Small Problems With Sports

Right now, we have the World Junior Hockey Championships being held in Toronto and Montreal. I understand that in Europe, it's known as the Under 20 (or U20) championship, in keeping with the naming system used in soccer and other sports.

But here in Canada we prefer to name our age ranges. And that brings up an issue I would have blogged about when I was a child, if someone had been willing to type it out, and invent blogging for me: Our sports age classes have embarrassing names.

We seem to have an obsession with making kids feel small. I played soccer, not hockey, but the problem seems to be the same. I started off in "squirt" which is the youngest level. Fair enough, though that does seem like an unnecessarily insulting name. Then I moved up to "atom." Obviously, that brings up the question of what the squirt could possibly be made of, if it's smaller than an atom, but I'll leave that to Neil Degrasse Tyson.

The point is, someone was clearly going out of their way to emphasize the concept of smallness if they named the class after the smallest thing most people have ever heard of, and that's the class the kids have to work their way up to.  I would have had to keep playing for most of my childhood before I even got to a level of sport that didn't have a silly sounding name.

Had I stayed in the sport, I could have gone on to levels like "peewee" and "bantam". Peewee is clearly meant to be demeaning. Bantam is more esoteric, but it's not just a small bird, it's a small chicken. There's even a hockey class named for an insulting word for small people, thus insulting people who aren't even involved in the sport.

I know, this probably all started when people created "senior" and "junior" classes to divide adults and teens. Then as younger kids wanted to play organized sports, the organizers realized that they'd painted themselves into a corner and had to come up with ever smaller things to name divisions after. But they didn't have to come up with such demeaning names. Why not name them after different sized animals? Instead they had to succumb to sports' tendency look down on inexperienced newcomers. The Europeans and their boring age range names have a point.

Shocking Doctrine

Prime minister Stephen Harper angered many during an interview when he again refused the idea of an inquiry into the huge number of missing and murdered aboriginal women. His and the Conservative party's avoidance of the issue has been particularly perplexing.

We're all used to the idea of politicians of all political stripes making big, public gestures, but avoiding anything of substance of it could be costly or difficult. So I would not be at all surprised to see a politician in this situation call a commission, let it work away for a few years, then ignore its recommendations.

That's why it's so perplexing that the Conservatives are so dead-set against the inquiry. The monetary cost would be small on the national scale. And it's not like it would go against any of their political priorities. On the contrary, they could make a good argument that the inquiry is an extension of their law-and-order agenda. But not only will they not make the public act, they won't even turn out down in a dignified way, unceremoniously saying that it wasn't a priority.

Naomi Klein recently wrote an article about the problem, linking it to the Conservative's energy policy. She points out that the First Nations have provided the only effective opposition to the government's pro-oil-industry platform, and she sees this as payback from a government that sees itself working against indigenous groups.

But I find that hard to believe. I don't like Prime Minister Harper. And I don't mean that I'm a I-disagree-with-him-but-I-respect-him way. He's condescending. He's a bully. He's quick to abandon people and principles. But even I don't think he'd take revenge on a whole race of people like that.

Despite that, the accusation is still going to be a problem for Harper. Like I said, the Conservatives' stalling on this is, above all, perplexing. When actions are so inexplicable, any explanation - even one so difficult to believe - is going to gain traction. The government is going to have to come up with their own plausible explanation for their inaction if they don't want Canadians to adopt Klein's conclusion.

The Invisible Backbone

As I mentioned previously, it's inaccurate to depict the decision not to release The Interview as being entirely about Sony. All major cinema chains turned down the movie first. And rumor has it that cable channels and download services wouldn't touch it either. But on the other hand, most individuals in the entertainment industry disagreed strongly with the decision.  And now that it is getting limited release, it's mostly at independent theaters that are run by individuals. That brings up a difficult question: how is it that our corporations all reached a different decision than individuals?

Companies are often referred to as, "fictitious people." That's a description that is often ridiculed, but I've always thought that it does describe the concept pretty well. Don't get me wrong, I don't think of companies as morally equivalent to human beings. But they are complex entities that have their own personality, characteristics and reactions. Those actions may just be the result of the actions of lots of people, but they end up having their own personality, one that often is quite different from that of the constituent people.

A few years ago the documentary The Corporation took this concept further, having a psychologist examine corporations and conclude that if they are people, they are psychopaths, since they don't show any empathy for the other members of society. I'd have to agree with that assessment, but I wouldn't take it as rejection of capitalism. After all, there are a lot of psychopaths in society who don't cause anyone any problems. But then, they have to obey laws. And to me, that's the conclusion to take from the psycho-corporations concept: it doesn't rule-out capitalism, just unrestrained capitalism.

But that seems strange when we look at the actions of corporations dealing with The Interview. I'm left thinking that these companies may be psychopaths, but they're also kind of cowardly. That's different from what we see in humans.  So I wonder how that happened.

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #19

There's a TV channel that just shows a burning fireplace.  It started as a holiday special during low-ratings slots like Christmas morning.  It also started off semi-humourously.  But people decided they liked it, so lots of people watch it now.

Betting On The Stacks

Doing Christmas shopping in Chapters, I learned a lot. For one thing, I can't believe how much manga and graphic novels have grown.  I remember being amazed that it had its own shelf, and now it has its own section.

But I also found these piles of books. You sometimes see the latest much-anticipated book arranged like this. I figure the height of the stack gives us an indication of how the book is selling. And they complexity of the design shows how much free time the site employees have.

I remember how there were huge arrangements of the Steve Jobs biography for a while, which I figure means that they ordered far too many in the hype following his death. So what do we know based on these piles?

Justin Trudeau should be worried that his book sales are well behind those of conservative icon Conrad Black.

The Leafs' book isn't doing too well. It's way behind the Gordie Howe book. Though it is beating the latest Young-Adult fantasy on the other side of it.

And the leading author? No, not Stephen King, it's Amy Poehler.

Maximum Ice

That's it! I've had enough of icing the kicker!  If you don't follow football, it's the practice of calling a timeout as the other team is about to kick a field goal; the purpose being to make the kicker think about it for an extra minute, and psych himself out or something. It's not likely to work of course; but for a last second play, the team has nothing to lose in trying it.

It's always annoyed me for adding an unnecessary delay to the climax of the game. It would be like having a quick commercial break before the kick. Possibly society that has gotten used to reality shows padding out the big reveal with edited-in pauses, but most people watching sports are trying to avoid that sort of thing.

It's also hard to believe it will have any effect. Kickers are used to performing under pressure. And kickers spend most of their time on the sidelines thinkin; I'm sure an extra minute to think about it won't make a difference. (Though the awkward practice kicks they do to kill the time might. ) Remember that this is a sport where a team of forty people occasionally depend on one person to succeed or fail based on one person's actions, and that person is easily the smallest of them.

I thought we'd reached the nadir of icing the kicker a few years ago when Joe Gibbs got confused and called a timeout twice, incurring a delay of game penalty. I didn't think it could any worse than a hall-of-game coach so crazed with the need to play mind games that he would end up hurting his own team. But then in today's Miami Beach Bowl, the coach of Brigham Young actually called a timeout to ice the kicker on an extra point. And this was with 45 seconds left. He essentially thought that it was more important to ice the kicker than run a good two-minute drill to get into range for what would have been a winning field goal. So please, let's ban timeouts on kicks.

Interview With The Empire

A few years back, David Letterman was the target of the threats from Islamic extremists over a joke he made. I figured that for a comedian, if you have to die before your time, that's the best way to go: murdered by the target of one of your jokes. That's something you'd always have over everyone else. George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor: none of them can claim that. Also, you'd have a kind of existential revenge over your killer: no one will ever be able to remember either of you without remembering the joke at his expense.

That is, assuming it’s a good joke. Unfortunately, in Letterman’s case, it was a laboured attempt to revive a previous gag into a running joke. It made little sense out of context, and wasn’t that funny in context. I would hope the incident was a wake-up call to all comics: put everything into each joke, because it could be your last.

Which brings me to The Interview. Obviously I haven’t seen it, but it doesn’t look like something you’d want to go down in history as the movie that started World War III. I’m not sure what you would want an act-of-war movie to be like; probably something that makes a profound statement. Even if it has to be within the genre of stoner/gross-out comedies, you’d want to go down in history for insulting the enemy leader with an American Pie-style unprecedented moment of raunch.

But now it appears that none of this matters. If they don’t release The Interview, we can just imagine it to be whatever kind of movie we want it to be. As for the question of whether it was a good move to drop the release, I find that most news stories, and all internet discussion, has missed a rather important point: Sony made the decision to cancel the release after several major American theatre chains said they wouldn’t show the film. I’m not saying that absolves Sony of the choice, but it does illustrate that this is not the decision of one isolated corporation. Several companies - when faced with the same situation - made the same choice.

Proponents of the choice to pull the movie have generally made the shockingly mature argument that we can’t just look at it from our current comfortable position, but rather we should put ourselves in the position of the alternate world where the film was shown, and the threatened attacks happened. It’s hard to look at that devastation and justify the decision to release a silly movie.

I can understand the reasoning and, as I say, admire the non-knee-jerk sophistication of that position. But what really worries me about the cancellation is that it sets a shockingly low bar for cancelling major events based on threats. The fact is, it’s pretty much an everyday event for people on the Internet to make idle threats they couldn’t possibly follow through on. They’ve let everyone know that all it takes for a major corporation to change their plans at great expense is some hacking skills and the shamelessness to threaten lives. I think we’re going to see that happen more often in the future. If it does, we’ll have to reassess the equation of how much risk we’re willing to live with.

Lego My Intellectual Property

Here in Canada, we take pride in anyone who makes it big.  (Except Justin Bieber.)  All Canadians can rhyme off the names of Canadian celebrities.  Canadian business success stories are a bit harder to come by, but we do make a big deal if a Nortel or a Blackberry gets to the big time, and politely look the other way when they fall back down.

So from time to time, I've seen stories about the success of MegaBloks, the popular Lego alternative from Montreal.  But it's hard to feel good about a company that copied someone else's invention after the patents expired, then figured out how to make it slightly more cheaply.  They're the generic drug manufacturers of the toy world. It doesn't help that they're selling Call Of Duty sets, despite those games being recommended for ages 17 and up.

But now I find that MegaBloks isn't even the only Canadian Lego rip-off.  There's also Brictek.  How did that happen?  In addition to resource companies and short-lived technology giants, our other Canadian business cliché is plastic blocks.  But surely if you can build plastic blocks cheaply, you can build other small plastic things easily?

This is just so damn Canadian, being a distant anonymous second to the folks who got things started.  Okay, it's refreshing that we're copying the Danes, rather than the Americans.  But this year MegaBloks was bought by America's Mattel, completing this microcosm of stereotypical Canadian business.  You could at least get together with a chocolate maker and go after Kinder Eggs.

'Cause The Man Would Never Give Me An Hour

I've been asking it on a nightly basis for months now, so I'll ask it here: what the hell is Late O'Clock News? Actually, I can answer that: It's a 5-minute satirical interview program on the Comedy network every night at about ten-past-eleven (that is, the first commercial break in The Daily Show.  Well, maybe not "program;" perhaps, "segment"? I guess it doesn't count as a TV program, since it's not in the Internet Movie Database.  The closest thing that site's search function could come up with is the British classic Not The Nine O'Clock News, and the juxtaposition of those two has now made me even more angry.

It's easy to see what's going on here.  The Colbert Report - which normally follows The Daily Show at 11:30 - is ending this week, so the Comedy Network had to find something to replace it, and they chose Jimmy Kimmel Live.  But that show starts at 11:35, so they'd have to find something to fill an extra five minutes.  Someone said, let's produce an extra, five-minute show that emulates the weakest part of The Daily Show - deadpan interviewers trying to make their subjects look silly without using the show's political humour.

Of course, they could have placed it at the end of The Daily Show, but then people would probably change channels to some other show that starts at 11:30, rather than sit through five-minutes of awkward interview before Kimmel starts.  So now we're stuck with an extra-long commercial break.  A half-time show in the middle of a half-hour show.  I guess their idea was to make something that would appeal to The Daily Show's viewers, but like I said, it only resembles the show's slowest moments.  They would have been better off emulating the show's political satire.  Say, have a guy do Rick Mercer-style rants.  They could be about Canadian politics, and then it would count towards their Can-Con.  I don't know if Late O'Clock host Paul Lemieux would be up to that, but given that he used to work for MTV, I'll assume not.  Or they could just hire Rick Mercer himself, since I'm sure Bell/CTV can afford to spend more on five-minutes than the CBC can on a half-hour.

Cloudy With A Chance Of Boxsters

This week in poorly-targeted app ads:

What gave them the idea that people using the Weather Network app would be in the market for the most expensive of Porsches?  Do they really think that someone too cheap to pay a dollar for an ad-free weather app is going to buy a $100,000 car?

I'm Dreaming Of A Wide Christmas

I'm one of those people who hates the coming of Christmas music. No, I don't have anything against Christmas or its music; it's the ubiquitousness of it. Yes, I know, I've mentioned this before. Having it going constantly, everywhere, for a month is a bit much.

But today I realized there is a potential positive: in trying to fill the airwaves with songs on a single topic, music programmers have to reach outside of their normal confines of time and genre. Just in the past few minutes waiting in a drug store, I've heard fifties, soul, and the Beach Boys.

A lot of people would consider that to be another negative, but I consider it a positive. I'd actually like a radio station that would play anything. Maybe it was being raised on the necessarily eclectic tastes of one music video channel that tried to be all things to all people.

So that's a good thing about Christmas, forcing us to break out of our normally strict music formats.  And it's all thanks to the limited number of Christmas songs.  So all you ignored genres, this is your ticket to greater exposure.  Polka, blues, free jazz: get recording.

Dyson's Fear

There's a classic book on making things usable called, The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman. It's a useful book for understanding how to make the devices around us easier to use.

One thing Norman rails against is arbitrarily changing standardized designs. There are a lot of things that aren't obvious, but don't cause problems because there are accepted layouts. You don't need instruction on how to drive a new car, because the controls are standard. This in spite of the fact that the standard steering wheel and pedals is not exactly obvious in its use.

Because of this principle, Norman doesn’t like faucets that have the one control that you turn to change the temperature and pull or push to control the amount of water. He figures the standard of two controls with the hot on the left is well known world-wide and should be maintained. I have to disagree with him here; the one-control kind is easier to use, since the two qualities of the water (temperature and volume) can easily be adjusted independently of one another. And that type of control has become popular enough that it is now a well-known standard of its own.

But there’s something we can all agree on: The new Dyson Tap design sucks. It is a sensor-driven, no-touch tap like many in today’s public washrooms, but being a Dyson product, it has to involve moving air. Sure enough, it has a built-in hand drier, so you can do all your hand-washing business without moving.

The trouble is, it’s far from obvious how it should be used. It looks like handlebars, so I assumed you have to do something with the bits sticking out the side. But no, you just hold your hands under them. More or less - the sensors seemed to be misaligned on the one I used. There are instructions etched on the tap itself, but the vague pictures of hands and arrows didn’t explain much.

I could have taken a picture of it, but you can just look that up at the link. Instead, I’ll include a picture of the instructions they had to print out to explain the new taps.

But there's one more problem.  I couldn't find the soap.  There were no soap containers in the washroom where I found these taps, and soap is not mentioned at the Dyson site, or any of the news stories I found about the tap.  So credit to Britain's Daily Mail, the only people who noticed the lack of soap.  This makes me wonder if people have really been washing their hands all these years.  Forgive me if I don't shake your hand.

And It Was All Yellow

I tried to Tweet this earlier, but it didn't work, so I'll just mention it here.  I was having trouble expressing it in 140 characters anyway.

Say you're approaching a traffic light, and it turns yellow. It's at just that time when you're not sure whether you should go through or not.  You make the snap decision to go for it, and get across the intersection just as it's turning red.  You're embarrassed, because it was closer than you'd imagined it, and you're glad your driving instructor isn't here to see it.

I've discovered that it's an unvarying truth: in this circumstance of pushing my luck at the lights, the person behind me will go through the intersection too.  I know I'm not that careful a driver, But these people are apparently even riskier than me.  Who are these people and why are they following me around?

Dave In Cincinnati

You young'uns won't know this, but when the Fox Network first started up in the eighties, it used the name FBC, or Fox Broadcasting Corporation. Not many people remember this because it was before American Idol, X-Files, Married With Children or The Simpsons. (Yes, even I have difficulty believing there was a time before The Simpsons.) This was when their only show was Joan Rivers's short-lived late night talk show. It's easy to understand why: all the other networks went by initials, even the few cable channels used initials (HBO, ESPN).

Of course, now times have changed, cable channels mostly have names. Radio stations have increasingly ridiculous names that they use in place of their call-letters that they only mention when they legally have to. I feel sorry for the stations that went to the trouble of coming up with a clever call-letter name like CHUM or CHYM. The hundred bucks they paid to a PR firm in the seventies must seem like a waste now. If they had PR firms in the seventies.

But the reason I'm thinking about the good old days of meaningless initials in broadcasting is the onslaught of silly names given to on-demand TV services trying to compete with Netflix. We're getting ads for "Crave," which is Bell/CTV's entry in the market. Because who wouldn't want to download programming using something named after a cat food. But even worse is their competitor "shomi" (sounds like "show me," geddit?)

Once again, living in the future is great and all, I just wish everything didn't have such dumb names. The need for unique domain names on the Internet forced some odd names, but at least they were mostly just non-sequiturs (Amazon) or bad spellings (tumblr.) But now things are getting silly names in juvenile competition. Somebody should edit old science fiction to add this detail: "Sha-zzzing me up, Scotty!"

My Word

It's that time of year again.  Time for dictionaries to get free publicity by declaring a word of the year, or a selection of words that will be added to their books.  I was going to rant about these choices, but it seems I've done that before.  More than once.  But the fact is, sometimes these words aren't really deserving of their accolades; I'm still waiting to hear anyone use the word "infosnacking" after it was declared 2005 word of the year by Webster's New World College Dictionary.

So I have a proposition.  This is for any dictionaries or linguistic societies out there that have put off finding a word of the year for 2014, and are now scrambling to find a new word they can use to get those cheap mentions from the world's news providers. A few weeks ago, I used the word "Googlespace" to describe the proportion of relevant results a word or phrase gets.  For instance, if I Google "jaguar", most of the results are for the car company, rather than the cat or the football team.  So the company occupies more "Googlespace" than the other uses of the word.
You'll note that I used the word without explanation, as though I'm assuming that my hip, fashionable readers on the bleeding-edge of technology would already know what it means, so you can reasonably claim that the word is already used and about to hit the mainstream.

I assure you that my royalty demands will be reasonable.  But if you don't want to use my word, you can always make up a word for a manufactured news item used to get free publicity.

Doc, I'm Coming Down With A Gerund

I previously mentioned the oddness of special waiting room copies of magazines. Well I found another today, this time it's a bit more understandable.

But I have to feel like there could be ulterior motives here.  Isn't that a great way to keep your practice busy, encourage patients to read about things that could be wrong with them? What's next, the special waiting room copy of hypochondriacs illustrated?

Also, you'll notice that gluten is now such a big deal, it's become a verb. At least This magazine is talking about people with actual allergies, rather than those who are just jumping on the bandwagon. I read through the article, and they kept talking about people getting glutened, without explanation, as though it were a widely understood word. Apparently it means “to be served food containing gluten, in spite of your best efforts to avoid it.”

I also learned a couple more things:

• Fewer people in the US have allergies than Canada: 2.5 million Canadians to 15 million Americans. The magazine claimed that was about the same proportion of the population, in which case they might want to look up the respective populations. It’s about 7% of Canadians and 4.7% of Americans.
• Children who grow up on farms have long been known to have fewer allergies than their urban counterparts. And new research shows that this is particularly true for dairy farms. Kids growing up on dairy farms have one-tenth the chances of developing allergies as kids in other rural areas. So if you want your child to avoid allergies, by a cow.

The Virtual Suspects

This month's Call Of Duty game is out. And the ads have all the usual war game ad tropes:

• Lots of cut-scene footage, but no shots of actual game play.
• Music that the target audience wouldn't normally listen to.
• People doing macho but strategically-unwise things that would get them killed in a real game.

But then out of all these clichés appears Kevin Spacey, crawling out of the Uncanny Valley by sheer force of will. He - or at least an avatar of him - seems to be playing the same character he plays in House Of Cards.

If you think about it, there's also the question of why he looks like Kevin Spacey. If you're going to have computer-generated actors, you could make them look like whatever you want. But of course, it's the same reason he's playing the same character: recognition. That's kind of sad that we have this ability to depict almost anything we want on screen, but all we're doing with it is having a talented actor play a recycled version of himself. Perhaps in the future actors will choose an appearance that they will take with them through all their roles.

But aside from showing how technology changes, this is also a demonstration of the changing fortunes of actors. Careers not only go up and down, but also slide from one style to another. Imagine this conversation taking place just a few years ago:

"We've done it! We have the technology to place photorealistic actors into a game, and it'll be ready for the next Call Of Duty. Who shall we use?"
"Kevin Spacey!"

But looking back through his career, I think there could have been several opportunities to have him reprise a role for a game. After all, The Sims came out the year after American Beauty.  There seems to be plenty of cross-promotion potential there.