You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [2]
And of course none of this would be possible without the young men and women who have fought and died so we could go on doing our ridiculous job. We may not know any of your names, but you are the bravest interns in the world.
INTRODUCTION
THE CONSPIRACY
YOU have been the victim of a conspiracy to make the world around you more boring than it actually is.
It’s true. Did you know that you could save the lives of thousands of depressed people by painting the Golden Gate Bridge blue? How about the brain parasite currently infecting 50 percent of people on earth that turns lab rats into zombies—did you know about that? We didn’t think so.
Nearly everything your impressionable mind soaks up from your peers, teachers, parents, and the media is a lie. Imagine if Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas had been rolled into a single movie and set loose aboard the spaceship from Aliens. That’s the real world you’ve been missing. The people who taught you everything you know took that movie, edited out all of the most aggressively ass-kicking scenes, and made it into a Saturday-morning cartoon. This book is the shocking, unrated director’s cut.
You hold in your hands the most mind-blowing nuggets of information federal and local anti-headsplosion laws allow us to print on anything that’s not a tarp. In these pages, you will find answers to questions you didn’t even know you should be asking. Questions like, Why were the Nazi’s so well dressed? and, Why is this five-inch-long hornet chasing me?
THE ROAD TO YOU MIGHT BE A ZOMBIE
The many shocking answers you’ll find in this book all arose from a single question we found ourselves asking about two years ago: How can we come up with $2.5 million, and fast?
It didn’t take us long to settle on the idea of writing a book. Like our online humor articles, books contain words. But while our website is free, people who suck at shoplifting pay money for books. The more we looked into this book business, the more the idea checked out. Our first move was to take a quick survey of some of the bestselling books of all time.
The Bible (300 BC-AD 95), 6 billion copies sold
Quotations from Chairman Mao (1964), 800 million copies sold
The Koran (AD 610-632), 800 million copies sold
Xinhua Dictionary (1957), 400 million copies sold
A number of striking similarities jumped out immediately. In addition to being old as shit, we noticed that all four endeavored to answer some of life’s biggest questions. After literally hours of brainstorming, we sent off the first draft of our book proposal and began taking out sizable loans and buying tiny expensive jets (to serve as fuel for our larger, also expensive, jets). Unfortunately, some guy named Webster had somehow retroactively stolen our idea “What Words Mean” and had even found definitions for real words rather than ones he’d just made up. After follow-up calls with publishing houses failed to turn up a single major religion looking to join forces with Crackedism, the official religion we promised to make up, one of the publishers said something that made us realize that life’s “big questions” had changed.
“Life’s big questions have changed,” she said. “Why don’t you write a book called You Might Be a Zombie?”
Whether she realized it or not, that lady (whose name now escapes us) had given us the idea for our book. Nobody needs to know the meaning of things like existence and words anymore. Hollywood has already answered those questions for us. Modern people have more-pressing concerns, like “Seriously, I’ve been sprinting for like ten minutes straight. Why won’t this enormous hornet stop chasing me?” and “Did . . . did it just shoot poison at my eyes?”
The answers to those questions and more are contained somewhere in the following pages. We don’t want to spoil it for you, but the short answer to the second one is yes, that giant hornet did just shoot poison at your eyes. That shit happens all the time.
DIRECTIONS