Author: Joey deVilla

This year’s Black Friday Death Count

Black Friday Death Count’s leaderboard says that Black Friday 2014 resulted in 8 deaths and 96 injuries.

I wouldn’t have counted the murder attempt/suicide at the Nordstrom in Chicago. That’s not violence or injury as a result of marketing-generated shopping madness, but a domestic assault carried out on someone who was working at a retail store on the day.

More and more of the Black Friday incidents on their list are taking place in the U.K., where they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but have borrowed the post-Thanksgiving shopping gimmick from their cousins across the pond.

The violent history of Black Friday

Here’s Machinima’s entertaining history of Black Friday, which wasn’t always a term used the way we use it today:

The science behind why people kill each other over TVs on the Friday after Thanksgiving

The photo above shows two sets of shoppers in Wembley, an area of northwest London (and remember, I mentioned earlier that Thanksgiving isn’t a tradition in the UK), fighting over a TV. It appears along with an article in the British paper The Independent, where they say that we’re hardwired in such a way that under the right set of circumstances, we will commit acts of violence, and Black Friday lines up those circumstances all too well.

Last year’s Black Friday Haiku, just because

I’ll close with Kenzie Lind’s three greatest sequential tweets from last year, which became an accidental haiku (right down to the 5 – 7 – 5 syllable scheme) that captures Black Friday so well:

Until this scene in the just-released teaser trailer…

…it’s been decades since we last saw a black actor playing a stormtrooper on the desert world of Tatooine, and the last time, it was in Spaceballs:

In case you don’t remember, it happens in the classic “Comb the desert!” scene:

…and yes, there’s a Millennium Falcon combat scene!

And new X-wing fighters flying just above the water, raising waves, either to avoid enemy scanners or just because it looks cool!

And big-ass speeder bikes!

And a soccer ball droid!

Here’s the trailer:

It’s pretty hard to tell the difference:

The Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail have named their CEO of the year, and it’s Tobi Lütke, CEO of my former workplace, Shopify! My congrats to Tobi and the team for a job well done and a company well built.

This article also appears in my tech blog, Global Nerdy.

Click the cover to see it at full size.

Here’s what the artist, Bruce McCall, had to say about the cover:

“This is 2014, and it seems a little late to be dealing with that stuff. It should have been quashed a long time ago. We did everything to the Indians that we could, and it’s still going on. It seems crude and callous. Names like the Atlanta Braves come from another time. So, in my cover, I’ve brought the cultural arrogance of one side back to the sixteen-hundreds and the first Thanksgiving dinner, just to see what would happen.”

“This is 2014, and it seems a little late to be dealing with that stuff. It should have been quashed a long time ago” could just as easily be the slogan for Ferguson.

Some bonus viewing: In case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s one of The Daily Show’s best segments, where they look at the Washington NFL team’s die-hard don’t-change-the-names fans and even arrange for them to meet with native Americans: