Although this actually started a few days ago, the news has broken everywhere that the Centers for Disease Control has, at long last, stepped up to the plate and given Americans some
useful information on how to prepare for a zombie apocalypse. As you can see, it's actually just a clever way to deliver information about slightly more likely disasters:
So what do you need to do before zombies…or hurricanes or pandemics for example, actually happen? First of all, you should have an emergency kit in your house. This includes things like water, food, and other supplies to get you through the first couple of days before you can locate a zombie-free refugee camp (or in the event of a natural disaster, it will buy you some time until you are able to make your way to an evacuation shelter or utility lines are restored).
Apparently, there has been so much traffic to this post on their blog that at one point the CDC's servers crashed. What this demonstrates, of course, is that people love zombies. Why? The short answer is that zombies are awesome. The longer answer...well, let's just stick with the short answer for now. A couple of years ago I wrote a
column about zombies, and I don't think anything I've written here at TAP has gotten more links. Because people love zombies. While we probably wouldn't want federal employees to be spending all their time thinking up clever new ways to use humor to attract people to their web sites, it's a reminder that the distribution of government information doesn't have to be all boring 100-page pdfs and CSV files. When
Barack Obama got elected, many of us hoped that his administration would bring a new spirit to the executive branch, in which the people running government actually believed in government and sought to make it work well. How much that has happened is an enormously complex question, but there are certainly positive signs. Federal web sites have been vastly improved - look, for instance, at the ghastly
old FCC web site, and the spiffy
new one. They've tried, with initiatives like
Data.gov and
Recovery.gov, to make information more accessible and usable. You may have noticed that in the recent spate of hurricanes and floods, we haven't heard a lot of complaining about FEMA, apparently because unlike in the "Heckuva job, Brownie" days, they're actually doing their jobs competently. This is just a tiny portion of all the things the executive branch does, and it would take a lot of reporting to get an accurate assessment of whether the federal government is really operating in a fundamentally different way now than it was a few years ago. But there's reason to suspect it is.
Although this actually started a few days ago, the news has broken everywhere that the Centers for Disease Control has, at long last, stepped up to the plate and given Americans some useful information on how to prepare for a zombie apocalypse. As you can see, it's actually just a clever way to deliver information about slightly more likely disasters:
