Free Republic

Police find spiked baseball bats throughout San Francisco San Francisco Police are asking for help leading to those chaining up spiked baseball bats to poles throughout the city. San Francisco Police Sgt. Michael Andraychak says officers first received reports of wooden or metal baseball bats appearing on poles and parking meters in the city on Thanksgiving morning. Andraychak says 27 bats with spikes running through them have been found since then. The latest discovery was Friday in the Fishermen's Wharf area. Andraychak says the spikes on the objects allow them to be considered a prohibited or deadly weapon, which is...

Bethesda has launched a new website almost certainly confirming Fallout 4 will be announced today. The site bears a countdown timer that currently looks like it'll run out today, June 3 at 7am PT / 10am ET / 3pm GMT.

• Republicans are particularly confident in their ability to survive an apocalypse Many Americans have experience with natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes but each time that one hits an area of the country it is apparent that few people take disaster preparation as seriously as the government tells them to. When people are often so woefully unprepared for a hurricane or earthquake, what hope is there if civilization as we know it were to collapse? Research from YouGov shows that Americans are relatively optimistic about their fate in the event of an apocalyptic event. People tend to say...

<p>MOUNT PLEASANT, Mich. (AP) — Some Central Michigan University students are getting schooled in the undead this semester, thanks to a religion course that's exploring apocalyptic themes in biblical texts, literature and pop culture.</p> <p>Philosophy and religion faculty member Kelly Murphy says she always wanted to teach a course on apocalyptic literature, and she is a fan of AMC's TV show "The Walking Dead." The result is Murphy's class, which is called "From Revelation to 'The Walking Dead.'"</p>

Top Secret Recipes Version of the Hostess Twinkie The Twinkie was invented in 1930 by the late James A. Dewar, then the Chicago-area regional manager of Continental Baking Company, the parent corporation behind the Hostess trademark. At the time, Continental made "Little Short Cake Fingers" only during the six-week strawberry season, and Dewar realized that the aluminum pans in which the cakes were baked sat idle the rest of the year. He came up with the idea of injecting the little cakes with a creamy filling to make them a year-round product and decided to charge a nickel for a...

Recipes for the Post-Apocalypse: How and Why to Eat Rat Meat Rat is a readily available street food in some Southeast Asian countries, and earlier editions of The Joy of Cooking contained instructions on the proper butchering of squirrels. But rodents have fallen out of favor in most Western cuisines, relegated to mere vermin. So how would you go about cooking a rat if you'd never tried it before? Laura Ginn did just that recently, breaking her lengthy vegetarianism to how to butcher and prepare rodent meat. Ginn is an artist whose work largely incorporates survival skills such as skinning...

Would you want to survive the end of civilization? Let's say the end of the world as we know it is coming — but someone offers you a priceless spot in their guaranteed-to-be-safe bunker, so you can be one of the chosen few who rebuilds the Earth. Would you want to survive, and emerge into the post-apocalyptic wasteland? Would the positives of playing a role in a new society outweigh the loss of creature comforts? Or would you rather just go out with the majority of the human race? I wouldn't last long in a Mad Max-style world — the...

No, a bunker will not save you from the apocalypse Everybody talks about the apocalypse, but almost nobody actually prepares for it. But let's say you're one of the few visionaries who actually plans for every eventuality. You've been stashing your supplies. You've built a personal bunker, or you've purchased your own spot in a communal "survival suite." When the apocalypse finally comes — possibly later this year — will you really survive if you're locked inside a bunker? (Answer: No.) Protecting against any 2012 scenario A thriving industry exists to offer structures that will defend against a variety of...

What are the tax implications of the zombie apocalypse? The only certainties in life are death and taxes, but how do you handle the taxes when death doesn't go quite as planned? Law professor Adam Chodorow takes a stab at estate planning for the undead in perhaps the only legal paper to cite both the Internal Revenue Code and Weekend at Bernie's II. Chodorow, a professor at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, authored the paper "Death and Taxes...and Zombies," which will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Iowa Law Review. Chodorow notes that, while the...

Holy cr@p! This zombie attack bike is powered by a chainsaw I'm sorry, did you think I meant a chainsaw motor? I suppose that's understandable (after all, two-stroke chainsaw engines are often used to convert bicycles into rear-wheel-drive motorbikes), but I didn't say chainsaw motor, did I? I said chainsaw. Because whoever pieced together this unholy death machine has clearly left the power source attached to a number of other components. They've even opted for a FWD conversion so that the saw's guide blade and cutting chain could be front-mounted. 100% terrifying, 100% brilliant. Perfect for plowing through hordes of...

How will we get around in the post-apocalypse? One of the irritating things about many post-apocalyptic movies in TV shows is that everyone drives everywhere, with little thought about alternative modes of transportation. But how will we get around after armageddon? We weigh the post-apocalyptic transit options. Hopefully, down the line, we'd see groups of people teaming up to bring back trains, but in terms of personal transit in the immediate post-apocalypse, here are a few options: Cars: Ah, the noble car, transit mode of choice in far too many post-apocalyptic fictions. For some people, cars might be a logical...

Could you really survive the apocalypse by eating freeze-dried food? Is it really a good idea to store freeze dried food for a long-term survival situation? It may be an attractive proposition for the survivalist in you, but you probably didn't bargain on what exactly the process of freeze drying involves — and its price. HOW TO CARRY A TON OF FOOD ON YOUR BACK The process of freeze drying plays with the properties of water within food. When freeze drying, a cooked portion of food is flash frozen under a vacuum. At low pressure, all but 2-5% of the...