- This is the time of year for zombies – assuming undead
beings even have any need for time. They’re starring in a hit cable series,
they’re all the rage on magazine covers and they’re über-popular on college
campuses. That much is evidenced by “Undead U: A Zombie Symposium,” set for Friday from 7-9 p.m. on
the campus of Michigan Technological University. The wealth of zombie
information and exploration is the creation of Syd Johnson, assistant professor
of philosophy at Michigan Tech. “’Night of the Living Dead,’ a low-budget movie
in the 1960s, started it all,” Johnson said. “Back then, there were fears about
nuclear disasters. We still have fears of plague, disease and death. There have
always been worries of losing control and losing our minds.” The professor
believes zombies go hand in hand with those fears. Johnson previously taught an
ethics class using zombies to help students think about what it means to be
human and probe the depths and other angles of life’s moral dilemmas. “If
zombies used to be human, are they still human?” she posited. “And how do we
treat them if they are? How can you kill something if it’s already dead?” All
of this might seem absurd because zombies don’t really exist, but Johnson
refuses to allow herself to be constrained by the confines of reality. She asks
vague, apocalyptic questions hinging on issues like what happens when there is
no government and no society, but everything eventually leads back to the topic
at hand: Are zombies people, and what is it to be a person? Maybe these zombies
are just severely brain-damaged people…like most humans you encounter during
rush hour traffic on an average day. The symposium is conveniently scheduled the
day after Halloween, in the midst of Mexico’s Day of the Dead observances. It
will bring together experts on various zombie-related topics and attempt to
figure out why zombies are so damn appealing. Best of all, it’s free and open
to the public and afterward, visitors can hang around and find a bitchin’
Halloween party just off campus……..
- Can a professional athlete be too focused on winning a
championship? Oklahoma City Thunder
star Kevin Durant believes so and he’s of the opinion that he was so obsessed
with leading his team to a title last season that it affected him personally to
the point that he took it out on others. "Last year, I was obsessed with
it," Durant said of winning a title. "Like, I wasn't going to sleep
because I wanted to win so bad. I was screaming at my teammates, at the refs,
at the coaches. I got mad because I thought, 'If we have a bad game here, we're
not going to win a championship.'" The hyper-competitive type of person
might suggest that is the very reason greats such as Michael Jordan won titles
and Durant won't, but it’s difficult to be too critical of a season in which a
player scored 28.1 points per game and joined the 50-40-90 club (50 percent
field-goal shooting, 40 percent from 3-point range and 90 percent on free
throws. Durant is on point when he argues that he was more assertive and
aggressive on the court last season as he was called for 12 technical fouls --
surpassing his total from the previous five seasons combined. Many observers
hailed the technicals as evidence that he was finally developing an edge to his
normally goofy persona, but it’s the feeling that he needed to play perfectly
each night and holding his team to that same standard that seemed to bother
Durant the most. "Like, for me, when I was coming in I was like 'If I miss
a shot, I'm going to miss this shot in Game 6 of the Finals,'" he said.
"'If we don't play defense this game, we're not going to play defense in
the Finals.' Like, I was thinking like that.” Higher standards and added
pressure or not, losing starting point guard Russell Westbrook to injury left
the Thunder woefully underequipped to go deep into the playoffs and Durant
shouldn’t be too bitter about that……..
- Go big or don’t go home to Dubai. A nation built on excess
received quite a boost for its ego this week when its new airport welcomed the arrival
of its first commercial flight. Oh, and this just so happens to be on the fast
track to becoming the world’s largest airport. The emirate's new crown jewel is
located in Jebel Ali and is part of Dubai World Central, an "aviation
city" that the government launched as a free economic zone. Al Maktoum
International Airport is not to be confused with the emirate's main airport,
Dubai International Airport, located 31 miles to the north. Al Maktoum
International Airport is owned by the government of Dubai and operated by Dubai
Airports Company and its starting date for full commercial passenger services
is 2017…or at least it was until the project was delayed for years due to the
regional financial crisis. The revised start date is 2027 and the government
estimates that it will ultimately cost 120 billion dirhams ($32.67 billion).
All of that is the bad news, but the airport has been open for cargo flights
since 2010. Low-cost Hungarian airline Wizz Air (real name) as the first
airline to be welcomed at the new passenger terminal. The customary festive
water salute on that day was almost enough to make the airline not feel like a
total loser for being all alone in a ginormous airport. The only other two
carries now operating out of the facility are Kuwait-based low-cost carrier
Jazeera Airways and Bahrain's full-service Gulf Air, which made its inaugural
flight to the new airport on Sunday. Some time in the next 14 years, the UAE's
state-owned carrier Emirates is expected to operate entirely out of the new hub.
Other airlines are reportedly interested in operating flights into and out of
the facility, but right now Al Maktoum boasts just one working runway. When
fully finished, it will offer five runways with an annual capacity of 160
million passengers and 12 million tons of cargo. Those numbers – should they
come to fruition – would dwarf those of the world's current busiest airport,
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, which serviced approximately
95 million passengers in 2012…….
- Emile Hirsch is about to take on a heck of a
role. Hirsch has signed on to star in a forthcoming biopic of late comedian
and actor John Belushi, who died
at L.A.'s Chateau Marmont hotel in 1983 following what is known to junkies as a
speedball: a combined injection of cocaine and heroine. Belushi, one of the
original “Saturday Night Live” cast members, was just 33 when he passed away.
His “Blues Brothers” co-star Dan Aykroyd will serve as an executive
producer for the project, so it should be true to form and accurate if nothing
else. Additonally, the screenplay will be based on the book “Belushi” by Judith Belushi Pisano,
the late actor's widow, and Tanner Colby. There is no official title yet for
the project, which is being written and directed by Steve Conrad, who also penned the script for Ben Stiller's
forthcoming film “The Secret Life Of
Walter Mitty.” Hirsch has played a wide range of roles and although the
success of his recent films has varied substantially, his performances in
projects such as “Milk,” “The Girl Next Door,” “Speed Racer,” “Into The Wild” and “Taking Woodstock” have generally been
well-received. Though the script may not yet have a title, Conrad is targeting
next spring as a starting date for shooting, with the project appropriately set
in New York. In between now and then, Hirsch would do well to get in character
by living a life of excess, full of drugs, overeating and spending every waking
hour either face-down in a pile of cocaine or in a club with hot women, trying
to convince one of them to go get face-down in a pile of coke with you…….
- Great news from Google. The company has somehow hired a
whopping 110 million new employees in the past few months. That number may seem
shocking and not possibly true, but there is no other way to explain things if
the tech giant’s claims that its social network Google+ has seen a 37-percent
jump in users in recent months. Everyone knows that no one outside of Google’s
employ actually uses the black sheep of the social networking world and that
employees only use it under compulsion by The Man, so Google+ going from 190
million users in May to 300 million monthly active users six months later has
to be the result of more employees inside Google’s empire. Vic Gundotra, head
of social networking at Google, claimed that a whopping 540 million Google+
members have interacted socially with any of Google's services in the past 30
days up from 390 million in May. Also, Google is also uploading 1.5 billion
photos per week and that number is increasing at "an amazing rate,"
Gundotra. Perhaps realizing that letting out too much information rather than
collecting information on users to sell to advertisers is unwise, Google did
not say how many of those photos are being shared on Google+. Bradley Horowitz,
vice president of product management at Google+, would say only that it was a
"very big number." Inflated numbers or not, Google remains über-light
years behind Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, MySpace and every other social
networking site ever conceived and probably always will. Google+ has value beyond
social networking because it helps the company identify and authenticate users
across all its services, including search, Gmail and YouTube. Obviously, the ultimate
goal of this is to help Google serve better ads - the core of its business……..
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