Month: December 2016

Banner image courtesy of iStock.

Whether you’re deeply invested in their modern lore or roll your eyes at the mere thought of undead fever, there’s no denying it: zombies have infiltrated pop culture. Found throughout contemporary culture, zombies can be fast, slow, sexy, goofy, or just gross, and their headcount just keeps growing.

Believe it or not, though, today’s zombies all descend from the same series of characters—ones that united diverse spiritualities against the real-life horror of slavery, and which have helped us explore our greatest fears and faults, from contagion to consumerism.

WHERE DO ZOMBIES COME FROM (OTHER THAN THE GROUND)?

According to BBC Culture, the word “zombie” may come from any number of terms in West African and colonial-era languages, such as ndzumbi, the Mitsogo word for “corpse,” and nzambi, “spirit of a dead person” in Kongo. In several West African traditions, such terms have alternately referred to harnessed spirits of the dead, fairies, humans transformed into animals, and even misbehaving children, to name a few. According to the book Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition, “Aside from being scary monsters, what all of these [figures] share in common is an idea of subjugated agency.”

The closest relative to modern brain-hounds, however, is the Haitian zombi. It’s often been depicted as a soulless human shell that may be reanimated by potion, enchantment, or other foul means to toil for all eternity under total command of a bokor, or sorcerer, of the Vodou religion. Not to be confused with ‘voodoo,’ Vodou is “a loosely affiliated, syncretistic religion … [that] began when slaves of wide-ranging African backgrounds were brought together in what became the hub of the slave trade—Haiti … [and] systematically ‘converted’ to the Catholic Church,” according to Race, Oppression and the Zombie.

According to Farewell, Fred Voodoo author Amy Wilentz, the idea of zombies developed among these Haitian slaves. As the slaves endured notoriously cruel conditions through the 17th and 18th centuries, West African traditions evolved to reflect these horrors. Between the new spiritual traditions of Vodou in Haiti, Obeah in Jamaica, and la Regla De Ochá (a.k.a. Santería) in Cuba, BBC Culture says, “[it] gradually coalesced around the belief that a bokor or witch-doctor can render their victim apparently dead and then revive them as their personal slaves, since their soul or will has been captured.”

Overall, said Wilentz, the zombie was “a very logical offspring of New World slavery. For the slave under French rule in Haiti—then Saint-Domingue—in the 17th and 18th centuries, life was brutal: hunger, extreme overwork, and cruel discipline were the rule.” BBC Culture pointed out, too, that while the new figure was real-life horror manifested in myth, it also threatened something even worse: an eternity on the plantation, “without will, without name, and trapped in a living death of unending labour.”

VOODOO SPREADS—AND CREATIVITY ERUPTS

In 1791, a slave rebellion erupted against colonial rule and the fatally cruel conditions in French Saint-Domingue (then renamed Haiti), and after a long revolutionary war, Haiti became the first independent black republic in 1804. Word of the carefully engineered overthrow spread as far as Europe and the Americas, inspiring slaves and troubling their oppressors. Soon after, bolstered by plantation owners and investors, shocking rumors of so-called voodoo practices among slaves began spreading around the world.

“The imperial nations of the North became obsessed with Voodoo in Haiti,” BBC reported. “From then on, it was consistently demonized as a place of violence, superstition, and death … Throughout the 19th century, reports of cannibalism, human sacrifice, and dangerous mystical rites in Haiti were constant.”

Artists from imperial nations began picking up those stories and putting them to enthusiastic use. Articles, short stories, and novels in English on the imagined ‘dark magic’ of voodoo were popular fare in the 19th and early 20th centuries, according to filmmaker Gary D. Rhodes. Generally, however, “those English authors who wrote of Haiti were not in the least concerned about the negative repercussions of their work,” Rhodes wrote in White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film, saying “such depictions of Haiti and voodoo both echoed and inspired dominant U.S. prejudices that have existed through the 19th and into the 21st centuries.”

According to Rhodes, it was information and flourishes from this kind of writing—and particularly material in William B. Seabrook’s 1929 book The Magic Island—that inspired the first full-length zombie flick in history: 1932’s White Zombie. Starring Bela Lugosi (and with a plot not unlike Dracula’s), the film depicted a betrothed young woman being forced into a romance in Haiti using a version of the island’s “black magic.”

The movie impressed audiences enough to earn its producers a small bundle but never garnered much critical success. However, along with a series of scary-to-goofy films that also took up these premises in the ‘40s and ‘50s, according to Rhodes, White Zombie provided key, largely invented details about voodoo, its practitioners, and “zombification” that future directors would bring to shores around the world.

ROMERO’S LIVING DEAD TAKE OVER, CHANGING ZOMBIES FOREVER

Over the past several decades, zombies in popular films and television series have alternately run or walked, groaned or chatted, and chewed human flesh or rather saved themselves for brains; however, according to Kim Paffenroth, author of Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth, they all reflect the work of a particular filmmaker. Paffenroth explained, “When one speaks of zombie movies today, one is really speaking of movies that are either made by or directly influenced by one man, director George A. Romero.” Beginning with his “landmark” 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, Paffenroth said, Romero established a new and now widely accepted set of rules for the undead that has shaped modern zombies across all mediums.

Oddly enough, the director didn’t set out to reinvent the concept of zombies. In fact, Romero told WIRED that the famously slow-but-unstoppable undead characters in his first film were simply called “flesh-eaters.” His legions of fans consistently called them “zombies,” though, so for 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, he gave into popular demand and renamed the hordes. Romero’s choice to drop the Haitian context for zombies (realistic or demonizing) led to major changes for the genre, too. “I just took some of the mysterioso stuff of voodoo out of it, and made them the neighbors,” he told WIRED. “Neighbors are frightening enough when they’re alive.”

Intentionally or not, Romero’s work with zombies had a big impact on the horror genre from the get-go. In the post-Romero film tradition, zombies are no longer living people who’ve been rendered powerless supernaturally, Paffenroth explained. “Such zombies are more victims than monsters, and can usually be released from the malevolent control by killing the agent that is controlling them, thereby returning them to human status, or to the peaceful rest of death,” he said. “The new type of zombie, on the other hand, is a horrifying killing machine in its own right that can never revert to ‘human.’”

With these fundamental changes, Paffenroth said, Romero and his colleagues pivoted modern zombie stories not just into new shapes and geographic regions, but also new areas of meaning. Whether it’s caused by a virus, a solar flare, or an otherworldly scheme, the revolutionary “zombie apocalypse” scenario popularized by Romero’s films has allowed artists to explore the fears and potential consequences of contemporary society, from authoritarianism to pandemics.

“In the movies, the cause of [zombism] is, of course, more or less irrelevant: it is only a necessary plot device to get us to the point of, ‘What would happen if corpses got up and started walking around?’ And the story that each movie offers is to look at one very small band of survivors in their struggle to survive, not to find explanations.”

SO, WHAT HAVE THEY BEEN UP TO LATELY?

In recent years, zombies have pretty much invaded Western culture, popping up everywhere from popular comedies to blockbuster video games. In some ways, they’ve become welcome figures (or, at least, more manageable ones) as part of a favorite new world fable. As such, the zombie apocalypse is even starting to serve as a kind of shorthand backdrop for tough times that may lie ahead—or, put another way, for when “all hell breaks loose.”

The CDC, for one, has been pushing Zombie Preparedness as a way to help get humans better equipped for handling a host of different disasters. There’s the potential impact zombies could have on international politics, too, while the inevitable challenges of “Death and Taxes and Zombies” continue to be areas of concern.

For zombie expert Max Brooks, who authored The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, the immense popularity of zombies makes perfect sense. “The [zombie] genre cannot exist outside of the apocalyptic,” Brooks told The Independent. “Since we are living in times of great uncertainty, zombies are a safe way of exploring our own anxiety about the end of the world.”

And while, from certain angles, the modern zombie may seem to have branched far away from its Haitian roots, experts aren’t so sure. In many ways, this character that “sprung from the colonial slave economy [is] returning now to haunt us,” and for good reason, said Wilentz. She explained to The New York Times:

“The zombie is devoid of consciousness and therefore unable to critique the system that has entrapped him. He’s labor without grievance. He works free and never goes on strike. You don’t have to feed him much. He’s a Foxconn worker in China; a maquiladora seamstress in Guatemala; a citizen of North Korea; he’s the man, surely in the throes of psychosis and under the thrall of extreme poverty, who, years ago, during an interview, told me he believed he had once been a zombie himself.”

No one knows if there’s a zombie apocalypse in our future, but given our long cultural history with the undead, it seems likely that many humans can already see bits of ourselves and our civilization reflected in those zombie hordes—and vice versa.

No election cycle would be complete without a debate over whether or not the Electoral College should be abolished. But have we ever come close to actually replacing the system that everyone loves to hate?

Almost, once. It all started when Nixon was elected.

The 1968 presidential election season was messy and contentious. The Vietnam War, widespread race riots, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and lame duck LBJ’s dissolving popularity created a perfect political storm for a third-party candidate. In 1968, that candidate was former Alabama Governor George Wallace, who ran on the American Independent Party ticket against Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey.

Wallace’s pro-segregation platform was popular in the South, and when the ballots were counted, he’d snagged 46 of the available 538 electoral votes. Though Nixon garnered 301 electoral votes and Humphrey went home with 191, the two were separated by less than 1 percent of the national total—just 510,314 votes. The disparity between the popular and electoral votes, as well as Wallace’s success, led New York State Representative Emanuel Celler to introduce House Joint Resolution 681, a proposed Amendment to abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a system that required a president-vice president pair of candidates to win 40 percent or more of the national vote. In the event of a tie, or if no pair reached 40 percent, a runoff election would be held between the two tickets with the highest number of votes.

Proponents argued that this system was friendlier to third parties (while not being too friendly to third parties, as 50 percent was deemed to be), less complicated, and would never result in contingent elections by the Senate and House for President and Vice President (which is a possibility with the Electoral College).

The Amendment was passed easily by the House Judiciary Committee in April 1969. By September of the same year, Celler’s Amendment passed with strong bipartisan support in the House of Representatives.

President Nixon endorsed the proposal and urged the Senate to pass its version, now called the Bayh-Celler Amendment after it was sponsored by Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana. A Senate Judiciary Committee approved the proposal with a vote of 11-6 in August 1970.

But things looked grim for the Bayh-Celler Amendment as the proposal prepared to move to the Senate floor. The measure was expected to fall short of the 67 votes needed to pass, so Bayh called Nixon for backup. While he never withdrew his support, the President didn’t call for any more favors regarding the Amendment. On September 17, 1970, the Bayh-Celler Amendment was met with a hearty filibuster from both parties, mostly from Southern states.

Senators from Mississippi, Arkansas, North Carolina, Nebraska, Hawaii, and South Carolina argued that they would lose influence in the national election, and even though the Electoral College is complicated and has some potentially messy loopholes, it had served the country well and there was no real reason to change it. But most explicit in his reasoning was Carl Curtis of Nebraska, who said, “My state of Nebraska has 92/100ths of 1 percent of the electoral vote. Based on the last election, we had 73/100ths of the popular vote. I am not authorized to reduce the voting power of my state by 20 percent.”

It was the beginning of the end for the best attempt in history to abolish the Electoral College. Eventually, the Senate voted to lay the Amendment aside to attend to other business. It officially died with the close of the 91st Congress on January 3, 1971.

A version of this story appeared in 2012.

Deaf kids who visit the Regency Mall in Racine, Wisconsin, this year will have a chance to tell Santa what they want directly. In an interview with local news station WQAD 8, Santa explained, “the children appreciate the idea that they can come and talk to me, talk to Santa without having to go through their parents or their siblings to interpret for them.”

The idea that Santa should be able to communicate with children who have different language needs is becoming more popular. Last year, a video of Santa signing with a little girl at a shopping center in Middlesbrough, England, went viral. That shopping center will once again feature “the world famous Signing Santa” this year.

Signing Santa doesn’t just benefit kids who sign; he can help bring sign language to everyone. Tomorrow in Toronto, a Christmas market will be hosting not only a signing Santa, but a whole program of events related to sign language in cooperation with the Deaf Culture Center there. The program is open to all, and perfect for the spirit of the season.

Paris officials are turning an urban problem into a public service: They’re selling the city’s “love locks” as souvenirs and donating the proceeds to refugee groups, The Guardian reports.

For traveling couples, the padlocks they affixed to the iron grills of the French city’s bridges, initials scrawled on the surface, were a symbol of romance. But to Parisian officials, they were a civil danger. Fearing that the locks would weaken overpasses like the Pont des Arts, they began dismantling the metal trinkets in 2015.

Left with one million padlocks (which totaled 65 metric tons of scrap metal), authorities needed a creative way to repurpose the waste. So they decided to sell 10 metric tons of locks to members of the public, marketing them as relics of the city’s bygone history.

“Members of the public can buy five or 10 locks, or even clusters of them, all at an affordable price,” Bruno Julliard, first deputy mayor of Paris, said in a statement quoted by The Guardian. “All of the proceeds will be given to those who work in support and in solidarity of the refugees in Paris.”

The sale is slated to take place in 2017, and it’s expected to raise as much as €100,000. As for the remainder of Paris’s love locks, they will be scrapped and sold.

Paris isn’t the only city that’s sick of its love locks. Last summer, the city of Portland, Maine, got rid of “Love Locks Fence”— a 30-foot chain link fence on the city’s Commercial Street—fearing the weight of the padlocks would weaken the fence and cause it to collapse. The plan is to replace it with a new, specially-designed fence, with a wave-like shape intended to make it harder for people to fasten padlocks to the barricade.

[h/t The Guardian]

A group of Hollywood’s most famous names—Johnny Depp and Twin Peaks co-creator David Lynch, to name a few—helped a teen horror fan with stage four kidney cancer make his very own zombie movie, Metro.co.uk reports.

Anthony Conti, 16, is an emerging filmmaker and creator of The Satanic Zucchini Show, a comedy and sci-fi YouTube series. He also wrote a short film called The Black Ghiandol, in which a young man—played by Conti himself—“risks his life to save the girl he loves, after his family is wiped out during a zombie apocalypse,” a synopsis reads (as quoted by Metro.co.uk).

Instead of letting the script languish on his computer hard drive, Conti ended up turning the project into a real-life movie. The Make A Film Foundation—a nonprofit organization that helps teens or children with serious medical conditions create short films with the help of a star-studded cast and crew—caught wind of his project, and offered to lend him a hand.

The Black Ghiandol ended up starring Depp and Lynch, along with actors Laura Dern and J.K. Simmons. As for its directors, they included horror movie heavy-hitter Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, 1981), Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight, 2008), and Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent, 2014).

The movie shoot ran for five days, and the film is currently in post-production. Check out some pictures taken during the filming process below, or watch a video of Conti describing his project.

[Metro.co.uk]

Unless you make all your purchases online, you’ll probably have to interact with a salesperson at one time or another this holiday season. Although most salespeople don’t try to intimidate or manipulate you into buying items you neither need nor want, it helps to know how to handle the ones that do. Whether you’re shopping for a car, gym membership, or toaster, here are eight tips for dealing with aggressive salespeople.

1. DISTINGUISH BETWEEN ASSERTIVE AND AGGRESSIVE.

There can be a fine line between being assertive and aggressive, and it’s up to you to distinguish between a salesperson who’s annoyingly overeager and one who will say anything to make a sale. If you’re waffling on whether to make a purchase, an assertive salesperson may provide more information or respectfully ask you what he can do to help you make your decision. An aggressive salesperson, on the other hand, may threaten to revoke a discounted price, complain that your indecision is wasting his time, or refuse to accept that you don’t want to make a purchase.

2. BE MINDFUL OF YOUR EMOTIONS.

Good salespeople are skilled at reading customers’ emotions and examining their body language to determine if they’re going to buy an item. But aggressive salespeople can use this skill to manipulate customers into buying something they don’t really want.

Depending on the product they’re trying to sell, salespeople for insurance plans or gym memberships may try to persuade you by capitalizing on your fears about death, money, health, or vanity. When you’re speaking with a salesperson, pay close attention to your emotions and listen to your gut. Watch out for salespeople who sound phony when they make small talk, reveal too much personal information (to try to become your friend), or make you feel guilty about not buying a product.

3. PRESENT A UNITED FRONT.

If you’re shopping for big-ticket items such as a car, boat, or house, salespeople may try to pit you and your spouse against each other. Beware of salespeople who try to physically separate you from your spouse, coax you to agree to a higher price than your partner, or appeal to your spouse’s sense of manhood or womanhood. Before you go shopping with your partner, decide on your budget, buying strategy, and any non-negotiables.

4. DON’T FALL FOR ARTIFICIAL DEADLINES.

To try to close a deal, aggressive salespeople often put time pressure on a customer. By giving customers made-up deadlines, salespeople exploit impulse buyers and appeal to customers’ fear of missing out on a good deal. To be sure, some stores run legitimate limited-time sales that put true deadlines on customers. Generally, though, if a salesperson tells you that you must buy an item now, and says that you’re not allowed to take time to think about it or do more research, consider that a red flag.

5. REGISTER YOUR PHONE NUMBERS ON THE DO NOT CALL REGISTRY.

Some salespeople (and scammers) make cold calls, hoping that someone they talk to will buy their product. Register your home and cell phone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry to stop receiving telemarketing calls. But keep in mind that some telemarketers will still call phone numbers listed on the registry, so file a complaint or block their numbers. If a salesperson somehow gets you on the phone, politely tell her that you’re not interested and you want to be removed from her call list. Don’t feel guilty about cutting her off, not answering her questions, or hanging up.

6. BE MINDFUL OF COMMISSIONS.

Some salespeople earn a percentage of every product they sell, and this potential to make a commission can turn salespeople into predators. Be aware that a car salesman who’s telling you why you’d be foolish not to buy an extended warranty or a bridal consultant who insists the dress isn’t complete without a veil may earn a commission on every add-on he sells. Take time to do your own research on the product you’re buying in order to take the salesperson’s advice with a grain of salt. And when you’re making a big purchase, it doesn’t hurt to bring along a friend who can offer a second opinion; this way you don’t need to place as much trust in the salesperson’s praise (“That dress looks perfect on you!”) or fear tactics. (On the flip side, if you have a good experience with a salesperson who is likely earning a commission but need to take some time to think, be sure to ask for her by name when you return to the store.)

7. DON’T BE AFRAID TO REPEAT YOURSELF.

Pushy salespeople know that their persistence can wear you down and break your resolve. If you don’t want to buy something or need more time to think, be firm—and use unequivocal terms like “I don’t” or “I won’t” rather than “I can’t.” Politely tell the salesperson that you’re not going to make a purchase, and repeat yourself if they keep pushing. Most “people pleasers” will find it challenging to hold their ground, but remember that your first priority is to yourself, not the salesperson.

8. HAVE COMPASSION.

Aggressive salespeople are simply trying to do their job to the best of their ability, so don’t take it personally if you encounter a rude or forceful one. Even if a salesperson annoys or frustrates you, try to be polite and calm. Be firm if you’re not interested in what they’re selling, and ask to speak to a different salesperson or leave the store, if necessary.

The digital revolution is in full swing, but music lovers around the world still appreciate the beauty of the B-side. As NME reports, vinyl sales in the UK eclipsed digital album downloads last week for the first time in history, according to data provided by the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA).

The ERA—a UK trade organization representing retailers who sell physical and digital entertainment products—says that in Week 48 of 2016 (that’s Monday, November 28 through Sunday, December 4), purchasers spent £2.4 million on vinyl. During the same time span, only £2.1 million was spent on digital album downloads.

These numbers illustrate a substantial shift in purchasing patterns from the same period last year, when audiophiles only spent £1.2 million on vinyl albums but shelled out £4.4 million on music downloads. Music lovers often prefer vinyl albums for their superior sound quality, but the question remains: Why are record sales exploding, especially when digital downloading platforms are now so ubiquitous?

The ERA attributes the phenomenon to factors including Record Store Day Black Friday (a new record sales promotional event held the day after Thanksgiving, modeled on the popular Record Store Day holiday), along with the increasing amount of retailers—ranging from music stores to supermarkets—that now sell records. In short, vinyl records are trendy again. Also, the BBC points out, album downloads have declined since streaming services (like Spotify and Pandora) have become more popular.

“This is yet further evidence of the ability of music fans to surprise us all,” said ERA chief Kim Bayley in a statement (quoted by the BBC). “It’s not so long ago that the digital download was meant to be the future. Few would have predicted that an album format, first invented in 1948 and based on stamping a groove into a piece of plastic, would now be outselling it in 2016.”

[h/t NME]