Back With Another One Of Those Blog-Rockin’ Beats

I've complained more than once about the song "It's Your Thing" by the Isley Brothers being used in commercials. Specifically, that it's been used in commercials for a variety of different products, with each company seemingly oblivious to the fact that it's already been associated with a different brand.

So, imagine if I'd been asked, "What do you think will be the next song to get overused in commercials for multiple brands at the same time? Hint: it's from another group with 'Brothers' in the name."

I would have said, oh, no, not "Unchained Melody!" That's such a classic song that so many people love. It would be such a shame if it became associated with dog food and denture cleaners

But no, it's "Galvanize," by the Chemical Brothers.

It started with a series of Michelin ads, which used the song for its distinctive "dun dun dun" part. That got it recognized enough that stadium DJs started playing it at sporting events. I thought that was a weird enough path for a song to go through pop culture: being revived by a commercial almost twenty years after it was released and getting attention beyond what it originally got. So I thought about remarking on it, but never got around to it.

But then, I hear it again on a Hummer ad. They're using the "Push the button" part to advertise their four-wheel steering. That's a different part of the song, so people may not even realise it's the same song. I suppose that's a way around the problem of over-using songs in ads: each company uses a different part of the song. Maybe that will even have a positive effect on music: You’ll put more effort into the complexity of your songs if you know you can sell different parts to different companies.

Oddly, we still haven’t seen the most obvious use; the song is, after all, named after an industrial process. It just seems natural that eventually we'll hear, "Ziebart reminds you..." (start music) "The time has come to…Galvanize!" (cut music quickly, because Michelin owns the dun dun dun part.)

But I'm also thinking about the demographic implications of this. It was all fun and games when it was another generation's songs getting overused. I could feel cheapened, but I'm trying to look on the bright side: We won the demographic competition (where "we" refers to late Gen-X, early Millennials, or in my case, Mid-Xer who stayed in university too long and thinks he's a borderline Xer-Millennial.) And now our music is being used to sell expensive stuff like high-end tires and SUVs. Yes, I realize it's a fleeting title, since it's only a matter of time before the next music takes over. But we could get a bit of an extension while advertisers struggle to make ads out of emo.

Wake Up, You Need To Make Money

I read this interesting article about why the current generation of kids is so stressed. The main reason is that they have so much pressure to plan for their career. Teachers and parents make them keenly aware of how big a difference a career makes in the current environment. So from an early age, they know that their education is a make-or-break situation.

I can kind of relate to this feeling myself. When I was in high school, Teachers worked hard to communicate the idea that we were building our future. I remember one correcting people who talked about the world outside of school as “the real world.” He reminded us that school is part of the real world, since our actions in class would have real consequences.

But it was clear that our elders were fighting an ingrained perception that we’d be alright no matter what. I think everyone understood that life would be better if you got more education, but there wasn’t a sense of disaster if you failed to get it. But by the time I was in university, the manufacturing sector was shrinking, and people were really getting the idea that there wasn’t much of a Plan-B. That’s when the Millennials were starting to go through high school and college, so I’m assuming that was the message most of them were given as they grew up.

But a point from the article is that while Gen-X’ers and Millennials may have been exposed to threats of failure, we were at least promised a payoff. The message of study-or-you’ll-always-work-at-McDonald’s might have been stressful, but we were also assured that we could have a good life and feel good about Making A Difference if we got a good job and worked hard. In contrast, the article says that we no longer give that carrot along with the stick. Now we just present the message that you have to get everything just right or you’ll face disaster. So kids are growing up with the idea that you have to work hard just to get a middling existence, with any sort of good life out of the question.

This follows on a popular article in Buzzfeed (cited in the above article) about burnout among millennials. My reaction to that was to ask for some respect: we Gen-X’ers invented early burnout. This multigenerational freak-out is just confirming something I’ve suspected for a while: Though the media may talk about the different generations as though they are different, we really don’t have distinct generations anymore. It’s now just a slowly-changing set of circumstances. So we divide ourselves into Generation X, the Millennials, and Generation-Hurry-Up-And-Get-A-Name-Already, but really it’s just one long spectrum of angst. It seems like we’re having this societal conversation that goes like this:

Millennials: We sure hate adulting. We made a meme about it and everything.
Generation X: We hated adulting first! But seriously, great word, “adulting.” Wish we’d thought of that.
Post-Millennials: Adulting sounds terrible! We’re never leaving home!
Baby Boomers: The millennials are such wimps that they can’t stand adulting. And they keep inventing stupid words.

See, the media keeps telling us that the millennials are completely alien and can’t be understood, but really it’s the boomers are the only generation that don’t fit in and don’t make sense to the others. Indeed, it’s been them that have been the primary drivers behind making society as unforgiving as possible. And that brings us back to the central problem that the exceptional make plenty of money, but for everyone else, the effort-to-outcomes ratio doesn't seem very promising. It would be nice if there was something to reward the average person who works hard, even if they aren't a superstar.

But you know what they call a reward for doing your job even if you’re not the best? A participation trophy. Yes, the concept that's come to symbolize millennial-bashing, and the general point of view that we’re too forgiving of our young people. But if we were too nice to young people, we’d all be less stressed. Really, we've got it all backwards. We're so obsessed with the fear of rewarding people for doing nothing that we've created a world where almost nothing gets rewarded. As much as the world portrayed in the article seems alien to us, we also have to admit that it's the world we've spent the last four decades crafting: one in which there is as little help as possible.

Is Pepsi Okay?

I'm amazed by these new diet coke ads. Coke seems to be rebranding it, with energy-drink-style cans, and young-person-based-ads. I know I'm not the target market, but they look awful. You know, the ones where they're walking down the street talking to you.

(And here's the other. I have to admit: it's cute that if you're watching closely, you'll see them pass each other. I'm embarrassed that it took me so long to notice that.)

I may not be the target market, but I do remember some of the embarrassing ads that tried to appeal to me when I was part of the hot demographic. Both then and now, it was clear that they were putting these ads together based on what the ad execs had seen on TV or overheard in malls, not by actually talking to young people. "Maybe you're into friends who leave voice mail"?!? What does that even mean? Can you be into friends who don't use voice mail anymore? It's like they wrote the script using Mad Libs Millennial Edition.

I guess there is a certain challenge in understanding new generations. In my case, they were trying to figure out what Generation X cared about, before finally realizing it was nothing. Now they're trying to focus our what Millennials have in common, and are realizing that is also nothing. Well, one thing most of them do share is a disappointment in an economy that isn't giving them opportunities for rewarding or prestigious careers. You know, like jobs in advertising, where they could have prevented this embarrassment.

Meanwhile, Pepsi had an ad that walks us down memory lane. That's a big departure for them. As I observed previously, one of the few constants throughout my life had been Pepsi constantly trying to align themselves with whatever young people idolize. But one of the necessities of that strategy is that your ads have to live in the now: if you're appealing to today's kids, you can't mention that you were also trying to appeal to their parents. In this case, they not only admit that, they go on to tell you that they helped your grandad score at the drive in.

The fact is, we've entered a new pop-cultural epoch, where time no longer exists. Between reboots, rehashes and remixes, we're experiencing everything at once, so nothing can be hot, cold, retro, or camp anymore. It's like at the fall of communism, some people claimed it was the End of History. I didn't believe that then, and it turned out to be totally wrong, but somehow Pepsi rejecting trendiness feels even more monumental. It's like the concept was dying on us, and society needed Pepsi to give us permission to let it go, and herald this new era.

What The Hell Are You Staring At (On TV)?

Recently we saw a bizarre news story in which fans of the animated series Rick and Morty went crazy over McDonald's Sichuan Sauce (Sichuan? Szechuan? Supposedly "Sichuan" is the new accepted spelling.) The whole thing reached ridiculous proportions when a woman in Michigan traded a packet of the sauce for a 2004 Volkswagen GTI. I mean, I could understand a Golf, but a GTI?

If you haven't seen the whole story, here's what I've pieced together:

• Back in the 90's, McDonald's briefly offered a Sichuan sauce for McNuggets (rumoured to be teriyaki mixed with ketchup) as a tie-in with the movie Mulan.
• Recently, there was an episode of Rick and Morty that focused on an obsession with Sichuan sauce
• McDonalds tried to get on board by offering limited-edition Sichuan sauce for one day
• Perhaps they were trying to set up a Tickle-Me-Elmo style craze, but more likely they just greatly underestimated the popularity of Rick and Morty, and they didn't have nearly enough for the throngs that showed up, some after driving for hours.
• Angry fans vented online. 

I don't want to turn this into a kids-these-days rant, or more precisely, a young-adults-these-days rant. After all, Rick and Morty fits into a longish tradition of cartoons that drop into the sweet spot between children's programming that displays imagination and flexible reality, and the fertile subject matter of the adult world. And I’ve been through that too.

In the past I’ve mentioned Ren & Stimpy being popular in my early years of university. In my later years at school, Teletoon was starting up, and we wasted many hours watching Duckman. Unfortunately, it’s been largely forgotten, but if you've ever wished that Family Guy and South Park had ripped off The Simpsons’ cleverness along with its irreverence, then it was the show for you.

After leaving University and getting my Adulting Licence, I watched a few cartoons in the same vein, such as Undergrads and The Boondocks. But mostly I’ve drifted away from the genre. Recently, I've seen slightly childish adult geeks like myself making references to Archer and Adventure Time, getting that same enjoyment out of it. I do feel a little jealous.

So I actually watched a few episodes of Rick and Morty once it started getting big, and it was indeed a fun show. But it will take a while before I get to the obsessed level. I have no desire for collectable McNugget sauce, though I wouldn't mind a Mr. Meeseeks.

And that's where we get to the kids-these-days part: I can't imagine my generation going this crazy to try to get limited-edition Gritty Kitty brand kitty litter.

So I can't really explain the current obsession. It could be that adult-oriented animation has become a big enough pop-cultural force that it's now attracting a wider swath of society. Where it was once followed by a few bored students, it has now reached a critical mass where it even appeals to a number of extreme fans who will band together to do things others find strange, like swarming a fast-food outlet.

Or it could be that this is just another aspect of society's already crazy priorities. People have long paid ridiculous amounts of money for items of nostalgia. If you don't have money to spend on your obsessions - but you do have time on your hands - then spending a few hours waiting in line at McDonald's for your cultural touchstone makes more sense than spending thousands on a rare lunchbox. Fittingly, some of the more expensive items of pop-cultural nostalgia are old animation cels.

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.

I Am A Dropout, Like My Father Before Me

There's an interesting new study that suggests people are getting - very slowly - less apt for education. It's based on research in Iceland; its small, long-isolated population makes it a goldmine of genetic research. It probably applies to other populations too, but for now we can only be sure of Iceland's slow decline. Now, if you agree that Björk was better than Of Monsters and Men, you have some scientific backing.

This is the sort of study that is destined to be misinterpreted and exaggerated for years to come. No doubt there are dozens of anti-Millennial essays being pounded out right now on hundreds of Baby Boomers' manual typewriters. But the truth is that the effect is tiny - less than an IQ point a decade.

But still, it's an interesting idea. It's easy to imagine how this could happen. Natural Selection works when factors affect a creature's likelihood to reproduce, and there are still plenty of factors that affect human reproduction rates, even if they're no longer sabre-toothed factors. And unlike past natural selection, this may not reward good qualities. In the education example, the thinking is that people who dedicate a lot of their life to their education will probably have less time to have kids. Say you take a masters, you won't graduate until well into your twenties. Your counterparts who got real jobs after their bachelors have a few years headstart on starting a family. And folks who just did high school have already been going forth and multiplying for the better part of a decade. Any genes that encourage education get passed to fewer members of the next generation.

Who knows how many other things could affect your reproduction? The type of job you have, the food you buy, the place you live. It's important to realize that these effects are not just small and slow, they're also dwarfed by individual differences. So you'll find plenty of prolific parents doing post-docs, and childless high school dropouts. Thus, these findings don't have much short-term practical use. And talk of overall strength of genetics will remind people of eugenics. But I like my science dangerous, useless and misleading. It's enlightening to demonstrate how natural selection works using relatively tangible things.

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 world.

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.

Will You Still Click Me, When I'm 64

I keep seeing clickbait ads that say something like, "You Won't Believe What The Cast of Major Dad Looks Like Now!" Sure, I will admit a little curiosity (probably not for Major Dad, but say, for a show or movie I actually watched.) But generally, it's easy to resist the urge to click, since I can guess the answer: they look twenty years older. In addition, since they're in the entertainment business, they started off better looking than most, and they probably have better than average knowledge of make-up and clothing, so they'll look significantly better than others the same age. But still, they'll just look good, but older.

I know this, because I have particular insight into how people's appearances change as they age. That is to say, I'm on Facebook. So I constantly have the experience of seeing what people look like after a couple of decades. It's a little intriguing, but in the end it's a pretty mundane part of life.

I suppose my generation is the first to see this as commonplace. It used to be that you either lost contact with people, or you stayed close enough to them that you weren't conscious of their aging, since you saw it one day at a time. Your only opportunity to get a real perspective on aging was at a reunion. But now I get a reminder of the aging process quite often. I have to say, I think my generation has actually aged fairly well. You'd think Generation-X would have developed more Worry Lines.

So I really don't want to see what such-and-such celebrity looks like now. I'm sure that years ago, this sort of clickbait would have made sense, If clickbait had existed back then. You're looking at the cover of the Entertainment section of the paper, and you see the page-turn-bait headline, "You Won't Believe What The Cast of My Mother The Car Looks Like Now!" You'd probably turn right to page C6.

Disaster Area Is On Larry Sanders Tonight

I've always found it interesting when there is some sort of media within media. I mean things like Itchy and Scratchy, which is a fictitious show within the Simpsons universe. It just seems kind of sureal when pop-culture has to look inward and create fake versions of itself. I mean, Itchy and Scratchy is probably better remembered than many actual TV shows, even though it never really existed. It was a great satire of American cartoons, but it's also fascinating when they do a bad job of creating the fictional media, and it sticks out like a sore thumb. That often happens when they need to create a musician that exists within the story. You can read about plenty of them in the Rocklopedia Fakebandica.

I had that experience recently while watching a Frasier rerun. There was a brief scene with Dr. Crane dealing with noise from his upstairs neighbour, who turns out to be a rock star, I believe named Johnny Chainsaw. It's kind of surprising he'd have such problems, since people have speculated about how preposterously expensive his condo must be, given its spaciousness and perfect view of the Space Needle. I assumed that such expensive digs were immune to these mundane troubles.

But there were plenty of unrealistic aspects. For one thing, the music was rock, and it was coming through fairly clearly; as someone who's had troubles with loud neighbours I can tell you that it's really only bass that gets through building materials, particularly with dance and hip hop. But it made me think about how rock was depicted in 80's and 90's sitcoms. It was always shown in a very superficial way, only used for cheap jokes about noise or uncivilized teenagers. To be clear, I wasn't expecting a backstory about the upstairs neighbour. And no, I wasn't expecting a nod to the Seattle Scene, as that wouldn't really fit with the show. Though strangely, that's the first time I've ever realized how weird it is that the city's two claims to 90's pop-cultural fame were so different. Great, now I'm going to be thinking about that all day.

But back to my point: this isn't the first time I've encountered this sort of vague, inaccurate depiction of rock in other media. In particular, there seems to be a specific type of rock that never existed anywhere outside the imaginations of Baby-Boomers. It's a kind of atonal blending of punk, glam, and heavy metal that clearly exists for no reason than to annoy others. Of course, the interesting aspect to this fake rock is that it tells us how older people saw the rock of the 80's and 90's. It was kind of a vague vision of unfocused rebellion, with no notice taken of the variations or nuances.

I don't know if early rock got a similar treatment from the media of the 50's and 60's. I haven't seen many episodes of I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners; did they have references to the music young people were listening to? The impression I get is that in that era people preferred to ignore what they didn't like rather than address it or even ridicule it.

Also, I haven't noticed a similar approach to hip hop in recent decades. I guess that's because traditional sitcoms are fewer and farther between. And because it's harder to work it into shows that are dominated by white casts. Too bad, that would have been fun to watch white writers creating a fake rapper every few seasons.

Let's Pretend I Looked Up A Pokémon Reference And Made It Into A Headline Pun

While I was in Kitchener's Victoria park today, I decided to count people playing Pokemon Go. No, I wasn't spying on people, I just looked for people walking along holding out their phone, glancing between it and their surroundings, looking slightly confused. I counted forty in less than an hour, and that's not counting everyone gathered around the Gazebo which must be the local PokeStop (didn't even have to look that word up - I'm actually learning the game by osmosis.)

I've never been into Pokemon, personally. I was a little too adult when it came out in the late nineties, so now I can't really be one of the adults who are currently playing it. It's unfortunate, because I'm intrigued about a new style of gameplay. But having said that, I signed up for Ingress, the previous agumented-reality game from the same company. I never really got into it, because it seemed like a lot of work to get into. Okay, I have to join a faction, mod my resonator, collect more items, and then maybe, just maybe, I can claim the local portal, that is the statue in the park down the street. So maybe it's not for me. I guess I like my reality either virtual or straight-up.

I find it amusing that people aren't really sure how to react to the game's success. It's a video game, and it's popular with Millennials, so everyone's gut reaction is to hate it. And yet there's a surprising amount of positivity coming out of it. From encouraging people to exercise, to helping them to meet people, It's forcing people to look at gaming in a new way. And anything that pushes Candy Crush off the top of the charts must be a good thing.

And I also I have to congratulate Nintendo. Yes, I usually resent them for overwriting my childhood gaming experience out of the pop-cultural collective memory. But I also have to respect how many times they can get up off the mat by embracing something new. We'll have to remember this ten years from now when their latest console has been a failure and we're still waiting for the latest Zelda game: Don't worry, they'll find a way out of it again, probably with MarioVR.

But Pokemon Go has got me thinking about what other classic games could be turned into an augmented-reality game. How about:

• Pac-man

  Streets make up the maze, and you - as Pac-man - go down the street, eating the dots, and avoiding ghosts. You have to get up early in the morning to get to the dots on your street before anyone else, then wander the back streets looking for power pellets. And just imagine the confusion for non-players when dozens of people suddenly turn and run away down a city street when they see a ghost coming.

• Mario Kart

  Your daily commute will be so much more entertaining when you can fire virtual turtle shells at people.

• Tetris

  Blocks fall from the sky, and you have to slot them between your city's buildings. The great thing about this game is that it will encourage people to go downtown because play will be pretty boring in the suburbs.

• Any MMORPG

  They involve a lot of wandering around exploring, so why not do it in the real world?

• Civilization

  You try to build a little civilization around your home or workplace, and try to conquer your neighbour.

• SimCity

  Instead of zoning a hypothetical city, why not fix the city you actually live in. You don't have to walk through your crappy neighbourhood anymore, just look in your phone and it will show you what the place would look like if you were in charge.

• Grand Theft Auto

  This would have to work with an Uber-style service. Getting a ride will be so much more exciting when you have to stage a virtual carjacking to get it.

• The Sims

  Create a Sim and then escort it through its virtual day. Take it to an actual workplace to do a job, then go to a restaurant to get it virtual food. Now, you hate your life? You can create a better one and actually live it.

Blog Features Giants

There's a new movie out called The BFG, based on the book by Roald Dahl. So apparently Dahl is going to be the kid's version of Philip K. Dick, with Hollywood grinding-out every one of his books eventually.

Of course, there's a problem here. The book came out in 1982, so for someone my age, it would have appealed to slightly younger people. So when I hear "BFG," I think of the weapon of that name from the Doom video game. It came out when I was in my second year of University, close to its target demographic, so I'm sure I'm not the only one. Just the association with a violent video game is an unfortunate thing, even before you consider what the word between, "Big" and "Gun" is.

The hilarious part is, you know someone at the studio did research on this, studying just what percentage of the population associated the three letters with each media property. I guess it makes sense: it's a fight between Generation X and the Millennials, and the latter wins on both numbers and likelihood to go to movies.

But here's something I never thought of before: I can understand wanting to put "friendly" in the title, since that's not how giants are usually portrayed. But "big" though? "Big giant" is redundant, since giants are, by definition, big. So it should just be "The FG," or, "The Friendly Giant." Well, Mr. British author and American director, that's a concept we in Canada pioneered, and we didn't even need any CGI to do it.

Sports Inversion

A few years ago, I remember a Toronto sports journalist ask the question, what is the second most popular team in the city? The Leafs were far and away the most popular, while the Jays were still in their generation-long post-World-Series doldrums. The Raptors were post-Vinsanity, pre-We-The-North, and Toronto FC was only just getting started.

Now things have changed: the Leafs are still pretty popular, but their deliberate rebuilding process has taken their fan support off the boil. The Jays' fan support of the 80's and 90's have been reawakened. And Raptor fanaticism during their recent success has been a shock to the city and the NBA alike. Even Toronto FC finally has success and star power. Oh, and I'm pretty sure the Argos are still in business too.

It's interesting, because it's always seemed like the Leafs' fandom is a different animal from Toronto's other teams. Yes, many of the fans of all these teams are the same people. But there seems to be a different culture to them. Anecdotally, the Leaf fans are whiter and richer, and I think maler. But there's also the way the media looks at it. It's been clear for the last twenty years or so that hockey coverage comes first, then everything else is a second-class citizen.

The is important to me, because of where I fit in to it. Demographically, I fit in with the hard core Leaf fans. Yet, that's not where my greatest passion lies. I grew up during the darkest years of the Harold Ballard era. Back then the Leafs were bad year-in, year-out. It was actually worse than their recent futility, since there wasn't even the hope of getting better. You just accepted that they were awful and always would be. It didn't help that this was in the era when you only got one or two televised games a week, so the only hockey we could get were the pathetic Leafs losing to slightly-less pathetic Norris Division rivals. Meanwhile, tremendous Oiler and Islander teams were making history, but we could only dream about what their games were like. So I came to resent the Leafs.

But eventually Ballard died, and some clever trades got them in contention. They had some great runs in the playoffs, the fan base was re energized, and I got caught up cheering for them along with most people in the area. So I've been a fan since, but I don't have the same deep connection that many others have. I'd like to see them succeed - which would be the basic definition of a fan - but I wouldn't be that torn-up if they didn't. A few years ago, it occurred to me that a Leafs cup win would be a huge cultural force; I've complained in the past about the ever-increasing legend of the Summit Series, but a Leafs cup win would be ten times that. So I asked myself, would that be worth it? And I said, no, I don't think watching the Leafs win the cup would be worth having to spend the rest of my life listening to Leaf fans go on about how that was the greatest moment in Canadian history.

Anyway, it's a bit of a mystery to me why Leaf Nation is so passionate today. You'd think they'd have a "lost generation" of jaded fans like myself. And yet, the fan base has seemed to become more fanatical over time. I don't understand why, but Canadian hockey fandom in general, and the Leafs in particular, has seemed stronger in spite of mediocre play and more sports options

Today, a large part of why I want the Leafs to win is because they've finally taken my advice of tearing the team down and rebuilding. It'll be great to shove that in the face of all the folks who eternally want them to trade for veteran enforcers for a gritty playoff run from the eighth seed. But really, I'd list the Blue Jays as my favourite team. Having watched Roy Howell while I was a toddler in the crappy outfield seats in Exhibition Stadium, I've literally grown up with the team. And I've become a Raptors fan, since they've become a relief from the all-hockey-all-winter nature of Canadian sports media. So they'd go second, followed by Toronto FC. Then I'd put the Leafs after that.

So I often feel like a freak in southern Ontario sports, a fan of everybody else, then the Leafs, while most seem to like the Leafs, then everybody else. But now with the recent phenomena of the Raptors' "Jurassic Park," Canadian media's attention has been piqued, and they've been working a little harder to figure out who these people are, and why they care so much about this team that hasn't had much success. And the Blue Jays have shown themselves to be eminently marketable, with support across the country.  For once, it's the golden age of non-hockey fandom in Canada. Welcome to the bandwagon, everyone!

The Days The Music Dies

About twenty years ago I saw a web page from a religious group that was trying to make the case that Rock and Roll was evil. Their reasoning was that God punishes rock stars by killing them off, and the group showed this with a long list of deceased rock stars and their cause of death. They noted that very few of them had died of natural causes, and they claimed that this was because God was punishing them.

To be clear, they weren't just saying that the rock lifestyle is dangerous, so you're more likely to die of, say, an overdose. They were including people like Buddy Holly, who lead a fairly upstanding life and died for what seemed like pure bad luck. They would say the plane crash that killed him was divine retribution.

You might assume that this "proof" was the result of gaming the numbers, but the intriguing thing was that the numbers were real. Rock stars that died early of unnatural causes really did greatly outnumber rock stars that has died of natural causes. So how can this be, if we hang on to the popular assumption that God doesn't really hate rock?

Supposedly this puzzle was actually used by some employers to test applicants' intelligence in interviews, presumably after they were sick of asking why manhole covers are round. To figure it out you have to do some simple math. (And remember that this was twenty years ago.) Let's say you're one of the oldest rock stars there is. Say you were thirty at the birth of rock and roll in the mid-fifties. That would mean you were born in the mid-twenties. So by the time I was reading this web page in the mid-nineties, you would be around seventy. There's no guarantee that you'd still be alive, but you probably would be. And remember, that's just the oldest rock star: in a more typical case, someone who made it big at twenty, in the sixties, would have only been about fifty, and probably not even retired.

Of course, this was twenty years ago. Today, our hypothetical oldest rock star is ninety, and most likely no longer with us. Even that typical sixties rock star is now seventy. The point is that we're entering an era when more rock stars are going to be dying than we're used to.

None of this is supposed to make anyone feel any better about the sudden rash of musician deaths. I'm just noting that the way pop culture has gone, we (meaning anyone likely to be reading this) have been relatively insulated from the deaths of our musical heroes. Obviously, there have been deaths. But they've mostly been both isolated and unusual. For instance, people my age were affected by the death of Kurt Cobain, and it made us think about death in new ways (and possibly for the first time.) But you could still chalk it up to unusual circumstances, or to the peculiarities of mental illness. And it's not like his death was part of a wave that robbed us of all our heroes.

I'm sure earlier generations had similar feelings on the deaths of people like Freddie Mercury, John Lennon, Elvis, and of course Buddy Holly. As well, in my life we've seen giants of music die after long and full careers. Say, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis and Sammy Davis Jr. But of course, they all seemed to belong to a different era and different genres. You don't think of it the same way when it's not someone you personally listened to.

But now we're finally at the point where rock stars are dying not because they're rock stars, but just because they're human, and that's what we do eventually. For one thing, that means it's going to happen more often now - the start of 2016 has been unfortunate bad luck, but it's the sort of thing that's going to happen more often in the coming years. And it's going to make us think about mortality in ways that the occasional stereotypical live-fast-die-young death wouldn't.

Speaking Words Of Wisdom

So I recently stumbled across the fact that both Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles covered both "Let It Be" and "Eleanor Rigby." If you'd like to hear them, um, consult this handy chart:

	Let It Be	Eleanor Rigby
Ray Charles	here	here
Aretha Franklin	here	here

I don't know, I just feel like someone should have mentioned this.  Yes, I know, you Baby Boomers were busy telling us we were lazy and should stop doing drugs and playing video games.  But if you were sitting on some intriguing musical nugget like that, you could have slipped it in there.  Say, tell us that we should get a job and be a productive member of society, like when Franklin collaborated with Duane Allman to cover The Band's "The Weight."

I guess the entire cultural heritage produced by a generation is a lot to pass on the younger folks.  Despite all of our society's celebration of the Beatles, there were still many people who didn't put two and two together and realize that Paul McCartney used to play bass for the Beatles before his solo career.  It's like, whoops, did we forget to mention that?

So now I'm wondering what we in Generation X may have forgotten to mention.  It's not just weird covers necessarily, though if that's what you're looking for:

• Tori Amos covering Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
• Alanis Morissette covering Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees"
• R.E.M. covering U2's "One"
• AlexisOnFire covering Midnight Oil's "The Dead Heart"

Hmm, what else.  Well, the guy from Foo Fighters was the drummer from Nirvana.  Don't fall for the conspiracy theories passed around social media - they're just trying to make fun of you.  And if you haven't heard, you should really know about Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke's fathers, just so you get the full ironic appreciation of their careers that we've been treated to.  Oh, and we're really sorry that we almost erased "Under Pressure" and "Superfreak" from the musical cannon by making half-assed samples into hits.  Check out the originals if you haven't already.

The End Of The Road

Toyota is cancelling Scion. In case you didn't understand all the words in that sentence, I'll explain that Scion is a brand that Toyota created to sell some of its cars in North America. That's not really unusual - many companies create brands to sell to a new audience. But that's usually to sell to a different tax bracket. For instance, Toyota created the Lexus brand back in the 80's, knowing rich people wouldn't feel right buying from a cheap brand like Toyota, but might buy cars built by Toyota if they were sold under a new name.

But Scion was a little different. Toyota was successful, but concerned that its customers' average age was rather high. So they decided to create a new brand aimed at young people. And for that, we should all be grateful, since the alternative would be endless commercials trying to convince us Toyotas aren't just for old people, like Buick has been doing.

That sounds like a good idea. I've always thought it would work if a company split its brands based on style rather than class. instead of cheap and luxury brands, you'd have conservative and funky brands. The trouble is, you'd have to work hard to keep the funky brand stylish and fresh. Scion, however, never got much of Toyota's attention. Their small, boxy cars seemed cool at first, but got dull over their decade on the market. It's a shame, because it could have worked: essentially the Kia Soul (that's right, Mom, the hamster car) was what they were aiming for, and it's been successful.

The other big automotive cancellation of the week is that Chrysler (oh, I'm sorry, "Fiat-Chrysler") has canceled its main compact and midsized cars, the Dodge Dart and the Chrysler 200. Losing the Dart is an embarrassment, since it was only recently introduced, a highly-touted modification of an Alfa Romeo design.

The 200, however, seems more to have been put out of its misery. Its predecessor, the Sebring, was a low, curvaceous design at a time when tall, boxy cars were the style. they tried to rectify this by grafting a square grille on to it, resulting in an odd-looking beast. They replaced it with a retro restyling based on some of their other car designs. Then they wanted to redesign it, but didn't have the money while in bankruptcy, so they just refreshed the styling again, renamed it to "200" and got Eminem to drive it in a Superbowl ad. After the merger with Fiat, they finally redesigned it from the ground up, only to flop on the market.

But what's really notable here is that Chrysler will now concentrate on SUV's and crossovers. So they are essentially the first major manufacturer to give up on cars, other than niche models like the Challenger or Fiat 500. I find it hard to believe that this is a good strategy in the long run. Cars may be less profitable, but they still dominate the roads, and the cleverest manufacturers in the world still find them worthy of time and money.

Pax Canadiana

What am I supposed to write about tonight?  The latest annoying TV commercial? Political analysis? Something about cars? Wait, what's that, Bloomberg has an article predicting Canada could be the next superpower? Drop everything, that's the topic.

The argument is threefold: first is resources, which we have plenty of. But I don't really buy that as a reason for gaining power. I could point out that the Middle East has lots of resources, but it's mostly just got them empty displays of wealth, plus invasions by the countries with actual power. But mainly I dismiss the argument because my ancestors came from a glorified rock off the coast of Europe and came to dominate the world for a century. When it comes down to it, the powerful can buy, borrow, or steal whatever resources they need.

The second point is that we have a relatively efficient, effective and trusted government. (I'll pause now so my Canadian readers can stop laughing.) Note that I said relatively. As I've mentioned before, we seem to be far more able to get things done than our American and European brethren. I'd like to think that we can keep that up, but I feel like the partisanship and risk-aversion that have paralyzed other western nations threaten us too. We merely seem to be less far along the road to political stalemate.

His third point, immigration, is the most compelling. Our immigration rate remains high. For one thing, that will remedy the biggest argument against our world domination: our relatively small population. But a diverse population has tended to be a trait of innovative times and places.

I do think that is our strongest characteristic at the moment. And it's accented by the fact that Europe, Australia and Japan are strongly anti-immigrant to the point of xenophobia, relight at the time they should be letting more people in to avoid demographic disaster caused by crashing birthrates. The Americans have recently been rather paranoid on immigration issues, though to be fair, it seems like they could be softening in that issue. But if they don't, Canada could be left as the only big developed-world immigration destination.

As for other world powers, it's easy to imagine Europe fumbling away their power with indecisiveness, mistrust, and poor planning. Japan arguably already has done that with its inability to reform its economy. Then there's the Americans. For all the talk of their decline, I still believe they have a lot of life left in them, but who knows how well they'll deal with their current ideological schism. And they appear to be one Rick-Perry-with-charisma from disaster.

Then there are the developing nations. Though most assume China's dominance is a foregone conclusion, I'm far more sure that:

1. Their economic boom can't last forever.
2. The people will demand democracy eventually, and
3. #2 will probably happen right after #1.

I still have my money on the dark horse India for world domination, but they have political fragility, cultural diversity, corruption, and portly distributed wealth. As for the rest of the BRICS, it's appearing that their wealth is greatly based resource sales due to the growth of China.

Of course that brings up perhaps the best argument against Canadian dominance: our economy has always ridden the coattails of the Americans, so it's hard to imagine a scenario where we replace a fading America, given that we'd likely fade right along with them. One would have to count on the idea that an influx of global talent would take us out of our traditional branch-plant mentality.

So it's not too likely that Canada would be a superpower. It’s possible, but would take a lot of things falling just right. And that’s just to be a relatively big power; I don’t think there’s any scenario where we would end up facing off against, say, South Korea in a new Cold War.

Faith No More

I saw this interesting new study on the popularity of religions in the USA.  That is, they polled people on what they said their religion is. I'll give you the quick version:

• All Christian denominations have declined in popularity (as determined by the percent of the population that considers themselves a member.) Though Christianity still makes up a big majority.
• The proportion of white people has declined in almost all Christian denominations.
• Non-Christian religions have nearly all gained, though their numbers are still small.
• The member of people saying they belong to no religion has increased fast. And young people are more likely to have no religion, and are leaving religions faster.

A couple of interesting things stand out to me. One is how universal the dripping Christian numbers are. The impression I had was that moderate denominations were leaking members on both sides, with people either leaving churches all together, or getting drawn to more conservative sects. This would lead to a "hollowed out" religion made up of the fundamentalist and the lapsed with few in between. But that's not what's happening. It does appear that liberal denominations are losing members to the conservative denominations, but that's small compared to the numbers they're both losing to "none of the above."

The other interesting point involves those people who say they aren't a member of any church. The survey has options for "atheist," "agnostic," and "none." While all three have been gaining, there are far more people in the last category (at 3.1%, 4.0%, and 15.8%, respectively.)

That could mean a number of things:

• They're Christian, but don't feel right saying they belong to a particular church given that they haven't been there since childhood.
• It could be that these people still have some religious beliefs, but they don't fit into Christianity.
• They are no longer sure what they believe in, as with people who give that cryptic description "spiritual, but not religious."
• They don't know what "atheist" or "agnostic" mean.
• They're straight-up atheist, but even they are turned-off by the the attitude of the new atheist movement.

Fortunately, they say future research will look into that, it seems like a big distinction. Among young millennials, self-described Christians make up only 56% of the population, so this is a pretty big slice of the population for us to not understand.

Missouri

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Can Never Get Away From The Sprawl

Maclean's has a graphic showing the relative density of Canadian cities.  The premise is that it shows how much space the population of Canada would take up if it was packed in with the same density as various Canadian cities. It's probably inspired by this map comparing cities around the world.

The around-the-world version is more informative, since it's comparing similarity large cities that differ only in their location and age. There's not much that can be gleaned from comparing the density of Toronto and Iqaluit.

But it brings up a pet peeve of mine when people start comparing different cities. Often, large cities are held-up as paragons of environmental virtue because of their density and reliance on public transit. There is some truth to the concept, and the point is important because many people - including environmentalists themselves - often assume that big and artificial things are always worse.

The problem is that when it comes to environmental righteousness, Toronto and Vancouver kind of cheat. That's because the political entities known as "Toronto" and "Vancouver" are really just the centres of much larger cities. The suburbs of those cities spread out with miles of suburbs (just as any Canadian or American city does) but those suburbs aren't officially part of the city.

I looked it up, and if you include the entire Greater Toronto Area, Toronto's density drops from 4,149 people per square kilometre to only 850. That's actually less dense than here in the city of Kitchener.  In contrast, they give the impression that Halifax is some sprawling, empty place.  But that's just because it's city limits stretch far beyond the actual developed area.  If you only count the urban area, the density again turns out to be more than 1,000 people per square kilometre.

A.I.'s Horrible Ending

Stephen Hawking recently said that it would be a big mistake if humanity created artificial intelligence.  There seems to be a lot of technologists concerned about the effect of possible future science. It seemed to start with Bill Joy's infamous essay on nanotechnology.

I can understand where they're coming from. When you think about how we've abused everything from internal combustion to high-fructose corn syrup, it becomes scary to even contemplate what we would do with self-replicating nanomachines.

But there is a flip-side to that line of reasoning: because we abuse every technology we create, we can't stop now. We don't use technology responsibly or with restraint, so we need to keep inventing new things to clean up our past messes.

To look at it another way, we often laugh at past alarmists, like Malthus or the  folks who said we'd have so many horses that today's world would be awash in manure. But they weren't wrong, they just didn't see new technologies coming. Without improved farming techniques, we wouldn't be able to feed the world (the part we do currently feed) and without the car, the world really would smell a whole lot worse.

So if you're going to advise us to avoid future technologies, you'll also have to prescribe a great shift in how we use our current technology.  Standing still with the world we've got now simply isn't an option.  I realize it may seem reckless to continue our current "strategy" of ignoring the consequences and assuming we can invent our way out of any problems we get ourselves into.  But until you can talk humanity into a new level of maturity, it's all we've got.