Who, CPA

Tonight was the Doctor Who season finale, or mid-season finale.  Whatever, it's not going to be on next week.  Forgive my confusion, I haven't blinked in three hours.

This brings up something I've always wondered about the show: The Doctor's strange use of his time.  With the entirety of space and time to chose from, he keeps hanging around Britain.  Okay, they've said he has an affinity for the human race, so that explains why he chooses our planet.  But why always with the British?  They're nice people and all, but there's plenty more to chose from. 

So I want to know, if other countries had their own Time Lords, what would they be like?  Let the cavalcade of stereotypes begin!

Country	Occupation	Tardis Shape	Sonic Device
Britain	Doctor	Police Call Box	Screwdriver
Canada	Accountant	Ice Fishing Hut	Bottle Opener
U.S.A.	Lawyer	RV	Gun
Japan	Cyborg	Capsule Hotel (The only Tardis that's not larger on the inside)	Phone
China	Loyal Politburo Member	Cheap Knock-off of the American Tardis	Chopsticks
Sweden	Novelist	Volvo	Allen Key
France	Striking Farmer	Bistro	Corkscrew
Germany	Engineer	Small Gothic Cathedral	Sausage
Brazil	Rubber Magnate	Carnival Float	Soccer Ball
Switzerland	Banker	Ski Chalet	Swiss Army Knife
India	Singer/Actor	Howdah on an Elephant	Sitar
Greece	Unemployed	Repossessed Porsche Cayenne	German's Sausage
Russia	Personally, I think Putin is a Time Lord
South Africa	Miner	Ecotourist Cabin	Vuvuzela

Laettner Has Scored For America

Today was the fortieth anniversary of Paul Henderson's goal to win the Summit Series.  If you're Canadian, you probably already knew this.  Everyone - even people like myself who hadn't been born at the time - knows the story, and can probably recite Foster Hewitt's commentary.  If you're not Canadian, I'm not sure how to describe it.  There doesn't seem to be anything quite like Canada's love of this one moment.  The U.S. has many famous sporting moments, but nothing quite as nationally transcendent.  I don't know if England's World Cup victory in 1966 is quite the same; they don't seem to relive it quite as often.  That's part of the uniqueness of this event.  As Henderson himself noted in an anniversary interview, it seems to get bigger as time goes on.

As a kid, it seemed to me to be a really amazing time, something I wish I could have seen.  Keep in mind that hockey lacked a little pizzazz back then: the regular season was mostly watching the Leafs lose again and again, followed by playoffs in which the Islanders or Oilers won again and again.  A really close, meaningful series seemed like an amazing spectacle.

But as I've gotten older, I've come to learn more about the context of the series.  And as I've learned more, I've started to wonder how the series took on such mythical proportions.

Since this is an emotional issue, I'll try to explain with an analogy to something we can be a little more objective about.  Remember the U.S. basketball "Dream Team" in the 1992 Olympics?  It was the first year professional players were allowed, and the Americans had what seemed to be the greatest team ever assembled, with Jordan and Bird and Magic Johnson and so on.  It was assumed they'd just crush everyone in their path on the way to an easy gold medal.

Of course, they followed up their bragging by actually crushing everyone in their path on the way to an easy gold medal.  But let's say hypothetically that they hadn't done so well.  Let's say it turned out the Argentines and Italians and Spaniards were better than anyone had expected, and upset the Americans early in the tournament.  But the team puts together a few close victories to avoid elimination and, set up a gold medal game against whatever the former Yugoslavia was called at the time.  It's a close game, but they manage to win on a last-second three-pointer by Christian Laettner.

The Americans celebrate in the streets, and brag about being the best roundballers in the world.  The rest of the world - especially Canadians - try to remind them that they were expecting to win easily, the big surprise had been how good their opposition had been, and all the Americans had done is avoid embarrassing themselves.  But they don't listen.  In their minds they had overcome incredible odds to prove that they were the world champs.

Well that's pretty much what happened in the Summit Series.  We went in expecting to win easily, only to barely win.  And rather than take it as a lesson in hubris, we re-imagined it into a story of great achievement.  In a sense, that's suitably Canadian: our greatest sporting accomplishment is an instance of saving face.  To be fair, you do occasionally hear people talk about the high expectations, and refer to the national soul-searching that took place while the series seemed in doubt.  But more often, all that context gets lost in the simplistic reminiscences and interminable replays of the final goal. 

A Stroller Tantrum

You know what I hate?  Two-wide baby strollers.  A double-size stroller is sometimes unavoidable - if you have twins, what else can you do?  But get one of the twice-as-long models, so you can get through crowds or down hallways more easily. 

Why would you feel the need to put your kids side-by-side?  It could be that you're showing them off.   Admittedly that is faster and less annoying than showing baby pictures.  But a more likely explanation is that you're just avoiding the argument over who gets the front seat and who is stuck staring at the back of their sibling's head.  The idea that it is all due to wimpy parenting also helps explain why I always seem to see parents pushing empty double-wide strollers chasing kids that are running wild ahead of them.

Don't make the rest of us pay for your spineless parenting, switch to a more aerodynamic (or "crowd dynamic") inline stroller.  Or better still, find a double-decker stroller.  Though that would likely only be safe if the lower kid is much heavier than the other.

Poke A Fork In It, 'Cause It Is Done

That's it, I'm officially on the "Facebook is screwed" bandwagon.  People have been talking about it for a while, asserting it's only a matter of time before it's going to take its place with Friendster and MySpace.  I haven't really taken much notice of their talk, since it sounded like the usual clamouring to be the first to predict the downfall of X, where 'X' is pretty much anything that's been successful. 

But now I think there's something to it.  Why?  I got a cell phone.  As many have pointed out, Facebook has a problem with mobile computing.  By the company's own admission in their IPO filing, they don't get any income from their mobile clients, since there's no advertising or games on their mobile app.  Everything they make comes from people using full computers.  There's plenty of those people, so they're making money, it's just a weird business model if you think about it.  It would be like a fast food place that charged people in the restaurant, but gave food away for free at the drive-through.

But now I've discovered another Facebook weakness on mobile: you can play all the games outside of Facebook.  Yes, you can just download apps of many of the games and play them against your friends, without logging in to Facebook itself. 

If you've been on Facebook since it first went mainstream, you'll remember that the apps used to be a wide variety of fun and original things.  But through Facebook's many redesigns and re-imaginings, the apps have been diluted down to mainly games, and those are dominated by Zynga's formula of calculatingly addictive time wasters, which help Facebook make money selling credits, not to mention the ads shown to people who keep coming back to play.

But now I've downloaded SongPop, and I'm playing against friends without logging in to Facebook.  I'm going to do the same with Scrabble, even though it insists on my joining Electronic Arts' new network called Origin.  But that just shows how easily someone else can step in and take over social gaming.

(Yes, Stargate SG-1 fans, there is a great "accepting Origin" joke to be made here, but I can't find a way to make it without confusing everyone else.  Giggle amongst yourselves.)

So that's it, we don't need Facebook for gaming, we can put humourous and inspirational pictures on Pinterest, post statuses on Twitter, and discuss things with your friends in, I don't know, real life.  Facebook stock will just keep going down, and the only people who will have made any money out of it will be the folks who made The Social Network.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

In software development, there's a saying: A "feature" is just a bug that's been documented.  In other words, when your program does something unexpected, you could fix it, or you could just tell everyone it's supposed to work that way.

Obviously, there are a lot of other facets of life that could use that kind of attitude.  For instance, it sounds impressive to say that a public washroom is the first to be equipped with a built-in bidet.  That's much better than admitting that the auto-flush feature is so sensitive it will go off every time you move.

Optweetmum

Definition:A person on Twitter with just the right amount of twitter activity.  Some people have twitter accounts they rarely use (what, why are you looking at me?) so it's hardly worth following them.  On the other hand, people who are too involved in Twitter are hard to follow for a couple of reasons: they tweet everything they do and clog your twitter feed, or they spend most of their time communicating with other twitterers, and their tweets are unintelligible sequences of twitter handles, hash tags, initials, and fragments of conversations you're not involved in.  But a person who is Optweetmum posts regularly, but still types in complete sentences, and understands that e-mail may not be cool, but it's still better for private conversations.

Movin' To L.A.

The news today has included footage of the space shuttle Endeavour being flown to Los Angeles on the back of a 747 to be placed in a science museum.  They made a big deal of flying it past local landmarks, and crowds turned out to see it go overhead. 

Does this strike anyone else as odd?  The Americans are backing out of space exploration meekly and awkwardly, yet they're taking a victory lap?  And people are cheering it?  Did any other declining empires do this?  ("Wait, don't disband the Roman Army yet; first, let's have a parade!")  The fact that one of its last photo-ops had the Hollywood sign as its backdrop was just painfully fitting.

The Post is Online and Unrated

Where does GoDaddy.com get their money?  Selling domain names can't make that much money.  Not only do they keep their business running, they also sponsor a bunch of race cars, run lots of ads - even during the Super Bowl - and have their own "GoDaddy.com Bowl".  Somehow they also have the money to support SOPA and send their chairman elephant hunting.

I always assumed that it must be a largely automated company.  Really just a web page backed by a sparsely staffed data centre in Hong Kong or something, so most of the $1.95 you spend on a domain goes into marketing.  But now they have a new round of ads trumpeting their support staff.  These ads are slightly less overtly sexual, and they do at least insult both genders for once.  But what's really perplexing is that they're saying they've got 2000 web site consultants. 

Where are they getting the money for this?  That would be like Walmart suddenly revealing that every store has a team of highly-trained shopping consultants.  But one thing is for sure:  Danica Patrick sold her dignity for way too low a price.

This is Not an Instagram Moment

I've complained about Instagram before, accusing it of being just a dumbed-down Photoshop.  But apparently that complaint accomplished nothing, because it's still annoying me.  Just to be clear, I've never used it.  I'm just complaining about the effect it has on the world. 

The latest problem came when I tried photo-editing on my cell-phone.  I didn't expect a lot from the software that came with the phone: basically just, well, an actual dumbed-down Photoshop.  But instead it seemed to be a dumbed-down Instagram.  Having used photo-editing software on computers for years, I'm used to thinking in terms of intensity, saturation, or brightness.  But it's giving me options like "vignette," "fisheye," and "film grain."  I had to sort through these faux-retro effects to find more basic controls.  I don't care about sepia, just let me adjust the damn contrast.

But besides cluttering photo software, there's the effect of all the Instagrammed photos themselves.  (Has Instagram become a verb yet?  It is now.)  You'd think the whole trend would have come full-circle by now.  We all know the script: it goes from intriguing to trendy to mainstream to clichéd.  Well, I'm sick of seeing fake frayed edges on digital pictures, especially when the photo is in the middle of a modern web page.  When are the rest of you catching up?

Hands Across The Sportsfield

Say, remember "Hands Across America," that time in the eighties when they tried to have a line of people holding hands all the way across the U.S.?  As charity/political events go, it was well ahead of the Million Man March, but it was no AIDS Quilt.  I had to look up what cause it was supporting (answer at the end.)  Anyway, this post has nothing to do with that; the title just fit.

By a strange, almost interesting coincidence, sports media on both sides of the Atlantic were making a big deal over potential handshakes before football games.  If you're unfamiliar with these incidents, here's a recap:

In the U.S., the controversy was the game between San Fransisco and Detroit.  Last year, head coaches Jim Harbaugh and Jim Schwartz got into a heated arguement after the post game handshake.  This year though, they seemed perfectly amicable.

And in Britain, with Queens Park Rangers playing Chelsea, there would be an awkward moment during the traditional pre-game handshakes when Anton Ferdinand of QPR encountered Chelsea's John Terry, since last year when Ferdinand (who is black) accused Terry (white) of using a racial slur during a game last year.  Terry offered his hand, but Ferdinand spurned him.

And now back to your regularly-scheduled blogging:

What got me was just how much attention these incidents got.  The one on this side of the pond seemed to drive commentators and analysts giddy with anticipation about what could happen.  It was actually invigorating to see them get disappointed when nothing happened.  They are after all, only a side show for the main attraction.  What they do feel like is something out of a reality show.  But here's the point that the sportscasters are missing: if people wanted Reality TV, that's what they'd be watching.

Sports seems like Reality Television:  It's the same basic premise of real people dropped into an unreal situation with artificial challenges.  But the attraction is quite different.  I'm not a big reality TV fan, but the impression I get is that the challenges the contestants face are secondary to the interaction between the contestants, and the way they face the challenges.

In sports, however, it's pretty much all about the challenge itself, with little consideration to the participants' personalities.  Sports fans will cheer for pretty much any otherwise despicable person as long as they win.  Their consideration of athlete personality is little more than judging the amount of anger and focus.  Hockey fans do go a little further, talking about whether players have "character," but some of the players they claim have character are kind of semi-psychotic, so I'm still not convinced of their ability to judge personality.

So look, sportscasters, stick to covering the game.  The only way we can truly combine sports and Reality TV is if they take my advice and make the Pro Bowl into an episode of Survivor.

And I almost forgot: Hands Across America took place in 1986, and was in aid of hunger and homelessness.

Repeating History Repeating

A few more thoughts on the controversial anti-Muslim film and its impact:

• One news report pointed out that in many counties around the world - and Arab countries in particular - the government plays a very large part in the citizens' lives.  So it would be impossible to make a movie - even an amateur movie like this one - without government endorsement.  That doesn't forgive the extreme reaction, of course, but it does help to explain why the anger has been aimed at the United States in general and not the film makers in particular.
• As with the Danish cartoon controversy, there are now calls from even mainstream Muslim politicians around the world for global laws against blasphemy.  This will probably be greeted with bland refusal by western leaders.  But what I'd love to see would be for them to say: "Fine, we'll prevent our citizens from insulting other religions, but if you're going to impose your ideals on us, we get to impose some of our ideals on you.  So take your pick of: respect for religious minorities, free political dissent, equal rights for women, or no persecution of homosexuals."  Then grab the popcorn and watch them squirm.
• After watching one newscast this week, it hit me: Muslims want to stop you from seeing a really bad, very hateful movie, while the British want to stop you from seeing pictures of a woman's breasts.  When you put it that way, I'm not sure who's side I'm on any more.

We Are Never Ever Getting This Joke

I sympathize with a local band trying to get attention.  But this is a good example of self-contradictory humour: Most of the people who would read on past the set up would be offended by the punchline.

A Tweetpost on My Blogpage

I just recently recognised another thing I'm sick of:  People ironically referring to the Internet as "The Internets" or "The Interweb."  Okay, I get it, you're making fun of the way a person's out-of-touch uncle who's never been online might describe it.  But what you have to understand is this:

• People have been making fun of the off-line since the Internet started to go mainstream twenty years ago.
• There's hardly anyone left who's oblivious to the Internet, so you're just making fun of people from the past, so you're humour is about as current as a joke about Betamax users.

And no, enhancing it to "Teh Internets" just makes it worse.  If you have to do some retro Internet humour, why not dig out "Information Superhighway" again.  I haven't heard that phrase in at least ten years; I don't even feel nauseous when I type it.

Just Little Bits of History Repeating

Sometimes I wish I had started a blog earlier.  There's lots of earlier events in my life and the world that I would have liked to have had an outlet to comment on.  But there's no need to worry about that: since history repeats itself, I just have to wait a bit and something similar will happen. Then I can say whatever I wished I had a chance to say the first time.  Have something I should have got off my chest when people were rioting over those Danish Cartoons?  No problem: now there are protests in several Arab countries about this low budget movie that insults Islam.

What Were They Thinking?
First up, I'm wondering what - if anything - is the thinking behind protests targeting anything and everything American.  I'm fairness, there have been some protesters which distinguish between anger at the movie and anger at the U.S.A.  But there's also a lot scatter-shot blame as though this movie is associated with all Americans.  As if Americans all got together during one of their national meetings, and decide to make a movie insulting Mohammed.  "Shall we use the Hollywood marketing machine to distribute our anti-Islam propaganda all over the world?"  "No my Zionist friend, just put a badly-edited trailer on YouTube.

Can it Get Any Worse?
With the cartoon protests, it was a shame how the issues got dumbed down the longer they went.  The fact is, the cartoons weren't really satirical, they were just thinly-veiled insults.  So the protesters did have a right to be angry.  Not burn-the-city-down angry, but a little angry.  As time when on though, the entire issue got hijacked by the most conservative, and it went from "how dare you insult our religion" to "how dare you depict Mohammed."  A genuine debate over the limits of satire vs. tolerance became a naive attempt to impose one group's morals on the whole planet.  The Islamic world looks misguided: someone depicts your greatest prophet as a terrorist, and your biggest complaint is the fact that they made a picture of him.  And the cartoonists - who, let's remember, are attention-seeking bullies - get elevated to international heroes of free speech.

Let Down Again
I was quite surprised by how much of the media just ran with the basic story "Arabs rioted in reaction to an American movie that insulted Mohammed"  without answering the obvious question: "Wait, what movie?"  Now finally, people are digging in to the increasingly bizarre story of this "Sam Bacile" person behind the movie. In a sense, this story is a great demonstration of what's wrong with modern news: A story that on the surface is straightforward, even boring, but intriguing after a little investigative reporting.  I'm also disappointed that the similarity to the word "imbecile" was pointed out to me on Twitter, rather than the news.

Still Afraid of the Dark

I have an old TV.  Yes, the heavy-as-hell, not-completely-flat kind.  It's held up pretty well, but the one problem is that the picture is getting rather dark.  I find that's not a big problem when it comes to watching TV - it's pretty rare that the plot depends on the viewer noticing one detail in an unlit room.

Where it does become a problem is in video games.  That's where you might miss something important in the dark.  You never know what baddies may be waiting for you in that pitch black hallway, so stick to the brighter rooms.  In racing games I've learned to keep to the lighter side of the street.  Or just remember where the guardrails are hidden.

All of this reminds me of the computer game Zork, in which you couldn't stay in any dark room for more than one turn, or you'd be eaten by a creature called a Grue.  Thirty years and countless technological innovations later, and I'm still trying to avoid virtual darkness.

So that's what an esoteric geek I am.  The situation didn't remind me of that one Vin Diesel movie.  It didn't even remind me of that Doctor Who episode with the carnivorous microbes in the shadows.  No, it reminded me of a text adventure written in the seventies.  Consider that the next time you wonder if you've become nerdy because you saw The Avengers .

Drop the Top!

You know what bugs me?  People who drive around in convertibles on sunny days with the top up.  It seems like I've seen a lot of them lately.  What are they thinking?  To have a convertible, they had to spend thousands of dollars extra on their car, and suffer on cold days.  Yet they don't take advantage of it.  I could understand if this were California, and you could assume they just didn't feel like driving with the top down today.  But this is in Canada, where you can only use the convertible for a few months a year.  If you're not going to use it on warm days in September, why did you buy a convertible?  Just to rub it in the fact that you - unlike everyone else - could put the top down, you just don't feel like it.

See, that's how you can tell I'm a real blogger:  my mid-life crisis doesn't make me buy a convertible, it makes me complain about them.

Waterloo Is Not A Normal City

Exhibit A: There is a museum in the food court

Try Again, Vivaldi

Spring is supposed to be a time for new beginnings.  In the natural world, it certainly is.  But I don't live in nature.  I'm a human being; I live in an artificial world with its own rules.  And it seems that one of the differences between the human world and the natural world is when things start.  For some reason, artificial things mostly start in the fall.  Particularly the first week of September.  School starts, new TV shows debut, financial years start.  But there's lots of little changes too:  here and there the familiar shifts just slightly, and you spend a week reorienting yourself.  Oh, Rachel Ray is on an hour earlier, McDonald's boxes are corrugated now, half the tenants in the building have changed.  And all my ancestors had were blooming flowers.

The Best @#*&$ Blog Post On The Internet

I remember reading (in the Book of Lists, I think) that the various symbols used in comic strips to denote swearing all have names.  A quick scan of the Internet revealed the following names: nittles, grawlix, quimps, and jams.  Unfortunately, I couldn't find anywhere that said which symbol has which name.  I could only find:

• quimp = Saturn
• grawlix = spiral

I can't believe it: there is still information in a book that is not yet available on the Internet. 

But what made me think about this is the way I treat these symbols: I don't remember how I read them as a child, but I find that now - after years of more mature entertainment - I have to read them to myself with the actual swear word that the character was probably meaning.  Let me tell you, it's a weird experience to hear Hagar The Horrible using the F-word when addressing his troops.

God Save The Queen For Something A Little More Appropriate

I've mentioned before that if it was up to me, Canada would dump the monarchy. I've also subsequently mentioned before that I realise I'm out-voted on the issue, so I won't waste my time flogging that dead horse. However, I think I can make this complaint anyway, if only on a technicality:

Recently, a monarchist group proposed to name a small park in my neighbourhood in honour of Queen Elizabeth's Diamond jubilee.  There are several layers of oddness about this.  First is their need to commemorate a non-event.  They aren't naming the park after her, on the occasion of her jubilee, they are naming it after her jubilee.  The jubilee isn't really an event in itself, it's an anniversary.

And this isn't even the first thing they've named after a jubilee.  A local stretch of road is now known as "Jubilee Drive" in honour of her Golden (50th) Jubilee.  A her reign gets to longer and ever more impressive anniversaries, there are going to be more and more times to commemorate, and they're going to run out of things to name after Jubilees.  Which brings me to the most questionable part...

The park in question is pretty small, and it is dominated by a memorial the firefighters who have died in the line of duty, along with a monument in memory of 9/11.  Naming the park after the queen's jubilee is not necessarily disrespectful, but unless you have a pressing need to find something to name, then the classy thing would be to leave the park to the people honoured by it.

This has me asking, what's up with these people?  They're so desperate to name things after symbolic events in the queen's life that they're muscling-in on deceased firefighters.  I'm glad to see that the whole idea was dropped when the local firefighters' union did not get on board with it.  But merely proposing it is a huge misjudgement in how the monarchy fits into modern society.  And that's the technicality I mentioned: fine, you can have the monarchy as a symbol if you want to (even if it's not the symbol I would have chosen) but it is just a symbol, and has to take a back seat to serious issues.  The royals themselves seem to understand that they need to take a back seat to those who make real sacrifices, it's time Canadians figured that out too.

Uncelebrated Celebrities

I'm not one to read supermarket tabloids.  But I do always scan them at the checkout.  I guess I like to keep track of certain things:

• Who is popular
• Who is trying to make a comeback
• Has Cosmo finally run out of sex tips yet

What I've always found odd are the arbitrary rules of which celebrities are tabloid fodder and which are not.  You can be a pretty big star without appearing on magazines.  A lot of it is of course the star's own behaviour: there's no mystery why Tom Cruise has been on more covers than Tom Hanks.

This strange, uneven respect given to celebrities has never been more apparent than the cover of People.  Among the items on the cover is a blurb saying that Avril Lavigne is engaged.  There's no mention at all of whom she's engaged to.  As you've likely heard, her non-cover-worthy fiancé is Chad Kroeger, singer-songwriter for Nickelback. 

I'll probably lose my membership in the International Siblinghood of Hipsters for defending Nickelback, but that does strike me as quite a slap in the face.  Especially since he's still selling music, while she's been reduced to being one of these lukewarm musicians who's worn out her welcome at home but is sustained by album sales around the world where they're still not tired of her.  But I can understand why she gets the cover: Lavigne's teen and tween fans from her most successful years are just entering their prime People-buying years now.  On the other hand, There can't be much crossover between People readership and Nickelback listenership.  Well, you might assume that, but right there on the other side of the checkout was a UFC magazine.