Zombie Walk and pie eating contest

Saturday July 3 was the Fremont Zombie Walk. I regret not having pictures, but there were three of us together as zombie scientists in lab coats. Here is a picture of me without blood or too much makeup. I participated in a pie-eating contest organized by The World is Fun, and since it was no-hands, I did not wear much paint because I would have been eating it.

The contest was a lot of fun. I had a 9″ apple pie which I ate top and filling in about 140 seconds. There were about 12 other competitors but most of them were quite dainty or unwilling to swallow without chewing so even with a lot of moaning and roaring I was doing well to out eat them. One of the contestants was this girl who had a cream pie with a cracker crust. The other pies had flaked pastry crust; I hope all readers understand the difference, but the pastry is crust is heavy, comprised of shortening, and serves more as a vehicle of the filling than something necessary to eating. In contrast the cracker crust was thin and attached to the pudding of the cream pie, and could be consumed with big licks rather than chewing and was therefore easier to eat.

I lost to this girl. I shook her hand to be a good sport, but was really upset that there were no international competitive pie eating rules for me to brandish and use to call foul. We all should have had the same pie instead of mostly pastry and two cream pies to be assigned, so when I write codifying laws for governing competitions of this sort I will be very bitter in remembering this and exactly describing how to make these things more just.

After the contest we made our way to Fremont to participate in the zombie walk. We bloodied up at a nearby diner and it seemed that everyone around was a zombie. We contributed to the fee for Guinness World Records to have the event checked as the largest zombie walk ever; the event was advertised as having extra money go to Solid Ground, a local food bank.

The unofficial count was somewhere around 4,900 people in the zombie parade. The average quality of costumes was quite high. It was difficult to talk to people because everyone was in character, so zombies wanting to take pictures of other zombies had to moan requests and confirmations.