Showing posts with label zombies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zombies. Show all posts
Thursday, September 10, 2015
Saturday, March 21, 2015
Zombie Apocalypse? Where to HIde
Wall Street Journal, Friday, March 20, 2015, MANSION section, Spread Sheet, Page M12:
(and F.Y.I.: http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2011/05/18/cdc-advises-on-zombie-apocalypse-and-other-emergencies/ )
Zombie Apocalypse? Where to Hide
Researchers at Cornell University have developed a statistical model for simulating the spread of a fictional zombie epidemic
ILLUSTRATION: TAMER KOSELI
Just a word of friendly advice—if you ever find yourself in the midst of a zombie outbreak, steer clear of Scranton, Pa.
Researchers at Cornell University have developed a statistical model for simulating the spread of a fictional zombie epidemic. Detailed in a study submitted to the scientific-paper repository arXiv, the model identifies northeastern Pennsylvania as the U.S. location most at risk of being overrun by the undead.
To develop the model, scientists in Cornell’s physics department broke down the U.S. population in a grid of roughly 3-kilometer-square boxes. They then built upon classic epidemiological models of infectious-disease transmission—measles, the flu and the like—to simulate a marauding band of undead ravaging the country.
What locales might those worried about zombies want to avoid? Highly populated areas are a bad bet in general, of course. ButAlexander Alemi, a graduate student and one of the authors of the paper, notes that the most susceptible spots change over time.
Seven days after the initial outbreak, lower Manhattan, with the map’s highest population density at 299,616 people, has the highest zombie susceptibility. In fact, the New York City metro area in general is probably best avoided, as are other large cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas.
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By 28 days out, however, the pattern has shifted, Mr. Alemi says. Instead of individual cities being at the greatest risk, areas located between multiple major cities are most vulnerable. “You start to see interactions between different cities,” he says. While northeastern Pennsylvania, identified in the paper as the country’s most vulnerable region, “doesn’t have a particularly high population itself, it is near all these other high population areas.”
This means that were a zombie outbreak to start in any of these nearby cities—New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C.—the creatures would have a high probability of finding their way to northeastern Pennsylvania, which puts the area at especially high risk, Mr. Alemi notes.
Also a bad bet—Bakersfield, Calif., which sits uncomfortably near San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The best spots for riding out a zombie apocalypse are sparsely populated areas of Montana and Nevada, which remain untouched even four months in, note Mr. Alemi and his co-authors.
The subject matter is completely hypothetical, of course. But the Cornell team’s zombie simulation could have applications for modeling real-life outbreaks, Mr. Alemi says.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
How Do U Transport Zombie?Mother-in-Law Love?Hagar the Horrible, Piranha Club, Pickles, The Argyle Sweater Comics
Sunday, January 5, 2014
"You URNED It!" tshirtbordello Sweepstakes
Simply FYI. I liked the graphics and the phrase "You URNED It!" I'm not endorsing this contest; feel free to enter if you wish (on their Facebook page), I guess.? Tshirtbordello makes t-shirts with messages/pictures/phrases on them, many zombie-related:
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Bill Cosby: Marriage=Living Dead/A Review of Far From Finished
I watched Bill Cosby: Far From Finished, twice. As a long-time Cosby fan, I have followed Cosby since I was a child. So I am an aging fan who has been married for some time, and I have several children. And I've lived in Philadelphia for 30+ years now. Far From Finished was good, maybe sublimely great, but it depends on your mood and inclinations. The first time I watched it I was not smitten in the least. The second time around I enjoyed it a lot. It was easier for me to enjoy it with the live audience laughing along. I'm not sure how funny it would be without audience interaction, laughter and appreciation; it might not be funny at all. It might just be a grim, sad indictment of marriage. Sure marriage can be tough, but it can be great also. His progression of your "girlfriend" who becomes your wife, and NOT your friend, is perhaps eerily accurate at times, but completely wrong at other times and downright sad and scary. His definition of a married husband and wife might be that they are zombies, living dead, who pass sometimes in the night.
He portrays husbands as blubbering idiots essentially. But Cosby's blubbering has earned him a large and loving audience, and wealth, which I'm sure he and his wife and kids appreciate.
His suggestion that the groom's mother walk the bride down the aisle is maybe a good one: "this way the groom can see the woman who brought him into this world and the woman who will take him out of this world." Some people might suggest that the mother of the bride also walk down the aisle so the groom can see what his bride will look like in the future.!?
He portrays husbands as blubbering idiots essentially. But Cosby's blubbering has earned him a large and loving audience, and wealth, which I'm sure he and his wife and kids appreciate.
His suggestion that the groom's mother walk the bride down the aisle is maybe a good one: "this way the groom can see the woman who brought him into this world and the woman who will take him out of this world." Some people might suggest that the mother of the bride also walk down the aisle so the groom can see what his bride will look like in the future.!?
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Lauren Cohan of "Walking Dead" Kills Zombies
Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, November 24, 2013, ARTS&ENTERTAINMENT, Front Page:
Lauren Cohan of 'Walking Dead' sticks it to zombies
Lauren Cohan (The Walking Dead, Chuck): Born in Philadelphia but raised in Cherry Hill and later the United Kingdom, Lauren Cohan is most well-known for her role as Maggie Greene on AMC's The Walking Dead and Rose on the CW's The Vampire Diaries.
'It's really about getting into a rhythm. The key is the angle."
Lauren Cohan is revealing the secret for dispatching large numbers of zombies in the most efficient manner.
It's a technique that Maggie, her character on The Walking Dead, has perfected this season out of necessity, as the ravening biters have gathered in growing mosh pits by the perimeter fences behind which the human survivors have taken refuge.
Periodically, Maggie and her besieged band must thin the zombie herds before they topple the ramparts.
Because of Cohan, a doe-eyed Philadelphia native, many inThe Walking Dead's massive fanboy base would willingly take a shift on the fence. Post-apocalyptic chicks are hot!Lauren Cohan is revealing the secret for dispatching large numbers of zombies in the most efficient manner.
It's a technique that Maggie, her character on The Walking Dead, has perfected this season out of necessity, as the ravening biters have gathered in growing mosh pits by the perimeter fences behind which the human survivors have taken refuge.
Periodically, Maggie and her besieged band must thin the zombie herds before they topple the ramparts.
Of course, things are not always what they look like - or sound like - on TV. On the phone from Georgia, where The Walking Dead is shot, Cohan has a rather melodic English accent, quite unlike Maggie's flat Mid-Atlantic intonation.
Is she using the interview to practice for a future audition? Or has she adopted the accent to make the faux American stars of The Walking Dead - Londoner Andrew Lincoln (Rick) and Liverpudlian David Morrissey (the Governor) - feel more at home?
Neither. "I'm like this Jersey girl who feels so English," she says. "It's an anomaly."
You got that right. Not to mention confusing. Let's start at the beginning.
The actress was born in Philadelphia of Scottish, Irish, and Norwegian stock. When her mother remarried, she took both the last name (Cohan) and the faith (Jewish) of her stepfather.
She remembers her adolescence in Cherry Hill as pretty idyllic. "I had a white Huffy with neon-pink handlegrips," she says. "Swim team, Baby-sitters Club books, and going to Kmart in the summer because there was nothing else to do. My best friend, Margaret-Ann Kavanagh, and I built crazy rafts and cruised down the creek, which was probably sewage."
When she was 13, her family moved to the United Kingdom, her mother's birthplace. Lauren felt like a hostage. "I was kicking and screaming," she says. "We have a picture of me outside the house in New Jersey. I think I'd been crying for three days."
The transition to life in Surrey outside London turned out to be surprisingly smooth.
"There was myself and one other American kid at the school," she says. "We were sort of a novelty. Everyone was obsessed with My So-Called Life at the time, and everybody wanted to know if that was what it was really like in America."
Are we cool on Cohan's binational upbringing? Let's get back to killing zombies.
No one works the fence like Maggie, using her sharpened cane to turn out the lights on one zombie after another like some cranked-up picador.
actual conversations with all of them," she says, laughing. "You can't see it, but I'm whispering to them, 'You need to come closer'; 'Growl a little more.' "
Occasionally, the grim survivalist tone of The Walking Deadwill take its toll on a girl.
"It goes in waves," she says. "In Season 2, I had a lot of bad dreams because it was all new. In Season 3, I really only got affected when I had to cut the baby out of Lori [the character played by Sarah Wayne Callies].
"I literally had this overwhelming wave of grief when we finished," says Cohan, 31. "I know it's not real and that people will get up and walk away. But the things we hope to make people feel are there and the body doesn't know the difference."
Cohan comes to South Jersey to visit her many relatives every chance she gets. Even then she has to be vigilant about The Walking Dead's strict secrecy protocols.
"My aunt and uncle are always trying to pry plotlines out of me," she says, laughing. "They think I don't know that's what they're doing. I intentionally feed them red herrings.
"They'll say, all innocent, 'We're so glad Glenn [Maggie's boyfriend, played by Steven Yuen] is going to be alive!' I say, 'Ooh, I don't know about that.' "
Devious and deadly! The fanboys must be drooling.
TELEVISION
The Walking Dead9 p.m. Sundays on AMC
dhiltbrand@phillynews.com
215-854-4552
@daveondemand_tv
Thursday, October 31, 2013
"Nothing Personal: (Cannibals) Want To EAt You" & Replace Zombies
New York Times, Sunday Review (The Opinion Pages), October 27, 2013, Page SR 7:
NEWS ANALYSIS
Nothing Personal: They Want to Eat You
By ERIK PIEPENBURG
Published: October 26, 2013
ZOMBIES may be hogging the pop culture spotlight these days in “World War Z” and “The Walking Dead,” but now that the flesh-eating undead are selling Sprint cellphones in television ads, one has to wonder: have they finally jumped the shark as the monster of the moment?
Well, there’s a new wave of evildoers waiting to step in: cannibals.
At the Toronto International Film Festival in September, Eli Roth’s hungry-savages film, “The Green Inferno,” and Manuel MartÃn Cuenca’s dark love story “Cannibal” played to gore-loving crowds. Other releases this fall include “Butcher Boys,” an urban thriller based on Jonathan Swift’s satirical 18th-century essay “A Modest Proposal”; “The Colony,” about flesh-eating survivors of an apocalyptic attack; “We Are What We Are,”about a father and his cannibal children; the German-language “Cannibal Diner,” with young women on the menu; and “Evil Feed,” a comedy about a restaurant that serves the body parts of losing participants in an underground fighting ring.
On the small screen, NBC’s crime drama “Hannibal,” based on Thomas Harris’s notorious flesh muncher Hannibal Lecter, will return for a second season. And two plays (both closing this weekend) brought cannibalism to the stage: In New York, “feeling” told the story of a woman who talks with Jeffrey Dahmer; in Minneapolis, “Kung Fu Zombies vs. Cannibals” took a comic-book approach to the subject.
So what’s behind this burst of fascination with flesh eating?
For Mr. Roth, the director of “Hostel” and an expert on pushing the boundaries of horror, the fear of cannibals “is not just having your own flesh devoured, but that you would have a taste for another person’s flesh. It’s a primal feeling.”
The tag line for “The Green Inferno,” showing on Nov. 2 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Scary Movies series, is, “The only thing more terrifying than Mother Nature is human nature.”
Gunnar Hansen, who played the weapon-wielding Leatherface in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (1974), a pioneering foray into cannibalistic terrain, sees it as a sign of the times, just as the cold war gave rise to fever dreams of space invaders and Vietnam ushered in a modern zombie era with “Night of the Living Dead.”
“You can look at the economy and say the past is about to bite us literally and figuratively,” said Mr. Hansen, whose new memoir is called “Chain Saw Confidential.” “We are at the point where a new generation has nothing to look forward to.”
Or perhaps there’s something more visceral at work. Another early favorite of horror cognoscenti — and an inspiration for Mr. Roth’s “Green Inferno” — is Ruggero Deodato’s“Cannibal Holocaust” (1980), about a documentary crew that’s attacked by the flesh-eating tribe they are filming in the Amazon. Its depiction of real-life animal slaughter, which still shocks today, suggests a weird affinity with today’s animal-rights’ movement.
“People rarely think of steak or fried chicken as consuming a dead thing,” said Tim Kelly, who writes about the cannibal genre for Cinematallica.com. “Cannibals force you to confront something you don’t want to understand, which is the truth of what you are consuming.”
Then again, maybe it was just a matter of time before pop culture caught up with real-life reports of cannibalism, like the case of a New York police officer who was convicted in March for a plot to kill and eat women.
And there’s always the possibility of shock fatigue. “Ten years ago nobody would laugh at a movie about eating people,” said Aaron Au, a co-writer of “Evil Feed.” “But the zombie genre desensitized us to be accepting of it.”
On another, even creepier, level, what sets cannibals apart from zombies may simply be their humanity. As Kimani Ray Smith, the director of “Evil Feed,” put it: “A cannibal’s just a smarter zombie. You need more cunning to get away with being a cannibal. But cannibals still have day-to-day problems. They still have to pay the rent.”
The Returned: Dead Return To Life !! = Work Of Art
'The Returned' on Sundance: Zombie yarn a work of art
AP
This image released by The Sundance Channel shows Clotilde Hesme, left, and Pierre Perrier in a scene from "The Returned," premiering Oct. 31, at 9 p.m. EST. (AP Photo/The Sundance Channel, Jean Claude Lother)
The camera pushes forward, taking us with it, across a deserted, wooded hilltop toward an inviting country house. We're transported through the door, along the hallway, and stop in front of a display case on the far wall.
It's a framed collection of butterflies. Marked by delicate wings yellow and blue, red and green, they are firmly affixed to the back board with pins.
Almost imperceptibly, one of the creatures stirs. It flaps its wings more deliberately now, and flies out. Crash! It goes through the glass, shattering it as it flies away.
That scene is a perfect distillation of the themes that pervade and haunt The Returned, an extraordinary, sublime mini-series premiering at 9 p.m. Thursday on the Sundance Channel.
Composed of progressive cycles of suspense, mystery, heartrending beauty, and terror, director Fabrice Gobert's eight-part French-language fable is about a small mountain community in France that begins to experience the spontaneous resurrection and return of deceased and buried townsfolk.
The Returned is inspired by Robin Campillo's 2004 feature film of the same name. Yet, while the film tracked a city's collective response to a phenomenon that affected the globe, the series is far more intimate, exploring the reaction of loved ones when confronted with each returnee.
Camille, a teen who died in a bus crash, is greeted with delight by her mother, who has prayed for this day for four years. Is her daughter an angel?
To others, the returned are demons. An elderly man who lost his wife when they were both young tries to kill her when she shows up still radiant in youth.
The Returned ups the ante on the usual run of ghost and zombie yarns by pulling up the genre into that rarefied region usually reserved for great works of art.
It's a deeply moving, unforgettable experience.
TELEVISION REVIEW
'The Returned'
9 p.m. Thursdays through Dec. 19 on Sundance Channel.
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