My Least Favourite Year

I was thinking of titling this entry as just, "Fuck You, 2016." But it seems somebody beat me to it. It was a really bad year. When people have mentioned that it was a bad year, some have tried to dismiss the concept by saying that it was just a bunch of celebrity deaths. If you are one of those people, I invite you to contemplate how you came to ignore the world beyond celebreties, yet dismissive of their mortality.

But was this really the worst year? On the scale of human history, clearly not. There were no plagues. There were no world wars. No major cities burned to the ground. No civilizations collapsed. Well, one began collapsing, sure. But still, this is no 476 (fall of Rome,) but a mere 330 (partitioning of the Roman Empire into East and West.)

So let's limit this discussion to my lifetime. With the help of Wikipedia, here are the contenders for Worst Year In My Lifetime, along with their credentials for the title.

1979

• Iran revolution, hostage crisis
• Sid Vicious dies
• Mardi Gras is cancelled due to police strike
• Salvadorian civil war begins
• White Night riots
• Margaret Thatcher takes office
• Skylab crashes
• Jimmy Carter's "Malaise" speech
• Lord Mountbatten assassinated
• The Who concert crush in Cincinnati
• USSR invades Afghanistan
• Chinese One Child policy is introduced

1985

• New Coke
• Ozone hole discovered
• Bangladesh cyclone
• Air India flight 182
• Brixton riots
• Mexico City earthquake
• Steve Jobs leaves Apple
• Volcano in Amero, Colombia
• Dian Fossey murdered
• Numerous plane crashes

1994

• Nancy Kerrigan attacked, media loses its shit
• Silvio Berlusconi elected
• Rwandan Genocide
• Kurt Cobain dies
• Ayrton Senna dies
• OJ murder/arrest
• Andres Escobar murdered (Colombian footballer who scored own goal in World Cup)
• Baseball strike
• Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's announced
• Newt Gingrich becomes Speaker of the House
• Russia enters Chechnya
• Whitewater investigation begins
• Mexican Peso crashes

1995

• OJ trial begins, media really loses its shit
• Cult attack on Tokyo subway
• Selena murdered
• Oklahoma City bombing
• Christopher Reeve paralized
• Busiest hurricane season in 62 years
• New Jersey Devils introduce the Neutral Zone Trap
• Srebrenica massacre
• Steve Forbes runs for President - is unsuccesful
• Second Quebec referendum
• Yitzhak Rabin assassinated
• Calvin and Hobbes ends

2001

• George W Bush takes office
• Earthquake in Gujarat, India
• Taliban destroys Buddha statues
• Mir crashes
• Berlusconi re-elected
• Aaliyah dies in plane crash
• September 11
• Anthrax attacks
• Patriot Act
• Enron goes bankrupt
• Shoebomber incident

2016

• Numerous celebrity deaths
• Ammon Bundy and friends occupy federal wildlife refuge
• North Korea gets into space
• Siege of Aleppo
• ISIS bombs Brussels
• North Carolina bathroom bill
• Panama Papers
• Syria/Libya refugee crisis
• Rodrigo Duterte elected in the Philippines
• Flint water crisis
• Zika virus
• Bastille Day attack in Nice
• Dallas police shooting
• Brexit
• Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando
• ISIS bombs Istanbul
• Numerous black people shot by police
• Colombian people vote down peace treaty with rebels
• Hurricane Matthew hits Haiti
• Berlin Christmas market attack
• Donald Trump elected President

So I think you have to agree that 2016 was, indeed, the Worst Year Ever (in my experience.) Because the Wikipedia year-in-review was still incomplete at the time of writing, I had to complete this list by adding more events from memory. It was truly depressing how many times I thought the list was finished, only to remember, oh, right, that happened this year as well.

But it's over now. So I want everyone to try harder next year. 2016, don't let the metaphysical door hit your chronological ass on the way out. 2017, you may have a low bar, but we're still expecting a lot from you; you have a lot to make up for.

How The Hell'd We Wind Up Like This?

It was kind of lost during Christmas, but there was a story about Avril Lavigne feuding with Mark Zuckerberg. How did that happen? Well, Zuckerberg released a video showing off "Jarvis," Facebook's AI assistant. In the video, Zuckerberg asks Jarvis to play a good Nickelback song, to which it replies that no such thing exists. Lavigne came to Nickelback's defense; keep in mind that she used to be married to Nickelback singer Chad Kroeger. Wait, they have divorced, right (checks) yep.

I never thought I'd say this, but enough with the Nickelback bashing already. I've never been a fan of theirs either, and I'm usually the first person to demonize someone for dumbed-down rock music. And yes, I've taken shots at Nickelback too. But this has gotten to the point where people are piling-on just for the sake of it. Like monologue jokes about France, people are joining in on the ridicule without even knowing what they're joking about.

Sure, their songs all sound the same. And "Figured You Out" had the most juvenile lyrics this side of the Bloodhound Gang. But be honest, "How You Remind Me" was a great song, and "Someday" and "Photograph" approached actual pathos. So, a few good songs, some crap lyrics, and a bunch of songs that sound the same: I just described half the rock bands that have ever existed. Much like Coldplay, people seem to be beating up on a band for being ordinary, even though they're in a medium that has always had its share of hateable artists.

But let's not be naive. The Nickelback hatred isn't about the band, but about the fans. Nickelback are the stereotypical favourite of the Bro Nation. That kid who stole your lunch money right up until he dropped out in high school? Probably listens to Nickelback now. The fratboy you hated in University? Big Nickelback fan. Half the people who voted for Trump? You're sure they listen to Nickelback.

Kroeger and friends are a nice visible target for a widely-hated subculture. And they're easy to be seen as the "other." Like Creed before them, there's a weird phenomena where they sell millions of albums and concert tickets, but you never seem to know anyone who admits to being a fan. So they're easy to attack without worrying about consequences. I'd say Lavigne went overboard in calling this an example of bullying; really it's just a way of making lazy jokes that sound hard-hitting, but don't require taking a stand on anything. Really, it's just unimaginative and repetitive. Sort of like a certain rock band.

Fan Of The Fans

Recently, I've written posts on both Stargate and Gilmore Girls. And in the process, I've also mentioned Buffy the Vampire Slayer and fan-fiction. That brings up something interesting I found about ten years ago.

I read an article about the world of fan-fiction; specifically, the sheer size of the subculture, and the fact that pretty much every story in every medium has at least a little fan fiction written about it. Yes, even movies and TV shows you barely remember have fan-fiction. Do you remember MVP, the CBC's short-lived soap about hockey players' wives? Well a couple of people cared enough to write about it.

Having never been exposed to this, I found it fascinating to see a site with reams and reams of fan-authored stories. I didn't read much of the fiction itself, but it was interesting to see what kinds of franchises attracted writers. It wasn't necessarily the most popular things. Also, it wasn't necessarily the worlds that traditionally captured fan imaginations: for instance, both Star Wars and Star Trek were at low ebbs during those early 2000's, so they didn't attract the attention you'd expect. I'm sure that if Internet-spread fan fiction had existed throughout the twentieth century, those two would have built-up story reserves that will never be eclipsed.

Anyway, the aforementioned shows, Stargate SG-1, Gilmore Girls, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer were the three TV shows that had the most stories written about them. That made me wonder what the common bond that attracts fan-fiction writer would be. Witty writing? Smart female characters? I suspected the subculture has female-skewed demographics, and apparently statistics confirm it.

The question stuck in my mind because they also have another thing in common: I was a fan of each of them. So apparently, I look for the same things in TV shows that fan-fiction writers do. That's kind of odd, since I've never really had a desire to write fan-fiction. (Though now that you mention it, I've got some great ideas for a Stargate/Gilmore/Buffy crossover.)

But since I'm revisiting the issue, I though I'd go back and see what the most popular shows are now. Here's the top ten shows that have the most fan-fiction stories written about them:

1. Supernatural
2. Glee
3. Doctor Who
4. Sherlock
5. Buffy: The Vampire Slayer
6. Once Upon a Time
7. NCIS
8. Vampire Diaries
9. Criminal Minds
10. Stargate: SG-1

Again, not a lot in common, other than female viewership. But now I have some future binge-watch targets.

Ad Rock

In the past I've mentioned how video game ads often have incongruous music. But previously this has usually been to contrast beautiful music with gritty fighting. For instance, there's a Playstation ad now set to a choral rendition of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This.)"

(Off topic, but has anyone ever successfully performed that song to make it sound like "made of this" rather than "made of these?" Since "dreams" is plural but "this" singular, the correct lyrics don't even sound right spoken, nevermind in the song.)

But the latest head-scratching musical combo is the ad for Battlefield 1 - a WWI game - with Smashing Pumpkins' angst-rock classic, "Bullet With Butterfly Wings." I've tried to figure out how a song about the exhaustion of unfocused anger could be applied to a hellish conflict that changed how the world looks at war. Sure, "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" could be a poetic description of a WWI fighter plane, but that's stretching it. Online I found ads set to "Seven Nation Army" which at least makes sense in a super-literal sense. I don't know why they didn't go with that song for the TV ad. I guess they decided their demographic needed to be a decade older.

For that matter, who wants a game set in World War I? If it's realistic, it will be hours of trying to avoid rat bites in the trenches before going over the top and getting gunned down to end the game. My condolences to history teachers everywhere who are currently trying to figure out how to convince kids the war wasn't about dramatically batting people off horseback.

Personally, I've never been a war game guy. I'm not trying to put the concept down: I'm open to the idea that you can make a game that both entertaining and respectful of the reality of war. But going all the way back to the Platoon tie-in game, I've been skeptical of the game industry's ability to deliver them. I'm inclined to keep that opinion, since someone at Electronic Arts thinks war is comparable to Billy Corgan's angry pet rat.

Lock Around The Clock

They're refurbishing some of the apartments in my building right now, and today someone arrived to deliver supplies to one of those rooms.  Unfortunately, the delivery guy got the number wrong, and tried putting them in my apartment instead.  Of course, he figured out something was wrong when he tried to open my door and found that it was locked.  But it was an unsettling surprise to me to suddenly hear someone try opening the door without knocking first.

It's a good thing I remembered to lock the door, or it would have been more embarrassing.  Usually I do lock it, but sometimes glance at the door and notice that it's unlocked.  That makes me wonder, just how often does it really make a difference to lock it?  No, I'm not bragging about living in a nice neighbourhood where you don't have to lock the door.  I'm just marvelling at how society works.

Say I go away for a week: how likely is it that someone will actually try my door to see if it is locked?  Based on how many people have actually tried it while I'm here, I'd say it's likely that I could leave the door unlocked for that whole vacation, and no one would come in.  Again, it's not because everyone in the world is honest; it's because we expect doors to be locked.  So we don't actually have to lock our doors, but that's only because we always lock our doors.

You Quite Literally Can't Handle The Truth

Recently, I saw a graphic being passed around Facebook, about peppers. It said that you can tell the gender of sweet peppers by the number of lobes on the bottom. (plants can have genders too; you knew that, right? ) Three lobes: male, four : female. And this also has a slight effect on the taste and texture of the pepper.

This sort of claim lands in the shadow of doubt for me. Weirder things are true, but they usually aren't. So I googled "pepper gender," somewhat alarmed at what I might find.

Actually, I just got a link to the misinformation-quashing site snopes.com. They pointed out that it's not true; peppers don't really have gender. They also pointed out that this is an urban legend that's been around for a while, but it's recently received new life on social media.

So now there are going to be thousands of people around the world choosing their peppers based on incorrect information, possibly taking out their romantic frustrations on their vegetables. "Think you can go a week without calling, Mr. Three-Lobes?" That's hardly a concern, but this is of course just an innocent and less emotionally-charged example of a much bigger problem: misinformation being spread - and believed - all over the Internet.

What's troubling is the disregard for the truth. In the above example, I made an assessment of the believability given the unknown source. But I also took advantage of the fact that the Internet can be used to easily look up facts, rather than passively consume them. I also have greater credence to an authority than to an anonymous source. Snopes.com isn't exactly the word of God, but I'm going to believe them long before someone I don't know, and has shown no credentials beyond a modest ability with Photoshop.

But I seem to be the exception rather than the rule. People are quite willing to believe anything they see on the Internet, a fact symbolized by the Oxford English Dictionary giving its word of the year award to the term, "post-truth."

Post-truth will probably be a term to define our era, so it will be hilarious when future historians look back and see that it's predecessor as word of the year was the crying with laughter emoji. So any future research into how this became the post-truth era will be short and sweet.

So how did we get here? We have the greatest information sharing device ever, and it's led to a total lack of consideration for the truth. Coincidentally, that question was recently posed to Brooke Binkowski, Managing Editor of Snopes.com. She said that it was a result of the low quality of mainstream news. I find that hard to believe. I mean, I'm as critical of them as anyone; throughout the election campaign, I kept fantasizing about the eventual downfall of conventional media, picturing Don Lemon on the streets, holding a hand-written sign reading, "will repeat talking-points for food."

But the fact is, the public is abandoning established news services for even lower quality online sources. I don't think anyone is saying, "my newspaper's reporting is too superficial, I'm going to switch to this web site that says Hillary Clinton had Justice Scalia murdered.

Actually, I first saw the post-truth world coming twenty years ago when the Internet was first going mainstream. I remember seeing a political discussion, in which someone referred to how Franklin Roosevelt created the New Deal, and that triggered the Great Depression.

Of course, many have critiqued and questioned the wisdom and success of the New Deal over the years, but everyone remembers it as a response to the Great Depression. Reversing the causality is a brazen attempt to rewrite history. When called on it, the far-right folks in that old newsgroup hedged a bit, saying, yeah well it made the depression worse, and that's what they really meant.

But the incident opened my eyes to the possibilities of a media world where there are so many voices. What we know to be true is really just the consensus of experts. After all, I wasn't around for the Great Depression; my knowledge of it is based on the words of those that have studied it. It could be that I have been deceived, but I think it's unlikely that so many would be so wrong in such an organized way. But what about when the waters are muddied by many people claiming to be experts? Or what if you're just not that choosy about who's expertise you trust?

Really, I don't think there's any explanation for our entering the post-truth world other than, we can. All this time we've held together the concensus of society only because there are so few microphones. Despite all the rhetoric that The Man controls The Message to his own ends, the fact is that people who get to speak are usually more-or-less deserving of authority. Without that bottleneck on information we'll need to develop a new way of attributing authority.

Words For A Loss

One pet peeve I have with the National Hockey League is the way they record team won/loss records. Or, as they put it, won/loss/overtime-loss records. Winning in overtime gets you the full two points, so they're listed with ordinary wins with no distinction. But overtime losses get you a point, so they're listed in a separate column, after the regulation losses, where they used to record the ties.

The problem is, what constitutes a winning record? In sports life baseball and basketball that have only wins and losses, you just look at those two numbers and see which one is bigger. Our in sports like football and soccer, they have ordinary tires that you can just ignore as neutral, and compare the W and L columns.

But in the NHL, it's not as clear. Say a team has a record of 6-5-3. Do they have a winning record? They have more wins than regulation losses. But they have more total losses than wins. But they have 15 points from 14 games, so they have more than a point a game in a league where they give two points for a win. But that's not really true when they sometimes give out more than two points in a game.

The problem is, it can really warp people's expectations. Last week, I checked the standings, and there were only four teams out of thirty that had losing records, with only five more at even records. And I've heard players brush off bad seasons by saying the team is at .500 when they're really having losing seasons. No, I don't know how you fix it. Or maybe we want it this way. After all, this is the league that once had 16 of 21 teams make the playoffs; if we can't give every team hope to make the playoffs, at least let them mask how bad they really are.

The NeverEnding Story

They're now bringing back Gilmore Girls for a short run on Netflix. Yes, it's been off the air for a decade; this new series is going to take place years later, rather than pick up where the old show left off.  I was a fan of the original show, so this is something I'll probably watch if I ever subscribe to Netflix.  Hopefully that will be before they're ready to do a series with Lorelai and Rory in the Stars Hollow rest home.

Bringing back a show is an interesting concept, continuing a show in a different period in the characters' lives. On the one hand, it sounds like an intriguing premise: you can really explore characters in great depth if you examine how they change in the long run.

And it’s an interesting format that we don’t normally get to see in storytelling media: looking at characters over a long period of time. An epic book (or a long series of books) is the only place we’re likely to see it. Sure, there are movies that try to encompass an entire life, but there usually isn’t enough time to look in depth at the characters in a couple of hours.

But the problem is, we are used to the idea that once a story is over, the characters are free to our imagination. For instance, JK Rowling’s elaborations and extensions to the Harry Potter stories have often been resented by fans. It shouldn’t really matter: she dreamt the whole thing up, so there shouldn’t be anything wrong with telling us more about the world she envisioned when writing. But still, if you’ve imagined that world in a certain way, it feels like interference to be told you’re wrong, even if it’s the author that’s telling you. And even if you aren’t a fan-fiction-writing fanboy, you’ve still probably got some sort of unconscious vision of the story. Imagine that the creators of Cheers suddenly announced that somewhere out there, Sam Malone is having heart bypass surgery right now, that would be strangely disorienting, even if it has no impact on you.

So perhaps there’s something to be said for creating something and leaving it at that. Though I suspect that’s just because we’re accustomed to stories having a finite lifespan. Between reboots, spinoffs, and sporadic streaming programming, we may have to start getting used to open-ended narratives. Perhaps we should start getting used to the idea that characters keep coming back. And hopefully, the lure of unending profitability will urge creators to make deeper characters that have staying power.

Chill 'Em All

It's about time for my annual complaint about ubiquitous Chirstmas music. Once again, I'm trying not to sound too curmugenly. I'm trying to find a reasonable middle ground between people like myself who only enjoy a little Christmas music, and the folks who want their Christmas cheer pounded into their head non-stop, Clockwork Orange style.

First up, while I do appreciate a reprive from Christmas music in stores, playing "What Are You Doing New Years Eve" in November is not an improvement. I'm just thankful there aren't any Valentine's Day songs, or they'd be staring later this week.

I also just heard a re-write of "Mr. Sandman" altered into a Christmas song - "Mr. Santa, bring me some toys." I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not. On the one hand, I've always figured that a way we could improve the Christmas music season would be to write more songs, so we would at least have a greater variety to play over the eight-weeks of Christmas. But rewriting existing songs to become Chirstmas-related? That's an awfully big can of worms to get into.

For a start, you might have already started by trying to think of other songs with "sandman" in the title that could be just as easily changed. And if you're similar in age to me, you immediately thought of Metallica's "Enter Sandman." There's some promise in the corus:

Silent Night
Holy Light
Take my Hand
We're off to Winter Wonderland

Of course, I knew someone would already have come up with lyrics along these lines. And in fact, someone has recorded an actual song. It's not quite the Christmas music diversity I'd hoped for, but at least now rock fans don't have to keep playing Trans-Siberian Orchestra. You occassionally hear their music in stores in the lead-up to Christmas, and it gives the experience an apocalyptic overtone that already-stressed shoppers just don't need. I don't think Merry Metallica will be much better in that respect. I think I'm going to do a search for Enya Christmas albums.

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #36

In 2016, Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg will co-host a cooking show. And that won't even be one of the top 100 craziest things to happen that year.

It's The History Eraser Button, You Fool!

As a fan of the Stargate franchise, I was delighted to see that new trilogy of Stargate movies probably won't happen.

If you're confused, here's how it happened: Stargate was a 1995 science fiction movie from director Roland Emmerich, a poor man's Michael Bay. It was built around Kurt Russell and the premise that the Egyptian god Ra was an alien enslaving humans. It didn't have a lot going for it other than that, except for some impressive (for the time) visuals and action set-pieces.

A few years later, someone thought it would be a good premise for a TV spinoff. The idea got handed to some new people, and the came up with a complex backstory for all the cool looking stuff in the movie, added and rewrote characters, and injected a lot of humour.

The result was a show that was far superior to its inspiration in every way except special effects. On the list of TV spinoffs that exceded their movie inspirations, it's a solid number two behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Okay, Westworld has probably pushed it to number three, but you get the picture. It maintained a cult following, and lasted ten seasons, and spun off a further two series.

But in Hollywood's current attitude that absolutely anything with any name recognition must be made and remade as much as possible, Emmerich arranged to restart the movie series. The catch here is that he was going to ignore the TV shows and start over where the original movie left off.

Of course, in today's media landscape, reboots and rewriting are an accepted hazard of fandom. Different franchises have had their own ways of dealing with it:

• Star Trek - we'll start a new timeline, so we can change everything and pretend we're not changing anything. Your beloved characters are safe and sound and unchanged in their own timeline that we're never going to use again.
• Star Wars - we'll drop all the peripheral stuff that only the hard-core fans know about anyway. But the main story from the movies won't change at all. What about the prequels? Well, you know, it's like...look, is that Baba Fett?
• Batman - just accept that each generation the same story gets retold, but darker.
• Doctor Who - People used to think it was silly to have a show that reboots itself every few years, but you're not laughing now, are you?

But in Stargate's case, it seems a little more severe. Rather than change the actors or the tone, this would have rewritten the story, premise, and style. And I know it doesn't really matter; creating a new story with the same name and a superficial resemblance shouldn't take away from my enjoyment of the franchise as it was.

In today's pop-cultural world fandom is part of the experience. It's expected that there's going to be discussion on the Internet, extra stories in other media, and humourous in-jokes with fellow fans for years to come. Really, that's the most troubling thing about reboots and remakes: the idea that your part of the pop-culturesphere is going to be paved over to make way for someone else's experience.

Let's Get It On

Today I had quite the misadventure with my new phone.  That's unfortunate, since it was in fact, my first day with my new phone.  In trying to transfer my service from one phone to the other, I was left with neither phone working.

That's extra unfortunate, because it had seemed like such a modern process up until that point.  I ordered the phone and the plan online, it was delivered quickly, and I went back online to activate it.  Having to go to the store and ask questions seemed quite archaic.

The illusion of efficiency was further punctured when I got to the store and had to go through a series of have-you-tried-this and what-happened-when-you-did-this. To quote Dark Helmet, "Even in the future nothing works!"

And then the final revelation that we still live in backwards times: the phone started working as soon as it rebooted, with nothing else having changed.  Yes, that remains the number-one way of fixing things.  That, and take it apart and put it back together again.  And occasionally, just hit it.

I'm not sure what paradigm I'd expect would be the universal way of repairing things in the future. In Star Trek, it's to wave a tricorder at it while saying something incomprehensible. But who knows, maybe the only thing the tricorder does is turn things off and on again.

So I'm wondering how many other things can be fixed by turning them off and on.  Could the economy work that way?  Maybe that's why they promote Buy Nothing Day. Or we could fix the U.S. by turning it off.  Maybe that's what Trump has intended all along. But the big test is people who survive being clinically dead.  They've actually been turned off and on, so I'm assuming that all their problems disappear.

Deriving Functions

Apple has an interesting new innovation. You may have missed it because we were all separated distracted by the collapse of western civilization. But their new MacBook Pro has replaced the function keys with a "Touch Bar" which is a small touch-sensitive screen. The idea is that a program can present customized buttons, or entirely different controls. The initial deliberation showed a video-editing program that let you scroll up different parts of the of the timeline with the Touch Bar.

The reaction seemed to be pretty negative. Though I thought it was a good idea. Let's face it: function keys kind of suck. They were okay in the pre-GUI days when they're really was no better way to track reach large numbers of features. But now that we have drop-down menus, toolbars, context menus, tool-tips, etc, there really is no need for a row of unlabeled buttons.

To make matters worse, computer makers have usurped the function keys to handle things like volume control. Now I can't remember whether my F5 is going to save or turn down the screen brightness. I actually find myself missing the WordPerfect function key template.

But a touch screen would be ideal here. Their disadvantage is that the lack of physical keys mean that using them at speed is difficult (as anyone counting typos on this blog will know.) Inevitably, a company led by a hunt-and-peck typist will try marketing an all-touchscreen keynotes, and then wonder why it flops.

But no one needs to touch type on the function keys, so it doesn't really mayer if you have to look down at them. And if you're going to look down before you press the button, you might as we get the confirmation that it does what you think it does.

What they need to do now is start replacing all of the less-used keys. A lot of them are just a technological appendix. Which leads to...

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #35

Computer keyboards still have a SysReq key. And no one has figured out what it's for.

But to me the biggest proof that the Touch Bar is here to stay is that people immediately started don't weird things with it. You can play the original Doom on it, or have a KITT style radar blip. I'm sure they can come up with plenty more ideas. Maybe make it look like a WordPerfect template.

Persuasion

This summer, I wrote a post about how Prime Minister Trudeau went to the Toronto Pride Parade and didn't end his career. In particular, I showed a photo of him at the parade, and marvelled that we've come far enough as a society that it didn't end his career.

Then I pointed out that inevitably someone would try using it against them, and this would blow up in their face. And sure enough, this week Facebook showed me this:

Of course, Bill C-16 isn't really the newspeak law they're making it out to be. You won't be send to jail for failing to memorize your alternate pronouns, and men still aren't allowed to enjoy the lush Victorian decor of public ladies' rooms.

I didn't really think the photo would be used by some conservative news outlet who fell victim to a massive breakdown in targeted advertising. I was picturing it being one of the Conservative leadership candidates, presumably Kellie "Values Screening" Leitch. But perhaps we should wait until the next election to see how far into the Trump playbook Canadian politicians are willing to go.

Now I Wonder How Whatsername Has Been

After today was mostly over, I discovered that it was National Unfriend Day. As you can guess, it's a day in which you are encouraged to unfriend people on social media, particularly Facebook. Apparently this was started by Jimmy Kimmel.  (Though the story about it on the evening news didn't mention that part, so as a viral marketing tool, it didn't work that well.) According to the Facebook page, you should use the following criteria:

• If you wouldn’t loan someone 50 dollars, unfriend them.
• If you wouldn’t invite them to your birthday party, unfriend them.
• If you wouldn’t cry if they got hit by a bus, unfriend them.

I'm not sure about those rules: I've never had large parties, and I would cry for a number of people I wouldn't loan fifty bucks to. But maybe I'm just emotional. After all, I don't really get the concern some people have over friendship being so broadly defined on social media.

Sure, there are plenty of practical concerns about how many friends you have. You can only keep up with so many people, you don't want to share your personal information with someone you just met, and some people post way too much stuff.  Or they post things that make you angry, which is another odd thing about this day: why have Unfriend Day right after American election day?  We've just gone through months of unfriending, with no promotion needed.

Beyond those problems, I don't see why there's a problem with having too many friends.  Unfriend Day's page says it's to "protect the sacred nature of friendship," but I don't think that's a problem.  My close friendships are not harmed just because my friend is also friends with someone they met at night school eight years ago, or the woman in HR he can't remember the last name of.

I'm not just targeting Kimmel here: Others have tried to put down social media friends over the years, portraying them as meaningless things that are little more than acquaintances.  I've always thought that feeling was misguided; there's a lot to be said for those lighter friendships.  I'm not pretending that they are the equivalent of the people you share a close connection with.  But they are a big part of your life. After all, since those relationships include most of your co-workers, and many people you socialize with, you probably spend half your waking hours with them.  They have a big impact on whether you gave good days or bad, and a person who has a positive effect on you can make a big difference in your life.

And the fact is, you don't know when you may have to depend on a sort-of friend.  You don't know when misfortune may strike, and you might need to rely on your acquaintances.  You may find that when push comes to shove, they care more than you expected.  Maybe they'll even loan you fifty dollars.

So don't unfriend your less-close friends.  Instead, be glad that we have technology to maintain connections with so many people. And you could reflect on how so many people have affected your life. Or at least, wonder why anyone would look at this world and decide the problem is that there are too many friends.

Don't Tell Me 'Cause It Hurts

It's been a week since the election, and I've seen a lot of articles passed around social media from disillusioned liberals. A lot of them have been good: They explain people's perspectives and how the result affects them personally. It's informative, and can be emotionally healthy for people to share their burdens. And of course, they can show people how they can do constructive and/or cathartic things to help the causes they believe in.

However, I've seen a few themes that are not helpful. Please think before posting anything with the following ideas:

Bernie would have won

Yes I know, you have that poll from the primaries that showed he'd beat Trump. Well, there was also a poll showing Hillary would beat Trump. You know when it was taken? The day before the election!

We should run Michelle in 2020

A lawyer and ex-first-lady from a centre-left ideology who we look up to because she seems very intelligent and self-confident? I'm sure I've heard that before somewhere...

First of all, note that she - like any famous person entering politics - benefits from the fact that she hasn't taken a stance on anything yet. She'll drop in popularity once she starts taking stands on things. And of course, see my write-up about how we only like strong women when they're not looking for more power.

At least the campaign is over

My fellow straight white able bodied cis males really need to stop saying this. I'm looking your way, Stephen Colbert. Yes, for us, it's over. But for many others, it's only starting.

It was a vicious campaign, we as a nation lost perspective

I'm still looking your way, Stephen. Actually, it was one ordinary campaign, and one over-the-top negative, vindictive, dishonest campaign. And it was the over-the-top negative, vindictive, dishonest campaign that won, so we're going to see more of that in the future. So once again, it's only beginning.

Let's remember, we're all Americans

That's kind of the point. One campaign was built around exclusion, and that was the side that won. So if you're now saying, "can't we all just get along?" the answer is no, Americans apparently don't want to get along. This appeal to work together is another example of a plea we hear a lot: "Let's put aside our differences, and work together to achieve the things my side wants."

When 40 Years Old You Reach, Look As Good You Will Not

I'll try to take a break from Trump-related articles now. I find myself wondering what one does when their ideals have been defeated and their values expunged from government. And the answer I keep coming up with is, accept exile on Degobah.

So, Star Wars. Are young people actually into Star Wars? Or is it just wishful thinking on the part of advertisers? I keep seeing ads for Star-Wars-related items portraying kids to young to remember the prequels as playing make believe in the franchise's .

I know some parents my age have introduced their kids to the holy trilogy. So it's probably easy to sell Star Wars toys to those parents. And there seems to be a wide market too; I mentioned Star Wars make up earlier. You can get Star Wars tights and other feminine clothing. I'm assuming the marketing juggernaut isn't slowing down or we'd hear rumours of companies dumping unsold BB8 necklaces in the desert.

The point is, it's kind of ironic that this third generation of Star Wars is a hit with the whole family. When the prequels started up in the late 90's, many of the old fans like myself thought they came off as a little childish. No, this isn't going to be another rant against Jar-Jar. Though, you know, Jar-Jar. But there we're lots of aspects of those movies that were cartoony or dumbed-down.

George Lucas answered criticism like this by pointing out that the original movies were made to appeal to kids, which is why folks like me - who were kids when the original trilogy came out - got into them in the first place. So it wasn't fair for us to begrudge the next generation their own child-oriented movie series.

I could see the logic behind that, except for a couple of things: Realistically, he had to know the audience would be mostly aging fans of the original, whether he likes it or not. And the fact is that young audiences are getting more mature in their media (witness the direction of superhero movies as an example.) In my admittedly subjective opinion, Lucas had gone in the opposite direction, trying to win over modern kids with movies more childish than the ones that won us over in the seventies.

So now the new movies - without Lucas' involvement - have abandoned his strategy. Instead, they're making movies that mostly fit with what the now thirty- to fifty-something original fans were looking for. And yet that ends up appealing to kids better than the prequels did.

Top Ten Good Things About Donald Trump Winning The Election

10. No need to listen to years of "It was rigged!"
9. Make America Great Again? More like Make The Daily Show Great Again!
8. Years from now, when you meet a young man named "Donnie," you'll already know plenty about his parents.
7. Conservatives have bought about all the survivalist gear they'll ever need; it's time for liberals to get in on it.
6. All the commemorative country songs.
5. ...and all the hilarious products Trump himself will sell to commemorate his win.
4. We can spend the next few months watching the media slowly realize that Trump really is President, and it's not that entertaining.
3. Assuming the pattern goes full-circle, we'll now get intelligent, polite, experienced reality stars.
2. Now that we have a new paradigm for successful political personalities, it will be fun watching other candidates try to copy it.
1. Deep-down, we all know it: this is the Karmic price for the Cubs winning the World Series

Eighteen Months Of Insanity

I'm headed back to my media-proof bunker for the next twenty-four hours. But if you want to read even more about the American election, here's a list of all my posts about it.

April, 2015

Hillary Begins The Ascent - ah, a more innocent time when the biggest problem for Hillary Clinton was that people kept calling her by her first name

July, 2015

Where Devils Fear To Tread - a negative impact from Donald Trump's campaign, win or lose

August, 2015

And Now Here It Is, Your Moment Of Absolute Panic - I'm first onto the Trump-is-scary-not-funny bandwagon

Electioneering: No Surprises - I make a clever explanation of Donald Trump's popularity, and a not-so-clever predition about his election success

October, 2015

Split The Difference - the difficulty in finding a candidate that appeals to everyone (bonus: I make a brilliant election prediction)

That's The News, And I Am Outta Here - about Trump's SNL hosting

November, 2015

Two Rails Are Safe, Let's Try The Third - outlining how Trump may Go Too Far

February, 2016

One Nightmare Down, Three To Go - I come up with several nightmare scenarios for the election, none of which are Trump winning the nomination

March, 2016

A Rare Right Turn - NASCAR's sort-of but not-really endorsement of Donald Trump

May, 2016

Cruz In For A Bruisin' - Poor Ted Cruz, he tried so hard

Preparing For The Trump Influx - a less serious discussion of how Canada can deal with Americans fleeing their country after a Trump election win.

June, 2016

Whistlin' Yankee - how Trump has changed how politicians refer to controversial topics

July, 2016

A Sudden Sense of Liberty - I tackle the old question of why relgious Americans love Donald Trump so much

August, 2016

A Smear To Far - the aftermath of Trump's attack on Captain Khan's family

Politically Incorrect Humour - I try in vain to convince non-political-junkies not to try doing political jokes during this election

Scar Tissue - I look at conservatives and their taste in 90's music

September, 2016

Lies, Damned Lies, And Satire - how comedians and talk shows have handled the election

October, 2016

Going Back For Thirds - a quick rundown of third-party candidates

Surveying The Slightly Insulted - how minorities not targetted by Trump have reacted to him

Do Rats Get Adorable Little Lifeboats To Abandon Sinking Ships? - the sexual assault accusations against Donald Trump and their effects on his candidacy

Try To Keep Up - more aftermath of Trump's sex assault issue

Peace Offering - the morality of Democrats paying for a firebombed Republican office

November, 2016

This Is On You - the effects of gender on Hillary Clinton's likability

I Know You Are But What Am I - the single weirdest thing about Donald Trump's campaign

I Know You Are But What Am I

Okay, there's a million unbelievable things that have happened in this election, so I'm just going to look at the most unbelievable, at least to me.

Melania Trump has announced that she wants to fight bullying, particularly cyber-bullying. Okay, that's weird to begin with, but not the unbelievable thing that I'm getting to. Sure, a First Lady usually picks a cause to promote, so nice of her to consider that. Aside from the fact that it's a bit presumptuous to be anouncing that before the election, there's the huge problem that she's married to someone who is basically bullying personified.

But there is precedent for this sort of thing. I've written about bullying-hypocrisy before. And Laureen Harper, wife of PM Stephen, tried to promote an anti-bullying strategy, also oblivious to the fact that she was married to Exhibit A. I'd like to think that they, on some level, they understand that their husbands are part of the problem. Remember how Barabara Bush, first lady to Bush Sr., promoted literacy. And then we met her son. And her other son. And her nephew.

Melania fighting bullying is strange, but wouldn't even make the top hundred strange things in this campaign. But here's the thing that I haven't been able to understand right from the start: Trump's a bully, and a candidate bullying his way almost all the way to the presidency doesn't surprise me. But, Trump is so bad at being a bully.

I mean, he's definitely got some abilities: in the primaries he showed a talent for someone's weakness and attaching a label that would stick. Low-energy Jeb, little Marco Rubio, that showed some real evil social skills. But there have also been so many blatantly obvious, grasping at straws moments. "No puppet, no puppet...You're the puppet" Really? Seven-year-olds on a playground would laugh at someone who tried to deflect an insult so desperately.

Countless people have noticed the pattern that he keeps insulting people by accusing others of his own faults, like some sort of ready-made psychoanalysis. It's comical, but it also displays his own weaknesses for all to see. Again, on any playground, that sort of thing would be exploited by everyone around him.

And then there's his common tactic of avoiding questions by spouting a meandering stream of diversions, vague descriptions and promises without details. Of course, polilticians have verbally dodged questions forever, but he is, once again, incredibly bad at it. Rather than distract us from bad news - as most politicians would - he transparently displays that he has no knowledge or plans on the topic he was asked about. Some people have compared this technique to that of a child giving a book report and hoping the teacher won't figure out he hasn't read the book. But a different metaphor is that of a kid trying to fit in, exaggerate his experience, tell everyone he's drank beer, kissed a girl, or kicked someone's ass.

So I don't get it. Bullying is part of everyone's past, and I can understand that the amoral or the authoritarian might be taken-in as adults by someone who displays the traits of a bully as proof of strength. But surely anyone who displays that agression as clumsily as Trump does would end up seeming like a wannabe, and perceived as just another weakling.

You Say You're Not Really That Keen On A Revolution

Most people think of politics as a spectrum. That is, you're not just "left" or "right;" there are different degrees from one extreme to the other. As such, you'd think that people's allegiance would be based on distance on the scale, not just which side you're on. As an analogy, a six-foot-tall man might be called "tall," as is a seven-footer. But really, the six-footer's life is less like the seven-footer, and more like a five-foot-six guy, even though the latter is considered "short." Similarly, centre-right and centre-left politicians have more in common with each other than they do with the extreme voices in their own party.

At least, you'd think so. In practice, I find that people usually find a kinship with others in their own side, even if their views are very different.

An example is when people observe politics in other countries. In the US, all of politics is shifted to the right compared to much of the Western world, such that conservative politicians from other places have policies similar to American liberals. Yet, you still see international conservatives supporting American conservatives, even if the latter is far from the ideals of the former.

Obviously, this whole discussion is motivated by Donald Trump and the cavalcade of Republicans who have knuckled under and agreed to support him. In many cases, this is even after heavily criticising him. And it's even more perplexing when you consider that the Democrats have nominated a business-friendly centrist who would seem to be about as tempting a nominee as they're likely to get.

It all makes you wonder if everyone is, at heart, an extremist. Maybe we only differ in how pragmatic we are in our pursuit of those ideals. That seems especially likely when we look at the other American party's experience in the primary season. On the surface, the battle between the centrist Clinton and the socialist Sanders is a pretty wide divide. Clinton is unofficially running for Obama's third term, while Sanders was calling for revolutionary changes.

But the view changes when you try comparing politicians' actual beliefs, rather than their policies. You never know whether a moderate politician truly believes their moderate policies are the best, or merely think the moderate policies are all they are able to get accepted. Of course, we can never know the answer to this question, as a pragmatic moderate wouldn't want to let on that they secretly want more extreme policies. But the point is that you don't know for certain what a moderate really wants; they could be ideologically the same as any extremist.

So maybe Hillary Clinton is as socialist as Bernie Sanders, and moderate Republicans have always secretly wanted a Donald Trump type figure. Though that does beg the question: does anyone want moderate policies? In most facets of life, the majority doesn't want extremism. Modern music is not just death metal and ambient electronic, so you don't expect politics to just be communism and fascism.

My guess is the explanation is about comfort. Going back to the idea of the political spectrum: we may all have an idea of the best place on the spectrum to be, but we also have a side we'd like to err on. Political people seem to only be afraid of attacks from one side. For instance, a moderate liberal may not want abolish tradition, but they aren't really afraid of or bothered by it the same way a conservative would be.

If we're not scared of the extremists on our own end of the spectrum, we might choose them over a relatively close candidate on the other side. It comes down to the things we value. You may disagree with an extremist's methods and the degrees they go to, but you may still share their priorities. And thus, you'll know that they won't harm the things you hold most sacred.

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #34

The Cubs will eventually win the World Series.

I don't have a joke about this.  But it does fit the category better than just about anything.

This Is On You

I think Hugh Laurie summed up the U.S. election recently when he appeared on Colbert. Most news focussed on Dr. House diagnosing Donald Trump. But that's not what I'm talking about - after all, do we really need one more person trying to explain what's wrong with him at this point? No, what I thought was insightful was his confusion at people's attitude to Hillary Clinton. As he put it:

The people who hate Hillary hate her so much...I feel as if I've missed the first reel of the film where she burned down the orphanage or something.

That's been my attitude all along. And it's fitting that I saw my views spelled out so clearly on a talk show, because I also had another moment of clarity about Hillary Clinton while watching a talk show.

It was back during the 2008 election campaign, when Bill Maher was on Leno. He happened to mention her name, provoking a few boos from the crowd. Rather than use that as a springboard to take easy shots at her, he challenged the booers, saying,

If you hate Hillary Clinton, that is so on you. She's a bland centrist. If you hate her, those are your issues. You were molested by a real estate lady or something.

Ironically, I could only find the exact text of that quote at a right-wing blog. But back to the issue. Maher has got a point. Centrist Democrats are the vanilla of politics: not everyone will like it, but no one will really hate it. When you actually look at what Hillary stands for and does, you can certainly explain why Republicans will not be won over, or why the far left won't be excited about her. But there's really no explanation for hatred.

But the understanding of Hillary hatred gets more difficult when you look back at her long-term popularity as a poltician. Sady Doyle points out that she's actually been quite popular once she has a job. Her highest popularity was only a few years ago when she was Secretary of State, but her approval ratings plummet when she runs for President. Of course, you can expect a politician to lose some popularity when exposed to political campaigns, but even that can't explain the night-and-day difference in how she's been seen over the past eight years.

People grasp at different explanations, like a lack of charisma. But I don't remember anything this antagonistic against Mitt Romney or Al Gore. But a bland poltician who gets instantly hated when she shows career aspirations? Let's face it: it's all about gender. We've reached a point where we're okay with women in positions of power, but we still haven't accepted women being assertive or striving to achieve.

Armed with that perspective, you can also understand everyone's sudden love affair with Michelle Obama. She's campaigning for Clinton, essentially saying the same things, and getting heaps of praise for it. And people are saying - with varying degrees of subtlety - how much better it would be if she was the one running against Trump. But that's naive. Of course we love her; she's not running for president.  Give her the nomination and the knives will come out.

One of the most disappointing aspects of this problem is how the prejudice is perpetrated by both genders. Throughout the campaign, I've seen so many women express the same vague-but-strong dislike of Hillary Clinton. There'll be talk of attitude, mannerisms, maybe a comparison to a disliked woman you knew in the past.

I know, as a man, I'm not normally in position to school women on sexism. But as a straight-white-able-bodied-cis-male, if there's one thing I do know, it's prejudice. So let me tell you: prejudice doesn't feel wrong. In fact, it doesn't feel like anything. It feels like you, your feelings. When you hate someone but there's no logical reason why. Or when you're okay with Group X, you just don't like this particular member of Group X. That's what it feels like, and you have to challenge yourself on that. It's something we all have to learn to do.

Behind Plastic Eye-Holes

For this Halloween,  I thought I'd complain about the costumes available when I was a kid. Pre-made Halloween costumes from the seventies and eighties were crap.  For a start,  they were just a cheap plastic mask, and a sort of tunic body covering that was obviously just a colourful garbage bag.

But the thing that bugged me most about these things is their complete failure at being costumes.  There'd be, say, a Bugs Bunny costume with a Bugs Bunny mask, but then the plastic garment would have a picture of Bugs Bunny on it, possibly with the words,  "Bugs Bunny" on it.  For one thing, it's a bad costume if you have to tell everyone what you are. But more to the point,  Bugs Bunny doesn't have a picture of himself on his chest. So you aren't dressing up as Bugs Bunny so much as you're dressing up as an obsessed fan of Bugs Bunny, which is no fun.

Even to my developing mind which was still figuring the way the universe works,  I could tell something was wrong with this arrangement.  I couldn't really articulate it,  because it's kind of an existential mobius strip: things don't usually have pictures of themselves on themselves.  So I just had to accept this and not criticize my classmates when they dressed up as Darth Vaders with pictures of Darth Vaders on their chests.

Since then,  I've found that others had the same problem with these costumes.  Apparently they were like Scrappy-Doo: we all hated it,  but didn't say anything at the time.  Anyway,  I bring this up because I'm amazed at how far costumes have come.  Even pretty cheap Value Village costumes are much better than those old plastic monstrosities,  and probably cost the same,  adjusted for inflation. And they at least take a stab at looking like things,  not referring to them.  So that's something kids today can take pleasure in: better Halloween costumes,  and better cartoons.

Mustang Silly

Back in 2002, GM took the Chevy Camaro out of production due to poor sales. I read an editorial in the Detroit Free Press that tried to explain why the Camaro's sales were low, especially considering that it's eternal rival, Ford's Mustang, was still doing well. Unfortunately, I couldn't find it now, but the gist was that the Mustang had some subtlety while the Camaro was too showy, a point they illustrated by refering to the song "Bitchin' Camaro" by the Dead Milkmen. I believe the way they put it was that the Mustang is a cool car for cool people, while the Camaro is the car that tries too hard for people who are desperate to look cool.

At the time, that seemed to me to be an accurate assessment. The Mustang of that era was a fairly modest car, an evolution of a design first used in the late seventies. While the Camaro contemporary was a gaudy vehicle that somehow managed to be sleek but not sexy. So I was totally in line with the editorial board of the Detroit Free Press and the Dead Milkmen.

But I'm not so sure anymore. If you don't follow automotive news on the Internet, let me explain. Owners of impressive cars often get together, for car shows, or more informal gatherings such as the Cars and Coffee series. And when people leave these gatherings, they often can't resist the temptation to lay some rubber. And since many people who own powerful cars cannot drive them nearly as well as they think they can, these burnouts often result in the driver losing control rather embarrassingly. And because there are usually a lot of people around watching this parade of impressive cars leaving the meet, there are a lot of people on hand to see the embarrassed driver, and usually at least one person recording it on their phone. It goes on YouTube, goes viral, yada yada yada.

What's weird is that the car driven by that bad driver is usually a Mustang. I'm not sure why: the Chevy Camaro and Dodge Challenger offer cars of similar design and power, and the Camaro is currently selling better than the Mustang, so you would expect that there would be plenty of Camaro crash footage too. But it's more likely to be a Mustang. And that's led to a bunch of memes on the subject. And that has led to one celebrated case of a Mustang owner who claimed he wanted to sell his car because he was sick of the memes.

In my own experience, I have to say that there may be something to this idea that Mustang owners are a little different. I mean, I think we all start to notice differences in the behaviour of drivers based on their cars. Even if you don't know much about cars, you've probably realized that you have to give SUV's a wider berth, because there is a good chance they haven't noticed you. And similarly, you realize that BMW and Mercedes drivers will notice you, but won't care. And I find that Mustang drivers are more likely to push the limits. When seeing one of them, I do subconsciously ready myself for aggression.

I don't know why there'd by a difference, since both cars seem to have a similar gaze-upon-my-masculinity style to them. But somehow the recklessly aggressive are opting for the Mustang. That's a little troubling for me. Mustang vs. Camaro is one of those dichotomies where you're drawn to one or the other, and I've always had a preference for the Mustang. But I have a much stronger aversion to the culture around it. So now I'm not sure which I would prefer out of these two cars I'm unlikely to ever own.

Subterranean Home: Sick, Alien

You know what would be a good idea: double basements.  That is, you have a basement that's twice as deep, so you have two floors underground.  I know it sounds crazy, but think of the benefits: you have more room in your house without compromising the space in your yard.  You have free insulation.  The ground moderates the temperature of the interior.  But best of all, it is the embodiment of the suburban dream: you live near your neighbours, yet you can also get far, far away from them.

I know, you don't like the idea of living below ground without windows.  Well, you don't really need windows: it's not like the view really changes in suburbia. Besides, in our modern world, you probably aren't looking up from your screens very often anyway, so who needs to look outside. And here in Canada, you'll only be missing out on the twelve days a year that the temperature is right for opening the windows.

And in addition to you not needing to look outside, people outside don't need to look at your house.  Most suburban houses are either small-and-simple, or big-and-ugly. Putting most of the girth underground saves you from having to come up with one decoration after another.  You have enough exposed house to express your sense of style, but you don't feel the need to add gratuitous arches and columns.

So I went googling the idea, but I found that my radical idea was a little too advanced for our timid development industry, saying that it's "too expensive," "probably illegal," and "you'll die from radon." But there was some precedent of it in Britain. It makes sense there, since space is at a premium, and rules often restrict your ability to add on to existing buildings. So if you want to have a big house, but you also want to live in London, building down might be your only choice.

I think that would be ideal: you're living in the city, but you can still have a quiet getaway deep in the earth. So that's what I'll do if I ever make billions.  That, or I'll build a mansion in the suburbs that will be disguised as a normal house.  There'll be a huge basement that takes up the entire property, but only a normal-sized house sticking up above ground, with no indication of anything unusual. The garage will have an elevator down to my car collection. And I'll make a deal with the developer to build my house before anyone else in the subdivision moves in, so no one will know there's anything unusual about it.

Let England Shake

It history, they talk about the "Great Man" theory, which is the idea that most of history is guided by a few strong individuals. Given that no one has bothered updating it to "Great Person," You can surmise that it's not a very popular view anymore. Today, historians are more likely to see the path of history guided by big movements among many people. For instance, both world wars were, on the surface, triggered by individuals. But both wars were the result of much bigger societal and economic forces, and probably would have happened eventually anyway, even if they weren't triggered as they were.

But I still find it interesting to look for those times when an individual makes a decision that impacts history. I mean a situation where the decision is not pushed by outside considerations, but instead is an individual's judgement. I'd say one example would be the Cuban Missile Crisis, where Kennedy and Khrushchev could have taken any of a number of actions, and that could have had huge impacts on the course of history.

Another example would be Brexit. I know, that sounds like the complete opposite of what I'm taking about. It was a referendum of a large country, not an individual's decision. But it was an individual - Prime Minister David Cameron - who decided to hold the referendum. It wasn't because of a recent change in support for the European Union in Britain; it was a calculated strategy.

British politics in general, and the Conservative Party in particular, have always suffered from the distraction of euroskeptics, those who dislike and demonize the European Union. The intention with the referendum was to get the public to agree to remain in the EU, thus disarming euroskeptics in the future, since the country would have very publicly endorsed membership in the EU.

Of course, it didn't go at all according to plan. The public surprised everyone by voting to Leave. What I find interesting in this is that Cameron's gambit has changed the direction of modern Britain, and it's all due to nothing more than timing: young people were disproportionately in favour of staying in the EU, Britain's membership in the Union would get more popular. So if Cameron had chosen a different strategy for dealing with euroskeptics, there never would have been a referendum for another decade or two. That hypothetical vote would have gone the other way. Today's young people, who mostly wanted to Remain, will eventually be the majority. But they'll live the rest of their lives in a more isolated country outside the EU, even though that wasn't their choice.

This all comes to mind because the Brexit referendum seems to have changed the entire mood in Britain. You may have already seen the reports of a troubling increase in racist attacks since the referendum, as the nation's bigots seem to feel empowered. The country's already nationalist newspapers were all-too happy to make their biases more open. But on top of that, the new post-Cameron Conservative government has embraced the anti-foreigner feeling, with disturbing promises to name and shame companies employing non-Britons.

So essentially, Cameron's strategy not only failed, it actually worked backwards: instead of discrediting the euroskeptics, the referendum discredited those who believed in a more international, interconnected country. I don't know how long this new attitude will last, but for now it appears that the entire country is going quickly in a new direction. And it's a direction that it really didn't need to go.

It certainly seems hard to stop. While all this has been going on in government, the opposition Labour Party is having its own crisis. It's currently lead by Jeremy Corbyn, who seems to be Bernie Sanders without the endearing anti-charisma. He's not popular with fellow politicians or - according to polls - the general public. But he's super popular among left-leaning people, so they put him in the position, then confirmed him when his own caucus tried to kick him out.

Of course, this sort of situation comes up a lot in politics: should the party choose the middle-of-the-road candidate the general public will like, or the ideologically-pure candidate the party members want? Essentially, both American political parties struggled with the same choice in the primaries. Yet with Labour, there seems to be no one arguing for moving to a leader that's more palatable to the electorate. Of course I don't know all the nuances of the situation, but in the discussion online, I've noticed that when anyone argues for centrism, Corbyn's supporters are quick to invoke the name of Tony Blair.

Their view seems to be that Blair made the deal that if the party moved to the centre, they could get into power, even if they didn't get everything the membership wanted. That worked, until he made the uber-blunder of joining George W. Bush's war in Iraq. That move wasn't merely unpopular, it was everything the party membership hated. Honestly, it was worse to them than anything Margaret Thatcher ever did. So Labour Party members felt like they'd been tricked into electing a might-as-well-be-Conservative government. That's poisoned the concept of moving to the political centre, and it is a non-starter among party members. Every liberal party may have is hardliners who say that moderates like Hillary Clinton are no better than their conservative opponents, but at Labour, they appear to believe it.

So all together, it seems like the United Kingdom has really lost it. But really, the crumbling seems to be concentrated in England. Scotland had far less problems with post-referendum hate crimes. And they voted solidly to stay, so now they're eying the exits. And people started talking about Irish reunification. And you know things are bad when even Wales is talking about leaving. But that's where they make Doctor Who. Great, another British institution that could pay the price.

England's problems are deeper than politics and economics; it's beloved soccer team has been a sort of metaphor for the country recently, first getting booted from the Euros by small but united Iceland, then losing their new coach after just one match thanks to bizarre bragging about rule-breaking. It's hard not to come to the conclusion that England has Jumped the Shark. Or, whatever the national equivalent of jumping the shark is. Actually, this could coin a new phrase. I suspect that centuries from now, people will be saying that China is no longer the country it once was, and that maybe it's "Voted to Leave."

These Memes Won't Turn Anyone On

I'm kind if surprised that people are still using homosexuality as a putdown.  For instance, I've seen a few variations on the graphic to the right.

As you can see, it makes pronouncements about how various musical jobs will affect a man's ability to attract women.  For the most part it shows the hierarchy we'd expect, putting the singer and guitarist at the top.  Although in my experience, people are quicker to slag the drummer than the bassist, but either way, neither gets the respect they deserve.

But it's disappointing that they use the implication of gay men to deliver the ultimate put down to the keyboardist.  Yes, I know, homosexuality has been devalued forever, this shouldn't be news.  But with its increasing acceptance in society, you'd think the people who still see it as an insult would be aging legislators who don't know how to use the Internet.

So it worries me that a lot of the acceptance of homosexuals may be shallower than we think.  People have gotten to the point of accepting their existence, or their lack of evilness at least. But perhaps they still haven't gotten to the point of seeing it as equal to any other sexuality.

Like I said, I've seen a few variations on it.  One was to insult different types of cars.  Unfortunately I couldn't find it when I just went looking, but the same point can be made with these graphics that reflect demonizing of gay men, or possibly straight women:

And of course it reasserts my point that the Chevy/Ford rivalry is just a meaningless lobbing of the same insults back and forth.

But the breaking point that prompted me to write this was when I saw the meme applied to programming languages:

I assume that if you aren't familiar with programming, then this looks rather surreal, a bunch of unfamiliar names arbitrarily assigned to implications of virility. Well let me reassure you that even if you are familiar with all these languages, it looks about the same.  I really have no idea how they decided on these, other than that it was obviously put together by a PHP programmer. As the oldest and least-forgiving language there, one would think that C will make you attractive to others. Maybe Perl if you're looking for someone particularly kinky. But the point is, that shows how silly this all is. People are just flinging outdated insults at others, but all they're doing is exposing their own bigotry .

Peace Offering

Sunday night, a Republican campaign office in North Carolina was firebombed. We don't yet know who did it, but graffiti at the scene showed it to be a targetted act. Even in this particularly bitter campaign, that is taking things to a scary new level. Some Democrats were also troubled this, so they set up a crowd funding campaign to raise $10,000 to fix the office. News of the campaign spread quickly, and the money was raised within hours.

That funding campaign seemed like a nice thing to do. After all, no civilized person wants to win because of violence, whoever committed it. So offering a helping hand goes a little way to revelling the playing field. But I've found a number of left-leaning people on the Internet didn't like it. Certainly, no one endorsed the bombing, but the fact is that the gesture is just symbolic, since the Republicans presumably have insurance.  And of course, it's an expensive gesture; ten grand may seem like a drop in the bucket in billion-dollar campaigns, but it still could have made a big difference for individuals.  And much as we'd all like to view political opponents as honourable and respectable, the fact is that Trump's Republicans have caused real harm to large numbers of people.  And this is North Carolina, where state republicans pushed through anti-LGBT legislation earlier this year.

So was it a good idea to give money to someone who's actively working to make many people's lives worse?  To me, it still seems intuitively like it is.  Though I have to point out that, in the tiny sample size of people I read on line, the people in favour were generally straight-white-able-bodied-cis-males like myself. Those who had problems with the monetary gift usually had one or more traits that put them in the Republicans' crosshairs.  So perhaps I'd see it differently from that perspective.

It would be nice to believe that we could do something that would ease the reconciliation after the election.  I know, that sounds naive, but at some point, people have to get along. I'd like to think that a gift like this would help the process, though I realize it may not work out. Playing up the bombing will reinforce Trump's us-against-the-world narrative, and his supporters will probably never hear about it on conservative media.  Still, I hope it made an impression on someone that there was an effort to restore a little fairness.

Voices Carry

I was just reading a transcript of a speech by President Obama, and realized I was reading it in his voice.  I'm sure in not the only person who does this, especially for people with distinctive voices.  I first became conscious of the phenomena when I read something written by Stephen Hawking, and just couldn't get through it without hearing it in his computer synthesized voice.

In some cases, reading in another's voice is inevitable, if they have a distinctive way of putting words together. It's easier to read Donald Trump's words in his voice, because that's the way we're used to hearing those meandering parades of sentence fragments.

Surprisingly,  I don't often read tweets in other's voices,  though that's because of the strange fact that I have heard little if any spoken words from the folks I follow.  So many of them are people I've found on twitter or elsewhere on the Internet.  The one exception is sportscaster Vic Rauter who tweets in the same spurts of phrases that he talks in, so I find it impossible to read them any other way.

I've tried to think back to remember if I did this reading quotes in the past, but I don't think I did.  But it occurs to me that we didn't really read the words of others very often.  Books and newspaper articles were written by people we'd never heard the voices of. Famous people spoke on TV,  but we didn't really have the chance to read anything they wrote. The most was perhaps reading a quote,  say in a newspaper. But they were often edited for grammar, and weren't very long.  Actually reading things written by famous people is a unique feature of our age.

Try To Keep Up

Today I saw a news bite that Jamie Lee Curtis had criticized Donald Trump for his attack on Lindsay Lohan.  I was like, wait, what?  I thought it was Marlee Matlin that he had criticized.  Oh, that was earlier today, leaked from Celebrity Apprentice. The loan insult was from an old Howard Stern. That's it, even for a person like myself, who tries to keep up with current events,  even with our 24 hour news cycle, the scandals are coming to fast to digest. We have reached the scandal singularity.

The reaction to accusations of sexual assault against Trump have followed a predictable pattern. You may have heard of Lewis' Law "Comments on any article about feminism justify feminism." I think we need a new law: People's reaction to women finally coming forward to talk about sexual assault is why women are so reluctant to talk about sexual assault.

On the one hand, there seem to be more people willing to listen instead of dismiss the allegations. Some of it is because people are finally getting experience and understanding of the issue. Though I suppose it's also because the allegations square with Trump's public personna more easily than they did with Bill Cosby. It's also easier to understand their desire to keep quiet given the accused's quickness with litigation. But on the other hand, the partisan nature of this issue had meant that people ate dug in on both sides, so the fight is going to be extra toxic. But it's further evidence that people are coming to accept this election as the referendum on civility that I always saw it to be.

Do Rats Get Adorable Little Lifeboats To Abandon Sinking Ships?

You've probably heard about the tape of Donald Trump saying Trumpy things. And now, at long last, it seems he has Finally Done It. Yes, as predicted by so many, he has Gone Too Far, and Republicans are making the decision of whether or not to jump ship. So if you choose "jocular discussion of sexual assault" in your Trump self-destruction pool, congratulations.

Observing liberals online, this lead to 24 hours of rejoicing, followed by anger that none of the other disgusting things he's done was enough to trigger such anger. If you are wondering why this was the final straw, here are some ideas:

• When you read or heard Trump's remarks you probably involuntarily pictured him doing the things he was talking about. And depending on your life experience and the literalness you took the remarks at, it was somewhere between bizarre and horrifying. But think back to that mental image and ask yourself, what colour is the woman?
• Notably, Trump made it clear it didn't matter if a woman was married. That allows old-fashioned men to take it personally, in a way that his insults against women don't.
• Republicans have been caught in a kind of Emperor's New Clothes situation with Trump, in which he holds so much sway over the party's voters that no one wants to point out that he's naked. This incident is the first that's big enough that people have the confidence to believe they won't be the only ones involved in the coup. Even as it is, we're seeing the wrath of Trump Nation. Republicans that criticised him are getting rude receptions at campaign events, and accusations of treason, and that's the ones that didn't actually pull their support.
• This leak is a great example of the "October Surprise." Elections are in November, and dropping big negative news just before the election gives the opponent little time to recover. What must have Republicans worried is that this leak came out on October 7, implying that there's plenty more to come. Indeed, people from The Apprentice claim there are.
• Keep in mind that the politicians will know things about the campaign that we don't. For instance, it's important to remember that the polls we see in the media are cheap things that are often not that accurate. The parties themselves do polling that's of much higher quality (which they keep to themselves.) So it's possible that Republicans knew the situation was bad even before this incident - say since the first debate - and had been looking for an excuse to jump ship.
• There were already several allegations of sexual assault against Trump, but they weren't getting much play in the media. We saw in the Bill Cosby situation that there was a turning point when the allegations went from being assumed unfounded and ignored, to widely believed. So there's a possibility of that pattern repeating itself with Trump, especially if anyone else feels empowered to step forward now.
• Keep in mind that Americans vote for lots of things at once, so voters will be selecting not only the president, but also representatives, and possibly senators, governors and other lower positions. Party leaders have to be concerned about Trump's effect on the other races. Even if he can ride an alt-right wave to victory, that would still turn people off of Republicans in general, or discourage traditional Republican supporters from showing up to the polls, thus hurting the party in all those other races. There's already word that the party is diverting money and effort away from the presidency and to other campaigns.

Give Up Truckin'

There's a movie coming called Monster Trucks. It won't be out until early next year, so you normally wouldn't be hearing about it so early. But it made the news not in the entertainment section but the business section. Apparently, the movie is so bad that the studio's accountants are taking a $115 million write-down on the movie, which is accounting-speak for "this movie's gonna bomb, so we'll just write all the negative numbers in the budget right now." And it's all under the assumption that it will bomb at the box office.

You might think that a movie about monster trucks would be a slam-dunk for Americans. And it stars the guy from the new MacGyver, who I was surprised to see is not also one of the guys from Supernatural. The idea is that this particular truck is possessed by an actual monster. See, this is what they call a "high concept" film, where there's a simple premise, which is explained in the title.

This preemptive panic by the studio had invited people to start piling-on the criticism. A movie about a monster living in a truck? What a silly idea, of course it's a failure. It gets worse when people find out that the movie was inspired at least in part by a studio exec's five-year-old. Again, cue the amateur critics, tut-tutting the idea.  But really, it's not that different from Cars, which was wildly popular. And Disney even managed to wring more money out of that concept with Planes, which you have to think would be a flimsier idea that going with trucks.

And the exec's son? Was it really such a dumb idea to get a kid's input on a kids' movie? After all, that little consultation could have prevented Mars Needs Moms. I don't understand why the same public that notices, or even revels in, the stupidity of movies, thinks that it's obvious which movies are going to be popular. And also, give the public a little credit for being open to oddball ideas.  Can you really say Monster Trucks is an inherently worse idea than Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs?  

I'm not saying it will be a success.  Though studios are sometimes surprised by bombs,  if they know the movie is in trouble this early,  they're likely right. Having seen the trailer,  it looks like it could be dumb fun,  though not nearly what I would expect from a movie whose two defining concepts are "monsters" and "monster trucks."  So I have no doubt the write-down is correct. But don't fire that exec's kid just yet.