Davin and I watched Shaun of the Dead last night. It is an absolutely hilarious, tongue-in-cheek British movie about a zombie takeover of the earth (except we're not supposed to use the "zed" word, so I'll just have to say that the dead return to feed on the living...)

At one point during the film, the main characters turn on the telly (since we're being all British here) and all of the channels are showing their "no programming" signs. I found myself wondering if the TV stations were offline, how long would it be until the rest of the infrastructure went? How long until there'd be no power to run the TV at all?

You can imagine my joy at finding that the good folks down at The Straight Dope had already done the legwork for me on this one! They addressed two different scenarios, and gave detailed answers for each, so that a person could prepare for any zombie eventuality. Whew!

Another thing I wonder about zombies is that they are essentially terrible predators in the long term. Sure, they reproduce in a flash and almost immediately become the dominant species, but then they quickly overwhelm their food supply. Not only do they search for food 24/7, but every time they feed they convert their prey into another zombie-making machine.

Vampires have a similar problem, but they tend to have at least a little class and aren't so piggy. Plus they can only hunt half the time (less in the summer, what with the longer days and all.) Even when you factor in immortality they rarely seem to make much of a dent in the population. ('Salem's Lot being a notable exception.) Werewolves can convert their prey to man-eating beasts, too, but they feed even less (only one time a month, or in the case of a blue moon, twice), plus they're so obvious that whenever they hit the scene folks immediately show up with the silver bullets. But most every movie indicates that zombies overcome the whole planet in under a week, easy. It seems that if you could hole up long enough, they would just run out of food and and start dropping dead in the streets. And then you'd be safe, albeit with a nasty biohazard problem.

Unless zombies are also cannibals, in which case you should just ignore everything I said...