Who Doesn't Love A Gnome?

I've always tried to like the Travelocity Gnome. It's a cute conceit for a commercial, and the ads are often funny. But the whole idea is a rip-off of the gnome from Amelie.  But then things got troubling when I saw this ad:



Given his ability to throw the laptop and the shovel, we now know that the Gnome can actually move.  He just can't move when we're watching him. Of course, any Doctor Who fan knows this means he's a weeping angel.

The Gnome is a more benevolent species it seems.  While the angels sent their victims back in time the Gnome sends people to Florida.  Which is arguably not that different.

Slamming The Slams

I'm now going to admit something that will make me look hopelessly square: all slam dunks look the same to me.  Okay, not quite all of them, of course.  When they have the slam dunk competition at the all-star game - where the player, say, jumps over a goat, grabs a Gatorade bottle off the backboard, then dunks the ball, the bottle, the goat, and a second ball hidden in his shorts - those dunks are quite recognizable and memorable.  But a slam dunk in a game - where the commentators go crazy over what a great play it was and it appears on all the plays-of-the-week segments that week - those ones all look the same to me.

Maybe the player slams the ball down with slightly more force than usual, or makes a slightly different movement of his arms on the way up to the rim.  But those subtle differences are about it.  Really, it's about as entertaining to me as the various stunts of football players on the way to a touchdown to taunt trailing defenders before crossing the goal line.

It's likely that my lack of appreciation of the slam dunk comes from my inexperience with both watching and playing basketball.  I admit there could be less obvious reasons why the dunk on tonight's highlights is very different from the dunk on yesterday's highlights.  But I suspect it's an Emperor's New Clothes situation: basketball has always been the cool sport, so sportscasters don't want to be seen as the nerdy guy who doesn't get it.  If so, I hope my lack of coolness has helped to puncture the myth.

Lost in Space

The big news in geekdom is that JJ Abrams has been selected to direct the first of the new Star Wars movies.  I'm not sure what to think about this, largely because I have so little experience with Abrams.  Unfortunately didn't watch Lost.  I've been awful at predicting which TV shows will turn out to be good - I missed the first three seasons of The Simpsons assuming it to be a cheap excuse to sell T-shirts to immature kids.  And sure enough, with Lost, I assumed it to be a cheap attempt to cash in on the popularity of Survivor.  By the time I heard people talk about how weird it was, it was too weird to catch up with.  One day, I will lock myself in a room with the DVDs and see what I missed.

As for Abrams' Star Trek reboot, well, I honestly haven't gotten the courage up to watch it yet.  So I have no opinion of him worth mentioning.  All of which brings up my big reaction: Like so many nerds, I'm still trying to come to terms with the idea that both Star Trek/Wars will be controlled by the same person (and it's not me!)

I would have thought that if a single person were to grab control of Sci-Fi's two biggest franchises, it would have to be because that person was one of the following:

• A hugely wealthy person who bought said franchises as play things the way other billionaires buy sports teams.
• The biggest suck up of all time.
• A person who has shown unprecedented credentials in the area of producing mainstream science fiction.

He's successful, but not enough to qualify for the first.  If he were the second, I assume we'd have heard about it.  As for the third, yes he's been successful, with a popular TV show and movie under his bealt.  But he also has some missteps too.  It's a good record, but not the Spielbergian resume I would have expected.

To me, it's just another example of the concentration of creativity in mainstream entertainment.  People at the top of the industry get more creative outlets than they know what to do with, while everyone else struggles to get heard.

I Refuse To Do A Nail/Fail Joke

People are still talking about Nail Yakupov's goal celebration from earlier this week.  The complaint is that his exuberant charge and slide down the ice after scoring the overtime winner was over-the-top and self-agrandizing.

This is something I find aggravating about sports.  The world of athletics may seem savage and anarchic, yet every now and then people in the sports world will lapse in to an almost Victorian expectation of manners.  Hockey seems to be the worst at this, in that it is the rawest, least civilized of sports, but it has the highest expectations of behaviour of players.  I could understand if there were expectations of great character and sportsmanship, but that doesn't seem to be the case.  You could be celebrated for intentionally injuring an opponent, then condemned for being too enthusiastic in celebrating a goal.  Go ahead and try to hurt your fellow player, but hurt his feelings and there'll be hell to pay.

I have to be honest, they do have a point that the celebration was a little excessive, and even a little selfish.  But on the scale of everything unjust in the world of hockey, this was hardly worth mentioning.  But instead, it's become a major topic of conversation, far more than if he had, say, broken his stick over an opponent's head.

Things I've Taken For Granite

Today I saw live curling for the first time.  It was the Ontario Scotties Tournament of Hearts, which is to decide the Ontario women's champion who will go to the big Tournament of Hearts.  So I think this tournament should be called the Tournament of Ventricles or something, but whatever.  Here's some of my reactions after seeing a sport in person after years of seeing it on TV:

• The Noise.  You don't realize how loud the rock and the brushes really are.  Or the fact that with five games going on at once, you can't tell which team is yelling "hurry hard!"  I assume they get to know each other's voices.  And the infamous "nice shot" that the skip says after every shot, regardless of how nice it really was?  There's no way the teammates can actually hear it.
• Everything seems smaller.  I know, that affects a lot of sports live vs. televised.  But the sheets seem much smaller.  If the shooter doesn't pull up after releasing the rock, she can coast all the way to the other hogline.  It's amazing there aren't any collisions between sweepers and the other players going back up the sheet.
• Only curlers can see the imperfections in the ice.  On TV, you'll see a rock hit an ice chip and turn, even though you can't see whatever it hit.  One player asked another to clean something off the ice.  It was right in front of me, maybe ten feet away, but I couldn't see it.
• They don't show the guy with the sprinkler who resurfaces the ice during the break.  After the fifth end, a guy goes over the houses with a specialized hose to sprinkle water on the ice.  Weirder is that the hose is connected to a tank strapped to his back.  I'm hoping that someone, somewhere has though of dressing him like a Ghostbuster.
• The scoreboards make no sense.  For big events, the scoreboard is a table listing the ends, with the number scored in each end, and the total scores on the right (like a baseball box score.)  At smaller events, the scores are listed across the top, and the numbers beneath them indicate the end in which the team got to that score.  I'm sure mathematicians would find this inverting of concepts interesting, but it's really hard to read.  I guess the advantage is that they'll need fewer number cards.  But come on, at one end you have computer monitors listing the time remaining for each team.  At the other end, you have unintelligible scoreboards because the club is too cheap to buy a stack of "1" and "2" cards.
• It's freezing in the curling club.  No wonder the expensive seats in the lounge sell out first.  On the other hand, I learned curling is good exercise.  While I was shivering in a winter jacket, tuque and gloves, many of the players were down to t-shirts.

Jason's Blogger Site

Normally, I'm in favour of laws defending Canadian culture from foreign competitors.  But there is one industry where I say we should open the protectionist floodgates and let the invisible hand of the market pound the local competitors into the ground: Television.

I hit the breaking point with CTV.  Currently they have a policy that all of their promos must refer to the show as "CTV's [show name]."  That policy even goes for that majority of shows that they don't actually produce, but just buy from American networks.  So you get ridiculous phrases like "CTV's Big Bang Theory."  That's sort of like the corner store saying they sell "Oscar's Convenience Store's Coca-Cola."  Okay, I guess it's theirs in the sense that they paid for it.  But they've gone to new lengths by asking us to tune in for "CTV's American Idol".

I'm Not Sure What To Call This Post

Right now, Kitchener-Waterloo is planning a new light-rail transit system, and it's time to give the thing a name.  Apparently the name we've been calling it, "LRT," just doesn't cut it, nor does simply calling it "the train."

So a local PR firm was hired to come up with a name for the system.  They returned with three names for discussion and public input: Ion, Arc, and Trio.  That has me wondering: if you pay consultants extra for a name, will they create a name that doesn't sound like it was made by consultants?  With all the efforts our society puts into good presentation, you'd think we'd have developed the art to the point of being able to sound natural.  But maybe that's only for the underground, independent public relations firms.

At the other end of the bad-names-we're-about-to-be-stuck-with spectrum, Ottawa's new football team needs a name.  To refresh your memory, for many years their team was the Rough Riders, a name widely ridiculed for being just a space and a capital away from being the Saskatchewan Roughriders.  Then their recent short-lived team was called the Renegades.  Apparently the new team is not beholden to either of those names, though they may feel pressured to choose another name beginning with "R".  Well now it comes out that the new owners are leaning towards "Red Blacks."  See, one aspect of the new team that is surely not up for debate is the red-and-black colour scheme, which has been used by pretty much every team coming out of the nation's capital. 

Unsurprisingly, the fans don't like the new name, and are letting the owners know it.  But rather than rethink their preference, the owners are brushing-off the controversy with the (admittedly correct) claim that people would find fault with any name they pick.  No other name is taking the public's imagination (they don't want to be saddled with the Rough Rider jokes again, and the Renegades name wasn't around long enough to connect with people) so Ottawa football fans may well be stuck with a team named after its colours, dumbed-down to the point of not even using conjunctions.

Between these two incidents, we have the two sides of naming problems:  Trying to please everyone pleases no one, and the people whose job it is to please everyone are so out-of-touch they can't sound natural anymore.  And people with enough power that they don't have to listen to anyone, made worse by a society where complaining is so epidemic that we no longer have any way of communicating that ideas are truly bad.

Today's Special at the Acme Restaurant

Here's one for the category of "Cartoon cliches you rarely see in real life":

That's the first time I've ever been served a sandwich with an olive on a toothpick on it.  Thanks to the Charles Dickens Pub in Woodstock Ontario for giving me that honour.  It was very good, though I only got to eat half of it.  Before I could get to the other half, a mouse ran out from a perfectly semi-circular hole in the base board and ran off with it.  I would have chased the mouse as it ran out the door, but they were raising a piano into one of the upper floors outside, so I didn't think it was wise to get involved.

Say It Ain't So, Te'o

I was going to go through a big explanation of my thoughts on controversial college football player Manti Te'o, but a flowchart is worth a thousand words:

...and that's the trouble: we have no way of knowing what to feel about Manti Te'o, at least just yet.  But worse, whatever we feel, it's something that we will feel very strongly.  This kid mislead us and tugged at our heartstrings, or this innocent kid was mislead by so-called friends.  We'll probably find out in the next few days.  But until then, he's a pop-cultural Schrodinger's Cat, simultaneously villain and victim.

For me, if a person is in that situation, I'm going to tread lightly.  Whatever pleasure I might get from ridiculing the perpetrator of a national hoax, it's not worth the guilt I would feel if it turned out I had made fun of someone who's already gone through a lot of pain for another's humour.  But most people seem to be taking a different approach, seeing him as at least half-guilty, and thus as viable a pop-cultural target as anyone.  It's not like there are no other targets right now in the area of heart-warming stories involving sports and cancer that turned out to be deception.

Bet My Friends Aren't Interested

Yesterday, people were speculating about what Facebook was working on.  Then today, we found out it was a search thingie: you can search for which friends have certain interests, or have been to certain places.  Or you can search for, say, which TV shows your friends tend to like.  I was pretty disappointed with that.  Ever since social networks became an important technology, there's been talk about how some company could somehow use them for searching, and kick Google's ass.  So Facebook is going to have another go at that idea.  Technologically it seems pretty sophisticated, but I still don't see people getting much use out of it.

If you're talking about searching amongst your friends, well, I already know them, I don't need a web site to do that for me.  In the introduction event, Mark Zuckerberg himself gave the example of searching for which of your friends are fans of Game of Thrones.  True, I don't know precisely which of my friends that would be, but I can take a pretty good guess.

On the other hand, if we're talking about searching amongst the huge network of people on Facebook around the world, then privacy concerns are going to put the kibosh on that.  Or if this is aimed at people who have thousands of "friends" they barely know, that searching among them is of limited use.

I wonder if this is a result of all the young people who don't understand today's technology.  No, seriously, hear me out:  I grew up without the Internet, when an almanacs were a huge repository of knowledge.  Once the Internet went mainstream, we were all shocked by just how much information there is out there that wasn't previously available.  If you're asking me whether to search the whole world, or just the part of it that my friends and I have experienced, I'm going to pick the former (no offence.)  Perhaps a deeply connected person who's grown up with deeply connected friends may not appreciate their limitations.

I'm Sure This Will Be The Last Mention Of The Hockey Lockout

We found out today that Scott Gomez of the Montreal Canadiens has been sent home from training camp, having been told that he won't play at all this season.  Why?  The team needs to reduce salary to get under next year's lower salary cap.  Teams are allowed to buy out players after this season to get under the cap, and the high-earning/low-performing Gomez is an obvious guy to drop.  But, you can't buy-out an injured player, so rather than take a chance on him getting an ill-timed injury, they've asked him not to play.  Yes, I know, he's going to collect his multi-million dollar salary for literally doing nothing.  But on the other hand, he's an athlete in his thirties trying to get his career back on track, and now he's not allowed to play at any level for a year.

I have to ask, how could this be allowed to happen?  After wasting half-a-season, you'd expect the agreement not to screw over one of the players so badly.  It's reminiscent of what happened to Wade Redden under the previous rules:  With no other way to get his salary off the books, the Rangers had him play in the minors for two years.  (Keep in mind that the contracts can't be renegotiated even with the player's blessing.)  And sure enough, it turns out Redden is in the same boat as Gomez now: not allowed to play at all this season to ensure he can be bought out in the summer.

So the players went to the brink to ensure they got every last percentage of revenue, but didn't consider that they may have just put themselves in a situation where they'd ruin several union members' careers.

A Team About Nothing

Hockey is back, and within days the Leafs are starting over in a state of disarray.  It's amazing how unchangeable this franchise is.  During the time they've been mired as confused also-rans, Pittsburgh has gone from nobodies to champs back to nobodies and back to champs.  But it takes a special kind of organizational dysfunction to fire your General Manager just days before the start of a shortened season.

Supposedly a big part of the reason GM Burke was fired was his reluctance to trade for Roberto Luongo.  Personally, I don't blame him for avoiding the trade.  On the one hand, it looks like something that could work well.  Vancouver needs to trade a goalie with a long and expensive contract, and Toronto needs goaltending and has space under the salary cap.  On the other hand, the trade looks like such a Maple Leafy thing to do: trade youngsters for a the most famous and expensive player on the market, all to improve a team that at most will just squeak into the playoffs.  I guess what I'm saying is: you remember that episode of Seinfeld where George becomes so frustrated with his life that he decides he's going to start doing the opposite of whatever he'd normally do?  Well the Leafs are the George Costanza of sports franchises, they might want to try it.

Although I didn't always agree with Burke, one thing he said that I really appreciated was that he wouldn't mortgage the future to barely make the playoffs and get creamed in the first round.  It's an attitude the Leafs haven't had in living memory.  Unfortunately, he said it just before L.A. finished eighth then won the cup.  That made Burke look foolish, and played into the fantasy of many a Canadian hockey fan that you just have to make it into the playoffs and anything can happen.  Of course that's only the superficial impression that one gets from the Kings' championship.  Look closer and you see that the Kings are stacked with talent, and their poor regular season play was a product of a slow start owing to a hastily-put-together team finding its rhythm.  Whenever actual mediocre but over achieving teams go on a playoff run, they do always get crushed by a more talented team eventually.  That's why the Kings' title was one of the greatest accomplishments in sports history: they didn't just win a championship, they did it in a deceptive way that will have rivals following self-destructive strategies for years to come.

Things I've Learned Playing Angry Birds

I recently started playing Angry Birds.  That's right, just "Angry Birds".  Not Angry Birds Space or Angry Birds Star Wars, or Angry Birds Battle of the Somme.  The game is now so big Microsoft is using it in their ads in a desperate bid to seem cool, but I'm just starting.  So I'm probably one of the few people left who can make some fresh observations about it.  Here's what I've learned:

• Birds don't have wings
• Things probably turned out fine for those first two of the Three Little Pigs after the wolf blew their house down, since pigs have a great ability to survive building materials falling on them.
• Eggs are potentially explosive.
• If you drop an object from something flying at high speed, it will just fall straight down.
• Cardinals aren't dangerous, but canaries can penetrate several layers of wood.
• Bluebirds can reproduce astonishingly quickly.  Just stay the hell away from starlings.
• There's really not a lot to do in Finland, other than designing hundreds of Angry Birds levels.  That and taking whatever drug made them think that flinging flightless birds at legless pigs would make a good game.
• Getting hit in the head will give you black eyes.
• The biggest challenge for Artificial Intelligence is not understanding natural language or binocular vision.  It’s figuring out when a stack of broken boards has finished collapsing and it should just go ahead and end the level.

Bowled Over

The American college football National Championship was decided this week, and all anyone can talk about is the quarterback's girlfriend.  If you didn't see the game - or wisely bailed out early on the one-sided contest - there was a moment when the cameras showed Katherine Webb, girlfriend of Alabama quarterback AJ McCarron.  At that point, the eyes of veteran announcer Brent Musburger sprang out of his head towards Ms. Webb, his heart shooting out of his chest with every beat.  Okay, obviously I don't know that's what happened; as a commentator, the cameras weren't showing him.  But based on the profound effect her beauty had on him I can only assume he was reacting as a cartoon character.

A lot of people found it offensive, or just awkward.  I'd go with the latter: My policy has always been that there's nothing wrong with acknowledging a person's beauty, or even mentioning a personal attraction.  So I see nothing wrong with mentioning that the quarterback's girlfriend is beautiful - though it is about as surprising as mentioning that the quarterback has a strong arm.  You'd think that a guy who's covered college football for twenty years would have noticed the trend in hotness of quarterbacks' significant others.  And that brings me to why it was awkward.  Not that Musburger attested to her attractiveness, but that he was so moved by her beauty that he seemed to lose his composure, as though he had never seen such a woman before - also odd for a guy who's spent most of the last twenty years on college campuses.  Whether you're approaching this issue from a perspective of feminism or chivalry, you'll agree that a man should have some control over his hormones.

This brings up something I've never understood about men.  I mean other men.  And that is their over-the-top reaction to certain women.  Okay, you're a heterosexual man, you're attracted to women.  Some women more than others.  Logically there has to be a "most attractive" woman in the world for you.  But in my experience that woman is maybe 0.01% hotter than the second most beautiful woman.  It seems odd to pick out one exceptional unattainable woman and claim that she is head and shoulders above all other exceptional unattainable women.  Most human traits are like that: there's usually little to separate the top people in any one quality.  If, for instance, you put the top two football teams on the same field, you'd expect them to be so closely matched that there's no way one would crush the other by 28 points.  Okay, bad example.

Really, I think this phenomenon of men claiming one woman as the far-and-away most attractive is something that helps them in relationships.  By maintaining the idea that one woman can be that superlative, they can plausibly maintain the claim that the woman they're with is the best in the world.  If any man were to admit that many women are attractive to him, it would deprive him of any success with women.  Crap.

Cheque? Please!

It's about this time of the year that someone asks, "Be honest, what year are you writing on cheques?"  I always want to respond, "1998 ... since that was the last time I wrote a cheque.  It's called the Internet, look into it."

But seriously, I do have to write cheques sometimes, and when I do, I never get the year wrong.   See, the last time I needed to order new cheques, it was just before the turn of the millennium, and the bank was apparently trying to get rid of the cheques with the year marked as "19__".  So even though I ordered a book of 50, they sent me a box of 500.  That was around the same time that electronic banking and direct withdrawals meant that I started using the chequebook only once or twice a year.  So I will never order new cheques again.  And I already know that when I go into the old-folks home, and I write the cheque to pay for it, I'll have to cross out "19" before writing "2063."

Coming Back, We'll See If All Is Forgiven

So the NHL lockout is finally over.  Let me be the first to say, great timing!  I don't mean that it was just in time to avoid cancelling the season all together. I mean it's great that just as football is winding down and the holidays are over, hockey is starting up.  It's the perfect time; We should do this again next year.
The big disappointment in all this is how ordinary the final deal is.  After all the delays, the walking away from the table, the mediation, you start to assume that nothing is getting done unless either one side totally caves (like last time) or the solution is a radical departure.  The way the two sides were carrying on, I assumed that getting a mutually-agreeable deal would require inventing new branches of mathematics to divvy up the revenues.  But nope, it just took boring old compromise and splitting differences.

So why couldn't this have been done in the fall?  No idea.  It confirms the low value the business of hockey places on actually presenting a product.  No, I'm not one of these naive fans who expects everyone to come together because they care about he fans.  But I do expect the leaders of any business to put the long term health of the business ahead of petty bean-counting, reasoning that at some point it's important to keep the product in the public eye than to maximize profit in every conceivable way.  I suspect that the NHL has put short term thinking ahead of long term once again.

But maybe they know the fans will come crawling back like the last few times.  The possible reasons they might not:

• This work stoppage seemed so arbitrary and unnecessary
• They don't have a new overhaul of the rules for fans to anticipate this time.
• Being half-way through the season this time, a lot of fans may have found other ways to spend their time, whether that's through junior hockey, basketball, Netflix, Downton Abbey or whatever.

Watching the NHL try to re-win its fans may be more entertaining than the games. 

Come Back, All is Forgiven

Today during the football games we've been seeing ads from CatholicsComeHome.org, which seems to be a public relations push by the Catholic Church to encourage lapsed Catholics to return to the church.

This was some of the most surreal television I've ever seen.  I couldn't help but think of Neal Stephenson's sci-fi classic Snow Crash, which takes place in a future where pretty much every organization in society has come to resemble a chain of stores.  Governments, churches, organized crime: they're all just store-fronts at your local strip mall. And now here's the Catholic Church advertising for your business on TV and on-line.

Perhaps it was because I saw it during football, but it reminded me of the ads for the schools at halftime of college football games.  They quickly impress you with their history and try to wow you with their achievements.  When they showed a clip of the Pope at the end of one of the spots, I expected him to deliver some sort of tagline, "Come back to Catholicism.  We'll leave a candle on for you."

And it just gets stranger when I actually go to CatholicsComeHome.org, and find that these ads are called "evangomercials™"  (yes, complete with the trademark symbol.)  I have to admit, I was impressed at how non-pushy the web site is.  Speaking of bucking Catholic stereotypes, I was also impressed that the one ad made a case for their connection to science, showing footage of a chemistry experiment, all overlooked by a priest who seemed straight out of a Dan Brown novel.  They exaggerated a bit when they claimed to have invented the scientific method. 


But I'm still wondering: Why now?  Is it because it's the start of the year, and people have made resolutions?  Or maybe it's because Notre Dame is in the National Championship game and that has them feeling they have the religious momentum.  Imagine what would have happened if Mitt Romney had won.

Speaking of which, perhaps the Mormons could have used this kind of PR.  They have done many commercials, but usually just with universal be-nice-to-each-other messages.  Maybe if they'd made the case for themselves, the religious right would have warmed to Romney.

So I guess this is a good thing: I'd encourage more open, polite discussion of what each church claims they can provide for their followers.  I especially can't wait to see similar ads from Protestants, Islam, Richard Dawkins etc.  And if you have a problem with the Catholic ads, just remember: at least they aren't coming to your door.

Daydream on Elm Street

Hey everyone, it's crappy movie time!  See, the summer is dedicated to blockbusters.  Quality movies come out in the fall, so they're still memorable to Oscar voters.  Family movies get released in time for the holidays.  But lately there are so many blockbusters that they enter the theatres in the spring in the hope of a really long run.  Lots of Oscar bait makes a token appearance in December to qualify for that year's awards, then gets wider release in early January.  All this means that the second half of January until the start of March is the only time the studios have to dump their worst stuff.  For the next few weeks, we'll be treated to the flicks that were only just better than direct-to-video.  Or direct-to-Netflix or whatever they say now.

And sure enough, here comes Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters.  Yes, a grown-up action-horror movie based on the old story.  One article I just read on it says there is a comedy angle to it, which could make this concept work.  But the ad I saw didn't seem to convey that, so I'm not holding my breath. 

Regardless of whether it's any good or not, it's perhaps the most extreme example yet of the darkening of pop-culture.  It seems like any long running franchise gets a little darker, more violent, grittier every time it's reinvented.  I don't mind any of those qualities, but it's getting a little tiresome, especially when it's getting applied to what our society knows as children's stories.  What's next?

• The Cat In The Hat reimagined as a supernatural, half-man-half-tiger killing machine
• Thomas the Tank Engine as a horror movie about machines coming to life and turning on their owners
• Where the Wild Things Are: the movie just writes itself
• Let's not even think of The Very Hungry Catepillar
• Or the Muppets.

You'd think there'd be a market for taking stories the other way: after all, more people can get in to see family movies.  Come on Hollywood, let's see a Cujo reboot.

Exciting Struggles Between Unexciting Struggles

So we've got the Fiscal Cliff agreement, but we're still waiting for more negotiations to end the NHL lockout.  It was an interesting question: which adversaries would figure out a compromise first.  It was like a race between the immovable object and another immovable object.  But congratulations, American Politics, you are not the most dysfunctional and disagreeable group in the world.  Next up, we'll see if we can get Mid-east Peace before we get an NHL agreement.