Some Walking Dead thoughts

My old friend Joe and I had a recent, brief email chat about The Walking Dead where Joe brought up some very good points and I told him I was going to steal his points and put them up here.  So here's me doing that, with my further thoughts included.  Joe is in green.

How many brand new RVs are sitting in lots at dealerships?  Why would you risk running around in a broke ass Winnebago?

Is penicillin that hard to find?  Really?

Guns have silencers, so why not get some or make one?  Ammo shouldn't be that hard to come by either - stop in at most hardware stores or a Cabela's.  There.  Enough to wipe out an entire zombie herd.

How long do zombies survive without food?  With no fresh humans, what are they eating besides the random deer?  They really aren't smart enough to hunt.

The fact that the survivors are so ill-prepared really doesn't make sense what with all the everything lying around for the taking everywhere.  I realize that at the outset of the zombie apocalypse people were maybe too shocked to stock up, but it's been long enough now that they should be getting their acts together.  I can believe that food is a real issue, what with spoilage and inability to grow anything fresh, but if they got themselves some decent vehicles (someone driving a tow truck would be a good idea, to help clear the wrecks from the road (I got that idea right from Stephen King's The Stand, btw)), they could carry enough clothing, equipment and weaponry to last a while.  And it seems like several survivors with automatic/semi-automatic guns could fell a whole herd - and you got 'em all, it wouldn't matter how noisy it was, and your spiffy new RV and tow truck could take you away before the next herd shows up.

I read a zombie novel this summer, My Life as a White Trash Zombie, about this girl who got zombified.  If she ate enough brains, she could maintain her human appearance and composure.  But three days without and her skin started to rot and crack off and she started to smell bad, and it just got worse from there.  If a zombie in that novel went for three weeks without brains, they basically turned into a dried-up, lurching skeleton with no higher function other than feeding.  I think the zombies in The Walking Dead should be somewhat similar with no food: they're never going to die of starvation since technically they're already dead, but they should shrivel and dry up and maybe move a little slower - but they'd still move, animated by their hunger.