So This is Halloween

I suppose I should like Halloween.  It's like the dark counter-weight to Christmas: less uptight, no relentless pressure to be having a good time, and ultimately with more giving.  And yet, I don't seem to get it.

See, whenever I hear an adult reminisce about their wonderful memories about childhood, they always emphasise how great it was to pretend.  For this one day, a child can be anything they want.  And to that I say, isn't that pretty much every day for children.  If, as a child, I wanted to pretend I was something I wasn't, I just did it.  I didn't wait for one day a year to get all my imaginary stuff in at once.

If anything, Halloween seemed to be a curtailing of a child's imagination, since you have this vague limitation on what you could choose to be.  You were encouraged to be something scary.  But not something really scary, just scary-flavoured.  You could be a ghost or a witch or one of a number of other things children never voluntarily pretend to be.  But if you want to pretend you're a three-armed alien from Alpha Centauri, people will look at you funny.  Save that for, well, tomorrow.

The Schlock Heard 'Round The World

There have been a lot of ads on TV for the latest game in the Assassin's Creed franchise.  Or more accurately, there have been two ads that they've shown over and over.  This game takes place during the American Revolution.

The one ad uses the song, "Coming Home," which subsequently sticks in my head for the next couple of hours.  That doesn't really seem to be apropos for either assassins or the American Revolution; but then there seems to be a tradition that video game ads have music that has nothing to do with the game itself.

The other ad uses "America The Beautiful," which is at least on topic.  Though if you listen to the lyrics of the song, like, "For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties...From sea to shining sea" you realise the song is mostly about places America added long after the revolution.  But more troubling, they prominently feature a line saying the revolution is about "whether Americans are to be free men or slaves."  For one thing, comparing unfair taxation to slavery is just a bit over-the-top even by the standards of American jingoism.  But more to the point is the (presumably accidental) irony: God forbid anyone in colonial America should be enslaved.  If you were wondering whether many African-Americans had broken into the gaming industry, there's your answer.

On The Buses

Walking home today, I walked past a bus stopped at a red light.  It was one of those buses with an ad completely covering the side of the bus, with even the windows covered with that perforated one-way poster material so people inside can still see out. 

Sometimes those whole-bus ads are well done - the most memorable being a bread ad where the bus was made to look like a giant loaf of bread.  More often though, it's a real estate agent with their picture blown up to humongous proportions.  I don't really get those ads: how is seeing a big picture of the agent going to make us want to use their services?  They're reasonably good-looking people, but not exactly supermodels.  It would be like a restaurant ad that doesn't show you what the food looks like, but does include a photo of the chef.

And if I was going to have my picture blown up so my face is the size of an SUV, I'd want it to be a really nice picture.  I'd find a photographer with the 20 gigapixel camera, and personally Photoshop the result to remove any blemish that would end up being an inch or more across.  But somehow real estate agents are okay with fuzzy, washed-out photos that look like they were taken with the first generation of camera-phones.

This ad, however, was a much nicer ad for a new condo development.  As a downtown resident, I have an interest in new urban development in the city, so I was interested in where this new building would be going.  The ad didn't say where it would be, so I had a good look at the artist's rendition of the structure to see if I could recognise the location.  As I'm staring at the picture, it occurs to me that it's directly over one of the bus windows, so there's probably someone inside wondering why some weirdo suddenly stopped walking down the street and started staring intently at him.

And If You Want To See The KHL, I Can Get You There Cheap

My earlier post about choosing a team in the Kontinental Hockey League attracted an interesting spam comment.  I've had spam in the comments before, making a generic, non-specific statement before offering a link to cutratecialis.org or something.

This time, however, the spam was clearly triggered by my mention of Donetsk, a major city in the Ukraine.  (Argh!  I mean "a major city in Ukraine"  I seem to remember someone getting angry about calling them "The Ukraine.")  It went into a discussion of how important Donetsk has become, and how you can still get cheap hotel rooms, in spite of it being the happenin' place on the Black Sea.

Odd, that's never happened before.  I haven't mentioned that many cities in the blog before, but they do come up occasionally.  I've made random-sounding references to Chinese cities before, but never received details on car-rental deals in Fuzhou.  So I'm guessing this is an Eastern European thing.  So we'll see if just mentioning places like Gdansk, Ljubljana, Tallinn, Tirana, and Bratislava is enough to trigger spam bots of the East.

My Pessimism Knows No Bounds

We found out this week that the cholera epidemic in Haiti following the earthquake started with bacteria carried by emergency personnel from Nepal.  That's terrible news, and we'll want answers about how this wasn't foreseen and can be prevented in the future.  And there's a lawsuit against the U.N. in Haiti for a billion dollars.

It would be nice if financial reparations and more careful future behaviour are the only things coming out of this incident.  But if there really is a great deal of money changing hands over this, it's sure to reduce future efforts.  Usually when there's a natural disaster somewhere in the world, it takes a long time for the rest of the world to respond.  You can bet responses will be even slower after all the cover-your-ass checks are done.  And if a big payout comes directly from Nepal, then it and other developing countries are going to be very reluctant to contribute to future humanitarian missions.

I'd certainly like to see justice done, I'm just skeptical that any changes are going to save more lives (in preventing disease) than they cost (in reduced response to disasters.)

Meanwhile in Italy, several geophysicists have been sent to prison for being too reassuring about the possibility of an earthquake.  It isn't quite as bad as the way it's being described: that they've been sent to prison for failing to predict the quake, even though that's impossible.  However, the reality is almost as frustrating: after one person used a widely discredited method to predict that there was a major quake coming, the actual scientists tried to reassure people, and were thus considered to have encouraged complacency.

This made me think back to the persecution of Galileo.  People have seen that as evidence of the Catholic Church being against science.  But now I realise it wasn't the church; it's the Italian justice system that hates science.  By the way, I've read reassurances that the way Italian justice works, they probably won't serve any time.  But still, you have to wonder what facts scientists will hold back from now on. 

Hockey Night in the Eastern Bloc

Let's face it, this isn't looking good for an NHL season this year. Sports programs are already having trouble filling the 95% of airtime they usually dedicate to hockey. I notice that TSN has even shown some highlights of Russia's Kontinental Hockey League (KHL). That's nice, they have plenty of talented players. But we don't know anything about the teams and don't know who we want to see winning. So I did a little Wikipedia research and came up with some reasons:

Western Conference

Team Name	In English that would be...	People you might recognize	Reason to cheer for them
Slovan Bratislava (Bratislava, Slovakia)	Bratislava Blue Eagles	Miroslav Satan	Czechs got most of the best players in the divorce
Vityaz Chekhov	Chekhov Knights	Danny Markov, GM Alexi Zhamnov	Think of the jokes cheering for Chekhov
HC Donbass (Donetsk, Ukraine)	Donetsk Donbass (Donbass is the area they play in)	Alexi Ponikarovsky	Lots of Canadians have Ukrainian blood, here's your team
Dynamo Moscow	Moscow Dynamo	Nicklas Bäckström, Alexander Ovechkin	They're the Mets to the Red Army's Yankees
Lev Praha (Prague, Czech Republic)	Prague Lions	Marcel Hossa, Alexandre Picard	Czech Republic: home of Pilsner
Dinamo Riga (Riga, Latvia)	Riga Dynamo	Rob Schremp, Mikael Tellqvist	As you may know from international tournaments, Latvia has the loudest fans.
SKA St. Petersburg	St. Petersburg Soldiers	Sergei Bobrovsky, Ilya Kovalchuk, Viktor Tikhonov (grandson of the famous coach)	If you like the St. Louis Blues or Utah Jazz, why not cheer for the Ska
Severstal Cherepovets	Northern Steel presents Cherepovets Steelers		Hamilton, be glad that one steel city got a big-league team.
Dinamo Minsk (Minsk, Belarus)	Minsk Dynamo		Logo has a buffalo that looks like the old Sabres logo
CSKA Moscow	Central Red Army	Ilya Bryzgalov, Pavel Datsyuk, Alexander Radulov, Anton Volchenkov, GM Sergei Fedorov	If you're a fan of the Yankees, Heat, or Manchester United, then this is your team.
Spartak Moscow	Moscow Spartacus	Oleg Petrov	Think of all the fun yelling, “I am Spartacus!”
Atlant Moscow Oblast	Moscow Atlas	Alexei Kovalev, Nikolay Zherdev	Argos, Titans fans, you Greek mythology teams have to stick together
Torpedo Nizhny Novgorod	Nizhny Novgorod Torpedo	Robert Nillson (son of Kent)	Wasn't the Torpedo supposed to be a strategy that would beat the neutral-zone trap?
Lokomotiv Yaroslavl	Yaroslavl Locomotive	Niklas Hagman, Staffan Kronwall, Curtis Sanford, Viktor Kozlov	Seriously, it's easy to cheer for this team after last year's plane crash

Eastern Conference

Team Name	In English that would be...	People you might recognize	Reason to cheer for them
Traktor Chelyabinsk	Chelyabinsk Tractor (but have a polar bear on the logo)	Andrei Kostitsyn	That's some hard core agricultural dedication: even teams on our prairies aren't named after farming equipment
Ak Bars Kazan	Kazan Snow Leopards		Mac fans, this is your team!
HC Yugra	Don't have a nickname, but their mascot is a mammoth		The mascot is because mammoths are often found nearby; sort of a counterpoint to the Nashville Predators
Metallurg Magnitogorsk	Magnitogorsk Metallurgists (or “Steelers,” if you prefer)	Evgeni Malkin, Oleg Tverdovsky, Coach Paul Maurice	“Magnitogorsk” just sounds cool
Neftekhimik Nizhnekamsk	Nizhnekamsk Petrochemists		If you think about it, their name is sort of like “Oilers”
Avtomobilist Yekaterinburg	Yekaterinburg Motorists		“Motorists” may not seem like an intimidating name, but keep in mind that we're talking about people driving Ladas through Russian winters.
Barys Astana (Astana, Kazakhstan)	Astana Leopards	Dustin Boyd, Nigel Dawes	If you saw Borat, you probably owe them one. Also, likely the only hockey team on earth with Arabic script on their uniform.
Amur Khabarovsk	Khabarovsk Amur (Amur is a local river)		In Eastern Russia, near the Pacific. So if you're a fan of one of the NHL's Pacific teams, this may be as close as you get.
Metallurg Novokuznetsk	Novokuznetsk Metallurgists	Chris Simon, Brent Sopel	“Metallurgists” is apparently Russia's “Roughriders”
Sibir Novosibirsk	Novosibirsk Siberians		In high school, we had an exchange program with Novosibirsk
Avangard Omsk	Omsk Vanguard	Alexander Frolov	“Vanguard,” they sound like a band of superheroes
Salavat Yulaev Ufa	Ufa Salavat Yulaev (Salavat Yulaev was a local hero, apparently)	Oleg Saprykin	Seems weird having a whole team of UFA's

Read This, Featuring Manuals

I saw a couple of weird things on the road today.  One was a driver stopped at red light holding her door open for the entire duration of the light.  As far as I could tell, this was just to let the smoke from her cigarette out of the car.  And - to go back to a previous rant - it was a convertible.  So if it was that important to her, she could have just dropped the top.  Yes, it was a little chilly today, but hey, if you're going to hold the door open...

The other thing I noticed was I got passed by a guy driving a Volkswagen GTI.  It was one of those guys who was driving Really Fast, and nearly rear-ended a parked courier van while trying to pass me on the right.  Fortunately he thought better of it and waited to pass me on the left.  Albeit in a hospital zone.

As often happens, for all his Really Fast driving, we both kept stopping at traffic lights, so he ultimately never got more than a car length in front of me.  That stuck in my mind because every time we started going again, his car rolled back a few inches.  Not enough that he might hit me, but enough to make it clear that he was driving a manual. 

I know I'll have to give up much of my car-guy cred for admitting this, but I've never driven a manual transmission.  Thus, I don't know how hard it really is to start on an uphill, but the impression I had was that it wouldn't cause that much trouble, at least on the modest incline we were driving.  So I'm assuming that either: he'd bought this street-racer car that he didn't know how to drive properly, or he was letting it roll back just to make sure everyone knew he wasn't one of these losers driving an automatic.  I could believe either one.

Personally, I would like to learn to drive a stick-shift.  Aside from regaining that street cred I just gave up, it would be nice to avoid that $1,000 or so added on to any new car prices.  Trouble is, I don't know how a grown adult goes about learning the skill.  I can't exactly go back to driver's ed.  I guess I'll just have to hope my ability to use manual transmissions in video games will transfer to real life.

For Once, I Can Relate To Yankees Fans

Canada was knocked out of World Cup qualifying this week.  Though "knocked out" hardly does the 8-1 loss justice.  Normally after Canada plays a major game in Central America I come away angry at biased officiating, but in this game the ref didn't have to offer any help.  It's not really a setback in this one cycle of World Cup qualification, rather it's a setback with multiplicative effects.

The dirty little secret of Canadian soccer is that there is no such thing as Canadian soccer.  Very few people become fans or players of the game in any serious fashion purely based on things that happen in Canada.  Most of them (myself included) become involved in the sport because their family has close ties to another country where the sport is more popular.  On the one hand, that provides a nice shortcut to popularising the game here, but it also provides a few obstacles to getting a competitive national team:

• A small number pool of people to draw on for potential players
• Many potential national team players qualify to play for other countries too
• Canadian fans are often outnumbered by ex-pat fans of the visiting team in home games.

Humiliating losses like the one in Honduras make all these worse: The reputation as an embarrassing team prompts players to chose to represent other countries.  Feeling the team is a lost cause discourages fans from supporting the team.  Without playing high profile games, it's hard to inspire the next generation of players

It also provides support for the many in the sports media who just shrug, say we just don't have the talent, and go back to analysing the minutiae of hockey. Much as there is an obvious talent gap, I'm not sure that's our immediate stumbling block.

To take the recent game as an example: previous to the debacle in Honduras, we tied (and nearly beat) the same team in Toronto. When a team plays to a tie at home, then gets annihilated on the road, lack of talent isn't the main cause.  I don't want to sound like I'm setting up recently-resigned coach Stephen Hart as a scapegoat. It just sets up my long-time complaint about Canada's soccer program: whenever our hockey team plays a game against a country that doesn't have much of a hockey tradition, we usually see that they have a Canadian coach. But for some reason, we never seem to take the hint ourselves. 

We're going to have to admit that this is a problem we'll need help from outside to fix.  Ironically, even though our soccer culture comes from other countries, we keep looking inwards for our coaching.

Lockout II: The Slowening

The National Hockey League season was supposed to have started by now, but their ongoing lockout has prevented that.  Personally, I'm not too bothered; my interest in hockey has waned over the years, and I've been mainly paying attention to the sport only because it's pretty much impossible for a sports fan in Canada to ignore it.  No hockey hasn't bothered me: as long as football and baseball are still going, I'm happy with them.  Along with occasionally enjoying the schadenfreude I always get from watching NHL management in action.

But things often get in the way of watching the NHL shooting itself in the foot: reporters, analysts, and other fans.  This being Canada, everyone is compelled to talk about the hockey labour dispute, even if they don't understand it.  Though come to think of it, that's true of hockey itself, too.

Sports business can be an interesting topic: because it's dealing with a very public and familiar business, it's often easier to relate to than some of the more esoteric industries out there.  But it can be pretty annoying too: people have a lot of emotions wrapped up in the subject, so they often lack any objectivity.  And of course there's the sports journalists.  Sports reporters aren't exactly the sharpest pencils in the newsroom to begin with, and every time there's a work-stoppage they're forced to report on a subject they have no experience with.

Everyone in and out of the media end up spouting the same myths, misconceptions and unrealistic solutions over and over.   So I'll do my part and try to counter them here:

This is a strike

A strike is when workers try to force negotiations by refusing to work.  A lockout is when management tries to force negotiations by refusing to let the workers work.  This and the last NHL work-stoppage were lockouts.

 

The players are looking for more money

I'm still surprised how many people jump to this conclusion.  Sure, we're constantly hearing about escalating athletes' salaries, but in both this and the last labour dispute, the players would have been more than happy just to keep what they already had.  Admittedly, one could argue that with the state of the game's finances, trying to keep the status quo is just as selfish as trying to get more.

This is all about greed

I hate greed as much as the next guy, but it's not quite like that.  The fact is this isn't about grabbing for more money; it's really about dividing the money that they already have.  Fans are often (justifiably) angry about how high player salaries have gotten, but remember: if the players didn't make that big money, it would be the owners making it. As silly as it sounds for people to make millions playing a game, I think everyone would agree it would seem even more unfair for an owner to get that money.  Which is related to...

High salaries lead to high ticket prices

To understand this, imagine that tonight all the players are visited by the ghosts of sports past, present and future, and wake up tomorrow as changed people.  They demand that they make nothing more than the average person.  The owners (who just dreamt of seat licenses or whatever sports owners dream of) are more than happy to massively reduce everyone's salaries.

What do you suppose the owners would do then?  Many would answer: lower ticket prices, say from $100 to $1, now that their expenses have been greatly reduced.  But why would they do that?  They know that there are 20,000 people in town willing to spend $100 to see the game.  If they can sell 20,000 tickets at $100, they'll do that, even if their expenses are much lower.  

The truth is, the causality goes the other way:  Ticket prices don't cause higher salaries; high ticket prices enable high salaries.

If the owners don't want to lose money, they shouldn't sign players to such huge contracts

The trouble is, the owners are in a Catch-22: if they spend big on players, they'll lose money because their expenses are too high.  If they don't spend big on players, they'll be perennially unsuccessful, and lose money because their revenue is too low.  If salaries are determined by a free market, the only ways around this conundrum are: have universal rules limiting spending (such as a salary cap) or live with inequality and uncompetitive teams.

The owners should just agree to stop giving out big contracts

There's a word for that: collusion.  (And it's illegal.)

Falling for Stunts

I'm surprised by how much attention Felix Baumgartner's extreme skydive has gotten.  I checked Twitter today and found that it was dominating discussion.  Normally the motley band of semi-intellectuals I follow on Twitter are at most only ironically interested in the touchstones of popular culture.

I kind of saw this as another guy-with-too-much-time-on-his-hands stunt.  For a long time these always seemed to be dull long-distance-ballooning record attempts.  They'd get far more media attention than they deserved, and no one seemed to care.  But I guess this is quite a bit more difficult and death-defying, so perhaps the uncynical adulation for Baumgartner is deserved.

However, I'm saddened by the number of people somehow tying this in to the achievements of space exploration.  It further convinces me that for many, the space program has been just a big publicity stunt.  But then, with this going on at the same time NASA is making headlines primarily in Los Angeles it's hard to blame them for that point of view.

But if we can just keep this stunt in perspective, it should be good for humanity: it's raised the bar for public stunts tremendously.  Just think how far David Blaine will have to go to get people's attention now.

Better Living Through Speech Recognition

A new feature on Android-based phones (as of version 4.1) is a "personal assistant" app called "Google Now" (see the video introduction of it.)  I've been using it, and I'll report the results as they come in.  But for now, what I want to report on is one aspect of it: a system to respond to simple spoken questions.  (Again, see video introduction in front of hysterical Google fans here.)

Of course, that's a lot like the famous Siri feature on iPhones, which was the big feature added for iPhone4.  (As opposed to iPhone5's big features, which was that it's slightly thinner and the maps don't work.)  So yes Apple fans, you did have this feature first.  But then, Apple is currently running a rather annoying commercial bragging about their panorama photo feature, which Android already had.

Of course, I've been testing the voice search ever since.  One disappointing aspect is that it can only respond in that friendly-yet-formal voice for a limited selection of data.  For instance, I verified that as in the video, it will tell you the height of the Space Needle, along with many other famous towers.  But when I asked, "What's the new name of the Sears Tower?" it just put that phrase into the normal Google search engine, and gave me a list of links related to what is apparently now called the Willis Tower.

Anyway, here are some other experiences:

Q: How old is Ichiro Suzuki?
A: Answered simply and correctly, "Ichiro Suzuki is 38 years old"

Q: How old is A-Rod?
A: I was worried when it transcribed it as, "How old is a rod?"  Yet it answered correctly again, "Alex Rodriguez is 37 years old."

Q: How did the Jays do today?
A: Got confused, spelled it out as, "How did J today," and gave me a list of web sites, strangely starting with John Elway's Wikipedia entry.  I rephrased it to, "Did the Blue Jays win today?" and this time it understood, responding, "No, the Blue Jays lost 3-0 to the Rays."

Q: Who won the Grand Prix today?
A: I was referring to the Singapore Grand Prix earlier in the day, and it gave me a write-up of the results.

Q: Who is Joe Walsh?
A: No speech, but it gave me a quick fact-sheet of his career.

Q: What is the Sub of the Day?
A: It just got confused, even when I specified the "Subway sub of the day."

Q: What did Mitt Romney say about airplanes?
A: I asked this after a bunch of confusing references to a Romney gaffe talking about air travel.  It did indeed give me a list of pages regaling the incident.

Q: Did Villa win today?
A: This was in reference to family soccer team Aston Villa.  Kept interpreting "Villa" as "Phil" or "Philo."  When I specified "Aston Villa," it gave me a table of recent Premier League results, which would have been nice, but I was enquiring about a League Cup game.

Q: Where is Dortmund?
A: Interpreted as either "Where is George mind?" or "Where is Georgia Mountains?"

Q: Did the Orioles win?
A: This was only minutes after the Orioles/Yankees playoff game had ended.  The question was transcribed as "Did the girl win?"  You can imagine the split-second of panic as I saw that this is what it had fed into the search engine.  Fortunately, only benign (but unhelpful) pages were returned.  Upon re-asking the question with superior enunciation, it interpreted it correctly.  However, the Google voice only responded by telling me that the Orioles and Yankees would be playing that night, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the game was over.

Q: Where's the nearest Salvation Army?
A: Successfully showed me three local properties.

Q: Where's the nearest cafe?
A: Gave me several valid answers, though it missed two of the closest ones.

Q: Show me pictures of Japanese Flying Squirrels
A: Just like the Pygmy Marmosets in the demo, I was successfully overloaded with cuteness.

Unseen At Any Speed

A weird thing happened on the highway today.  I had just pulled onto the highway, when I noticed there was a police car at the side of the road ahead.  Of course, it's good road manners to leave the lane by the shoulder if you see anyone parked there, for safety's sake (and it's now the law here in Ontario.)

The trouble was, as I had entered the highway, there was a truck beside me, so I couldn't move over.  Thus, I'd have to either pass the truck and pull in in front of it, or let it pass me, and pull in behind.  I was closer to the front of the truck, so I accelerated.

Only after committing to this action did it occur to me:  I've seen a police car ahead - obviously looking for speeders - and now I'm accelerating as I approach it.  Fortunately I made it past without the officer intervening. 

How?  It could be that I just wasn't going that fast to begin with, or that the police are more concerned with crazy-fast dangerous drivers than someone edging over the unofficial speed limit.  But I suspect that it's because my older, unassuming car doesn't attract attention.  As I tweeted a few weeks ago, I passed a Lamborghini on that same stretch of road; I assume that only happened because that driver knows his car is asking for a ticket and was driving accordingly.  For just a moment, I bet he was jealous of my automotive freedom.  A few more years and my car will be old enough to attract attention to itself, and the effect will be lost, but for now, I'm going to try to enjoy the automotive anonymity.

It's A Sin

I'm not a big animal rights guy.  I'm not a vegetarian; I've never been in any animal-related organisation.  But as a compassionate person who cares about animals, I figure I'm the sort of person that animal rights groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals would be most likely to win over.  And yet, I find myself laughing at PETA's antics right along with everyone else out there.
Their latest target is Pokemon, complaining that the game okays exploitation of animals. 

PETA seems to have a weird stream-of-consciousness way of picking targets.  This isn't even the most delayed reaction protest they've had.  In 2009, they asked the Pet Shop Boys to change their name to the Rescue Shelter Boys, a mere twenty-four years after they made it big.

Of course, I find myself wondering just how seriously PETA takes themselves.  To look at it another way, I described myself as laughing at PETA, but maybe they want us to laugh with them.  As I've mentioned, I've enjoyed reading examples of people taking Onion stories too seriously.  Could it be that I'm going find myself on some web site ridiculing people who don't get the joke behind PETA?

I don't think so.  My impression is that they are trying for publicity:  That is, they don't really think Pokemon or the Pet Shop Boys are the biggest threats to animals today, they're just easy ways to get into the headlines.  Who knows, maybe they are issuing these press releases tongue in cheek.  Trouble is, it's hard to make people laugh when you're also making serious accusations against much of society.  They've won over a lot of actors over the years; perhaps they should concentrate on recruiting some writers.

Speed Reading

photo by Jose A. Herran used by creative commons licence

At right is a picture from the Nürburgring north course.  It's an old race track in Germany that's often considered to be the world's most difficult.  You can also see that for some reason, it has become traditional for people to leave graffiti on the road surface.  Mostly it's just people leaving "___ was here" type messages - in some cases remembering people killed on the track. Some people use the track writing to brag about their favourite car brands (there's a large VW logo in one part of the track.)

from Gran Turismo 4, by chuckoutrearseats

Because of the Nürburgring's legendary reputation, it's made its appearance in racing video games.  And gaming technology being what it is nowadays, the virtual versions include all the authentic graffiti.

So I had an idea as I was driving my virtual car over this simulated track (or more likely, ricocheting off a virtual guardrail.)  One reason the track is difficult to drive is that it's so long that you can never remember what is coming up in the road ahead.  Thus, it would be very beneficial if there was useful information painted on the track.  So I'm appealing to anyone travelling to Germany: please spray paint some instructions on the Nürburgring.  Nothing complicated, just "Brake!" in front of some of the blind curves.  Gamers the world over will thank you.

You Don't Want To Get Involved In High-Tech Gang Wars

Today I saw this on a local building:

In most places, the File Transfer Protocol is a forgotten part of Internet history, but here in Kitchener-Waterloo it's vital enough to be the stuff of graffiti.  What's next, HTML tagging?  Ha! I'm hilarious (among people with very specific background knowledge.)

If You Can Find A Better Ad, Film It

If I ever find myself CEO of a company, I'm going to try to remember the following: don't appear in my company's TV commercials.  There must be something that urges them to be their own pitchmen.  It could be to save money, or it could be a by-product of the big ego a person needs to get that far in the corporate world.  But I suspect that the blame can all be laid at the feet of Lee Iacocca and Dave Thomas.

They were the only execs who made good TV ads.  But after them, everyone with a corner-office thinks they can do it.  But Iacocca was a gifted speaker; he made it look easy because he was so good at it.  Thomas, on the other hand, had a kind of anti-charisma.  You felt comfortable with him because he didn't come across as polished and artificial.

Unfortunately, for every one of these guys, there are five of the Alarm Force guy.  So remember execs, stay in the boardroom, and get your products pitched by attractive families with dumb husbands.

Logonym

Definition: A word whose structure symbolises its own meaning:

Examples:

• "committee" has unnecessary letters everywhere tacked on wherever they'll go
• "awkward" has that weird-looking "wkw" in the middle
• "bookkeeper" - all the letters are organised into groups
• "embarrassed" has extra letters sticking out