's Milk bar when I feel the need -- complex carbohydrates, sugar in a reasonable amount, minerals and vitamins, protein and fat. Supper is usually instant potatoes with Parkay margarine, a bouillon cube and a vitamin pill, as well as some dried meat or fish. During the day I graze wild food along the way. It doesn't sound like much but it makes me feel good. When I'm on the trail I'm just not hungry for anything else. Traveling food is fuel, not entertainment. My trail diet matches up very well to what ancient travelers discovered worked the best for them.

As a runner I've had more trouble, depending on modern professionals for advice and drinking energy drinks or power gels to keep charged on the runs. I don't find that such things work well for me. They give me a short burst of renewed energy and then I'm back to being really tired. This year I'm going to apply the traditional foods to my long runs and see if I find an improvement.

I also rebuilt my huaraches, using some tips from the Tarahumara, who build their running sandals out of old car tires. See my post about Shoe Goo on The Marked Tree for construction details using lighter materials. That works like a charm.

Advanced Yang Style
Tai Chi Chuan:
Tai Chi Theory and
Tai Chi Jing

It's easy to set aside much of what the Tarahumara Indians do and file it away as some genetic quirk or simply exaggeration, but to me it looks real and possible for the rest of us, too. I wouldn't call it magical even though I know running can be a truly spiritual experience, pushing people into new areas of perception as well as pushing the boundaries of physical experience. To me what the Tarahumara do seems based on something that's possible for the rest of us to acquire, and I remember a couple of times in my life when possibly I did reach that level of fitness. I lacked something else that the Tarahumara don't even have to think about -- technique.

In Tai Chi Chuan one of the basic concepts is that in the ancient days, people did things differently on a basic level. People breathed differently and people walked differently. People performed mechanical work using a different set of physical principles than we do today. Tai Chi enthusiasts learn the ancient set and then try to apply that to daily life as well as self defense. Tarahumara running resembles some very basic things I learned in Tai Chi and then set aside. Now I'm seeing how those principles fit . Maybe for once something odd that I've learned will turn out to be really useful.

This year what I'm noticing most about my own running is that in spite of the barefoot training I've fallen back into bad old habits in terms of foot posture. As my feet got tougher my running reverted to the heel-first style again, and that mostly worked out ok. The problem showed up when I did longer runs. The heel-first strides put more stress on my hips and I was back to the problems I started with, sciatic pain that at its worst made my legs go numb and inoperative temporarily.

Read more »

Born to Run: A Hidden
Tribe, Superathletes,
and the Greatest Race
the World Has Never Seen

I finished reading "Born to Run" by Christopher McDougall last week, and even though I enjoyed the book I found it disappointing in technical terms. There's a lot of good talk about running but not enough real explanation of how the Tarahumara style works. Worst tragedy of all, there's no recipe for tesquino, the corn beer that Tarahumara runners stoke themselves with the night before a big race. How can you write about the Tarahumara and not include a recipe for tesquino? Fortunately I've experimented with enough home brew that I can figure it out for myself.

From having sorted through the book for useful bits of info and from having watched as many videos as I could find of genuine Tarahumara runners actually running, I do have a theory which is probably as good as anybody's theory. The same rules of physics apply to these people as to the rest of us, and that means the 40,000 calories people burn on an ultramarathon doesn't come out of thin air. Some runners carry dried corn, and there's a chia-based tonic they drink along the way as well. Just as people there aren't likely to ask for food and water -- because it's impolite -- people aren't likely to not offer something if they see you're in need of it. Several stories in the book deal with that local brand of generosity.

We can assume that people aren't running these long distances without food or water. On races here in the States where impolite Americans didn't offer the Tarahumara food and drink, they didn't take any, and they didn't do all that well in those races. Properly fueled they did just fine on others. But, they're not eating 40,000 calories during a race, and they don't have a lot of body fat to burn. So again the question is, how the heck do they do this?

The Gods Must Be
Crazy -- on DVD

The answer must be in efficiency, not in calories. The Tarahumara run barefoot-style, on the balls of the feet and the toes instead of on the flat of the foot or heels. That puts a more efficient set of leg muscles into operation and reduces impact stress -- something I've noticed from running training distances for several years in a bastard style of Tarahumara form, and something I'm seeing more now that I've actually watched them run. I was doing it all wrong, and even then I saw major improvements. Maybe I'll see another big jump soon.

A couple of things struck me as useful, from descriptions of the runners in the book. They run quietly, people speak of them as gliding, making so little noise that during night finishes observers nearly missed them running past. That's really low impact running, without skids or twists, and something to strive for. I can't do that yet.

Read more »

Tarahumara men in Chihuahua, Mexico, 1892.
Photo by Carl S. Lumholtz.

Currently I'm a little bored, and I'm looking for something unusual to do -- something so fascinating that I won't just drop it and watch something on television. I'm thinking about taking up spiritual running, as soon as I can form an opinion of what that actually is. Chi running recently became popular and I was briefly excited by that, but it didn't hold much that was new to me because I've practiced Tai Chi Chuan for quite a long time. Applying those principles to running and walking is a normal outgrowth of practice. Most people find it surprising that we do basic things like running and walking incorrectly, but it's fundamental to Tai Chi. Changing those basic things changes everything we do. I'd like to see more changes of that type, especially in my running.

I've been a runner for a long time, since the 70's. There were times when I'd run 15 miles a night, four or five times a week; and there were years when I'd run an occasional mile just to see if I still could. I ran a half-marathon a few years ago and found it to be a miserable experience. I currently am in a training program for a full marathon and unsure if I'll ever actually do it, but since I'll feel like a shrimp if I don't I expect that I will -- even if it means dragging myself across the finish line on my elbows. I'm also interested in the mental and spiritual aspects of running, which is actually one of the simplest shamanic ordeals and mind-altering experiences a person can do. Runners who push their personal limits often encounter supernatural entities, and a few hallucinations as well. Like me, the runners who have this experience find it easy enough to sort out the meaningful apparitions from the pointless. If it's a useful contact, you get useful and sometimes life-saving information. Otherwise, it's just interesting to watch.

Born to Run: A Hidden
Tribe, Superathletes,
and the Greatest Race
the World Has Never Seen

Three styles of spiritual running currently have my attention. The first is practiced by the Tarahumara people of Northern Mexico. I took up their running style a few years ago because of foot injuries and have run in thin huarache sandals ever since. That completely altered my running technique, cured my foot problems and eliminated most of my running aches and pains. Adjusting to a barefoot-running technique also slowed me up for a couple of years while I learned to run with different muscle sets than before. Most people run with the front of the thigh providing the most power, but in barefoot running that focus shifts to the back of the thigh. I think I'm just now really getting the hang of it and I want to learn a little more from the Tarahumara if I can. Especially about fuel.

Here in the States, runners typically fuel with sports drinks and sports gels while on long runs, and although I've done this I'm not happy with it. It works, but I've got a feeling there's something better, and I see too many problems with sugar rushes and crashes. If you don't get the timing right, you're into a fatigue cycle that's hard to put right again. So instead of tinkering with the salty sweets I'm trying to find out what the Tarahumara eat.

Read more »

Buddha's Lions:
The Lives of the
Eighty-Four Siddhas

It's kind of strange to spend your life in pursuit of something that can't be defined, but serious Buddhists do that. Although we're told it can't be known or logically understood, or even intentionally pursued, we've heard stories of enlightenment and either go after it tenaciously or stop believing in it and turn what we do into religion instead.

I don't look at enlightenment in the way most Buddhists see it or conceive it. To me the old meditations led to something which fits the descriptions of enlightenment, but did leave me unable to explain what it might be. It wasn't what I expected, and it wasn't exactly as scholastic Buddhists describe it.

To find examples of what I mean I have to go back in history fairly far, because in the beginnings of Buddhism the experience seems to have been different, with fewer rules and simpler approaches to the problem. In Buddha's Lions: The Lives of the Eighty-Four Siddhas, 84 examples of enlightened people show us this older side of things. Most would think the stories exaggerated or symbolic, but if you consider them literal descriptions of what happened you do get that older view of what enlightenment actually means.

One of my favorite stories from this book is the story of Manibhadra. This young girl came from a wealthy family and at 13 was already entrenched in ordinary life and engaged to be married. One day a guru stopped to ask for food and after a conversation with him, she asked to learn how to obtain liberation. They spent several days in the local cemetery as he taught her the different stages of the path, and then she went back to her family.

Her parents were very upset with her, thinking she was rebelling against the arranged marriage that was still pending, but even though they beat her she was calm about all of it. She explained that she'd been around so long that every living being had been her mother and father at some time, and she'd just accept the beatings as part of her path. Her parents thought her remarks were silly, and she continued her ordinary existence as before but practiced her meditations faithfully. She married, had children, and was a good wife to her husband.

Twelve years later while carrying a pot of water back to her house, she dropped the pot and stopped where she was, just staring at the broken vessel for the rest of the day. When people spoke to her she didn't respond, just kept staring at the pot.

At the end of the day she seemed to come out of her trance, but looked around her at the people who had gathered there and couldn't understand what they said, accusing them of being possessed.

At sundown she flew up into the air and hovered there for 21 days before heading out into the Outer Heavens to visit the Dakas. While hanging around, she gave instructions in the path to any who cared to listen.

Part of her speech:

"Living beings without beginning,
break the pot of the body.
Why should I return home?
My pot is now broken.
I will not return to my home in samsara;
now I will go to the great bliss.
Behold, O guru, a great wonder:
desiring great bliss, I have recourse to you."

Today not many believe such things actually happened, but this book records 84 unique examples in detail, with some hints about how and why it was done. There are stories of monks who ate pigeons, hunters who gained control of life and death, scholars who fell in love with young prostitutes, and beggars who lived on fish guts. They all succeeded in finding that undefinable miracle. Every rule modern Buddhists consider essential is at some point in one of these stories broken, and the outcome is something few people today even imagine might be true.

Illustration taken from Buddha's Lions, translated by James B. Robinson.

Riding hundreds of pounds of delicious horse meat
into a city filled with hungry carnivorous zombies
wasn't the brightest idea this Georgia sheriff ever had.
Former Volvo salesman Ed Gruber, on left, is momentarily
stunned by this sudden good fortune.

In the promos for this series we saw something unforgettable -- a lone horse and rider heading into the city of Atlanta on the empty incoming lanes of a freeway jam-packed with deserted out-going cars. For that scene alone this series is worthwhile, but even though it's fun to watch it's less than I expected. What I expected from that promotional shot was what I saw -- a competent gunman in the tradition of the Old West, riding confidently into the concrete jungle just because he could. That's not the guy on this horse.

Recap of the Final Episode at the end of this article!

Every zombie movie needs a unique bit, because since the release of Night of the Living Dead when I was just a kid the story has been worked and reworked. It's always a cool story, even when it's done badly, but the best versions deal with the concept of a world-ending zombie plague in surprising new ways. What's surprising about The Walking Dead is that the hero turns out to be pretty much clueless, literally the last one to wake up to the horror of the world's ending.

In a coma for most of the dramatics, Sheriff Rick Grimes (played by Andrew Lincoln) has no idea what happened to his planet while he was slumbering and struggles with things more experienced zombie fighters don't even think about twice. He worries about the feelings of the zombie dead and ponders whether it's morally correct to actually shoot one. Although this approach seems to be the unintentional result of writing for television and not a truly original artistic idea, it does give us an interesting new look at Zombie Armageddon. Everyone in the story who's still living doesn't seem to be very good at surviving. It's not the cream of the crop who survive, it's just the stuff that floats.

From the people trapped in the sky-rise department store who don't think to drop heavy objects off the roof onto the tightly packed zombie crowds; to the trailer park survivors at the quarry outside town who haven't thought to put up barricades; we're dealing with a bunch of heroes who really haven't quite made the jump to the new reality. The fun I find in this show is taking it apart and looking at what's wrong, and in that sense there's plenty to do. Out of Atlanta's population of 429,500 (the city proper) there appear to be only a couple of thousand zombies walking around. That's a very optimistic figure and should mean that if you drop enough stuff from the Home Improvement Department off that roof, the war will soon be over. At least shoot the zombie guy who's banging on the glass door with a big rock, because he's the only one who remembers how to use tools.

Faults in the logic of this story are too numerous to mention, but include the lack of weapons and ammunition in the Deep South. This is supposed to take place in Georgia. Knock open the door of any abandoned farmhouse in post-apocalyptic Georgia and you ought to find enough sniper rifles, shotguns, pistols, assault rifles and ammunition to outfit an Army platoon. And that's just the civilian side of Georgia. With all the dead soldiers laying around there shouldn't be a shortage of tools. In real life the combination of rural survivalists, local police forces, extremist militia and real military would have quickly dealt with the zombie plague and turned on each other already.

That's ok, it's just a story and I'm having fun watching it. The final episode of Season One airs tonight and I'll be here, filing away ideas for the end of the world.

Season One Final Episode Recap: TS-19, How do I Love Thee?

We entered this last story with the entire surviving group of survivors from the Quarry Run Trailer Park arriving at the Centers for Disease Control and realizing immediately it was a bad idea. Just as they're about to head off into the darkness and zombieland, the lone survivor of CDC, a pock-marked microbiologist named Jenner, opens the door. Pockmarks on a microbiologist aren't a good sign, and when Jenner says when the door closes it doesn't open again, somebody should have thought about that. But with zombies coming up behind you it's hard to be skeptical of an impregnable fortress.

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The Entity

Of all the supernatural things which could happen, probably the creepiest is the "night visitor." Late at night you wake up, knowing something's in the room with you, and then it makes physical contact. Doesn't have to be a lot of contact to be scary -- anything will do. This isn't an experience to which most people respond well.

While many people would consider The Entity -- the story of Doris Bithers -- to be creepy entertainment, those of us who've had the experience see it much differently. This isn't an uncommon event and could be as much a part of the UFO abduction experience as any contact with aliens. People make contact with lots of things in this way, including other people. Talk to people "in the industry" and you'll hear all sorts of stories no one wants to put into print. Few of them have been told as often or as well as the Doris Bithers story, which I'll not go into in detail.

While the movie may over-dramatize certain things in the story, it's pretty hard to over-dramatize something this unusual. Even if the real thing doesn't include all the special effects in the movie, the real thing is enough to make you decide never to close your eyes again at night. Of course that solution only lasts until you fall asleep. People who actually deal with these intrusions or visitations find other ways to work them out. It's very possible that this sort of phenomenon inspired such wonderful things in human history as The Spanish Inquisition -- which some say responded to sexual predation upon humans by supernatural beings called incubi or succubi.

The Entity Movie

My own experience of similar things caused me to do what I do when unusual things happen, and start talking to other people about them. It's probably not cool to do this a lot and I've stopped now, since professionals who don't have the experience tend to think you're crazy. Along the way I did meet many people with the same sort of experience, some who were petrified of it and wanted it to end, some who had come to terms with it and found it sexually exciting and even humorous, and some who considered themselves responsible for the experiences others had.

When these visitations first happened to me, I considered them all hostile. After enough contact with anything it gets to be kind of familiar and you stop panicking. I realized that whatever it was, it wasn't actually doing me any harm. I decided that instead of fighting off whatever was happening, I'd let it progress and find out what it was about, if it was possible to do that.

As it turned out, some of the things that visited me were hostile and violent and might even be considered demonic. They certainly had the marks of that. Other things weren't like that -- once I got past the fear it was easy to see they were friendly, but in disturbingly sexual ways. After a brief struggle with moral concerns I realized I was complaining that sexually ravenous women were visiting me in bed at night, and to me that seemed silly to argue about.

Such things don't happen to me any longer, possibly because I explored the possibilities thoroughly and decided that physical relationships were more important to me than astral ones. I do believe in the reality of both, and there's no clear border between them. Everyone feels these things on some scale; some people become vastly more sensitive, like Doris Bithers.

If you want to get a glimpse of what it's like when you do understand that reality is illusion and illusion is reality, this is a great movie to study. In a world where walls aren't physical barriers, you draw quite a bit of attention from unusual things.

The Doris Bithers story didn't end with the movie, and even the intervention by the paranormal investigators didn't stop what happened. For a look at what happened later in the story visit the following link:

Ghost Theory: The Entity – Interview with Doris Bither’s son