Taylor Swift Beat Me To The "Stevie Knicks" Pun

We just saw the NBA and NHL championships handed out on consecutive nights. I don't have much to add to the Carolina Hurricanes win, beyond pointing out that they now join Colorado and Tampa Bay on the list of places that have now won a Stanley Cup, rebuilt, and won another cup with a different team, all since the last time a Canadian team won the cup.

Speaking of long championship droughts, congratulations to the Knicks on their first NBA championship in more than a half-century. That should give the Leafs some optimism. Maybe.

But that brings up one unsettling aspect of their win. We've now seen a few teams end long championship droughts in the twenty-first century, and the feelings around them are a bit different. Obviously, the Cubs spring to mind as a team that had a long and painful futility streak. When they won a World Series, there were generally good feelings from those who didn't have a connection to the team. We were glad to see their long-suffering fanbase have their moment of success. After all, they were the Loveable Losers, people who took their misfortune with good nature. You felt like they deserved a change in fortune.

Contrast that with the Red Sox a few years earlier. Their World Series drought was also measured in lifetimes, but there wasn't such an outpouring of joy to see them finally happy. I'm sure some of that was their rivalry with the Yankees, and thus taste-makers in the media capital weren't so happy to see them succeed. But there was also a feeling that the Bosox weren't such loveable losers; rather than being seen having a laid-back acceptance of their fate, they came across as a little too intense and taking it a little too seriously. Their continued failure gave the rest of the sports world a bit of schadenfreude, and watching them finally have their day didn't give us nearly as much joy. 

So when it comes to long-suffering fans, there's differing levels of sympathy. To bring this back to the Leafs, they'll definitely be the extreme counter to the Cubs. Yes, plenty of Leaf fans have a Cub-like humour to their futility, but for every one of them, there are twelve with dangerous levels of obsession. Even as a Leafs fan, I realize that if they ever win a cup, no non-fans will feel good for them.

So what about the Knicks? Well, I found that this was one of those Medium-is-the-Message situations. Watching them win - clinching on the road - it was easy to feel good for them. A hard-working team, coming from behind, it all seemed to parallel a fanbase that has remained passionate through thick and thin.

Contrast that to the previous game, where they won in an exciting, record-setting comeback. But that was at home. Normally it's great for a neutral observer to see a home team win, with a passionate crowd cheering them on. But a Knicks crowd is second only to a Lakers crowd in celebrity sightings, and the director of the TV coverage was intent on getting a reaction shot from every famous person in the lower bowl after ever decisive play. You could just imagine him in the control room shouting out the names in succession to cut to the close-ups, "Sandler! Seinfeld! McEnroe! Stiller! Swift!" 

I have nothing against any of those celebrities, but it does make it harder to cheer for the team. If I'm envisioning the long-suffering Knicks fan as some janitor from Queens, then I feel really good to see their sports dreams come true. But if it's Jerry Seinfeld, then it's harder to imagine that this team's futility has left a gaping hole in his life. 

So I hope that future sports broadcasts will think about this. Aside from the fact that you should really have more cameras showing the game than the crowd, you should also think about how that shapes the view of the team.

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #48

 Maestro Fresh Wes is on a stamp.

A Very Big House In The Country

I came across the existence of Longleat Safari Park in England. It’s one of those drive-through safari parks. What's weird about it is that it's on the grounds of a historic stately mansion. Of course, you have to wonder how that happens: A safari park isn't really what you associate with British aristocracy. Okay, you might imagine a rich British person with a private collection of exotic animals, but that's not what this is. Picture a huge and luxurious Victorian house in the English countryside; then imagine the camera shifts a little to the side and you see a middle-class family in their sedan watching the monkeys converge on the car looking for handouts, and the family is going from delight to a slight panic as more and more monkeys show up.

And yet, this cultural juxtaposition isn't that unusual. I remember going to an amusement park called Alton Towers, which is also on the grounds of an old estate. It seemed a little weird; I mean, I realize they need to put the theme parks and Safari parks somewhere in England, and they also have historic Manor houses. And since there's not much room, they could be side by side. But you'd think the historic Manors would want nothing to do with the entertainment of the common people. You know, build a tasteful wall between them. At the very least, don't name the park after the house.

But apparently, running a massive luxurious house is all fine and dandy when it's the nineteenth century and you have tenant farmers paying rent, and you're not paying any taxes, and there aren't many factories to outbid you for your workers. But in more modern times, these big houses became unaffordable even for the wealthy, and many were torn down or sold off. Others had to find new sources of income, and that's how a few of them came to have attractions for the masses on their grounds. Even at Alton Towers, the amusement park wasn't enough to make ends meet: the interiors of the house were sold off, and only the stone shell of the building remains. 

Anyway, part of the reason for my interest in this concept is that I just read Pride and Prejudice, which mostly takes place in such homes. One of the odd aspects of the setting is that the heroine’s family, the Bennetts, are on the poor side of rich. They may lose their house and their income, and probably end up in a Dickens novel. So you have to keep reminding yourself throughout the book that even though their cohorts look down on them, they're still much better off than most in that era. 

But now that I've seen the fate of such houses, I can't help but wonder what became of (spoiler alert) Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy's descendants. By now Mr. Darcy's estate at Pemberly is either gone, or maybe  home to Europe's third largest water park. 

Yes, I know, it's actually a good thing that these houses are no longer focused on a wealthy few. And this is a win for society: the welfare state and market forces combining to deliver a deserving comeuppance to an exploitative system. 

Maybe it's my English blood, but it still feels sad to see an end as undignified as Pemberly Splash Xtreme (Liz Darcy VII, proprietor.)

It’s Okay, We Never Really Liked Hockey Anyway.

Well, it’s another year of The Great Canadian Stanley Cup Drought. Last year, I made a post about how long it’s gone on, but this year, I’m trying to be more positive. 

It was an oddity of watching Shai Gilgeous-Alexander lead the Thunder to an NBA title while Canadian hockey teams couldn’t make it to the summit yet again. That got me thinking: while the past thirty-two years haven’t been good for Canada’s NHL teams, it has been a great time for sports we aren’t traditionally good at. You know, non-winter sports. So here is my list of things that Canadians have (rather surprisingly) won since the last time a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup:

Athletics

• Men's 100 m Olympic gold (Donovan Bailey)
• Men's 4x100m Olympic gold (twice)
• Olympic Decathlon (Damian Warner)

Auto Racing

• Formula 1 world championship (Jacques Villeneuve)
• Indy 500 (Jacques Villeneuve)
• IndyCar championship (Jacques Villeneuve, Paul Tracy)
• DTM championship (Bruno Spengler)

Baseball

• MLB MVP (Larry Walker, Justin Morneau, Joey Votto)
• MLB Hall-of-Fame (Larry Walker)
• Batting title (three times for Larry Walker, one for Justin Morneau)

Basketball

• NBA MVP (Steve Nash twice, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander)
• NBA Finals MVP (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander)
• NBA scoring title (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander)
• NBA Hall-of-Fame (Steve Nash)
• NCAA Consensus Player of the Year (Zach Edey)

Football

• NCAA All-American selection (Chuba Hubbard)
• CFL Most Outstanding Player (John Cornish, Brady Oliveira)

Golf 

• Majors (Mike Weir, Brooke Henderson twice)
• Canadian Open (Brooke Henderson, Nick Taylor)

Mixed Martial Arts

• UFC welterweight championship (Carlos Newton, Georges St. Pierre)
• UFC middleweight championships (Georges St. Pierre)

Soccer

• Olympic gold (Women’s)
• Gold Cup (Men’s)
• FIFPRO Men's World 11 (For best player in the world at each position - Alphonso Davies)
• MLS MVP (Dwayne De Rosario)

Tennis

• U.S. Open (Bianca Andreescu)
• World Top Ten Rankings (Bianca Andreescu, Milos Raonic, Eugenie Bouchard)
• Davis Cup
• Billie Jean King Cup

So let’s concentrate on these positives. Nearly all of these achievements had never been done by a Canadian before that last Cup. Let’s not dwell on the fact that Steve Nash’s entire Hall-of-Fame career was during the drought, or that Bianca Andreescu, Brooke Henderson, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and Alphonso Davies weren’t even born the last time Canada won the Cup. Instead, just accept that we’re becoming more well-rounded sports-wise, whether we like it or not.

Jersey Chore

We’ve had most of a season with the new PWHL team branding now. Personally, I didn’t really miss them in the opening season’s cities-only identities. And some of the new ones are still not feeling quite right. So here’s my reviews of them:

New York Sirens

The Name

Pretty clever: has the double meaning of the sound often heard in New York, and the Sirens of Greek mythology. 

The Logo

Kind of disappointing. I realize it’s difficult to make a symbol for a team named after a sound. What would you do, show a mythological siren holding an air horn? Though the extra bits of letters at the side, to look like an alarm light was very clever.

Colours and Uniform

The teal is borrowed from the WNBA’s New York Liberty, which in turn is borrowed from the Statue of Liberty. Combine it with the dark blue and amber and it looks like a blending of the 90’s and today. Nice.

The use of multiple colours in the uniform is refreshing when so many teams have fallen in love with an all-one-colour look. So now you can enjoy teal without O.D.ing on it like in San Jose. Too bad the word, “Sirens” on the logo is the same colour as the home uniform, so from a distance, you just see these two disjointed chunks of white above and below it.

Toronto Sceptres

The Name

If you’re going to make a bunch of team names, there’s bound to be a WTF entry, and here it is. I have to admit, when I heard the name, my mind went to an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where she fights the old shamen who created the slayers, and defeats one by breaking his staff, which turns out to be the source of his powers, and she says, “I knew it. It's always the staff,” as if to comment on the phallic nature of so many symbols of power. So does it really make sense to name a women’s team after such an item? 

But I’m also thinking they need to read the room. There are places for taking a chance on an off-the-wall name, but Canadian hockey fandom in general, and Toronto in particular, is not it.

The Logo

That was well done; it looks classic without being dated, thus winning back some of the Canadian Hockey cachet that the name lost

Colours and Uniform

You had to go with blue, which was Toronto’s civic colour before the Raptors started dragging it towards the red end of the spectrum. Light blue was bold. But yellow? It’s a little St. Louis Bluesy to me. I normally hate it when sports teams describe their yellow as “gold,” but in this case, it might have been a good idea to darken and dull the yellow a bit and tell everyone it’s gold. After all, what else would you make a sceptre out of?

Boston Fleet

The Name

It’s pretty nice; sounds tough while also sounding modernly singular. Though it loses some marks for being recycled from the Alliance of American Football

The Logo

A "B" shaped like an anchor: The letter-that-looks-like-something is a classic sports logo strategy. And it gets a big bonus for looking like a sideways version of that greatest-of-all-hockey-logos, the Hartford Whalers. Of course, that means that I keep looking for something hidden in the negative space, and being disappointed that I can’t find it. At least it has the surreal quality in that it's an anchor — something you put in water — though it appears to be full of water, like a sporting tesseract.

Colours and Uniforms

Going green was a good choice. You’re copying a Boston classic, without just piggybacking on the local hockey team. And the light green accent is a bold twist on it.

But watching them on the ice, I keep thinking there must have been a mistake at the cleaners. Whose blue pants are these? Okay, there are tiny blue accents elsewhere in the uniform, but the pants still look out of place.

Ottawa Charge

The Name

Kind of generic, I mean, for a modern sports team name. All the possibilities offered by a national capital, and the name sounds like a USFL reject.

The Logo

It’s an O. No, it’s a C. No, it’s a wheel. It looks like you asked an AI to make a sports logo for a team with the initials, “OC.” Though you have to remember that it’s pretty hard to build a logo around the letter O, As some of the Senators’ alternate jerseys have shown.

Colours and Uniform

They’re not bad looking, but well… There aren’t many cities that have coordinated sports team colours. Really just Pittsburgh (Black and Yellow) and Ottawa (Red and Black.) But in Ottawa’s case, they even have a team named after their civic colours. The Charge tried to nod towards that colour scheme with various greys, and they look more like red and black on the ice, but I feel like yelling, “You had one job!”

Montreal Victoire

The Name

I saw some people comment that Montreal “won” the PWHL identities, and I think they’re right. “Victoire” is new, but sounds classic. It’s distinctly French, but doesn’t need explanation in English, like Nordiques did.

The Logo

Again, they won here. Looks good, looks timeless, looks like a bird, has a hidden “M” in it, looks sort of like the board for Atari’s Tempest. What more could you want?

Colours and Uniform

Did a better job than Toronto of paying tribute to the local NHL institution while carving out a new identity. The colours of dark red, dark blue, and really-old-newspaper looks great without tying it to an era. My only change would be to make the logo on the home uniforms reverse colour. Having it on a light-backgrounded shield so it shows up is a little busy.

Minnesota Frost

The Name

They won the first championship, and now they've got a great name too. It’s got the WNBA abstract-concept name style, but without sounding contrived. For most of the PWHL names, we can argue whether they’re better than the city’s NHL counterpart, but this is the only one where the PWHL team wins in a knockout.

The Logo

A nice simple letter in a distinctive style, that’s a classic approach. More for baseball, I guess; but it works here too.

Colours and Uniform

Purple is the colour of two of Minnesota’s most beloved institutions: The Vikings, and Prince. It's a nice color, though it doesn't make one think of frost so much as frostbite. It’s also nice that they included a contrasting lightish red, or magenta, or light purple. I guess it’s lilac. They put lilac in there and just dared you to complain. That's pretty bold.

DJ Got Us Paralyzed With Decision-Fatigue

I’ve started learning to make electronic music. It’s kind of a crazy thing for me to take on because I don’t have a background in music. I was the one playing outside while you were taking piano lessons; it was fun at the time, but now I’m trying to learn music theory from scratch.

But I’m not going to whine about my lack of music fluency; I’m just pointing out something I’ve noticed about music software. I won't bore you with the details, but I'll just tell you that to be a bedroom producer, you'll need a piece of software called a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW.)

There's something weird about the DAW market. See, they can get pretty expensive, so the makers of DAWs usually let you try them for a limited time, or have a lesser, free version. So far, these are the ones I've tried out: 

• Garage Band
• Cakewalk
• Tracktion Waveform 
• Cubase 
• Studio One
• FL Studio 
• Ableton Live
• Reaper
• LMMS
• Bitwig
• Mixcraft
• Acid Pro
• QTractor

And there are many more I haven't tried. A few of the more famous ones: 

• Logic
• Pro Tools
• Ardour
• Reason
• Maschine

What I'm getting at is that there are a lot of options. And out of all those, only LMMS and QTractor are not-for-profit open source projects. The rest are by people trying to make money. 

This isn't modern capitalism! There should be only two options: the crappy one and the expensive one. Or maybe two nearly identical competitors, but people get really worked up arguing which is better. A bunch of these should have merged together. Some of them bought by big companies who lost interest and discontinued them. Statistically, if you have this large a group of tech companies, at least one would have been bought by Yahoo and mismanaged out of business. And either Google or Microsoft should have started their own competitor and run another half-dozen out of the industry. And what about changing focus? Every time there's a new buzzword in tech, one or two should have announced a pivot to the new paradigm, and now they're in cloud computing, cryptocurrencies, or A.I.

But no, somehow this is the one industry where there are dozens of options: synergies and economies of scale be damned. I'm not sure why. One explanation is that it's a labor of love. Music is a business that's very personal, and everyone wants to do it their way. 

Also, the market is at just the right size: there's a fair-sized market available when you consider both the pros and hobbyists. It's enough to keep each of the competitors going, but not enough to attract big companies that will wipe out the competition (save for Apple, which makes Garage Band and Logic, but being exclusive to the Mac, they won't push everyone else out of business.)

There's also a lot of nuances to the industry, where applications have grabbed their own little niche: Pro Tools has established itself as the standard for recording studios, while Ableton Live is the choice for Electronic Music. FL Studio has hip hop, and Logic is the choice of Apple worshippers. Reason is the best for people used to working with traditional electronic music equipment, and Reaper is beloved by the folks who think the best application is the one that can do anything, but in a really complicated way, and thus keep recommending Linux to your grandma.

It's also weird that visual art didn't work out this way. That industry is dominated by Adobe. And yet, you'd think that if any software customers would walk to the beat of their own drum, it would be visual artists. They'd be the ones to ignore the advantages of compatibility to get a product with the right intangibles, or one that's made by a little band of idealists. But no, they've given one giant company a near monopoly. The only ones walking to the beat of their own drum are the ones programming it on a drum machine. Okay, that was pretty corny, and I apologize; I wrote that thing about the artists walking to the beat of their own drum without even meaning to make a joke, and then felt like I had to do something with it, and it all went wrong.

So I don't entirely know why, but this is the one industry where things worked out the way I expected the future to look: Dozens of options, something for everyone.

Hyper Links

There's a new made-for-television golf event called TGL. It's a golf league, though I'm disappointed it doesn't stand for, "The Golf League." I've watched a few times, even though I'm not really a golf fan. I was just curious what it would be like. Strangely, I find it's like looking at an edgy work of art: I'm not entirely sure if I'm enjoying it, but it's so relentlessly weird that I can't look away.

The idea is to repackage golf in a smaller, more viewer-friendly format, with everything taking place in an indoor arena. The courses are all computer-simulated. The golfers tee off, hitting the ball at a big screen showing the virtual fairway. Then the computer figures out from the ball's trajectory where it would have landed. They either hit another drive at the screen, or, if the ball landed on the virtual green, they move to a big putting green, and putt from where the computer said the ball landed. The green can be warped and angled to simulate the lie.

Oh, and it's a team game of match golf.  With fifteen holes for some reason. There's a bunch of other rules that are still a mystery. They sometimes throw a hammer on the green, but I'm still figuring that one out. 

But the basic idea is that it's deconstructed golf: all the parts of golf, but dismantled and crammed into a new form. The shocking part is that I jokingly suggested something similar years ago: I saw a driving range with a mini golf course, and realized it could be a substitute for actual golf. And now, here it is, turned into a televised spectacle.

The whole thing is pretty bizarre. On the one hand, it's like the future we imagined, with people playing simulated sports, surrounded by a wildly enthusiastic audience. Throw in some mortal danger and it would be Rollerball.

But on the other hand, it's lacking in the polish you would expect future sports to have. I can't help thinking there is a weird inconsistency using technology in simulating real golf. Like you have this big mechanical surface that can morph itself into any hypothetical golf green, but it also has sand traps, and they're just plain old sand. Not computer-controlled magnets in the turf increasing the resistance to the golf club to simulate the resistance of sand. No, just a big pit full of sand.

One good thing is that many of the made-up holes are arrangements that would be hard to build in real life, like the tee and the hole are on opposite sides of a canyon. That's fun, but it loses something when it's just simulated, and you're not really watching the heartbreak of the golfer watching the shot come up short and bounce all the way down. Though it might be better if they got even more impossible, like the tee and green are on the roofs of different skyscrapers.

Of course, I'm now wondering what other sports could be deconstructed and remade like this. Auto racing would be an obvious possibility, since it's also a sport that takes up an inconvenient amount of room, and is difficult to watch live. You could have cars on giant treadmills, but that would be dangerous and loud, and even sillier. It would be better if they were just driving simulated cars. But they already have simulated racing; it's been part of eSports for a while now. While it does attract viewers, I don't foresee people packing an arena to watch it. Though it might be fun if — like the simulated golf — they had them drive on crazy, unreal courses. It would also be nice if the drivers could have a casual interaction with one another, like the golfers do in TGL. Maybe people would pay to see live racing simulation if they could hear Verstappen swearing at Hamilton, live and in person. (Lewis Hamilton is an investor in TGL, by the way.)

Of course, that introduces the idea that there would be some sort of interaction through the simulation; a way to get revenge within the sport. Okay, I've just reinvented Mario Kart, haven't I? But seriously, the world's top drivers playing Mario Kart: I would watch that.