That's a great find of more meta-commentary. I don't know about super-scholarly, but Cracked can be very interesting, a finger on the pulse of pop culture mayhem. I don't understand its compulsion for lists and numbering things though.

The 'new' drugs they're referring to are bath salts - the latest in any number of idiotic ways to do yourself some real damage.

What I find interesting (in a ghoulish sort of way) is that the CDC had published a zombie survival guide last year, as part of a disaster preparedness program. It was an ironic repurposing of the zombie meme. But what I also find troubling about the labelling of these incidents as zombie-like (and then the resulting chortling on the internet about zombie outbreaks, ho ho, it's starting) is the apparent invisibility of the victims. The man who was attacked in Florida faces a very long and difficult recover; he will never be the same, physically, and probably emotionally. The man who was dismembered in Montreal was murdered. The staffers who opened the box are traumatized, and understandably so.

The zombie meme seems to be a convenient way to look away from victims. In the zombie narrative, victims are seen as people who were less prepared, who took unnecessary risks, or who were just too feeble to survive in the post-apocalyptic world - they didn't have the 'right stuff' to become tough, hardened survivors, ready to take on anything. It's a strange way of viewing vulnerability - victims are reimagined as liabilities to themselves and the people around them.

THAT is what I find troubling about the zombie meme. It seems to be the latest in a narrative of callousnes, which also seems to fit with our current colletive, cultural logic.

"Victims are reimagined as liabilities": You make a vital point, and it's very well put.

The zombie apocalypse as a "narrative of callousness" corresponds very well with some of this research group's founding premises about the function of this fantastic figure for neoliberal hegemony - which Greville Rumble, quoting Honderich, rightly calls "a 'vicious' system" (175).

The problem with the libertarian argument is that it allows for a perfectly just society within which there are people who have no food, no healthcare and no education (Honderich, 2002, pp. 43–44). So ‘in this [formulation of a] perfectly just society [there are people who] have no claim to food, no moral right to it. No one and nothing does wrong in letting them starve to death’ (Honderich, 2002, p. 44). ‘This’, says Honderich, ‘is vicious’ (2002, p. 44). (171)

See:

Rumble, Greville. “Social Justice, Economics and Distance Education.” Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning 22.2 “Ethical Issues in Open and Distance Learning” (2007): 167-76. Web. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02680510701306715

Having tried Macbook-only, iPad-only and iPhone only, if I am away for more than a couple of days I now typically travel with a portable Apple Store in my SEV jacket pockets - Macbook Air, iPad and iPhone. On the bright side it is still a great deal smaller and lighter than a single laptop used to be, even with the typical assortment of connectors and cables I bring with me for presentations.

I've found that I can survive pretty well for about a day with only an iPhone, two or three days on just an iPad, but after that the need for specialist tools like decent integrated bibliographic software, word processors that don't mess with MS Word templates etc, or proper development tools becomes a problem - not impossible, but it becomes time-consuming, prone to error and tedious. It's definitely getting better though.

It will be interesting to see whether Windows 8 lives up to its potential promise as a tablet system - I'd really like to find a single device that works for everything. I've tried hard to love Android but, compared with iOS, it's clunky, unreliable and its computer roots show through much too much.

"Portable Apple store": you know, I've actually seen that in a US airport - it was like an oversize vending machine, dispensing iPods instead of candy.

It sounds like your tech needs after a couple of days - biblio-ware, dev tools - reflect your work's methodology. I think there's an interesting subject for discussion in how different methodologies require different tools - not just different research instruments, which would be obvious enough, but different apps, if you will, given that most apps (that I know of anyway) aren't designed to be field- or discipline- or even academia-specific. Mendeley is decidedly an academ-app, true, but it's cross-disiplinarily capacious. I'm thinking out loud about this, because over in the Humanatees we're starting a conversation about methodology, and it strikes me that I don't see similar methodological limitations on my own work being imposed by sticking to tablet use. (Of course it could just be that my own understanding of methodology is itself too tablet-like: reductive and simplified :)

Great site. A lot of useful information here. I’m sending it to some friends. thanks for the nice post !
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Ha! I love the poem and the picture. :) 

(I get a good, juvenile giggle about being asked to "bare with me," too. Is there a poem for that one?)

There should be - that's one that needs to be written!

Of course, thanks to the wonder of the InterWeb, it is no surprise to find that something like that has happened already though, I fear, sometimes unwittingly. For your delight and delectation, some of the finest poetry you may never have heard...

http://www.gspoetry.com/baby-bare-with-me-spokenword-poems-160988.html

http://www.gspoetry.com/bare-with-me-emotional-poems-443667.html

Rather more wittingly but of a similar genre...

http://www.poetrysoup.com/poems_poets/poem_detail.aspx?ID=238615

http://www.gspoetry.com/bare-with-me-spiritual-poems-413127.html

Though technically the malapropism here is not part of the poem so should really be disqualified, perhaps the finest poetic moment I've found in my 3 minutes of research into this genre comes from...

http://katie-katiedidit.blogspot.ca/2009/01/poem-i-wrotejust-bare-with-me.html

Jon, I think you've made an exciting literary discovery. There could be a paper in this --

"The brews on my sole was more than I could bare": Homophone misuse, angst, and the poetry of the internet age