Train In Vain

Do you remember Consumers Distributing? If you're too young, or too non-Canadian, I'll explain that it was a catalog-based retailer. Their "stores" were little more than small warehouses with a few desks out front where you could order items. Then a sales person would go back into the warehouse and find they were out of your item and they'd have to order it.

Anyway, Consumers went under some time in the early 90's, and their stores became so many bingo halls. But I always thought that was such unfortunate timing. After all, who would be better positioned to take advantage of e-commerce, than a company who already had an ordering system and network of warehouses? If they could have just survived that early-nineties recession, they could have beat everyone to the market and ensured years of prosperity, instead of ending up as a retail footnote.

I'm reminded of how cruel business timing can be when I look at this:

This is a plaza near where I live. As you can see, it's seen better days. A number of businesses have cone and gone, and it's mostly closed now. Its parking lot is small and hard to get into, it's off to the side of other shopping areas, and it's not the most prosperous neighbourhood to begin with.

The sad part is what you can see in the front of it:

It's a half-finished light rail station. Yes, this sad-sack plaza has suddenly become prime real estate, because it's right outside one of the stops on KW's new transit system. We've recently seen several other development projects started or announced near other stations, as they transform eyesores and vacant lots into hot properties.

So just think, if any of those businesses could have just hung on for a few more years, they'd be looking great right now, with a big source of foot traffic dropped right in front of them  Instead, it will fall to new businesses to take advantage. Someday soon, the closed stores will be filled by over-priced coffee shops, who's patrons will be unaware of the ghosts of short-lived nail salons around them.

It Was The Best Of Forms, It Was The Worst Of Forms

Years ago, I remember an article on computer usability. They had an example of an online form where you had to choose the city you were from. This form was used by people from all over the US, so when you type in the city name, if there was more than one city by that name in the country, it would have to ask which state before proceeding. The usability experts suggested that this was poor design, since the vast majority of people who type, "Boston" will be from the famous Boston in Massachusetts, but they will have to select it from a list of all the pokey little Bostons around the US.

This article suggested that web site should just send you to the page for Boston, Massachusetts, and make the citizens of other Bostons have to click a link to go to another Boston. (That's sort of how Wikipedia works: If you search for Boston, it sends you to the Boston MA page, and forces you to choose the "Disambiguation Page" to choose a different Boston.) At the time, I - being from a small town - thought that was an unfair approach. Yes, I know, I'm forcing the 4.6 million people in the greater Boston area to pick their city our of a list, just for the sake of a few hundred people from other Bostons. But hey, equality and all that. If Vermont gets as many senators as California, then Bostonians can make an extra click.

Well, after another decade or so of filling in forms online, I take that back. Kitchener, British Columbia, I hate you. You may only be a few streets in the Kootenays, but some people seem to think you deserve to be listed in online forms, instead of rolling you in with Cranbrook. If it was, say, Kitchener, Saskatchewan, then we'd at least be at the top of the list by alphabetical order and we wouldn't have to scroll down. But no, we have to key down to miss the few hundred of you or whatever; I don't even know the population, because you don't even get your own Wikipedia page.

Look, "Kitchener" isn't a great name. It sounds weird, and it honours a really despicable man. So you'd think we could at least have it to ourselves. And unlike Ontarians, British Columbians are great at naming things. I mean, Kamloops, Nanaimo, Chilliwack, Kelowna. So please, leave us to our strange name.

Teenage Fanclub

Harry Styles, of One Direction, recently made headlines when he came to the defense of teen girls and their choices of music. He says their tastes are unfairly maligned, and are just as legitimate as those of a thirty-something hipster.

In the general point that we shouldn't be so critical of teen girls' favourite music, I have to agree. And we definitely shouldn't (as many do but won't admit it) hate music because it's liked by teenage girls. But I can't go along with the everyone's-equally-discriminating-and-a-People's-Choice-Award-is-better-than-an-Oscar philosophy Styles and the above article supporting him are pushing.

I'll give you "we respect girls' music less than boys'." We tend to ridicule the targets of girls' fandom as talentless pretty boys, while giving a free pass to boys' idols, who are often talentless expressions of meaningless rage and rebellion. I'll also concede that there's often an ugly motivation behind the criticism of girls' idols, in which the critics attack a boy-band or sensitive singer-songwriter for seeming unmasculine. But they hide the homophobia in these attacks by wrapping them in high-minded musical notions.

But I can't go along with Styles's main thesis. The fact is, teens - of any gender - have some bad musical taste. It's not universal of course; many do have better taste than most adults. But when I look back at the history of artists propelled to the top by teen fandom, it's hard not to conclude that a big portion of teens have been listening with their hormones and little else. Yes, you can - as Styles did - point to the Beatles as an example of teens getting it right before anyone else. But for every such example, there are dozens of artists chosen by teens that turned out to have no talent behind the facade.

You can certainly point to many examples of hipsters who like something just because others do, or to try to look cool. But if we put aside the outliers on each side and just ask whose ear you trust more, the hipster or the youngster? Sorry Harry, but my money is on the hipster.

Oh Lord, Won't You Iron Me A Mercedes Benz?

Mercedes Benz' head of design Gorden Wagener has announced that the time of creases is over. No, this wasn't some executive acid trip, it actually meant something. You see ceases in all kinds of cars these days: they're the sudden, superfluous angles in otherwise smooth metal. Creases can have all sorts of aesthetic purposes: making flat surfaces more interesting, making things seem shorter or narrower (which is great on humongous SUV's.)

But it's really gotten excessive. Combined with other unnecessary styling additions like fake vents chrome accents, we're in an era of ornamentation. It may not be as noticeable because they aren't as ostentatious as tailfins, but it's similar levels excess.

I mentioned before about how much of the radiator grille on a modern cars is often fake. But it's really reached a new level in which cars have fake vents that don't even really look like vents any more. They may have a square of patterned black plastic, but there's obviously no opening, and it's in a place where you woudn't expect a vent to be, like in front of the wheel. Essentially, they just wanted to break up some plain area of the body, so they just stuck some random shape there.

I'm not some modernist hardliner demanding that everything on a car have a reason. I'm just saying that we've pushed the pendulum too far. With all the chrome and angles on today's cars, we might as well drop the pretence of maturity and go back to putting firebird decals on the hood. So I'll applaud anyone who will push the trends the other way.

But as some have pointed out, the concept car being revealed by Mercedes does still have creases. But it doesn't rely on them nearly as much as other cars. It has a nice rounded, relatively-minimal look. And that brings up something I've worried about in recent years. I used to find Mercedes car designs pretty boring, like they were aiming for the Platonic ideal for sedans. But lately I find like their designs a lot more. What worries me is: I have no idea whether they've improved their designs, or this is just part of the natural aging process for me.

Filtering Facebook

Yesterday the local TV station did a story on the murderer who streamed his killing on Facebook. Or, to be specific, it was about the use of the Internet to publicise the crime. I had several problems with it. For one thing, they played a lot of the video (cutting it before the act itself, of course.) But the most objectionable aspect of the filming was the making the innocent victim a prop in his game of revenge, and showing the recording plays into that.

But that was clearly not the way they were looking at it. The reporter went through some other crimes that have been broadcast on Facebook or other social media sites. That list included the case of Philando Castile, who was shot by a police officer, which was recorded by his girlfriend, who wanted to show that the killing was unprovoked. Now most people would say there is a world of difference between a remorseless killer broadcasting his crime as a twisted revenge and a victim broadcasting a crime to prove its injustice. But in this case the journalist was more concerned with the fact that violence is being spread on the Internet, than with the causes of the violence.

And that brings up another aspect of the story that I find frustrating: the apparent surprise that a person can post something violent on the Internet. To be clear, Facebook did take the video down (although they took their time about it.) But this report (and several other media outlets I've come across.) Seem to be questioning how the video got on the site to begin with. I'm not really sure what they're envisioning; Do they expect teams of people vetting everything uploaded to Facebook, or Artificial Intelligence that can make sense of videos at the level that they can tell the difference between an actual murder and a clip from an action movie.

I can't believe that we're a quarter-century into the Internet revolution and we're still having this conversation. If we're going to have a medium where everyone is a publisher or broadcaster, there is no way we can automatically edit out what we don't want. We can act to remove it when it happens, but we can't have a world where objectionable material never appears. In other media, society came to an understanding with what was possible and what was reasonable to expect. No one expects the phone company to stop people planning crimes using their system. We've made - and accepted - the idea that the reduction in crime wouldn't be worth the expense or intrusion in privacy. But we can't seem to reach that consensus with today's technology.

Just to clarify, I'm not one of those techno-libertarians who thinks the Internet shouldn't have any rules. We do need rules, and our Internet institutions could usually benefit from more of them. We just need to be realistic about what they can do. And that's part of why I'm angry about this: there are important discussions that we need to have in this society about what's going to be acceptable on the Internet, but we can't have those discussions because so many of us still live in a fantasy world where we can get anything we want just by telling the nerds to throw technology at it.

Hal, Tell Them About Doritos

Burger King got into the news recently because of a clever but dickish ad. The ad has someone saying, "OK, Google, what is the Whopper burger?" As you may know, "OK Google" is the phrase used to get the attention of Google-based products, like Android phones (For you Apple types, it's the equivalent of addressing a question to Siri.)

Of course, that means that any Google products in hearing range will be activated, and go to a page on the Whopper. Google responded by changing the programming to recognize that particular sound clip and not respond to it. And, just to underline that Burger King is subversive/tone-deaf, they re-recorded the clip to get around Google's response.

In case you're wondering, yes, it is possible to change the phrase to something else on your Google products, so this won't happen. I'm reminded that in the sci-fi book, Old Man's War, there are personal assistants built into people's heads, and most people find it so intrusive that they choose profane names to address it with. That would solve your problem: just use one of the words you can't say in TV.

It seems to me that there's a learning-curve for everyone when it comes to new technology and media, where we all learn about what is going to be considered acceptable. In the early World Wide Web, there was a company - I think it was Pepsi - who programmed their web page to record the e-mail address of everyone who came to the site. Today, it's hard to believe that a company wouldn't know that would blow up in their face, or that we were so naive about privacy that a Web browser would give out your info to whoever asked. When people found out, there were complaints, they stopped the e-mail trawl.

But the other similarity in these two incidents is that it came from exactly who you would expect it from. For all their imperfections, it's hard to imagine McDonald's pushing the limits of acceptable use of technology like this. But Burger King and Pepsi are both playing the role of the brash upstart in their business duels. Of course they'd be the one to push the limits to far. Coke isn't going to offend everyone by trying to appeal to woke youngsters, but Pepsi would. In the book, Infinite Jest, where years are named after their sponsors, it's mentioned that the first such year was the Year of the Whopper. And that made total sense; of course they were the first ones to buy a year. They always will be.

I Hope Melissa McCarthy Was Free This Weekend

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer got into trouble this week for his attempt to compare Syria's dictator to Hitler. He tried to say Assad is even worse, because he used chemical weapons against his own people, unlike Hitler. It was quickly pointed out that Hitler was quite famous for gassing his own people, even if it wasn't on the battlefield.

I'm amazed at how not-angry I am at this. After all, it has the classic Trump attrocity characteristics:

• It's incredibly agressive
• It's not true
• It has racist undertones
• It's from a guy who's clearly in over his head

So why can't I get angry at this? I'm sure it's partly because Trump vs. Assad is one of the few fights where I'd back Trump. But the main reason I'm not feeling the hate towards Spicer is that in this incident, normalicy seems to have reasserted itself.

Sure, the infraction may have been classic Trumpism. But as they say on the Internet, you'll never guess what happens next:

• A journalist corrects him immediately.
• Spicer admits he was wrong
• The media concentrates on the story, without some tortured attempt at false equivalence
• Spicer continues appologizing, rather than doubling down.
• Others with an interest in supporting Trump don't look the other way.

Wow, it's like the good old days of 2014. So, much as I would have liked to see Spicer resign, or come to some personal revelation about his life choices, I'm actually coming away from this feeling better about things.

Looks Like We Made It

Wow, can you believe Barry Manilow is gay?  Oh, you can. Well, that seems to be the reaction: people aren't really surprised.  I was a bit surprised, since I would have thought that most gay celebrities are out now.  Could someone check The Closet, and let everyone else know it's safe to come out now.

But I'm a little disappointed that a lot of people have reacted to the news by saying that they always knew he was gay, or to ask why didn't he come out a long time ago, homosexuality has been accepted for decades, you know, Liberace and The Village People and them.

As for the idea that you knew it all along, I have to point out:

• There's a secretly-gay rumour for just about every male celebrity
• Have you seen the seventies? Even the really masculine guys had moustaches that would seem over-the-top at a Pride Parade today.

And for the people who think gay celebrities have always been accepted: Some of those folks are probably from that odd brand of bigotry that fervently denies that bigotry exists. But others seem to be really misremembering the past. Yes, you can point to gay artists of the 60's-80's, but a surprising number of them publicly denied their sexuality until more enlightened times. Liberace might seem like the most obviously gay man of all time, yet he claimed to be straight throughout his life.

The fact is that our society has had a strange attitude towards homosexuality for a while now, and there was a long period where we had kind of accepted that it didn't really hurt anyone, but we still held on to the general idea that it was wrong.  And that lead to a lot of celebrities who were stereotypically gay, but would never admit to it, fearing it would be career suicide.  And for a long time, they were probably right.

(Fun fact: The Village People weren't all gay.)

As if to underline our muddled views of sexuality, there's news that John Mayer has found a more masculine heart emoji. Specifically, he's using the heart from the playing card symbols, not the heart intended to symbolize love, which is more rounded. Certainly, it's not clear whether he was joking, but given the continued need people have to defend masculinity, I can't tell anymore.  It's one of the big mysteries of modern society: homosexuality is getting more and more widely accepted, yet men seem ever more fearful of appearing gay.  Just like there are fewer closeted celebrities, yet people are as quick as ever to speculate on who's secretly gay.

Ironically, by jumping to conclusions about people's sexual preference just based on their traits or interests, we're fuelling men's need to affirm their masculinity. Yes, I know, they should be accepting enough of others that they wouldn't mind being mistaken for gay.  But it's also putting a lot of pressure on them when they know that everyone will be quick to misrepresent their sexual preference the second they step outside of society's notions of heterosexual men. And it's all because people have this bizarre need to say "told you so" as soon as anyone comes out. So let's just stop the speculation and let people express their sexuality as they see fit.

Always On My Mind

You sometimes hear a person praised for always saying what's on their mind.

I don't know why this is such a good thing. I'm far more concerned with what a person has on their minds, rather than whether they say it. After all, a quick look at social media verifies that opinions are not rare, but thought is. I have to wonder why you never hear this said about people who have a lot of interesting things on their mind.

“This is Sue; she always says what's on her mind.”
“Pleased to meet you. Do you think a person can feel in control of their life without blaming themselves for their failings?”

I don't know, maybe people are like this if they’re in a more intellectual setting. Say, in a physics institute, they do describe one another that way.

“This is Dr. McNeil, she always says what's on her mind.”
“Hi, I believe quantum chromodynamics can be modified to explain the weak interactions of nucleons.”

Really, if we're honest about what is actually on our minds most of the time, we'd admit that it's good that people don't usually say what's on their mind.

“This is Bob; he always says what's on his mind.”
“How are you doing? I have to get bread on the way home.”

Of course, for myself and others, we've noticed the says-what's-on-our-mind compliment is just a polite way of saying that someone is an asshole.

How is it that we only say that about assholes? You'd think there are some nice people out there who say what's on their mind, and it's always something nice. Okay, for that sort of person, we'd probably just say that they're nice. And that further shows how say-what’s-on-your-mind is calling you an asshole: for most people who say what's on their mind, we just describe what they are like. Dr. McNeil up there is a physicist, not someone who says what’s on her mind, and it’s usually about physics. If we don't want to mention what they usually talk about, we praise them for talking.

But that's weird: I think most of us would agree that assholes would be better if they spoke less.

“Here's Joe. He never says what's on his mind.”
“…”
“That's too bad.”
“No no, Joe’s an asshole, so it's better this way.”

But here’s what's really perplexing about this: if saying someone always-says-what’s-on-their-mind is really another way of saying a person is an asshole, then the people saying this are not practicing what they preach. If you really believe that saying what you're thinking is more important than being polite or respected, then just say it: that’s Barb, she's an asshole, and I like that.

Sports Fans Losing Their Shirts

It was recently announced that the Edmonton Oilers are going to be wearing Orange jerseys for the forseeable future. If you're not familiar with the situation, they've traditionally had blue shirts with orange shoulders and trim. But in recent years, they've introduced a third jersey with inverted colours: Orange with blue shoulders. In this new era with young superstar Connor McDavid as their leader, those orange unis have become more popular, and now they've announced that they will be the main choice for the playoffs, as well as next year, when the NHL will not be having any third jerseys.

It's a nice arrangement, since the Oilers have the awkward situation of having a proud history, but one that revolves around a very specific generation of players. This way, they can honour their history while drawing a clear dilineation between...wait, no third jerseys next year? But, they are what modern sports is all about: gratuitous changes that squeeze more income from fans.

It turns out that this is because Adidas is taking over as the league's uniform supplier, and to simplify things, they are going to drop back to the old-fashioned arrangement of just home and away jerseys, at least for this one year. Again, this is refreshingly unlike modern sports. I'm sick of people introducing changes at the worst posible time. It's like, we've got this new kind of camera, let's use it for the first time at the Superbowl. Or, here's this new soccer ball, shall we test it out in the Armenian third division? No, let's start using it in the World Cup.

I'm glad one aspect of pro sports is changing, because other areas are getting even more pro-sportsy. The Oakland Raiders are moving to Las Vegas. Of course, sports teams moving for financial gain is hardly new, not even for the Raiders themselves, who will be going into gratuitous move number three. But this one seems more galling. Let's count the ways:

• Local governments will be paying $750 million for the Raiders' new stadium in Las Vegas.
• Local governments in Oakland were willing to pitch in $200 million for a new stadium. That may be much less, but when you include the fee the league charges to move teams, it would have been cheaper to stay in Oakland
• The new Vegas Golden Knights of the NHL are also about to start. As a hockey team in the desert, they face a challenge, and were hoping that being the only pro team in town would help. But so much for that. Oh, and they're going to be playing in a new arena that was built without public money.
• Not only is Las Vegas getting two teams at once, Oakland is losing two teams at once. The Golden State Warriors of the NBA are also leaving, though only across the bay.
• Oakland will still have one professional team left: baseball's Athletics. But they're looking for a new stadium, and might also move (to Montreal, <crosses fingers>). And at least part of the reason is that Oakland Coloseum is not a great place to play is because of the massive section of football-only seats in centre field, which were built to lure the Raiders back to Oakland in the 1990's
• Those seats cost $200 million dollars. They were paid for by the city, which still haven't finished paying for it.
• The new Raiders' stadium, along with the new stadium for the relocated Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers, will be run by a company owned by Dallas Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones
• They haven't even started on the stadium in Las Vegas yet, so it won't be ready for at least three more seasons. The biggest stadium in Las Vegas is tiny by NFL standards, so the Raiders are planning on staying in Oakland - the city that now hates them - for at least two of those seasons.

Meanwhile, the Atlanta Braves and Falcons will be starting their upcoming seasons in new stadiums, despite their previous homes being barely old enough to vote. In fact, current Braves pitcher Bartolo Colon began his career one week after his team's old home Turner Field hosted it's first Major League game. And the Falcons' stadium will be named for Mercedes-Benz, despite their also having the naming rights for the nearby Superdome in New Orleans.

What's really interesting is that the NHL's Arizona Coyotes are looking for a new home. Of course, the NHL went to the wall keeping the team in Phoenix, and I assumedthat a big part of the reason was the arena. It had been paid for by the Phoenix suburb of Glendale, which was slowly paying off the debt with a tax on tickets. If the Coyotes - as the arena's only tenants - were to leave, the city would be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars and no way to pay it off. While I'm sure the NHL doesn't really care about the finances of an Arizona suburb, a debacle like that would make it hard for the next team that has to go begging to the local municipality. But apparently I was wrong; the NHL, like all sports leagues, is so intent on screwing everyone, that they can't even strategically not screw people when it makes sense. Except on the uniforms.