Hurry Hard!

For a number of years, there's been a strange phenomena in Death Valley, California.  Specifically, it's in a place called Racetrack Playa (I have all his albums.)

There are rocks that move. At night, when no one's around, they apparently stroll around, and the next day they're found in a different place, with a trail of dirt where they've moved. The desert is flat, so they aren't just rolling, and the surface is so dry the ground is cracked, and there are no footprints around them.

I read about this mystery a few years ago, and it stuck in my mind for a couple of reasons. First is that it's just so bizarre; I've never known any rocks to behave that way. But secondly, the writer of the article seemed giddy with the idea that the phenomena was perplexing scientists. Not on the joy of a challenging mystery, but a vindictive enjoyment of the idea that the scientists couldn't explain something.

It's an attitude I've seen many times: a resentment at science's attempted explanation of nature. No, not the anger people have when science's explanations don't match religious or political beliefs (though that is its own annoyance.) I'm talking about people getting frustrated with science for trying to explain things, rather than leave mysteries to be mysterious. 

This attitude usually comes with a misunderstanding of scientists' motivations. There's a belief that scientists are motivated by some anal-retentive need to eliminate the world's uncertainty and mystery. Hence people's joy at their perplexment when they fail.

But the truth is that scientists are not just comfortable with mystery, but thrive on it. After all, their job is all about facing mystery.  Where they differ from most of us is that:

• They don't believe a mystery must remain permanently unsolved in order for it to be meaningful to us
• They are confident that we won't run out of mysteries.  Probably because they've noticed that answers tend to lead to more questions.

Of course I'm writing this because scientists have the last laugh on this one: this week, they solved the mystery of the wandering rocks. It's because of a rare combination of ice and wind.  So with that solved, you'll have to find something else in the entirety of the universe and human experience to wonder at.

Have A Coke And A Name

Coca-Cola has a promotion on now, where it is putting names on their cans and bottles. I've seen some displays of bottles where the names are people's names, though the cans sold by the case just have generic titles like "friend" or one of many family relations. And I notice a gender bias there; I just went through a case of twelve that contained three "Mom"s but no "Dad"s. Where are you on that one, Men's Rights Activists?

I noticed that the bin of Coke bottles at the grocery store had names, but a quick glance showed that they were very modern names. Easy to find a "Dylan" bottle, but "John" is out of luck.

That's quite a shift. When I was a kid, I couldn't always count on finding a "Jason" item on pre-made name things. And that was in spite of Jason being the top male name in my cohort. The named-item industry was that slow to react to the changing popularity of names.

But not today, not with Coca-Cola. They've done their homework. And that in itself is somewhat depressing. You know that someone, somewhere in the marketing department studied the popularity of names, and put together some formula that would give the optimum quantity of each name, given its popularity in a given age range, and the company's need to promote its products with that age group. I bet they even did a calculation to figure out how many extra "Dylan" bottles they'd have to print to satisfy the baby boomer music fans who would buy it for the novelty.

Wouldn't You Prefer An "End Of August Sale?"

When I was in school, Back-To-School ads used to bother me, as an unnecessary reminder that summer was eventually going to end. The record earliest was two weeks into summer, and the record stupidest was from a car dealer. In retrospect, I realise that one was supposed to be ironic, but it wasn't too funny at the time.

It was understandable then that stores made a big deal about it then: there was a lot to buy for school because so much of it was consumed or wore out: pens, pencils, paper, binders, bags.  You had to stock up on all you would need during the year because in those pre-Staples days, you didn't know when you could get it for a reasonable price again.

It seems to have changed with technology, though. The ubiquitous lined binder paper used to be an easy loss leader (I still have a box of out that I'm trying to get through.) But today it's more about technology, which doesn't really have to be replaced every year (trust me, I made it to 1992 writing reports on a Commodore 64.) But parents with the combined panic of back-to-school and fear-of-technology could be easily manipulated by their kids to get everything replaced with the latest models now.

Which leads me to this Future Shop ad where they have the teenagers walking out dressed as the academic superstars they are supposed to become: astronauts, surgeons, rock stars. And now I'm glad that I only had to deal with a reminder that school was about to start again, not pressure to be exceptional. Once again, our fast-advancing technological world we're expecting too much from today's kids.  It makes me glad I came from good old no-hope Generation X.

King Tim

When I first heard that Tim Hortons and Burger King were in talks, it seemed odd. After all, Timmie's was previously merged with Wendy's, and that didn't work so well, resulting in them splitting up about ten years later. What benefit could there be to teaming up with another burger chain, this one being in a long-term decline?

An explanation I've seen in the media is that it would benefit Tim Hortons' underwhelming American expansion. The idea is that Burger King had plenty of expertise in dealing with the American market. But is not knowing the market really the problem Tim's has in the US? Because it seems to me that it's more to do with entrenched competition from Starbucks, Dunkin et al. Or to put it another way: by that logic there must be a lot of out-of-business mom-and-pop stores lamenting that if only they had better understanding of the American market, they could have survived against Walmart.

But growth is such a strong desire in business that it seems to override all other considerations. If I was a Timmies shareholder, I'd personally prefer they didn't pursue a long-shot expansion that will likely end in tears, even if the alternative is settling for the same returns in the future.  The odds just seem too long to be worth the huge costs.

Now that the deal is complete, we see that a big motivation is that Burger King wants to do an inversion. That's a tax-avoidance strategy where a big American company takes over a company in some other country, then reorganizes such that the big American company is a subsidiary of the foreign company, and thus pays its corporate taxes in the other country. In the past that's happened in countries that have gone out of their way to lure foreign investment, like Ireland. But Canada? Socialist, high-tax, bureaucratic, success-hating Canada?

So that's a positive we can take out of this. We may be losing our favourite food chain, and gaining technical ownership of a chain we don't really like, but at least we can take pride in out business-friendly-ing or neighbours. And from now on I'd better not hear any more Canadian conservatives trying to shame us into believing that we have unsustainably high taxes that will drive business away.

I Challenge Dear Liza

You've probably seen this ice-bucket challenge for ALS. When it first started going around, it really looked like people were missing the point: that is, people were having fun, and keeping the trend going, but not really putting much effort into raising/donating money. A lot of the challenge videos - even those from celebrities who should know better - didn't even bother mentioning ALS or telling viewers where they could donate. This seemed to be the dot-com of charity campaigns: popular and fun, but with little consideration for how it was actually going to make money.

And yet it actually is making money. ALS donations are way up. Thinking about it, you can understand how that works: ALS isn't one of the bigger diseases, so it probably doesn't get a ton of donations. But then it gets a huge, trendy, society-wide trend. So even if that trend only gets a tiny percentage of its audience to donate, that will still produce far more money than they usually get. Again, there's a technology comparison: businesses like Twitter are widely used, but only make a little bit of money - if any - from each user. It's a different approach than most businesses, which would try to make more money off each user, say by charging each user a fee. Similarly, the ice-bucket challenge doesn't use a more obvious money-making plea to each participant, say the way a telethon would.  It relies on a small amount of money from a large number of people.

It's interesting, and it would be nice to believe that every cause could work that way. But when I think of all the charities in the world, and multiply it by the cultural impact of the ice-bucket challenge, I'm not sure we have room in society for that much unfocused fun.

Five Channels (And Nothin' On)

TSN is about to expand from two channels to five. That's quite a shift, which I assume is for more than just the ability to show the same programming at more and more times. Apparently part of the reason is to show more regional programming, like their competitors Sportsnet.  Though the channels are being given generic numerical names, and the ads aren't playing up the regional aspect, so I'm assuming that they hope we'll see them as more than that.

Expansion would make sense if they were on the verge of greatly expanding their programming. But on the contrary, they're about to lose the national NHL contract. So they're not just losing their prime media property, they're losing it and expanding their programming hours by 150%. It further convinces me that they are going to have to build up Canada's interest in other sports.

I suppose they could just use their many channels to show the same things at different times, ensuring that no matter your schedule, there'll be a showing of Pardon The Interruption for you. But in the she of PVRs, is that really necessary? You can time-shift on your own, so you don't need multiple channels to do it for you.

And that's the second element of odd timing: this comes just on the cusp of the collapse of traditional broadcasting. At a time when downloading TV and dumping cable is the in-thing, TSN seems to be betting big on conventional TV. Hopefully they will be concentrating less on the manufactured talk shows and more on original programming.

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #18

The best name we could come up with for flying robots was, "drones."

Running This Up The Flagpole

You often see these flags or banners hanging outside houses that have some seasonal or holiday theme, like they have a jack-o'-lantern flag for Halloween. Recently I walked past a house that had a flag celebrating summer.  It had a colourful design with sunlight and flowers, and prominently featuring a ladybug.  Somehow, I thought it would be funny if someone made one of these flags to look like a national flag.  Like the summer flag could feature a simpler, more stylized lady bug, like this:

So I was going to do a big production where I would come up with national flag-style designs for each of the seasons.  But I only got as far as fall, and was thinking what would be on that flag.  A leaf turning colour - say, red - would be appropriate.  Of course, you could just use the Canadian flag for that.  So here's my proposals for flags you can use to celebrate the seasons, using actual national flags:

Fall: Canada

Winter: Israel

Several countries have wintry colours, but Israel has the bonus that lots of people will mistake the Star of David for a snowflake.

Spring: Mauritius

The island nation in the Indian Ocean is full of Easter Egg colours.

Summer: Palau

The sweltering sun in a cloudless sky is a great sign of summer.  And Palau's 18,000 people could use the income.

Would You Buy A Car Adjacent To This Person?

I've always liked Mazda. There are plenty of reasons why:

• They're the only Japanese manufacturer that cares what cars look like.
• Like other manufacturers, they have a common corporate style to all their cars, but unlike other manufacturers, they've chosen one that doesn't look out of place on their smaller cars.
• They're one of the few manufacturers willing to make a sporty car that isn't just pathetic overcompensation.
• And of course, they just won't let the Wankel die.

But I gotta say, their most recent ads are pretty far fetched. No, not the one with the retro soundtrack courtesy of Chromeo. I mean the ones of the form:

• Admired person did this great thing
• (S)he has these great qualities.
• That's just like Mazda.

Even by the normal low standards of ads, that doesn't make any sense. Worse, it's just a simplistic implementation of advertising strategies: associate your products with with something else with good qualities. But they just dispense with the subtleties. No need to show athletic people driving the car; just talk about an athletic person, then talk about the car. It shows a really low opinion of us that they don't even dress up the trick. And there's no need to even have the endorser present, we can just toss up a montage of stock photos. That even robs us of the pretence that we're responding to the endorsement because we value the celebrity's judgement.

It even allows endorsement from beyond the grave. We can get celebrity appearances from Jackie Robinson, Bruce Lee, and James Naismith. That means a lot; I bet Naismith (1861-1939) really know his cars. And didn't Robinson already do an ad for Mercedes a few years ago? Speaking of which, Mazda is running an ad with Christine Sinclair in Canada, and an ad with Mia Hamm in the U.S.

So please, Mazda, ditch this commercial campaign, and come up with something else.  I'm sure the "zoom zoom" kid needs work.

Eruptions Of Anger

It seems like there's so much going wrong on Earth right now, that we can't take another problem thrown our way.  But apparently the Earth itself thinks otherwise, because there's danger of another volcano eruption in Iceland.  That's not a danger for the people of Iceland - they're used to this sort of thing.  But you'll remember that the last eruption in 2010 spewed a plume of ash that greatly reduced air travel in Europe.

That incident introduced one of humanity's more embarrassing tendencies: the belief that if nothing went wrong, then any steps to prevent anything from going wrong were unnecessary.  Since there were no plane crashes due to the dust sent into the atmosphere, that means we didn't need to cancel all those flights.  The added irony was that some of those inconvenienced travellers were business leaders who had campaigned to remove financial regulations since we hadn't had any depressions lately.

And sure enough, people are already looking for excuses to not cancel flights this time.  If they can do that because of improved technology, great.  I just hope they aren't going to cave to pressure from the impatient.  Hopefully any stranded passengers will use their free time to read about what happens when a plane flies through volcanic ash.

Missouri

It was some time in the early 2000's that I first heard someone describe America's red/blue social dichotomy as an extension of the shifting morality of the 1960's. That concept was quite a shock to me.

I had first become conscious of recent history in the 1980's. While there was lots of sixties nostalgia then - as the Baby Boomers had reached many positions of power - it was mostly in a rather light-hearted way. The Boomers had grown up, gotten jobs, become boring, and started to look back on their sixties antics as something between an embarrassment and a fun anecdote. And even when they did try to put forward the idea that the sixties were a significant time that changed the world, it was hard to take them seriously given the conservative shift going on around me. Essentially, I was learning about the sixties with the knowledge that all those kids at Woodstock would go on to elect Reagan.

So I thought of the sixties as a self-contained moment of history that didn’t impact on anything I saw around me. Other than the conception of some people in my age range. Today’s political divide couldn’t be related - for one thing, Fox News’ geriatric audience is composed of a lot of Baby Boomers.

But the more I thought about it, the more I could see how there could be connections. A lot of that just came from getting to see a longer sample of cultural history. I’ve realized that there are long-running disputes that may not involve the same people, but are part of a continuous narrative.

This all came into focus this week during the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. I was thinking about how different aspects of American society see this differently. Every night on Twitter, my (largely liberal) feed erupts with shock and fury over the police treatment of demonstrators and the media. And yet, there’s a large constituency that is quite supportive of the police actions. It occurred to me that it was similar to the shootings at Kent State in 1970. Although that incident is now largely remembered as a tragedy, at the time there was a feeling among much of America that it was a reasonable action by the National Guard. It exposed a huge divide in American thought, and we seem to be seeing a similar division opened up by today’s events. Indeed, a number of those Tweets have been making explicit comparisons to sixties unrest.

So I get it. There is a continuous chain of societal conflict. And much as it pains me, I must apologize to the Baby Boomers; yes, you did have a profound impact on American society after all. 

Tragedy Of The Cut-Ins

Today I was driving through a construction zone. Okay, I guess that was redundant. It's August in Canada; I just had to say, "today I was driving."

Anyway, there was a point where two lanes narrowed to one. I was in the lane that continued, and the lane to the right merged into mine. Whenever that happens, I try to be a nice guy and let someone in, but not be a pushover and get caught letting everyone in. I figure it's a good policy for each car to let one vehicle from the other lane in, then proceed. Similarly, if I'm the one cutting in, I won't try to force my way on front of someone who's already let someone in.
But today, I hung back to let a car in, and a second car squeezed in right behind. Of course, that ticked me off since that's abusing this gentlemen's agreement between drivers that exists in my mind.

It bugs me because this is such a silly little thing to try and get an advantage. Yeah, you're a big man cause you got one car-length ahead. That made me want to pull forward and try to block him from getting in. Of course, he'd probably curse me: oh, you're a really big man cause you can't stand me getting one car-length ahead.

What do you call that sort of situation? Person A does something cheap and childish, person B resents this and thus tries to stop person A, even though the consequences of the original action are minor. It does happen a lot. Like if a person always had to get on the last word, so you follow up everything they say with your own comment. You think you're teaching them a lesson, but really, it just leads to an endless conversation in which both sides look equally silly. And of course, there are countless political examples around the world. Really, the only way out is not to put any value on such unimportant concepts, and satisfy yourself with laughing internally at those who do.

But most importantly if you are going to cut in front of me in a vortex of psycho-philosophical game theory issues, you could at least wave thank you.

Dog And Big Pony Show

In one of my High School English classes we had a unit on media literacy.  It was a pretty forward-thinking move for the time, but now I realize it was just a mangled summary of Marshal McLuhan's theories.  And of course the media has grown more complex, ubiquitous, and devious since then.  Teaching kids to consider the message of advertising seems quaint now.

Certainly, I've found that I have to reach far beyond that unit to make sense of today's advertising. And even then a lot of it makes no sense.  We were taught that commercials portray an unrealistic ideal of the customer.  That is, you sell beer by showing a good-looking successful person drinking the beer.  But now, most beer ads show losers you wouldn't want to associate with.  The only one with an idealized drinker is the Dos Equis "Most Interesting Man In The World" campaign, and they use the ploy in an ironically obvious way.

And there's this Ralph Lauren ad:

I'm still trying to understand who this is aimed at. It's apparently appealing to a man who likes the following:

• The sport of polo
• Tiny vintage sports cars
• Bright colours
• The music of OneRepublic
• The professional sports being shown when this ad runs
• Yachting
• Skydiving
• Football
• Hanging out with black people
• Women
• Dressing as a comically stereotypical rich person
• Shopping at mainstream department stores.

I'm not sure these people exist.

Hold That Tiger (Still For A Second)

Tiger selfies have been declared illegal in the state of New York. See, there's supposedly a trend for men to take pictures of themselves with dangerous animals as an eye-catching profile picture on dating sites.  I don't know; I don't browse men's dating site profiles, so I can't confirm the existence of this trend.  I can only hear about it, and say, yep, that sounds like humanity.  But it's no longer legal in New York.

I don't think the law was a good move. Sure, I like to protect vulnerable animal populations as much as anyone. But a tiger is hardly threatened by a dudebro with a phone. It makes sense to protect animals when they can't protect themselves, such as against poachers or pollution. But when animals can protect themselves, the law doesn't need to get involved.

But what's particularly great about tiger selfies is the circumstances. Like many others, I've often cynically wished that people doing stupid things would just remove themselves from the gene pool. But the problem with that idea is that many people risking their own lives have already reproduced.  Thus their offspring will ensure that stupidity survives for another generation. But tiger selfies are being used to get an impressive picture for dating sites. That works out perfectly! People are risking their lives in the attempt to procreate. Now we just need to encourage the women to have risky dating photos too. What animal would be stereotypically feminine but still dangerous? Perhaps cuddle up, teddy bear style, with an actual bear?

Training Camp

A while back I was discussing throwback uniforms in sports, and I made a throw-away suggestion that teams should make up fake throwback outfits, rather than some of the ugly or forgettable uniforms they use now.  I didn't expand on that idea, but I was also thinking that some of the newer teams should create their own fake old-fashioned uniforms. It turns out that the Tampa Bay Rays have done exactly that: they've created outfits that are a pretty convincing example of what the team would have worn around 1980, if not for the fact that the team was actually created in 1998. Better still, these uniforms have become known as "fauxbacks" which should ensure it will become a trend.

Good for them. I award them one free exemption from my cursing them for either their ugly stadium, or continually defeating my Blue Jays. Speaking of which, that's kind of who I was expecting would start the trend: a team like the Jays, founded in the sixties or seventies, creating fake uniforms from the twenties and thirties since those are regarded as the game's golden age (by white people.)

So now I predict the next trend: the really famous, iconic teams - the Yankees and Celtics of the world that never change their uniforms - will have throwbacks to the uniforms they might have had in previous eras. They'll show what they would have work to chase the trends, if they weren't "better" than all that.  Here are a couple of suggestions:

Since these are fake uniforms that are indulging in the tackiness of the past, I dub them "fauxtacks." I look forward to all the expensive players in this kitschy clothing.

Choosy Moms Choose Portable Network Graphics

There's been an explosion of GIFs lately. There are times when the motion capabilities of a GIF are useful. But really, those are few and far between. Most ideas that don't require a video of any appreciable length can be depicted perfectly well in a static picture. The number of things that can be depicted well in a clip measured in seconds is small.

You see, you can depict motion in a still picture.  Take a look at this Cheetah chasing a gazelle:

"Cheetah chasing Thompsons gazelle crop" by Original uploader was Profberger at en.wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia; transferred to Commons by User:Richard001 using CommonsHelper.. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.

Wow, that looks fast.  See, we don't assume that the cheetah and the gazelle are standing still just because we can't see them moving.  It's actually pretty amazing how we can imply movement.  Take a look at Umberto Boccioni's Dynamism of a Soccer Player:

"WLA moma Umberto Boccioni Dynamism of a Soccer Player 1913" by Wikipedia Loves Art participant "shooting_brooklyn" - Uploaded from the Wikipedia Loves Art photo pool on Flickr. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It's not even a picture of anything, except the movement.  My point is that we aren't living in Harry Potter's world where everyone expects every picture to move.

Sometimes movement can be useful.  There's that GIF of the ice-cream-sandwich machine which is fun to watch, and the occasional blooper or cat video. But now people are using GIFs to show moving clips of things that don't really require it. If I see a picture of a great white shark, I get it, I don't need to see it biting something to get the full effect that one gets from a picture of a shark with its huge, toothy, mouth open. But worse, now you see clips of people talking in movies even though GIFs don't have sound.

I'm not complaining about GIFs because they're new technology (for one thing, they aren't) but rather because they, like most technologies come with a price that needs to be weighed. In this case, it's the bandwidth needed to send the GIFs. Video is, after all, a series of pictures. And unlike other forms of video, GIFs don't have a way of conserving memory by reusing the data for parts of the image that don't change from frame to frame. So adding a moving GIF to your blog or web page is like adding dozens of similarly sized pictures. That's fine if you have a fast Internet connection, but if you're like many of us - particularly in rural areas - a page decked out in gratuitous moving GIFs take forever to load, with little payoff.

The sad part is that this problem is just repeating the same problems the web had always had: too many people treat web design as an attention-getting collage, with no consideration for the consequences, both technical and psychological. Moving GIF are just the latest incarnation of the blink tag, Java applets, frames, and Flash.

A Sting That Smarts

I've been seeing ads for a new show this fall called Scorpion. It seems to be about a team of geniuses who ... I'm not sure, solve crimes or something. Is brought back a pet peeve of mine about how movies and TV depict smart people.  After years at the University of Waterloo, and working in software, I've spent a lot of time around smart people, and the popular depictions of them aren't very realistic.

Among the standard fallacies:

• A person who is smart in one area will be smart in all areas.  If they can do math, they'll also be good at interpreting literature.
• Intelligence trumps knowledge and experience.  It's fine to show a smart kid beating a grandmaster at chess, because we can assume the child deduced centuries of accumulated knowledge of chess strategy on his own.
• Smart thinking is always quick.  Unique insights never require contemplation.
• Non-mathematical intelligence manifests itself as magic control over people.  A person gifted in psychology will have a svengali-like influence on others.
• Genius can come up with a solution regardless of the resources available. Any problems you see in the world are apparently just a result of lack of intelligence.

It's kind of weird because geek culture has unprecedented acceptance, and our economy depends on innovation more than ever. Smart people are a more important part of society than ever, yet pop-culture still struggles to understand intelligence itself.

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #17

Mr. Big's "To Be With You" will be used in an ad, to sell burgers. Okay, that's not so surprising, but it will feature a woman singing to her hamburger bun. Oh, and Wendy's - the "where's the beef" people are using a bun as their main selling point.

Oh, Capitaine Crouche!

Today I heard a DJ say that French music always sounds sexy.  That surprised me.  A few francophone musicians have made headway in English Canada, and it's always seemed to me that they don't fit any linguistic stereotypes, and are no sexier than your average anglophone indie musicians.

But I've always thought that the inherent sensuality of the French language was a pretty silly concept. For one thing, I thought that in today's more open world, we're surely more sophisticated about the vast amounts and variations of things people find arousing. "French is sexy" seems like rather childish once you've seen the full extent of Rule 34.

But there's also the worldliness of today's society. French people aren't just a caricature; they're actual people we can learn a lot about. They aren't always sexy.  The whole world has watched the people of France blocking highways with tractors to protest government cuts, patronising Eurodisney, or voting for racists. Really they're just as unsexy as the rest of us. And after their apoplectic anti-gay-marriage protests in recent years, surely they sound have dropped right off the list of sexiest countries. For any thinking person Germany, with their rough language but permissive attitudes, has actually become sexier.

But what really surprised me about this is that it's coming here in Canada. Usually, we're free of other countries' French stereotypes because French is so ordinary for us. You can't get romantic every time you happen to see the other side of the cereal box.

Wikimandias

When I recently mentioned Harold Ballard, I linked to his Wikipedia entry for anyone outside Canada or too young to remember the former owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Having looked him up, I skimmed through the entry for a trip down memory lane.

Why would I reminisce over such an unpleasant man? I find it's reassuring to see the mighty that have fallen. So often, there are unpleasant things in our society that are so heavily entrenched that it seems they will never be defeated. So revisiting such forces of the past reminds us that there is hope for tomorrow. For instance, Amazon.com may seem like a bullying monopoly right now, but one look at the current state of Microsoft shows that they will get their comeuppance eventually too.

Sure, the Leafs still haven't won the cup. In fact, here's a depressing thought: Ballard became majority owner of the Leafs in 1971, not long after their last Cup in 1967. Then he owned them until his death nineteen years later in 1990. But that was twenty-four years ago! So he's not even mostly responsible for the Leafs' futility anymore.

So I was reading the list of selected Ballard incidents. Usually, the wikieditors frown on that sort of thing in their esteemed site, but with Ballard they seem to have conceded that there's no way to describe him; his personality had a Zen quality that must be explained through examples.

And as I was reading through these incidents, I was struck by the similarities between him and Rob Ford, another Torontonian that you could never really describe:

• hugely antisocial, but has somehow made enough connections to climb the ladder
• Doesn't even pretend to be civil
• Acts like a stereotypical business man from fifty years earlier
• Many people love him for his entertainment value
• Will drop to any level to insult or slander enemies

So there is hope here too.  For all his votes and radio shows, one day Ford too will be just a series of bizarre anecdotes.

Unsafe At Any Size

Last week, you might have seen a headline like this one from the Buffalo News: "Small cars, save for one, fail to make ‘good’ in crash tests."  That's a bit misleading.

The crash test that they're talking about is the Small Overlap Frontal test, in which a car hits something that's one-quarter the width of the car.  So it simulates hitting a small but solid object like a tree or a post.  It's counter-intuitive, but that sort of collision is harder for the car to withstand than hitting a larger object such as another car.  When you hit a large object, the front of the car is crushed, absorbing the energy of the crash.  But with a smaller object, less of the car is crushed, so it's not as able to absorb the energy.

But this article wasn't written because small cars did particularly badly, it is because all cars have problem with this relatively new test, and small cars just happen to be what they were testing lately.  I know this because I saw a previous article about how cars were having difficulty passing it.  In that case, the cars being tested were luxury cars.  Now that's surprising: small cars have less material to absorb impacts, so it does take more work to make them safe.  But if luxury cars are also doing poorly in the test, it's apparently about more than size.  Probably cars won't do well on this test for several years, until new models have been introduced that have been designed from the ground up with the new crash standards in mind.

I don't want to sound like I'm making excuses for the manufacturers - after all, they did mostly fail the tests.  But when you read a headline like the one above, it seems to contain two facts:

• small cars failed general crash tests
• the problem is specific to those cars

In fact, neither of those facts are true.  The cars failed one particular test, while passing all the others.  And this is true for cars of all sizes that have done the new test.

My Relationship Is Pre-Alpha

So now there's a trend for beta marriages. That's living together for a year or two before actually getting married. Get it? It's just like beta software: trying it out before it's ready for public release.

You're probably also thinking, how is that new? Didn't we get over living-in-sin generations ago? The name is cute, and surprisingly descriptive.  (Funny aside: when I used Bing to search for "Beta Marriage" it included a link to this page on Betazoid Marriages.)

It's another example of the media bending things to for their narrative of millennials as an alien breed warped by technology. Here's the current generation just doing what the last several generations have done, but we attach a technology-related name and treat it as something new.

Having said that, it seems to be a common phenomena for us to act like generations each invent the world anew. For instance, it was hilarious when Baby Boomers were horrified that their teenage kids were having sex. Had they already forgotten what they did in their youth?

So let's come to terms with it: generations aren't that different, people do have sex before marriage, and it's been happening for so long that no one gets credit/blame for inventing it.