With Or Without U

My alma mater Waterloo has generally not had a great football team. They had a golden era of sorts in the 90’s, when they were a perennial contender. I could point out that their good era coincided with my time at the school, but I don’t think that’s fooling anyone.

Unfortunately, it went downhill after I left. The lowlight was a one-year suspension following a steroid scandal, followed by a brutal six-year run with a combined record of 4-44. But now it appears that the team is much improved. So when I remembered that they had a big test against Western yesterday, I was curious how it went.

So here is the record of my quest to find the score of yesterday’s Western-Waterloo game on the Internet. This shouldn’t be asking too much; this is the Information Age, and I just want a tiny piece of information. But as I’ve mentioned in the past, it’s amazing how often we can’t seem to convey information. And it all gets worse when you combine it with the giant national shrug that is Canadian university athletics (or U Sports, as it is now officially branded.)

Remember, this isn’t some obscure event, it’s a football game played approximately 24 hours earlier, featuring one of the most storied sports programs in the country:

SportsNet.ca:

• Choose “More/U SPORTS” off of the top menu. I’m greeted by a month-old story about Duke’s Canadian tour
• I choose “Men’s Football” off the U SPORTS sub-menu.
• I’m given a list of the weekend’s games, which immediately refreshes to show a list of next-weekend’s games. I can’t seem to find a button to go back a week. There’s a “Previous month” link at the bottom, but it doesn’t work.

TSN.ca:

• I choose “Sports” from the top menu, which drops down a list of sports and leagues. NCAA is on it, but U Sports isn’t.
• I choose “More Sports” at the bottom of the list. It pops-up a second list of choices, including U Sports, though it’s below “Jay and Dan”
• I’m greeted by a list of stories, the newest of which is more than two months old. The fifth-most recent story is about Western winning the Vanier Cup last year.
• I can’t find any link for scores: the U Sports sub-menu just has an entry for “News,” which is the page I’m at. The score ticker at the top of the page only has CFL/NFL/MLB/NHL/MLS

CBC.ca:

• Hit “Menu” link
• Choose “Sports” from “quick links” list
• Try “scores” heading, but it only has NHL/MLB/CFL/NFL/MLS
• Try “More/All Sports” this sends me to a list of sports that includes entries for the Commonwealth games, Red Bull Crashed Ice, and Spruce Meadows equestrian, but no University sports

GlobeAndMail.com

• Choose “Sports” from top menu
• Choose “Football” from Sports menu
• There are several stories listed, I click one labeled as “U Sports roundup”
• A pop-up tells me that this content is only available to subscribers

TheStar.com

• Choose “Sports” from menu
• There are articles arranged into several categories depending on what team, sport, or city they are about, and which columnist wrote them. There’s nothing on University sports, and only three articles in the “Football” section, all on the NFL.

NaitonalPost.com

• Choose “Sports” from main menu, and “Football” from sub-menu. The sub-sub-menu only has CFL and NFL options
• Try “All Sports” item instead. That page has many sports articles, but I couldn’t find any on Canadian University sports. There’s a “Scoreboard” box, but it only has NHL/NBA/MLB/NFL/CFL

I then gave up on national sports outlets, and when to the Waterloo Region Record, site, where I quickly found a recap of the game. Unfortunately, Waterloo was about as successful as I was looking for info on the game, in which Western won easily, 67-7.

A Bad Title

There’s a new movie opening next week called The House with a Clock in its Walls. I don’t know about the movie: it looks like a cheap excuse for special effects and Jack Black. And it’s a bad sign that it’s been relegated to a post-Labour-Day opening, meaning that the studio doesn’t have high hopes. But there’s one thing we do know for sure: that is the worst title in the history of movies.

Just to make sure, I looked up some lists of the worst movie titles of all time. There are some bad ones, but I think we may have a new loser here. Actually, I was a little disappointed by much of the bad title lists. I was expecting some of the all-time awkward names (I Love Trouble, Cutthroat Island,  Moon Over Parador) but for the most part, they were just strange and/or bad movies with appropriate titles (Santa with Muscles.) I mean, I have no doubt that Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot was a terrible movie, and it’s a terrible premise. But once you’ve made that movie, what else could you really call it?

Lately, the bigger problem with movies titles is that they’re vague. Edge of Tomorrow was a title that didn’t tell you anything about its intriguing and exciting concept. And one of the all-time great movie titles, Snakes on a Plane, was nearly called “Pacific Air Flight 121” and only changed back at star Samuel L. Jackson’s insistence. And they made a movie about tiny people fighting for control of a forest, and what did they call it? Epic. I had trouble finding it in IMDB, because if you just search for “epic,” it returns all the movies that are classed as epics instead. What could be vaguer than naming something with a genre?

But The House etc... could be worst.There have been other movies with overly-long titles (The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain) and overly literal titles (Life as a House) and titles that make an interesting concept sound boring (John Carter,) but it’s amazing that they put them all in one movie.

Car And Browser

It's long been a feature of our Internet age that advertisers try to figure out what we are interested in and then advertise more of it to us. And it's a feature of our Internet age that it often fails, sometimes hilariously.

It seems like a simple enough programing concept: if customer X has shown an interest in product Y, show X some more Y's. Show all the Y's. Try Y₁, Y₂, Y₃. Maybe Z, that's close. Give Ω a shot, that's the same idea, really.

But there are times where this doesn't work. I remember one person complaining that after buying a toilet at Home Depot, it started suggesting other bargains on toilets. Their program apparently didn't consider that for some products, once you've bought one, it actually becomes less likely that you'll buy another.

And I realized this right from the first time I tried ordering things on line. Some of the first things I ever bought were gifts. That lead to months of misguided suggestions for products I, personally, had no interest in.

Now I'm having the same thing happen to me with car ads. I've looked through on-line used-car ads many times, but, well, I often use the car ads to dream, rather than find practical transportation. But the Autotrader ad program can't understand that if I'm looking at a Maseratti in Winnipeg, that doesn't mean that I am likely to buy a Maseratti, or that I'm in Winnipeg. I don't know, but I had kind of assumed that if you actually were in the market for expensive cars, you wouldn't be looking for them in Autotrader. But maybe they do things differently in Winnipeg.  Anyway, the point is that I look at car ads the same way I look at Wikipedia; I start with a nice, pragmatic search, then  I follow a few links out of interest, and next thing I know, I’m looking at a vintage Land Rover in Trois-Rivières.

The problem is, the misunderstanding doesn't end there. When I'm on Facebook, I'll often see ads placed by Autotrader. It will be something like, "Great deals on coupes in Winnipeg," followed by some of the cars on offer, hoping I'll go to the page. I'll snicker at it at first, but then I'll see that one is a third-generation RX-7 for $20 grand, I'll think, that's a great deal, and click on the link. And then I'll be off in automotive fantasy land again, looking at cars I couldn't afford.

And so the cycle repeats itself. The next day I'll see an ad for convertables in Kamloops, and I'll remember, okay, sure I guess I did look at one such car, and they extrapolated from... ooh, a low-milage Boxster in Kelowna.

Anyway, Autotrader's idea of what I'm looking for has long ago departed from any vehicle I'm ever likely to buy. And that's how I was today shown an ad for trucks in Edmonton, by Autotrader's french service, AutoHebdo.net.

I’ve Got The Brains, You’ve Got The Looks

I'm really getting sick of investment commercials. I know, you have to expect this sort of thing at tax time, but now it seems like they're going year round.

I especially hate those Questrade ads where they have highly assertive customers talking back to their brokers. The intended result is that were supposed to feel empowered to rebel against our brokers. But for me, the feeling I get is sympathy for the brokers. Poor guys, having to defend themselves against people who are surprised to find that mutual funds have fees. The fact that they don't lose their temper shows some remarkable restraint. I think i'll invest with them. Where do they sell Strawman Funds?

The Wealth Simple ads have a bunch of people in the target demographic talking about investing. At first, it was kind of refreshing: they talked about money in a relatable, down-to-earth way. They managed to sound like overwhelmed consumers, without sounding like the unrealistically dense idiots normalizing stupidity on most commercials.

But as the campaign has gone on, they’re increasingly being smartass know-it-alls. It wouldn’t be so bad if they were showing people learning about investing and thus getting more confident, but instead they just seem to be getting more arrogant but still clueless.

I mean there’s that one where the woman talks about how you don’t want to invest in big institutions, because everyone knows that large organizations are crumbling dinosaurs going nowhere, really, just trust us, the upstart investment company. Then she says you want to invest in the “disrupters,” a word she surely learned from an online TED Talk. Has she ever thought about how may startups go nowhere? I know millennials hate being characterized as inexperienced and unworldly, but I know they’re old enough to remember the dot com crash.

And now there’s a new ad, where they tell you how your money can make more money, and that money can make more money, etc. It leaves me depressed that they feel the need to explain compound interest to people. I guess it’s good that they’re trying to clean up after our education system. But mainly I’m suspicious of it. Why are they specifically targeting the least knowledgeable segment of the audience?