AKABAS | A Way Too In-Depth Analysis of the Fast And Furious 8 Trailer

Sometimes when people mention the Seven Wonders of the World, for a few seconds I think they’re talking about the Fast and Furious movies. The Fast and Furious franchise has gone from low-budget street racing movies to big-budget street racing movies to big-budget action movies to even bigger-budget action movies. It is a franchise running out of combinations of “and”s, “the”s and words starting with “F” to use for movie titles. It is a franchise that went from Vin Diesel playing a street-racing criminal to Vin Diesel playing an indestructible superhero. It is a franchise so far removed from logic that its chronological order is 1-2-4-5-6-3-7-8.

AKABAS | We Need to Do Something About Professional Sports Team Names

As a society, we suck at naming things. I don’t really need to defend this claim other than stating that someone decided to name this place “Greenland,” but there are countless other examples. We park in driveways and drive on parkways, whoever named oranges “oranges” is possibly the least creative person to ever walk the face of this planet, there is a car repair shop in the United Kingdom called “Poorly Car Repair” (I swear this is real, click on the link), and the number of expert astronomers that probably signed off on a planet being named “Uranus” is truly quite astounding. Case in point: Last month, we had a baseball team in the World Series called the Cleveland Indians. Sigh.

AKABAS | Let’s Clear Up A Few Things About Kevin Durant Joining the Warriors

NBA fans constitute one of the most delusional groups of people, along with people who think Chicago-style pizza is pizza, people who don’t like pizza at all, and people who think that Gary Johnson or Jill Stein is anywhere close to knowledgeable enough about how anything works to be President of the United States. Rarely has this delusion been more palpable than in the aftermath of Kevin Durant signing with the Golden State Warriors in free agency this summer. Last year, the Warriors went an unprecedented 73-9 and narrowly defeated Durant’s Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference Finals before losing a heartbreaker in the Finals to the Cleveland Cavaliers. Many fans were angry that Durant joined forces with the team that beat him, and this is justified. A lot of people, however, have said a lot of other things about what Durant did, and most of them are inaccurate, so let’s debunk these myths, one by one.

AKABAS | Top 10 Movie Soundtracks to Listen to While Studying for Prelims

Like every other college, Cornell has tests. But, unlike every other college, we don’t call these tests “tests” — we call them “prelims.” Why, you may ask? Well, why is equestrian an Olympic sport? Some things we’ll just never know the answers to. Anyway, you will likely want to listen to music while you study for these prelims, and since I find music with lyrics distracting while I’m trying to read and memorize notes, movie scores are the way to go.

AKABAS | A Non-Exhaustive List of People Who I Would Vote For President Over Donald Trump

To Republicans, Donald Trump is like receiving scented candles for a holiday gift: you don’t want it, but for social reasons, you have to pretend like you don’t hate it. To Democrats, Donald Trump is like receiving a pet monkey for a holiday gift: it seems harmless and even amusing at first, but it’s actually the most annoying thing ever. I am in the latter group, and I wouldn’t trust Donald Trump to place a dinner order over the phone, much less be leader of the free world for four years. But I’m wondering just how deep into the barrel I’d need to reach to find someone who I wouldn’t vote for over Donald Trump. For many opposing candidates, my decision wouldn’t even be close, such as Michael Bloomberg (perhaps the only moderate politician alive), Michelle Obama (who recently joined Ryan Gosling as the only perfect human being), Jon Stewart (who would obviously run with John Oliver and call themselves “John Squared”), Mark Cuban (an outspoken, successful, aggressive billionaire who isn’t also a racist, sexist lunatic) and Cornell Psychology Professor David Pizarro.

AKABAS | Bracketology: Who/What is winning 2016?

There are many things that literally everyone on Earth hates, such as hangnails, hotels that charge for WiFi, late-2000s M. Night Shyamalan films, and that moment when you don’t check your phone for an hour and there are 257 unread messages from a single group chat when you come back. There aren’t many things that literally everyone on Earth loves, but one of those things is March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournament. A single-elimination bracket – the concept that you need to win every single game to stay in it – is ingenious. I support using the bracket concept whenever humanly possible, so let’s make a bracket to determine who or what has had the best 2016 so far. The competitors were determined subjectively by me, and the seeds, listed below, were determined primarily by number of Twitter followers (credit to former Grantland-writer Rembert Browne for this idea).

AKABAS | Top 10 Dunks from the 2016 NBA Slam Dunk Contest

On Thursday, February 11th, over 1,000 scientists were credited with discovering the existence of gravitational waves. Two nights later, at the NBA Slam Dunk Contest, Aaron Gordon and Zach LaVine discovered that gravity doesn’t even exist at all. Gordon and LaVine put down never-before-seen dunk after never-before-seen dunk and needed two tiebreaker rounds to ultimately crown LaVine as the champion. They were so good that the other two candidates should have strongly considered just pulling a Ben Carson and not come out onto the stage. What follows is my attempt to rank the 10 best jams from what might have been the greatest dunk contest of all-time.