Those pictures, along with your talk about zombies, recalls the movie Day of the Dead, George Romero's followup to Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead (which was set in a mall). It was shot in the underground salt mines where Hollywood stores movies, because moisture is the enemy of film, and the salt absorbs all the moisture. A sort of anti-Xanadu. Well, once the zombies get in anyway.
Yeah. We can't function without Charmin. Also, this feels like a perfect plot for a heist book. But instead of gold, it's cheese. And ever read the book, 'who stole my cheese?'. This made me think of it.
A heist would be great but the logistics are not feasible. My initial numbers were low, apparently we currently have 1.4 billion (with a "B") pounds of surplus of cheese. Assuming a standard non-permitted load for a tractor-trailer truck is roughly 40,000lbs (20 tones), it would take 70,000,000 round trips in a large semi-truck to haul away all of the cheese. We wouldn't need to steal it all, but nothing about a heist seems practical. This looks exactly like the cheese caves. Just imagine, we humans have caves all over filled with our random junk (smelly cheese/movie reels/etc) buried away - we're like squirrels and their hordes of nuts.
But with anticipation, right? Where do we think the US Govt keeps the 400 million jars of pickled gherkins? Nearby the cheese mountain one hopes, for an efficient end of the world cook-out. That they must have a stash somewhere is surely beyond dispute.
Imagine the archaelogists uncovering that cave in four thousand years. Blackness and a sense of vastness. Then their torch twitches on and reveals the rough hewn floor beneith their rubber booted feet. Slowly they drag the beam up; it moves out away from them revealing the huge expanse of the cavern floor until it illuminates a wall that must be four hundred yards away. They can't make it out clearly from that distance, but as the beam traces they see it stretches up into the subteranean firmanent beyond the range of their torch. And it glistens. It glistens green. Their breath catches. Could it be? After all these centuries? Generations of archaelogists have hunted the fabled Gherkin Cave of the American Empire, and now, dare they hope that they, humble post-grads from the School of Ancient and Discredited Civilisations, are the ones to finally find it? One of them speaks, in a hoarse, awed voice, "Its burger time, boys."
To quote wikipedia: "This processed cheese was used in military kitchens during World war II and has been used in schools since the 1950s." That sentence alone made me freeze in horror. That cheese was used in army kitchens in the 1940s and is still being used? Zombies? Pah! Weaklings, unworthy of being called "formidable". Come, sit by the fire, and let me unravel the tale of the dreaded Pizza Elemental. 'Tis as tall as a tree, and many times as tasty. But it has many special powers, among which is the ability to fling superheated cheese at you, or use its delicious but forbidden pepperoni circles as shuriken -- especially if it combines these with tiny slivers of jalapeno pepper. Beware, brave pilgrim, lest thou be caught by one of these! For the pain of being hit in the eye by a sharpened, flaming pepperoni-and-jalapeno shuriken is as easy to imagine as it is difficult to forget. Duck beneath its deadly missiles, O intrepid hero, and stab it fiercely with thy carving knife (also known as a pizza slicer)! Also, sharpen thine sabre, and the day shall be thine! Patience, young grasshopper. You know why you can't have that government cheese, right? Because it's nacho cheese. These puns are endless. We're milking them for all they're worth, so don't have a cow -- they're cheddar than any fish puns you can imagine, although fish puns are also plentiful, by any scale. fin.
Ya know, you ain't half bad at this-here Writin' thing. Do you ever do it? I don't recall you ever talking about any stories you might have penned (or keyed) or uploading anything to yon Workshop. Though could be you've submitted to the Showcase, I don't check in there as often as I should. Nor do I seem to recall you asking questions on the various and sundry boards devised for that purpose. You know, character development, plot development, word mechanics etc. You mainly seem to want to relate your lengthy jokes loaded with—dare I say it?—cheese!
Heyyy ... Disco Stu doesn't advertise. Honestly, though, I'm too busy planning or writing my next chapter to talk about it very much -- but this has given me some incentive to revise (and strengthen!) my back-cover blurb. Thanks! Well, hey -- this particular thread seems designed for cheesy jokes and puns. I thought of sharing my back-cover blurb here and asking for opinions, but it's probably not the place, right?
There's a blurb subforum somewhere. Perhaps in the darkness-shrouded depths of these moldy greenish caverns, but a long ways back.
OK ... any idea where I would start looking? I tried searching the forum for the word "blurb", but obviously this thread came up first... ***EDIT*** Whoops, never mind. Found it: https://www.writingforums.org/publishing/self/blurb-critique/ Sorry for the silly question. *blush*
Many many moons ago, in the dark ages of the Reagan administration (1980s) the feds did a massive giveaway of a lot of stored cheese from those caves-- I think it was all cheddar. I'm not sure why it was done, if the cheese was getting to a an expiration point or for political gain, but I know it happened, because my agency -- a community action (anti-poverty) agency in the frontlines of the ultimately futile "War on Poverty") -- participated, and I recall standing at the back of a truck doing it.. We had semi-trailers of cheese and handed them out to allegedly low-income folks. I say allegedly because we had no real way to verify anyone's status. We also had a rule of one block per person, but again no way to verify. It was a generally peaceful if somewhat tumultuous couple of days, and for awhile afterward blocks of cheese were serving as a form of currency in the low-income community.
Looks like things haven't changed much - see this wiki-link ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese#21st_century I'm ... just baffled that cheese that was made before World War II can still be edible. It sounds like it's older than the "eligible seniors" that it feeds! Also, back during the golden age of the Roman Empire (roughly 1 to 200 AD), the Roman satirist Juvenal wrote that ordinary citizens were able to stomach almost anything, as long as they received their panem et circenses (better known now as the phrase "bread and circuses"). So ... is the modern equivalent "government cheese and Netflix"?
Cheddar it is not. It is typically only about 50% actual cheese. Western Missouri has some of those caves, which are large enough to drive a semi-truck around in. If someone tried to live primarily on that cheese, it would fall under one of the names for MREs. Meals refusing to exit.
