In Which I Try to Write Intelligently About Basketball

Today the top two teams in English soccer, Manchester United and Manchester City played an important game.  It's always amusing to me how the fans and journalists of European soccer leagues dance around the fact that they only have a handful of real teams that contend for the trophies, and the rest might as well be in the minors.

It seems like that's what's become of the NBA.  It's hard to get excited about the playoffs: even in the best of years, the first round seems like a formality, but now with Derek Rose out, it seems like entire Eastern Conference is a formality for Miami.

Like a lot of people, I have no affection at all for the Miami Heat and their trio of superstars (well, two and a half - sorry Mr. Bosh.)  It's not so much LeBron James's leaving Cleveland or their over-the-top boasting; it's the playground mentality of it.

And I mean that quite literally.  In my elementary school playground, whatever sport we played at recess, the three most athletic kids would always play on the same team, thus ensuring easy wins.  Of course, there's not much challenge in that, and I'm sure that with maturity, they would come to see that such victories are hollow, and that true joy in sports comes from a more even competition.  I assume they would grow to learn that - we never had recess in high school, so I don't know.

So that's what I hate about James, Wade, and Bosh: they have the same mentality as pre-tweens on a playground.  So my hope was that they would fail to win a championship together in Miami in however-many years they have together before their egos push them apart.  But then this year, I saw a chance at another possibility when Jeremy Lin became a surprise star.  The script as I would have written it would have Lin lead the Knicks on a long, valiant playoff run, then when the Heat win the Championship, hardly anyone talks about it because they're still amazed by Lin's accomplishment.

But with Lin injured, and the Knicks getting crushed by the Heat in the first round, it appears we won't even get that poetic justice. But one last point about Jeremy Lin.  With all the talk about the feel-good nature of the story, and the concern over the racial angle, I think we missed the big story, and one of the biggest challenges stemming from the Rise of China: more and more famous people with short names that are easy to make into puns.

For instance, the Vice President, and likely next President of China, is named Xi Jinping (with "Xi" pronounced, "she.")  Think of all the "That's what Xi said" jokes we'll be subjected to in the coming years.  We don't realise how lucky we were with Yao Ming.

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About the Future, #4

They still play 2Unlimited songs at sports events.

The Limits of My Tolerance

It's not often that I'm conscious of the moment something becomes annoying.  There are a lot of things in our world that are overdone and overused, but started out as good ideas.  If you're my age or older, you may remember the first time you saw a minivan.  What a great idea: a van (which, as of the early eighties, was still inherently cool) but for families.  Then one day years later, you're looking for a parking spot at Wal-mart, find yourself cursing an entire row of spots all taken by minivans, and you realise that at some point you learned to hate them.


I just noticed that the same thing happened to me with Stan Lee cameos.  It used to be fun, you felt like you were in on a subcultural connection if you recognised him in one of the X-Men movies.  But watching the latest Dr. Pepper ad, I groaned internally at their chummy attempted in-joke.  Maybe the concept has been done to death, maybe Comics Culture has gone too mainstream to have inside jokes, or maybe it's just the fact that a months-ahead tie-in commercial.

On the other hand, I know exactly where I was when I got tired of those child-drawing family stickers in the back windows of cars, SUVs, and the aforementioned minivans.  Just a few days ago they seemed cute, but then, as I walked through a mall parking lot, I saw one, something snapped in my mind, and they just started getting on my nerves.  They're as boastful as the "Baby on Board" signs from the eighties, but without even the pretence of having a useful purpose.  They've also been hurt by the lack of variation: Usually a trend that lasts this long gets spoofed.  You'd think that by now, bored children in the back seat would find a way to combine the family stickers with one of the Calvin peeing stickers you see in the back of pick-ups.

RIM Can't Buy a Break

As if RIM needed another kick in the teeth, I keep seeing stories about how NFL teams are using iPads to replace their paper playbooks.  Think about that: you work in the office of a football team, someone tells you to replace the playbooks with tablets, there happens to be a tablet brand called a Playbook, and you still go with someone else.  And now RIM has to endure headlines written by unknowing sports reporters saying things like, "Broncos the latest team to embrace the iPad, eschew the playbook."

As an aside, can you think of any other companies that sell all their products under a brand name that's not the name of the company (as with RIM/Blackberry?)

What Better Day to Complain About a Music Chain...

 ...than Record Store Day?

My hat is off to HMV on their recent sales pricing.  They've priced most of their CD's at $5, $10 or $15, but somehow done it so that none of the CD's I want to buy are in that $5 category. 

It's not that they've just set all the really bad music to the lowest price - any amateur can do that.  I developed immunity to the bargain bin of cheep crap as a teenager.  But HMV are more clever: they've also lowered the prices on the very finest albums that I also don't want to buy, in this case because I already own them.  Occasionally seeing great music at ridiculous prices just keeps me coming back again and again.  I'm stuck naively rechecking their shelves every time I'm in a mall, only to walk away disappointed like the hipster Charlie Brown that I am.

Supercar Friday

Stopped at a traffic light today, I was surprised to see a McLaren MP4-12C pull up next to me.  However, shortly after the heavy traffic began crawling forward again, I lost sight of it as that lane fell behind.  It seems the car gods were teaching me a lesson: My car may be worth only 0.5% as much, but speed still comes down to who didn't get caught in the lane with an over-loaded semi half-a-block ahead.  Perhaps a car that is theoretically fast on the track isn't what this world needs.  Someone should make an urban supercar: extra small and manoeuvrable, it can hop between lanes in an instant, fit into tiny gaps in traffic, and navigate busy streets in record time.  I guess that would be a motorbike.

Then a couple of hours later on nearly the same stretch of road coming back in the other direction, I saw a Mercedes SLS, their top-of-the-line sports car.  It was about to turn into a parking lot, and I was tempted to follow just to watch the driver open the gull-wing doors - which, aside from looking cool, would finally answer the question of whether you can open gull-wing doors in a crowded parking lot.  It was then that it occurred to me:  Parking lot?  It was headed for Home Depot!  Again, like seeing a supermodel belch, it was an important lesson that we're all the same deep down.

Grocery Store DJ

Last week I heard a song on the radio, then the next day, I heard the same song on the Musak at a grocery store.  What's weird about this is that the station in question was the erstwhile alternative station, the Edge (née CFNY.)

Now you might take this as evidence of the station's continuing watering-down of its "New Music" format.  (Nickleback?  Excuse me?)  But the song in question was a recent Jack White single that is more solidly in their musical target area than the warmed-over nineties hits that they've come to rely on.  Gratuitous video link!

My point is, this isn't exactly what you would expect to hear in the grocery store.  Even among White's oeuvre, it doesn't make one want to spend. 

So was this the career-ending act of a Musak programmer who finally snapped after one too many Coldplay tracks?  I don't think so, since it seems to be part of a mini trend.  In the past few weeks, I heard the following songs you never would have expected to hear in grocery stores:

• Sour Times - Portishead
• Once in a Lifetime - The Talking Heads
• Lullaby - The Cure
• Suburban War - The Arcade Fire

So what's going on here?  Has Musak started looking outside the Top 40 for material, much the way TV commercials have started using Indie Music?  Or have they just noticed that this town hasn't go many natural food stores, and hipsters gotta eat too.



P. S. :  What do you call a post-script to a blog post?  "P.P." for "Post Post" just sounds stupid, and "epilogue" is pretentious.  Anyway, while typing the above post I searched YouTube for "Once in a Lifetime," just to make sure that is in fact the name of the song.  I was disappointed to see Michael Bolton's song of the same name at the top of the search results.  But that disappointment turned to joy/derangement when I saw the following further down the list:

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About the Future, #3

Tampa, Carolina, Dallas, Anaheim and Colorado have won the Stanley Cup.  Toronto is still waiting.  Oh, and enjoy it when Montreal wins it next year, that's the last Canadian team you'll see winning it for a while.

Freezer Etiquette

I put a Muffin Top in the freezer.  Only afterwards did I realise that I put it right beside some muffins that were already there.  I think they're going to need therapy.

I Still Miss Dave Thomas

I'm confused by this new Wendy's ad:

Is the woman in the back seat supposed to be...

• Actually there?  The guys are really not paying as much attention as you would expect.  But they're not surprised by her presence, so I'm thinking she's an apparition, possibly some sort of "Spirit of Wendy's" which brings up the next possibility...
• The grown-up Wendy?  I guess that's possible; you'd like to believe the girl in the logo grew out of her dorky stage eventually.  But that makes the ad kind of awkward: What's next, a good-looking guy in a McDonald's ad turns out to be the reformed hamburgler?  That's why I really think she's...
• The next best thing when they couldn't afford Allison Hannigan.

Hooray! Technology is Getting Weird Again!

I still can't wrap my head around Facebook's billion dollar purchase of Instagram.  It just got weirder when I found out that Instagram is given away for free and has never made a cent.  Yes, dot-com times are here again, revenue doesn't matter, it's more important to have users than income, and everyone with a half-assed idea will try to get rich with it.  I'm looking forward to the bizarre ideas we'll be seeing in the next decade.  What does it say about us that our economy is most interesting when it's behaving totally irrationally?

Certainly I'm trying to come up with my billion-dollar idea.  I'm starting with the principle that Instagram is a dumbed-down Photoshop that's connected to the Internet, so I'm trying to think what other popular desktop software can be simplified for the iPhone set.  When you put it that way, Instagram's success is a little more understandable: This particular audience consists largely of people who have been introduced to computers through smartphones, and aren't fully versed in what they're capable of.

Instagram is to Photoshop as my app is to _______.  So what desktop software goes in the blank?  I was thinking of a simplified spreadsheet, but the simplified, mobile version would be a calculator.  Even I'm not nerdy enough to want a calculator that posts it's results to Twitter.  How about a simplified, mobile blogging platform?  That would be Twitter.  Original crazy ideas are hard to make.

I Must Be In The Front Row

You can't just walk up to a baseball stadium and buy tickets for the front row - so everyone you see on camera at a ballgame behind home plate must have known well ahead of time that they were going to be there.  So why do you always see them waving at the camera while on the phone telling someone they're on TV?  They could have told everyone they know ahead of time.

The Spring Flags are Out

It must be spring - today I saw someone selling flags at the side of the road.  I'm not sure about this guy: on the one hand, he actually had a South Sudan flag, so he must really be, um, hip to the flag scene.  On the other hand, he had both a Confederate flag and a rainbow flag.  I'm thinking the flag-impulse-buy crowd is small enough already, without cancelling-out most of the audience with those two flags.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Facebook Memes

I recently saw a posting on Facebook pointing out that this July will have five Sundays, five Mondays and five Tuesdays, and that furthermore, this only happens every four-hundred years or something.

This reminded me of a calendar I had as a child.  It was a calendar of that year (I'm figuring it would have been 1978) but a blurb at the top of the calendar pointed out that it would also work for the then distant year of 2006.  Needless to say, this blew my preschooling mind.  But the point is, I was introduced early on to the fact that there are only a limited number of possible calendars that keep getting re-used.  If you think about it, it's only fourteen (it's either a leap-year or it isn't, and each of those two types of years can start on any one of the seven days of the week.)

My point is, the claim about this July being really exceptional is not true.  For myself and most of my friends, it isn't even the first time in our lives that we've seen a July like that (dig out your 1984 calendars, guys.)  Big deal, you say, something on the Internet wasn't true.  Well, I've long been used to the idea that there are lots of dishonest people out there.  What surprises me is what silly things they're being dishonest about.  Oooh, you fooled people about the details of the Gregorian Calendar, you must really feel superior now.

Another great example comes from the video below.  It was sent to me in an e-mail, but being loath to click on an e-mail link, I looked it up on YouTube instead, where the comments tipped me off to the inaccuracies.

It's entertaining, but like I say, those claims appearing in the video were not entirely accurate.  It turns out it wasn't made with old farm equipment, and it didn't take 13,000+ hours to set up.  And it wasn't actually build by the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory or the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa, nor is it on display at the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall.  And it turns out none of those places actually exist.  And neither does the machine in the video - it was all computer animation done by a company showing off its technology.  Someone made up the story around it, added the graphics describing that made-up story, and uploaded it to YouTube, presumably starting the e-mail as well.

Why?  To fool a bunch of people who have never been to Iowa into believing that a certain fictitious pair of schools exist, or that a grainy computer animation is real?  Is there some psychological condition that makes people enjoy really mundane hoaxes?  Convincing people that Paul is dead was impressive, but if you're going to start a lie this lame, you should really find a way to get money or political power out of it.

The Futures We Were Promised

People who grew up in the fifties and sixties often complain that they never got the flying cars or jet packs that they were promised everyone would have in the future.  While I'm sure that was disappointing, they should spare a thought for those who grew up in the thirties and forties.  Those poor folks have to deal with living in a future where we have the technology for Dick Tracy wrist radios, we just don't bother making them.

Things Only Canadians Wonder

Why is it that Sweden and Finland are good at hockey, but not Norway, but Norway and Sweden are good at Curling, but not Finland?

Things I've Had Enough Of, Part 1

I've had enough of:  The Philosophy of ________ books

It was a cute idea to do books on the philosophy behind pop cultural phenomena.  Some things, like The Matrix lent themselves to the idea.  And other entertainment franchises tend to lead to obsession in their followers (e.g. Twilight,) so in-depth study seems warranted.  But now it seems half the Philosophy shelves at Chapters are "The Philosophy of..." books.  Do we really want to know The Philosophy of Metallica?

But rather than stopping, it's now spreading to other fields of study.  I looked up "psychology" at the local library, and found that a lot of the top suggestions were Psychology of Something.  In this case, "something" was: Batman, Twilight, Dexter, and Survivor.  Where is this going to end?  I've already seen books on the physics behind various science-fiction creations.  Where else can we go?  The Economics of Mad Men?  The Sociology of World of Warcraft?  The Kinesiology of Cirque de Soleil?  Someday you'll be able to get an entire PhD related to your favourite pop-cultural franchise.

Odd Trash Analyzed

Litter is so prevalent in our world that I long ago stopped even noticing it.  That's pretty bad, but now there's so much litter that I find myself starting to noticing the freakish, exceptional trash.  For instance, I don't even see fast food wrappers discarded by the side of the road.  But every now and then, something more unusual stands out, like an empty can of tomatoes.  How did that happen?  Someone was driving by, and threw it out a window?  A pedestrian just finished twenty-eight ounces of tomatoes and dropped the can?

This concept came up a few days ago I was in H&M, and noticed, on the otherwise clean floor, one goldfish cracker.  I don't spend a lot of time there, but I find it hard to visualise someone eating crackers of any sort in H&M.  If anything, I'd find it easier to believe someone was having soup and the goldfish was only an accompaniment.

Once, while waiting for the elevator in my building, I noticed a banana peel stuffed into the ashtray that had been re-purposed as a garbage receptacle.  Why would that be there?  Either someone was eating a banana while leaving their apartment, and were so rushed that they couldn't stuff the last couple of bites into their mouth, or someone was eating a banana while coming home, finished it just before arriving at their apartment, and couldn't be bothered to carry it the fifty feet from the elevator.