DEADLINE open thread. Have a party.

Well, today I did my re-read, and I have two questions.

First: Kelly says her mother is Deborah Connolly, but Mahir's blog says that William Matras's eldest child is Marianne Matras-Connolly. Multiple sisters married men named Connolly, or something else more complicated, or I misread something? (Related question: is the William Matras mentioned in Deadline the Ian Matras of Countdown? I remember you saying you weren't being edited there, and I understand, just wanting to try to have things straight in my own head.)

Second: Mahir says he wanted to be a sports reporter initially. After I read Feed, I kind of figured that the coming of the zombies would mean the end of professional and major college sports, or at least giant live audiences. (The security kabuki of getting into an NFL venue is irritating enough without the threat of zombies. Imagine if everyone had to pass a blood test - gah. I am a sports geek and so of course it occurred to me to wonder about this.)

Thanks for answering everyone's questions so far - I understand if you don't make it to these. (I believe I've read all your comments in the thread here to see if anyone asked them, but if they did, I missed them.)

And edited to add: on this second read-through, I enjoyed all the Wizard of Oz references.

Yeah, noticed that with the Connolly's too.

I wonder how sports are done in this era? There's some kind of rock-em-sock-em robot movie with Hugh Jackman coming out, maybe sports are done via robots and remote controls these days? Or it's all done over video and Wii? That's still up there with my wondering how the film entertainment industry is doing now.

I can just hear a half time speech.
"You people are shambling around out there like zombies!"

"Act like you're alive out there!"

"We need to put the bite on these guys!"