Continuing the Globalizing Trend...

...suddenly the number of pageviews on my blog has become dominated by Chinese spambots. To which I say, a bot audience is better than no audience at all! So.

A very long time ago (self-hyperlink), I told you about a random geographer that I follow on twitter, in the context of describing the seemingly-now-defunct Z World Detroit. The same geographer is at it again, today passing along a link to this article entitled, "We are surrounded by zombie architecture."

A more recent tidbit from this blog, which you're sure to recall, was my description of the Elkhart County Fair, and how Miss Gokey said that if she were going to die on a ride, it should be the one invented for the 1893 World's Fair. As we were boarding the wheel, I commented that ticket booths from the fair still occasionally pop up in Chicago. You can read about where to see the fair's remnants in this old Tribune article.

"We are surrounded by zombie architecture" discusses the fact that a Chinese gazillionaire wants to reconstruct London's Crystal Palace, which was constructed for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and is now as defunct as Detroit (by which I mean, of course, Z World Detroit. Ahem.). The article's writer is a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He states, "The building's absence...is ever present." He questions the wisdom of the reconstruction, contending that, "Reanimation can't bring back the original but rather invents a new form of the present."

This reminds me of a lesson we already learned when we read Stephen King's Pet Sematary back in middle school.

He refers to the proposed rebuilding as a "cartooning of history."

It is an extremely interesting editorial and well worth the read if you have time.

Are there any spaces in your life that have been "cartooned" as they have been restored?

A Passing Fad?

This post starts by making two points:

1. There are a host of schemes out there that seek to separate you from your money, and 

2. If that person you admire and follow on twitter doesn't answer the questions that you tweet to him or her, you probably shouldn't specifically promote that person on your blog. 

I'll address item 2 first. 

So I follow this one guy on twitter. I think when I was setting up my account, I looked for "who to follow," typed in something bland and inoffensive like "urban geography," and I've been following him ever since. Social media in general, and this guy in particular, has led me to a host of instructional materials that I have been able to adapt for my students' use. I strongly encourage my teacher-readers to look for experts in their subject-matter fields to follow. 

Resting on the laurels of my recent and triumphant visit to the Zombie Apocalypse Store, I took a few days off from blogging and was beginning to fear that I wouldn't find any more fodder. Then, an amazing concept popped into my twitter feed courtesy of my silent and reluctant mentor. It's a seminal urban renewal project for the city of Detroit.

Now, moving on to point 1: my cousin Ryan's band Shiloh recently used an internet site called kickstarter to plead for money to make a new album. The band was successfully able to purchase some studio time to work on their new project. A site similar to kickstarter is indiegogo. These funding platforms will have you donating $1 to 27 different, really-great projects in no time, although personally, when I need money, I use Donors Choose.

Z World Detroit is a project asking for funding on indiegogo.

As you can see, the concept is to take advantage of Detroit's urban rot to make a zombie-themed amusement experience where a group of friends go overnight into the gamescape and get chased by zombies. If they get caught, they become zombies themselves and chase other park-goers.

It's brilliant.

But as you can see from the numbers, it's very ambitious and not getting funded, which I completely understand. Not only does the project pander to the niche market of Zombie Apocalypse enthusiasts, it targets a subset of that market: Zombie Apocalypse enthusiasts who are athletic enough to want to run around overnight with their friends, practicing their skills and such. I also doubt the staying power of the Zombie Apocalypse theme. I think that it will eventually play itself out. However! If this project already existed, fully operational, I totally would have tried to get some donors on my favorite funding platform to send my former 8th grade Explorations students to Z World Detroit.

What a creative way to incorporate the Apocalypse to fill a real need - the need to transform and renew blighted cities.