Fixing Good

Yes, I've been complaining about how everyone was talking about the Breaking Bad finale.  I already pointed out previously that many critically-acclaimed cable shows get minuscule ratings, yet people talk about them as though everyone is watching.  This reached extremes in the last week, when it seemed like I couldn't go on the Internet without seeing countdowns or wild speculation about the show.  And sure enough, the ratings are in and 10.3 million people watched the final episode.  That's huge for Breaking Bad, but less than one-in-thirty Americans.

Some of it is surely Emperor's New Clothes.  I just saw a talking head on CBC introduce a segment on the show by calling it the show "everyone is talking about" then went on to admit that he's never seen it.

But I suppose there's another way of looking at it.  If only some people care about the show, and most of the people I listen to on the net are among them, that that should tell me that I should be watching it too.  So, everyone I follow on Twitter or read in blogs, why didn't you make a big deal over this show earlier?  I could have hopped on the bandwagon earlier if you'd started talking incessantly about it by, say, season two. 

Great Expectations

I don't know if you can see it in this photo, but someone has added masking tape to this motivational poster, attributing the quote to Lex Luthor.  Also, that metal box you see on the bottom right is a toilet paper dispenser. That's right, this sign is in a washroom, hanging over the toilet. Specifically, it's a washroom at Communitech, an organization for promoting tech companies in KW.  If you're in Canada, you may have seen the Communitech offices this week on The National when they went looking for reaction to Blackberry's troubles and found surprising optimism that the influx of laid-off tech workers would be a boon for other local companies.

I could ask what motivated someone at a non-profit organization to put up such a Type-A motivational slogan.  Or I could use this as an example of the male-bias of the tech industry - the sign is over the toilet, not on the wall opposite. But instead, I'd like to talk about the idea itself.

I have no idea if Lex Luthor actually coined the phrase or if someone was just commenting that the over-bearing demand sounded like something from a supervillain.  But I'm pretty sure the first time I heard the phrase it was from Bono a few years ago, when discussing a recent album. And then by am astonishing coincidence, he was on Letterman just a few days after I took this picture, and made the same point again.

Well I'm not sure the sentiment it's so true. Yes I get the basic point about having high standards, but I think the reverse is equally true: "great" is also the enemy of "good."  And I say this based on Bono's own example: listening to U2's recent output, they do sound like they're trying hard to be great, and I think it's to their detriment. A lot of critics haven't been too excited by their recent albums, but I think they do have some good music on them, it's just buried under gratuitous vocal flourishes, and ornate fragments of melodies.  They'd be better off with a more stripped-down, simpler production.  In other words, I wish they would aim for good rather than great. It's a principle you sometimes hear in baseball, "if trying harder doesn't help, try easier."

Really, I suspect that most truly "great" accomplishments come from people who were trying to be neither good nor great.  Great things are usually original, and created by people who weren't measuring themselves against any established standards.

Moving Pictures

I thought I'd mention the upcoming movie Rush, since it's opening tomorrow and I'm sure the studio will reward me for helping them out with publicity.  That is how it works, right?

As a racing fan, I've always been disappointed that there's never been a good auto racing movie.  You'd think a sport that's such a visual spectacle would lend itself well to film.  There was Grand Prix, which offered great cinematography, but with self-consciously arty directing that was a distraction.  And a rather one-dimensional story didn't help. 

Days of Thunder was much worse: a talented cast and crew all underachieved, and the special effects were quite disappointing.  That is, they were disappointing because they weren't actually special effects: in those pre-CGI days, they had to use actual cars driving around actual tracks.  So how did it end up looking fake?

And the less said the better about Driven, the Silvester Stallone vehicle (Hah!) about Indy Cars.  I've seen parts of it on TV, but I don't think I could sit through the whole thing.  Though I did see the YouTube video someone put together of all its ridiculous crash scenes.

I was kind of surprised on the choice to focus Rush on James Hunt.  You have the budget and talent to finally make the good auto racing movie and you chose him as the best guy in the history of motor racing to tell as story about.  Of course, I got to know him in the eighties in his second career as a kind of annoying commentator rather than as an exciting and charismatic driver and playboy.  Niki Lauda on the other hand was already a legendary multiple-world-champion, rather than just being Hunt's frenemy as Rush seems to play it.

But I'm sure it's a good movie.  I should know, the ads have shown us pretty much the entire thing.

Congratulations On! Your Win

If you're a Canadian, and the sort of person who reads five pages into the entertainment section, you know that Godspeed You! Black Emperor won the Polaris Prize, the award for best album of the year by a Canadian.  Good for them.  They used to be known only for preventing Panic! At The Disco from claiming the title of Best Group With An Agrammatical Exclamation Mark.

Personally, I love the Polaris Prize, just because it is so un-Canadian.  You would expect that a Canadian music award would go in one of the following directions:

• Due to our feelings of national insignificance, we just give it to the most famous; or more specifically, those most famous in the U.S.
• Out of politeness, we give it to the hardest-working or most underrated.
• For fear of taking bold stands, we just give it to old and established acts.
• In the name of inclusion, we rotate the winner among each genre of music.

After eight years, Polaris has avoided each of these fates.

This year the prize got some extra attention when Godspeed You! Black Emperor was less than thrilled to get the award, issuing a statement that was thankful, but also critical of the award, its lavish gala, and its corporate sponsorship.  That lead to some weird reactions.  Many criticized the band's attitude, but a lot of people were appreciative of their willingness to take a stand.  I'm not sure if that's a good thing that Canada's indie music community can be self-critical, or if it's become self-parody, in which our idea of rebellion has become so neutered that we applaud someone for criticizing us.  But I'm not too worried: I'd rather be contemplating that after an award show than discussing what people were wearing on the red carpet.

Someone Found Their Calling

Ever wanted to use a business just because of the name?

Girls' Friends

There's been some controversy over a new line of toys from Lego.  "Lego Friends," which is aimed at girls.  And they aren't the only ones: Even TinkerToy, which is even more abstract than Lego, has introduced a new line for girls.

This has a lot of people angry that they're reinforcing stereotypes.  Lego seems to be a very gender-neutral toy, so the idea of femming-it-up seems gratuitous.  Personally, I don't like the idea. As a mild-mannered liberal male, I always liked Lego's abstract, androgynous, oh-so-Scandinavian style.

But, the people complaining about the new toys are off target.  Yes, there was a time when a mostly-male business might waste money on products that make little financial sense but reinforce their image of gender roles.  But in today's business climate where no belief is too sacred to be sacrificed for profit, I have no doubt they'd rather sell one product line to both genders.  Introducing a new line of toys is expensive. Aside from the cost of manufacturing new parts lines, there's the huge cost marketing a whole new brand.

If they are going to all that expense, it could only be because they know that's the only way to get at market.  So don't get angry at the company.  Get angry at the parents who won't buy toys for their girls unless they're pink, flowery, and in the same aisle as Barbie.

This Is Beeping Annoying

Today I was walking downtown, and I could hear the constant beeping of a large truck backing up.  I looked around for something along the lines of a dump truck, but I couldn't see any such truck, reversing or not.  The largest reversing vehicle was a parallel-parking SUV.  So I though maybe SUV's had finally gotten so big that they'd had to use the beep warning too.

But then I saw that it was actually a cherry picker at a building being demolished across the street.  It wasn't the occasional beeping of someone trying to manouver the machine either; it never stopped.  At first I assumed that the warning must go off not just when it's reversing, but also when someone is lowering the platform, to warn people underneath.  But no, the beep kept right on going even when it was totally motionless.

That's a pet-peeve of mine: overwarning.  If the beeping is going on all the time, people will just ignore it.  No one is going to look around (or up) when they hear it, because it will just be part of the background noise of the construction site.

It reminds me of a house I lived in during university.  It had a really sensitive smoke detector.  That sounds safe, but the problem was, it went off if you set the toaster too high.  Anything beyond my super-light-why-bother-toasting-it toast was pretty much guaranteed to set off the alarm.  We complained about this of course, but a house of male university students complaining that the smoke alarm goes off when they cook is not going to be taken seriously.  The sad part is, we were so used to cooking setting it off that our first reaction upon hearing the alarm was to open the windows to air the house out and hopefully stop the alarm.  But opening the windows is a bad idea in a real fire, since the fresh air will feed the flames.  So in this case, making the smoke detector more sensitive actually made it more dangerous.

I don't want to sound like an uncaring person who just doesn't want to be bothered; I do like the idea of alarms and want to be warned in a dangerous situation.  But we have to find a happy medium in which we don't dilute the meaning of warnings.

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About The Future, #9

Three new landmarks have been built in London, England.  Two are nicknamed "The Gherkin" and "The Shard," and the other is a Ferris wheel.

Goldberg Variations

You may have seen ads for this new show, The Goldbergs, which is set during the 1980's.  I can just see the meeting where they came up with that premise:

"Nice idea, but I'm not sure the entire decade of the 1980's offers us enough clichés to sustain an entire sitcom."
"We could make them Jewish?"
"That should do it."

But the reason I'm sceptical is that the show violates the Two Decade Rule of Televised Nostalgia:

Show	Set in	Started in
That 70's Show	90's	70's
The Wonder Years	60's	80's
Happy Days	50's	70's
Hogan's Heroes	40's	60's

Okay, Hogan's Heroes is pushing it, but my point is that we should have moved on to 90's nostalgia by now.  There was also a That 80's Show, which debuted in the 2000's, thus maintaining the pattern.  But it was here and gone faster than KITT solving a Rubik's Cube so you may not remember it.  I guess that's why the networks figure they can take a pastel-emblazoned mulligan.

The 80's were a funny decade, so you should be able to make a show about it.  Say, thirty-something boomer former hippies running a BMW dealership.  And their kid interns for Atari.  And a new wave band lives next door.

On second thought, just show Family Ties reruns.

Figured It Out

Sometimes, if there's construction that involves a lot of digging, they accidentally open a hellmouth...

 

...which explains why you always find stakes around the site. 

Grown-Up Pains

My thoughts after watching fifteen minutes of Growing Pains on one of the rerun channels:

• It's really hard to watch the show now. Boner is dead, Kirk Cameron is a fundamentalist, Alan Thicke's son is a pop star. There hasn't been a distracting post-show divergence like that since Al Franken and Dennis Miller were on Weekend Update.
• It's the eighties, and the father is named Jason, but the child is named Carol. Don't these people know anything about names?
• Who would have believed that Thicke's real son would be in a sexually suggestive dance with the biggest teen sitcom star of their generation? I wonder what Cameron thought about that.
• By an unfortunate coincidence in the cycle of life and fashion, Alan and Robin Thicke have had disturbingly similar hairstyles at the height of the fame.
• Here's a thought: Miley Cyrus is the anti-Kirk Cameron.

The Blogging Dead

And now, but relatively popular demand, here's my thinking on this commercial:

First of all, it's good to see Matt Smith getting work after Doctor Who.  Way to overcome typecasting.

But my main question is: what's with the present fascination with zombies? Yes, I know, there's The Walking Dead. But if pop culture were determined by popular premium-cable dramas, we'd also have ads with meth dealers and motorcycle gang members trying to get phones.  The last time I surfed past the country music channel slowly enough to see what was on, it was a video based around zombies.

So I feel sorry for zombie fans, because it's pretty much played out.  When New Country and phone providers have capitalized on a trend, it's over.  In just the last half-decade, we've gone through vampires and zombies.  Assuming succubi are still not going to get their turn, it's down to werewolves.  Who knew the new Teen Wolf was ahead of the curve?

When I originally searched YouTube for this ad, I accidentally searched for "Verizon Zombie Commercial"  rather than Sprint.  So, Canadian Wireless industry, consider your mission to demonize Verizon successful.  Though they are continuing their attack ads even after Verizon announced they're not entering the Canadian market.  So, who's the zombies there?

And I Thought I'd Never Use The Word "Frosh" Again

Usually I don't notice Frosh week now that I'm out of university.  But this week, it was hard to miss in Canada, thanks to the frosh event at St. Mary's University featuring an offensive chant.

It used to be that frosh week was unregulated and anarchic.  But by the time I went through froshdom in 1992, it was starting to be tamed, and there was more oversight and regulation added in the next few years.  You might think the student body would find that intrusive, but most people I knew welcomed the changes, as there seemed to be a general perception that frosh week really wasn't all that fun.

What I'm getting at is that I'm not at all surprised that this chant existed, or that it had been used for years.  What was surprising was the fact that it was still in use.

This is the sort of story that encourages news outlets to get the public's opinion. Normally I hate it when the news talks to the person on the street, or reads out tweets and e-mails on the topic.  But in this case, I think it is called for, as the disparity of public attitudes is the real issue here.  One tweet the CBC read on the air was from a person defending the students, saying, "You can’t sneeze without offending someone."

First of all, while I understand the basic point that it can be hard to avoid hurting anyone when some are quick to take offence, why is it that people with that viewpoint always seem to complain at the worst possible time?  Really, you feel inconvenienced by the idea of not making fun of raping the underaged?  That's really limiting your topics of conversation?

But that quote stuck out for me because it's a problem society is encountering in a lot of places.  If you're a geek, you're likely aware of controversies arising from behaviour at conventions dedicated to sci-fi, gaming, and technology.  There's an increasing number of women at these places, and suddenly behaviours that were once accepted are now frowned on, and the people asked to change feel hard done by.

We're going to have to accept that a more complex society will have more rules.  The more groups that are interacting with each other, the more likely we're going to offend one another.  Certainly there is a flip side, where groups will have to relax their impulse to be offended (hello, Muslim cartoon readers!)  But asking not to make light of rape is definitely in the category of legitimate offence, and if women are going to be equal partners in society, it's not asking too much to stay away from it.  If that's your equivalent of sneezing, then you're just going to have to find a good antihistamine.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Everyone says history repeats itself.  That's a good thing.  Not that everyone says it - that's kind of annoying - but it's good that it repeats, since we can be a little more ready the next time.  But the other advantage of history repeating is that it allows us to understand the past better.  We can understand the emotions and motivations better by seeing them in light of current events.

In other words, I'm not going to waste time admitting I don't know what to do about Syria. Instead, let's use this opportunity to better understand Rwanda.

First of all, let me say that in Hindsight, we (the West) should have intervened.  Not even wussy limited I-promised-no-boots-on-the-ground kind of intervention; I mean something decisive, likely at great cost to everyone involved.  So to the many people who have criticized the West's actions (or lack thereof) I'm not going to disagree with that basic premise.

What I do have a problem with are the many people who turn that retrograde regret into a moral condemnation, implying that the correct course of action was obvious, that our inaction could only be due to apathy, self-interest, or racism.  We should have known what was going to happen, so that proves the West doesn't care about Africans.

To anyone who still hangs on to that idea, I invite you to look at Syria today.  See the confusion:  We don't know how far each side will go.  If we intervene on the side of the rebels, what will they go on to do?  How much time does Assad have left, and how far will he go to keep power?

That uncertainty is how Rwanda looked twenty years ago.  The powers that were at the time made a decision based on the situation and it turned out to be horrendously wrong.  We should examine that incident and learn from it, but a wrong decision based on an uncertain situation is not an indication of laziness or prejudice.

5 September, Year Of The Depend Adult Undergarment

It's been announced that the next version of the Android mobile operating system will be code named Kit Kat.  As some people pointed out, that announcement seemed to eclipse the fact that Microsoft bought Nokia.  (This graphic should help indicate why the latter announcement didn't set the world on fire.)

If you're confused as to what that means: Android is like most pieces of software in that the versions are given numbers.  It's also like most software in that the developers get tired of using the numbers and thus give the versions code names, with all the names having a theme.  Often, the users or marketers start using the code names too.  One of the best known examples is the Mac operating system, which for years have used names of large cats (Lion, Leopard, Cheetah etc.)  It's been like that for years in the software industry; old-timers will remember how we discussed Windows 95 as "Windows Chicago" prior to its release.

Android's code name system is that each version is named after some sort of dessert or snack, beginning with successive letters of the alphabet.  (The latest is "Jelly Bean," prior to that were "Ice Cream Sandwich," "Honeycomb," and "Gingerbread."

People who care about such things were wondering what they would do, given the paucity of sugary things that start with K.  I had heard someone mention Kit Kat, but dismiss it, given the trademark problems.  The smart money had been on Key Lime Pie.  But no, Kit Kat it is.  And it's not merely a case of Google scooping up a bucket of cash and throwing it at Nestle to pay for the license; there's actually going to be cross promotion here: You can win Android-based products, and credits on the Google Play store in specially marked packages of Kit Kat.

So that does it.  Even insider code names that weren't originally meant to be seen by the public are being sold.  There's nothing left that's off limits.  I will now be listening to offers to put brand names in the programs themselves.  Where I would have written:

if(x == 5)

I'm now willing to change it to:

if(pepsi == 5)

for reasonable prices.  The possibilities are endless: recipes, blue prints, storyboards.  And once everything in public is sponsored, and everything not in public, we'll have figured out how to do dream product placements.

Hey, Bale

The big new in the sporting world (and for once I do mean "world") is that Real Madrid is buying Gareth Bale from Tottenham Hotspur for €100 million. (Translation for North Americans who didn't understand a word of that: big Spanish soccer team pays $130 million to get up-and-coming star from biggish English team.  And I just learned Android phones do have a Euro key.)

And this is a regular occurrence.  As soon as a great player emerges , they'll be off to a bigger team.  My family's own Aston Villa has a budding star in Christian Benteke, and its already a foregone conclusion. That he'll be gone by next year.  It's like what happens in baseball but even faster.  Fans of the poorer baseball teams worry that they only get star players for four years before the Yankees snatch them up?  That's nothing: in European soccer your lucky to get one year.

So each country's league has only a few real teams that win each year.  Some have suggested that it would be better if these top few teams in each country left their domestic leagues and joined one pan-European league.  But even that wouldn't work, since the two Spanish leaders, Real Madrid and Barcelona have emerged as the dominant teams of the continent.  Even other massive teams like Manchester United are really just working with star players that couldn't quite make the Spanish giants.  I'm not sure why Spain emerged as the ultimate hirer of European talent .  They don't seem to be any more soccer-mad than, say, Italy or England.  And they definitely aren't awash in money.  Maybe it's just because their two teams are based around two dominant cities, representing two cultures.  That would concentrate fan loyalties - and thus, fan wallets - unlike more arbitrary rivalries.

Every time a player transfers from a feeder team to a big team, I think maybe this is the point that they're finally going to realize how stupid their system is.  But it appears that nothing will provoke a change, and we'll one day see the top twenty-two players on Earth facing off in a single game, arbitrarily representing the two largest cities in Spain.

If You Believe They Put A Man On The Moon

People sometimes ask, "if they can put a man on the moon, why can't they (Insert complaint here)."  I've never done this though.  For one thing, the moon landings were all before I was born, and of course, anything that happens before you're birth seems like it's always been there.  Of course we put a man on the moon, we've always been able to put a man on the moon.

But there's also the fact that it doesn't really feel like a technical achievement any more.  Looking back at it from my perspective: the moon program was a huge accomplishment at the time, and was a result of making full use of our intellectual capacity, thanks to an alignment of political motives.  Since then, we've had the ability to go to the moon, but haven't because of a lack of political necessity and cooperation.  So from my perspective, the moon landing is a testament not to human technology and ingenuity, but to the fickleness of human motivation.

You know what has always stood as the they-can-do-this-so-why-can't-they-do-that example for me?  Cookie Dough Ice Cream.  That's always seemed to be the silliest, most childish achievement I've seen in my life.  But in our society, the taste whims of middle class North Americans create huge motivations for invention, while the lives of many others offer little to no incentive.  Heck, even other North American consumers don't rate high enough to get their own products.  I'm still waiting for smaller, "single guy" packages of food that I can get through before it spoils.

It's that motivation that is the real driver behind change in our society.  The lack of technological change no longer surprises me; I'm only disappointed if there is an innovation that would please large numbers of desirable consumers.  So tonight, when I asked myself, why can't they invent a crouton that you can poke with a fork without breaking it, my mind when to Cookie Dough Ice Cream, not a man on the moon.