Location, Location...The third one, I can't...Sorry. Oops.

Nothing says, "great neighbourhood" like needing a No Trespassing sign on your For Sale sign.

Bringing Micex Back

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about the Moscow stock exchange, and how it's called Micex, which sounds like "my sex."  Well according to the stats from Blogger, it got about ten times the hits a new post normally gets. 

You might thing that's just because it was one of the few posts I've written that prominently features the word, "sex."  But not necessarily.  In the past, the stats have claimed that I get a lot of traffic coming from Russian sites.  So I wondered if it was interest in Micex itself that was driving the popularity.  But when I looked at the breakdown of visitors by country that day, most of them were either from the U.S. or France. 

So my guess is that it really was the references to "sex" that caused the extra visits.  Mentioning sex in a post generates traffic, because people search for sex.  Yep, that's what people use the Internet for, sex.  That's what's on their minds, sex, sex, sex. 

Why it was so specific to those two countries, I don't know.  We always thought of them as being opposites when it comes to their attitude to sex.  But now we've seen France's division over gay marriage, we realize that they share more with the Americans than you'd expect. 

A Hellish Utopia?

I'm sure you've seen this TV commercial for the console version of Diablo III:

Now let's count the modern TV ad rules broken here:

• Man doesn't act like child
• Woman isn't humourless
• Woman doesn't look down on man
• Man and Woman share an interest
• Play isn't equated with childishness
• Woman is comfortable with technology
• Woman is geekier than the Man
• Geeks aren't ridiculed to make everyone else feel better

Could this be an indication of the gap between the cultures of the Internet and Television?  

I Want My MTV To Shut The Hell Up

Yesterday I complained about Syfy, a channel we don't even get in Canada.  In case it wasn't clear, they still have an effect on my life: although Canada's Space channel is more geek-friendly, they rely on Syfy for a lot of programming.  So if Syfy fills their hours with wrestling and reality shows, then Space has difficulty finding programming, and their tapes of Stargate SG-1 aren't going to last forever.

And now I'd like to complain about another American channel that we can't watch here but affects our lives anyway: MTV.  (Yes, I know there's an MTV Canada, but it's a separate channel.  Fun fact, Americans: MTV Canada has even less music videos than the American version.)

This weekend, they had their annual Video Music Awards, so now we have to sit through the media's annual attempt to make a story of the show's orchestrated controversy.  They always have someone on stage do something that would shock your grandmother, but doesn't shock any of the people who are actually watching.  And all the news outlets take the bait, and spend the day reporting on something everyone either already saw, or don't care about.

I'm Sure They're Up To Plan Thirty Or Forty By Now

As someone who appreciates both Science-Fiction and irony, it should be no surprise that I loved the movie Plan 9 From Outer Space, reputed to be the worst movie ever.  Many have pointed out that it's not really the worst  or even the worst by its auteur Ed Wood.  But on the principle of "so bad it's good," it's the best worst movie ever.  Any movie worse than it would - in the words of Enid from Ghost World - be past good and back to bad again.

But I wonder how people reacted to Plan 9 when it first came out.  Would they have appreciated it in the same way?  For one thing, irony appreciation seems to increase with time.  But there's also the matter of our differing perspectives:  I don't know when I first saw it, but it would have been early to mid-eighties.  At that point, we'd already had the Star Wars trilogy, Star Trek was in continuous reruns, and there was at least one epic special effects blockbuster per summer.  With a growing number of Sci-fi options in the popular culture, it's easier to look at a horrendous misstep in the genre and enjoy.

But, if I step into the shoes of my 1950's counterpart, it's hard to laugh.  His Science-Fiction options are limited to literature.  So for him to head down to the local theatre to see one of the few genre movies he'll ever get to see, pays his hard-earned nickel, and sits through the cartoons, news reel, trailers, serials, etc, then see something that could only be appreciated for it's badness, it would have to be a disappointment.

The reason I'm doing mental time travel here is Sharknado, the purposely terrible movie from the American Syfy channel.  It did well enough to warrant a sequel, and even got a limited theatrical release, which is the noblest achievement for a made-for-TV movie.  Many of my geek brethren embraced it, but I couldn't get so excited.  Yes, we may have moved from one SF/comic book blockbuster a year to one a week, and from Star Trek reruns to an entire sci-fi channel.  But those movies and TV shows are getting continually dumbed down, and Syfy is one of the biggest offenders.  So like my 50's geek, I find it hard to appreciate the irony of intentionally bad sci-fi when its swamped by lazy dumb sci-fi movies and reality shows.  So, Syfy, put some money into bringing back more scripted science fiction, and I'll gladly tune in for Night of the Living Sharks.

He's Too High To Be In Way Over His Head

We've heard plenty about Justin Trudeau's admission of marijuana use, and that's before the Conservatives have even had the chance to make an attack ad about it.  I find that kind of troubling; it's evidence of the Americanization of Canadian politics.

And just to be clear, I'm not using "American" as a simplistic insult, as in, it's American so it must be worse.  But I do believe that overall, our political culture has been better than theirs.  And a big reason is that we tend to take a practical attitude to things.  We don't get caught up in Obama's bowling score or Romney's dog transporter. At least we used to: here we are spending days discussing a politician's occasional use of a drug most of us aren't really worried about.

Yes, there are reasonable arguments as to why cannabis shouldn't be accepted, but I have trouble believing that many Canadians really believe in those arguments.  Why?  Because if you really believe strongly that marijuana shouldn't be part of civilized society, then there are bigger things to worry about in Canada than the odd toke by the leader of the third party.  Nearly half of Canadians have used it, and more than 12% use it at least once per year.  So if you feel this drug is truly dangerous, then you should already be scared into taking political action.

People are condemning Trudeau even though there hasn't been a large national push against marijuana use.  That tells me that either they're just looking for something to get angry about, or we've fallen into the American trap of judging our politicians by a social code fifty years behind the one we use in our personal lives.

But Are They Cheaper Than In The States?

I've argued about Target's Canadian strategy in the past.  Particularly against their laying off Zellers' employees.  It takes a lot of balls to do something like that.  And sure enough, here they are:

What are those things?  Sometimes you see posts in front of the doors to protect them, but these aren't even in line with the doors.  I took this picture a while back and never got around to publishing it.  But this week with all the news stories about Target's poor performance in Canada, I saw plenty of interviews in which interviewed shoppers complained about the disappointing prices and poor selection while standing in front of the Target store.  And apparently Targets have these big red balls in front of them from Victoria to St. John's. 

You didn't hear this from me, but if any drunk frat boys out there want to act out the "Project Mayhem" section of Fight Club, how about setting up a ramp in front of the bull's eye on the sign, and then rolling the balls towards the sign in the world's largest game of skee-ball?

We Hate It When Our Democracies Become Successful

First up, yes, the title is yet another Morsi/Morrissey joke.  Admittedly, they're getting old.  I mean, I like bad indie rock puns as much as anyone, and even I'm tired of them.  I guess I'm just saying, that joke isn't funny anymore.  Damn! I did it again!

Anyway, the reason I'm thinking about Morsi is this article I read in the Waterloo Record, titled "Morsi Is The Arab World's Mandela" by Tawakkol Karman, winner of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. 

Now, that just doesn't sound right. She praises Morsi for not resorting to violence.  That's high praise considering she had been one of the many calling for Morsi's resignation (just not his forcible removal.)  Though her claim that "not a single one of his political opponents were jailed" is a bit of an exaggeration; he merely threatened to arrest them.

In the wake of the Arab Spring, and the fall of Communism, we're starting to come to terms with the fact that there is more to Democracy than free and fair elections.  There has to be a respect for the system on all sides too.  This is one of the surprising things I got out of political science classes in university: every country has some sort of shocking but never-exploited loophole in their government.  I knew Canada's Governor General theoretically has dictatorial powers.  But did you know the members of America's Electoral College don't have to vote for the candidate their state elected?  For a democracy to work, there has to be a common belief that the system works well enough that hijacking it isn't worth it.  And there has to be trust on all sides that no one will try to fix the system in their favour, or else everyone will try to pre-emptively fix it for themselves.

And that's where Mandela stands above Morsi: given the chance to rebuild his country, he encouraged reconciliation and the building of a fair, workable country.  In doing so, he vaulted South Africa past decades of pseudo-democratic retribution.  Morsi used his government to build a country in the Muslim Brotherhood's image, which would have led to vengeance by their opponents in the years to come.  He's better than Mubarak, but not nearly the leader Karman thinks he is.

One Set Of Footprints On The Crosswalk

Today in downtown Kitchener, there was a guy at speakers' corner (yes, we have one, at King and Benton.)  Anyway, he was preaching.  And not inspiring, Jesus-loves-you preaching, this was fire-and-brimstone stuff.  That happens from time to time, but usually it's one guy speaking on his own.  Today it was a big production.  He had his own soundsystem, and people on each corner of the intersection handing out literature.

It's pretty common for charities to have people canvassing downtown at street corners.  I'm sure I'm not alone in that I don't want to be rude, but I also don't want to get caught receiving a long, awkward pitch.  Normally I'm good at using other pedestrians to avoid the canvasser in a basketball-style pick-and-roll manoeuvre.

But here I was a little worried, because I had to go to the diagonally opposite corner, which meant that I'd have to go past three of the folks handing out stuff.  The first one handed me a pamphlet, and I accepted it politely but kept going.  At the second corner, a woman tried to hand me a gospel-themed business card.  I turned that down, showing that I already had the pamphlet.  But I thought that was unusual, that they seem to have something different being distributed at each corner.  So I look across the street to see what I'm about to be offered at the next corner, and I see a guy with a big wooden cross over his shoulder.  I thought, great, how am I going to politely refuse that?

Iron Jason

A few days ago, British writer & feminist Laurie Penny asked men on Twitter how they were adversely affected by gender roles.  That led to a lot of feed back from men who had a lot to say on the subject.  A lot of it seemed to revolve around the expectations to be aggressive, unsentimental, and play sports.

It's difficult to get discussion about men's problems.  Sure, the concept of "men have it easier overall, but they are treated unfairly in some ways." Is not exactly quantum physics.  But it is two ideas in one, and that's a bit too many for our sound-byte culture.  On the one hand, people will say that men have it easier, so they can't complain about anything. On the other, people will claim that men have problems, therefore they're the real victims.  Those simplistic views have a tendency to derail the discussion one way or the other.

So how would I answer the question of what problems gender roles cause for men?  I think most of it comes down to emotions.  In most areas of human activity, women are far more limited in the way they act.  There are very specific ways they're expected to look, hold life priorities, and take career paths.  The one area where the tables turn is with a person's emotional life.  Specifically, the fact that women are expected to have them, but men are expected to have none beyond anger.  As with our expectations of women, the expectations are both restrictive and unrealistic.

It's not really clear whether men are making progress in breaking out of gender roles.  In the media, there seems to be plenty of stereotyping of male characters - as I've said before, advertisers can't get enough of dumb, childish men.  And it's seemed to me that men who prefer traditional masculine attributes are reasserting that masculinity, as a reaction to the uncertainty over gender roles.  In the same way that women have had to find a compromise in which women are free to pursue their own lifestyle, but without shaming those that retain traditional roles, men are going to have to find a similar balance.

Monday Morning CEO

One big item of tech news this week - at least in this part of the world - was that RIM Blackberry is formally looking at its options for the future, including going private.  It's been hard to get news about Blackberry from the mainstream media lately, because they feel the need to begin every Blackberry story with a recap of its fall from grace, as if we didn't already know.  I realize not everyone follows the tech biz, but surely everyone knows the basics of this story by now.  They didn't begin every story on Pamela Wallin's expenses scandal with a recap of how she was once a journalist.

But since we are rehashing the company's history, it's as good a time as any to look at where RIM went wrong (not a mistake, it was called RIM then.)  Wired offered a recap of its mistakes, but I'm not sure it really explains things.  Each error they illustrate is bad, but not exactly Edselesque.  This brings up a couple of possibilities that we should consider when examining RIM/Blackberry's path:

1. Maybe they were just screwed from the start.

I know that seems defeatist, but is it possible that they had no more chance against Apple and Android than a mom-and-pop store against Walmart?  Really, I doubt RIM was completely without hope, but the assumption has always been that they had the advantage as the first mover in the industry.  I would suggest that even if you're the first in a market, you don't have the advantage when companies with deep pockets and strong reputations invade.

2. Management is not all about strategy.

We tend to think about good and bad corporate management in terms of the decisions they make.  Launch this product, sell this division, enter this market.  But the success is also due to the environment they produce within the company.  Have they organized the company to make best use of their employees?  To be clear, I don't know about the inner workings of Blackberry, and have not talked about them with the people I know who have worked there. But certainly the company's delayed products, as well as the infamous 2011 anonymous letter to management do hint that the company isn't working efficiently.

A Series Of Tubes

Elon Musk released his new idea for high speed transportation, Hyperloop.  People (who had heard about it) had been speculating about what it could be since Musk hinted at it a month ago.  Most of them guessed it would be a maglev train in a vacuum tunnel, a concept that's been played with for decades.  Instead, it's kind of the opposite: a "train" in a tunnel that uses the air in the tunnel to propel itself.

Something seemed unusual about the whole proposal but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.  Then I realised: it seems strange to hear about something daring and futuristic that's not in China.  We just don't seem to discuss anything like this without relentlessly negative.  For instance, USA Today printed an article titled, "Why Elon Musk's 'hyperloop' transport won't work".  But upon reading the article, it just quotes an expert who discusses some of the potential technical problems with the concept.  At the time I read it, the top comment admonished the paper for the misleading headline.  When Internet commenters say you're taking an extreme position based on flimsy evidence, you've got some serious problems.

Musk's two businesses have plenty of engineers between them - who have supposedly worked on the Hyperloop proposal - so I'll assume it has some real chance of actually working.  But is it practical/saleable?  I'm not sure.  For one thing, there's not a lot of room in there.  I've never suffered from claustrophobia, but even I think it looks a little "cosy."  Having said that, it's probably no less space than you would have in, say, a Lamborghini.  And truthfully, it looks more comfortable than your average airplane seat. 

It's good that the small size and enclosed tube makes it unobtrusive: no fear of crashes at level crossings, no need to slow down in urban areas (which has bedevilled past high-speed rail proposals in the U.S.) and there's less opportunity for NIMBY types to make up some public health concern.  But there is the safety problem: It's hard to imagine surviving a crash in it, so safety will have to come from not having accidents in the first place.  It might be hard to build up the necessary trust with the public.

All in all, it's an intriguing idea, and it's too bad Musk's not going to personally pursue it.  As a long time space fan, I hate to admit it, but I kind of wish he were building this rather than chasing the private space industry dream with SpaceX.  Hopefully some other Internet billionaire will try it.  Let's see, Bezos has the Washington Post, Paul Allen has SpaceShipOne, Bill Gates has Africa...so it's all up to Mark Zuckerberg.

All You Need is Pavlov

Lots of people are familiar with Pavlov's experiment with dogs, getting them to associate the ringing of a bell with the serving of food, and thus salivate.  If you continually pair a feeling with an arbitrary thing, that arbitrary thing will cause the feeling.  (Classical Conditioning, for my fellow Psych grads.)

With that in mind, I'm thinking that by the end of summer, Canadians will have a Pavlovian response to construction signs.  Just show them the big orange detour sign, and it will cause an automatic response of anger and frustration. 

Big deal, you say, everyone knows Canadians hate all the construction in the summer.  I realize that's an old complaint, but here's the new wrinkle: The government have started putting those Canada's Economic Action Plan signs at road construction sites.  Thus, by the principles of Pavlovian Classical Conditioning, Canadians are slowly developing an automatic response of anger and frustration every time they see Economic Action Plan ads.  I think this proves that the Conservative party's team of crack psychologists have really lost their touch.  If they were really thinking, they'd order pictures of Justin Trudeau at every road closure.

Playing FTSE

You may have heard the old joke of the guy who named his dog, "Sex."  It was printed by Ann Landers years ago, and has now been around the Internet a few times too.  There are different versions, with excuses for light double-entendres: "Sex keeps me up at night," "I only had Sex before I got married," etc.

I was reminded of this joke recently, when I found out that the Moscow stock exchange is the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange, which is abbreviated, "Micex" and pronounced "mice-X," or if you prefer, "my sex."  So now there's an excuse for a whole new generation of jokes: My sex is improving, lots of people are interested in my sex, my sex brings in a lot of money.

Green Tape

Here's everything you need to know about governance in Canada.  They can legalize Medical Marijuana, but they can't spell it.

 

It's not a government office, but a marijuana accessories store.  Later, I saw an employee out front smoking - a cigarette.  I found that quite disappointing.

I Promised Mess I Wouldn't Write This

Everyone's talking about the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Gretzky trade today.  As they have been all this week leading up to the anniversary.  Because of the volume of media content delivered today, we'll probably spend more time discussing it now than we did at the time.

It's become accepted knowledge that the Gretzky trade grew the game in the USA, and led to the expansion of the league throughout the American south.  Indeed, that's the main thing that the reminiscences just keep repeating over and over.  Some have even implied that LA's recent cup win was somehow related to the trade.

I'm not so convinced that the trade had much to do with the American expansion.  After all, the expansion was based so much on either sheer demographics, or on imaginary and assumed support, it's hard to link it to any real predecessor.

I wonder if the Gretzky trade might even have hurt the league's marketing: essentially, the NHL conducted a giant bait-and-switch with the US over the course of the 80's and 90's: Gretzky and Lemieux grabbed unprecedented exposure for hockey in the US, but introduced it as a fast-moving sport of individual offensive skill, akin to contemporary Jordan-era basketball.  Then the league expanded its American presence, just in time to introduce those new American fans to slow, boring, neutral-zone-trap hockey.  Hockey would have been better off being introduced as a rough, physical test right from the start.

So how would I memorialise the trade?  I'd compare and contrast it to Canada's biggest baseball trade two-and-a-half years later, in which the Jays sent Tony Fernandez and Fred McGriff to San Diego for Joe Carter and Roberto Alomar.  I remember some commentator recently describing that as the last "real" trade in baseball.  That is, two teams, dealing from similar positions of power, traded players of similar ability, with both teams simply trying to improve themselves.  Not counting minor trades of journeymen, that just doesn't happen any more.  If a player you've heard of gets moved, you just assume its because of contracts, or impending free agency.  Well, by the same token, the Gretzky trade was the first "unreal" trade: a team giving up a player they still wanted, getting much less in return, just because they didn't have a choice.

Spare A-Rod And Spoil The Child

It's kind of a forgotten incident now, but if you're a baseball fan you may remember the time Sammy Sosa was caught using a corked bat.  I looked it up, and that was just ten years ago.  But that seems so long ago because it was just so quaint.  A corked bat, you say?  My, what a cheater.  Why those things will make the ball go one, maybe two yards further than a legal bat. 

It's hard to believe now that actually hurt Sosa's reputation.  If Alex Rodriguez were caught with a corked bat, it would be the most popular thing he's done in years.  So why did I think back to that now-irrelevant incident?  It was a question posed by a sports pundit afterwards: Why is it that people get incensed over corked bats, but just laugh off spitballs?  Gaylord Perry was reputed to have used the illegal pitch his whole career without being thought of as a cheater.  And spitballs/doctored baseballs actually make a performance difference, unlike corked bats which most physicists agree have only placebo effects.

Now that we have cheating on a much bigger scale, this distinction seems moot.  But it's still true that fans, media and players have very different attitudes to different types of cheating.  Faking being hit by a pitch, out-of-the-basepath takeout slides, that's totally expected.  Of course, those are on an entirely different magnitude, and I don't expect them to generate the same amount of anger now being directed at Rodriguez.  But the important distinction is that small scale cheating isn't merely not-condemned, it's actually endorsed and congratulated.  It's considered playing hard, doing what it takes.  Commentators gleefully repeat the line, if you're not cheating, you're not trying.

So I wonder if this is an example of the Broken Windows theory (that tolerance of small law violations will lead to greater incident of serious crime.)  But in this case, people aren't merely allowing vandals to break windows, they're cheering the vandals on.

Right Honourable Brutus

Some members of Ontario's Conservatives are trying to push their leader, Tim Hudak out the door.

This brings up something that bugs me about parliamentary politics: the decision to replace the leader is done based on an absolute measure of electoral success, not on the leader's a achievement above or below reasonable expectations.A good example is in comparing Hudak to Ernie Eves.  Eves went down to decisive defeat, and thus fell on his sword, as was expected of him.  Hudak, in contrast, reduced the governing Liberals from two straight majorities to a minority.  That's considered a success, so he keeps his job.  But Eves inherited a lot of baggage from the outgoing regime of Mike Harris, and it's doubtful that anyone could have done better.  Hudak, on the other hand, was facing a two-term government plagued by scandal and a poor economy.  Really, the election was his to lose,and he lost it.  Putting aside sheer seat counts, you'd have to conclude that Hudak is an underachiever.

That seemed to be confirmed last week when the Tories won one of five seats in by-elections.  Many newspapers went with headlines about how bad it was for the Liberals, but a scandal-ridden government scoring 40% on by-elections was hardly surprising.  But the opposition winning even fewer seats, that's something to worry about. 

Hudak seems reasonably likeable, so what's the problem?  I'd say it's his wishy-washy strategy.  As a Conservative in twenty-first century Canada, there's two proven strategies: 1) limit your conservative policies, play the moderate, and win the centre (the Harper Strategy) or 2) be unapologetically, flamboyantly conservative, get your base excited, and overwhelm the half-hearted opposition (the Harris-Ford Strategy.)  But Hudak doesn't seem committed to either.  So even if they don't remove him before the next election, they need to rethink strategy.  Perhaps this is one instance where ads building up their own candidate would be better than spending all their money on attack ads.

Turning Japanese

Well its finally happened: I saw the news reports about the little Japanese robot being sent to the space station, thought "I should blog about how stereotypically Japanese that is, then thought "that sounds familiar.". I looked it up and sure enough, six months ago when the robot was first announced, I made a post just like that.

So this time I'll take a different angle.  Since this robot looks like Robo-sapien crossed with Astro Boy, it's clear there is some pop-cultural influence here.  I've heard that point before: Japan's tech-positive anime is in contrast to western movies where the machine is often the enemy, and that translates to their greater enthusiasm for robots.  Really, it's hard to see the direction of causality here: are the Japanese robo-positive because their fictitious heroes drive giant robots, or does anime/manga freely use tech because that's what their public wants?

But I would like to think that culture can affect the progression of technology.  It seems that most often, our culture is shaped by the things we invent, and what we invent is just a result of a slow succession of one invention after another.  In our world, we see China as a potential successor to the U.S., but for all the talk of their mystery and tradition, they seem to be building a modern world just like the one they're eclypsing.  Meet the new superpower, same as the old superpower.

So I hope Japan is showing us that we can chose the nature of our future.  For one thing, I hope the future really will be as cute as they will try to make it.  But it also gives me some solace that I may have seen a preview of the future through our imaginings of it.  I may not live to travel the stars, but at least I helped sow the cultural seeds that guarantee who ever does travel the stars will do so using something they'll call, "warp drive."

I See Great Pain In Your Future

So I just saw this story about a plastic surgeon in Japan who will alter the lines in your palm so that your fortune will be more desirable. (Warning: the link is predictably gross.)  But wait, there's more: the lines are made by burning them in.  Rather than go on a big rant, I'll just invite you to meditate on all the layers of stupidity that are present in this story.  Keep in mind that it could all turn out to be a hoax, so you can add cruel Internet hoaxes and the fact that we can no longer tell satire from reality as two more layers.

But just so you don't go away with no faith in humanity, here's a link about how an old Walmart in McAllen, Texas was turned into America's largest one-floor library.

Foiled Canadian Jilted Has-Been

In my first year of university, back in 1992, the coolest TV show for us first-year students on an all-male floor was Ren & Stimpy.  It was made by Nickelodeon in the U.S., but shown on MuchMusic in Canada.  Most of our residence floor would huddle in the TV room to watch.  That is, until it was taken off the air after a few months.

Interestingly, we found out later that it wasn't pulled from the schedule because of ratings, but because of regulations.  MuchMusic had a license to show music-related programming, and other than the odd episode, Ren & Stimpy wasn't about music.  (Fortunately, a few years later Much was able to import Beavis & Butthead, which did qualify as music-related.  But I had matured beyond it by then.)

The weird thing is that although we were angry at the time about being deprived of our favourite animated chihuahua and cat-ish blob, we shouldn't have been.  As you've surely noticed, the regulators are much more lenient on programming focus now, and MuchMusic has morphed into the teen drama channel.  In retrospect, Ren & Stimpy was the first step in that deterioration.  Had we known that at the time, I think we would have understood, and preferred to keep Much as a music station, especially if we had known that in just a few years, the Internet would allow university students to pirate all the TV from anywhere in the world that they could want.

Why am I bringing up this reminiscence of cartoons and government regulations?  Because today, TSN showed an episode of The Amazing Race.  And so, another channel begins its slow fade away.