Hold This Thread As I Walk Away

Scotiabank has been promoting a new book they're sponsoring, called The Hockey Jersey. The commercials make the point that it's to promote inclusion and tolerance. That's something everyone in hockey agrees is important,  but isn't too good at actually doing. And although Scotiabank are selling physical copies of the book, you can also download a digital copy for free from their website, which is the nicest thing a bank has done since, well, ever. 

It's about a bunch of young girls who come together as a team after they get their own hockey jerseys, which somehow look better than at least half of NHL uniforms. Of course, that title is similar to The Hockey Sweater, the classic story by Roch Carrier, about a boy in Quebec who is mistakenly given a sweater of the hated rival Toronto Maple Leafs, not the Montreal Canadiens sweater he wanted. There is also an animated version from the National Film Board available for streaming.

(As an aside, I love that in the middle of the Wikipedia synopsis of the story, they point out the plot hole: the fateful sweater was ordered from Eaton’s, and Eaton’s pioneered the money-back guarantee, so the mother could easily have returned or exchanged the sweater. Don’t ever change, Wikipedia.)

This being hockey, a lot of people will surely resent something new piggybacking on something old. But I think it gives us an opportunity. Can we finally give The Hockey Sweater a rest? When I was a kid it was really over-used in school. The story was drilled into us so much, one time in junior high, when the teacher announced that we’d be reading a wonderful new story called The Hockey Sweater, the whole class groaned. She was honestly surprised we had not only heard of it but were already sick of it. Now, I find out it was only written in 1979, and thus was a little less than a decade old at the time, so I can understand her not realizing how fast it had saturated the school system.

But it's easy to get why teachers were eager to use it: it's a perfect storm of sports, Canadiana, and situations relatable to kids. Also, looking back, I can appreciate how much of mid-twentieth-century Quebec life he squeezed in: People forced to do business in English, the towering authority of the church, the place of Maurice Richard as a hero. In the eternal quest to find things that will engage students, it sounds like quite a find. 

But there's a problem with The Hockey Sweater that really bugged me - I mean besides it being overused. I've been carrying this around with me ever since, so get comfortable.

It's not really a kids' story. Yes, I know, it's about children, but that doesn't mean they're the target audience. A story can be about children or through the eyes of children without being intended for them. To Kill a Mockingbird, Angela’s Ashes, Lord of the Flies, etc.

Like those books, The Hockey Sweater is pretty dark, when you look at it. The main character doesn't do anything wrong, but ends up a social pariah. His mother doesn't care about his situation. His religion blames him for his problems. And then there's the subtext that his people are trapped in a system rigged against them. Add a murder and it would be hailed as a classic of existentialism. 

An adult can appreciate a story of frustration and futility, but at the time, I found it really depressing. At a young age, children are still expecting stories to have a moral, or at least, to not be a nihilistic commentary of on the futility of life. 

That recounting of unfair situations is also the kind of thing that is best appreciated with a buffer of a few decades to protect you from the raw reality. Sure, now I can read a story about a kid ostracized for wearing the wrong clothes. That’s a common trope of stories about young people. But back then, it was your average weekday. Seeing that happen in a story, with no comeuppance for the bullies or actions by the adults in charge was, well, again: your average weekday. When his only hope for justice is divine-intervention moths, and that’s presented as the punchline, it just seemed hopeless.

So let's retire the Hockey Sweater. Print it on a Syl Apps jersey and lift it into the Bell Centre rafters beside Richard's number 9. That girl in the Scotiabank book can annoy future generations.

Plus And Minus

You may have seen that Google+ was recently shut down.  You may also have forgotten what Google+ was; it was Google's attempt to cash in on the social network gold rush. It wasn't too successful. Too bad, we could use some new blood in the Social Media field. Facebook is still making a fool of itself on the privacy issue, and Twitter is still dragging its feet on the should-we-allow-nazis issue.

And frankly, this is the sort of thing I wish Google would put more effort into. My complaint about them in recent years has been that they are choosing which business to enter on a whim, rather than the classic business basis of find-a-problem-and-fix-it. We needed a good search engine, and they built one. We needed a competitor for iOS and they built one (well, bought and nurtured one, but close enough.)

Then they started going off the rails with Chrome. If they'd released it a decade earlier to counter the dominance of Internet Explorer, that would have been great. But doing it after Firefox had managed to - improbably - break the monopoly, Google just looked like bullies. Now they're bringing out a game streaming service, despite the fact that the gaming world is already a crowded business, and that people are starting to get leery of the everything-is-a-subscription juggernaut. Oh, and rural folks keep trying to point out that they're not okay with streaming everything on their antiquated broadband. And hey, that's just the sort of problem Google could solve and win lots of kudos, instead of suspicion.

So if you're not too pleased about Google's game streaming plans, just remember that it might be another Google+ instead of a Chrome. After all, I wasn't even going to comment on the passing of Google+, except that they somehow set things up so that if you had a Google+ account when you signed up for Blogger, it lost the connection with your Google account, so I just had to have a panicked run through FAQ's and message boards to try to get signed back in. And this post is my combined test/scream-of-frustration

Find An Ending, But Don’t Cheat

There’s a concept in storytelling called deus ex machina , which is when a conflict is resolved by an unreasonably lucky occurrence, rather than the characters overcoming the obstacle. I first became aware of it when I took drama in high school. It stuck out for a few reasons:

• It sounds cool in a way that other Latin phrases like habeas corpus and carpe diem don’t.
• It sounds even cooler when you realize it literally means “god from a machine”
• It allows you to condemn stories for a reason that would be too hard to explain otherwise. So many people want a happy ending and don’t care how it comes about, and it’s a struggle to explain why these happy endings aren’t satisfying. But now I can just say it’s a deus ex machina, and they say, "huh?" But I feel better.

But I have to say to science fiction creators: please stop using this in titles. It started in 2000 with the cyberpunk video game Deus Ex. Okay, that made sense, since the blurring of humanity and machines gives the phrase new meaning, with the idea that what was once thought of as exclusively divine could now come from a machine. But then there was a movie about humanoid robots a few years ago called Ex Machina, essentially copying the same idea, but leaving out a different word to sound original.

Now I see that there’s another game coming out called Daemon x Machina. Sure, that’s funny and appropriate to the subject matter (battling giant robots.) And old-school Unix users will appreciate the use of “daemon.” But really, can’t we come up with some new ways to describe stories involving robots, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics? It’s becoming a cliche and something should end it. I don’t even care if it’s something unanticipated that comes from out of nowhere.

Through Rose-Coloured Camera Phones

I'm getting tired of the demonizing of phones and mobile devices in public places. I mean, like any technology, it deserves skepticism and analysis rather than naive acceptance. But a lot of the critiques of phones' effect on society is just scattershot complaining from the memory-challenged.

I'm guessing that young people are dismissing these attacks as just a bit more ageism. But in case any of them are falling for it and believing that the mobiles are the downfall of civilization, I'd like to offer some reassurance. As someone who was there for the pre-mobile era let me clear some things up.

People weren't very social before mobiles.

Listening to Boomers, X-er's and older Millennials, you'd think that the old world was a marvelously social place where public places were full of conversation, and where complete strangers regularly reached out to one another.

Actually, it was an awkward bore, where entertainment was limited to old magazines. Yeah, that's right: the pile of old magazines in every waiting room? You probably thought the reason they're so old is that no one bothers replacing them now that we have phones to entertain us. Nope! They've always been years out of date, but it used to be that people would actually read them, because there was nothing better to do. That's why most people resorted to starting off into space instead. They would have killed for a convenient portable entertainment device. And you would have killed for the person across the room starting at you to have his own entertainment device to divert his gaze.

People weren't more caring

It's not like they were completely cold-hearted, but they weren't any nicer. Perhaps you've heard some of the old shocking stories about bystanders not helping victims? Well those all happened without phones.

People have always been reluctant to get involved with strangers around them. Now, at least they may be using their phones to connect with strangers on the net. Even I'm writing this while sitting in a waiting room. That may be odd, but it's still better than the old way of living in a shell.

Kids weren't very active

Looking at memes on facebook, you'd think that kids once spent all their time doing healthy and wholesome activities outside, then someone gave them phones and it all ended.

I don't know, maybe there was once a golden age of kids' activities, but it would have been decades ago. Keep in mind that TV - and vacuous programming on it - has been widespread since the 60's. Video games were commonplace by the 80's.

Tinder et al have destroyed dating

Look up the "personals ad" concept. People used to look for love using twenty words at the back of a newspaper, right above the ads for escort services. Does that sound better than modern dating apps? And don't even ask about 90's singles phone lines.

Nevermore

I recently saw a trivia question asking what a group of ravens is called. You may already know that a group of crows is a "murder," which is one of the most famous of the oddball animal group names. But I hadn't heard of a group of ravens before, so I had to look it up. It turns out that a group of ravens is an "unkindness," or a "conspiracy." That's certainly better than my deduction that it's a "manslaughter" of ravens.

What's interesting is that my Google search also turned up this article from the Audubon Society, arguing that it is, in fact, a "group" of crows, ravens, and whatever, since that's what people actually call them. As a birder, he's never used or heard any of the obscure group names, so you can't really say that a group of ravens is called an unkindness, since people in real life call it "a group of ravens." At most, you're just saying that people centuries ago called it by the obscure word. He goes further and asks experts on various animals if they've ever used or heard the group names, and not one had.

Most interestingly, the wombat expert pointed out that wombats don't get into groups, thus begging the question of how anyone devised that they should be a "wisdom" of wombats. I would further point out that although these group names come from the middle ages, no English-speaker set eyes on a wombat until centuries later. So someone out there is just arbitrarily coming up with more of these names, and now has slipped up by including animals that don't group together.

But back to the original idea that these names aren't real. I hadn't really thought about it before, but he's got a point. I mean, here I am, a trivia fan, and yet I've never found the groups of animals interesting, or made much headway in remembering them. I guess that's why; trivia isn't just random info, it has to have at least some importance to be interesting, say, by linking to some other facts. I can remember that the Baltimore Ravens football club is named after the poem because it was written by local boy Edgar Allan Poe. But I'm never going to remember an unkindness of Ravens, even after writing this blog entry about it.

On a similar note, can we lay off the phobia name trivia? I hate it when people ask, "What is 'flentaphobia' a fear of?" I think what you mean is, theoretically, what would it be a fear of if it actually existed. Yes, that's what it theoretically would be called, but just because you can put some Latin roots together, doesn't mean it's an actual thing. I could just say that I have inaniaephobia, the fear of inanity.

Pineapple Express

This weekend we got news that the inventor of Hawaiian pizza has died. You may know - or may have just guessed - that Hawaiian pizza is not actually Hawaiian. In fact, it's not even popular in Hawaii.

I think I heard somewhere that Hawaiian pizza is originally Canadian. But I definitely didn't know that it was from Chatham of all places. So score one for small-town Ontario. It's good to know that between this and Crokinole we've made a lasting mark, of some sort.

It's also interesting that the inventor was of neither Italian or Hawaiian origin, but rather Greek. So a Greek immigrant running an Italian restaurant naming something after a place in the U.S. is either the most Canadian thing ever, or an epic incident of cultural appropriation.

Mostly though, I have to ask, can we please use this moment to end the tiresome argument about pineapples on pizza? Yes, I know, it's supposed to be one of those silly time-wasters where we have passionate discussions of something that doesn't really matter, like over-the-top vs. down-the-wall toilet paper. But this one is just annoying because:

• Hawaiian pizza has been around since the sixties, it's too late now. Watching people in their forties suddenly feigning disgust at a food that's been around their entire lives just sounds forced. It's not like we don't have new foods to get angry about. I mean, who decided salt and caramel have to go together? In what world is caramel not good enough on its own? Or not bad enough for you?
• It goes against the democratic appeal of pizza. As the ultimate personalizable food, I don't really care what disgusting things other people are putting on their pizza. I know someone in the world loves to defile their pizza with brussels sprouts, but I'm okay with that. I disapprove of their pizza, but I will defend to the death their right to eat it.
• Pineapple is constantly dropping down the list of unconventional pizza toppings. Look at Canada's other unconventional pizza institution named after an unrelated part of the U.S.: Boston Pizza. Have you looked at their menu? You can get perogy pizza with potatoes and sour cream on it; how is that not a bigger abomination?

It's Everyone's Thing

You have to wonder what advertisers are thinking when they choose music for their commercials. Obviously they're trying to associate a catchy, usually energetic and positive, song with their product. Ford has decided to build their entire campaign around Rachel Platten's "Fight Song."  It's the kind of transparently defiant pop song that I honestly was surprised was not by Kelly Clarkson. Is that really the tone to sell cars? They're trying to convince me to buy a compact crossover, then close-out the pitch with a song of someone trying to overcome a personal crisis.

But what really surprises me is that advertisers don't consider the problems with reusing a song. They're trying to associate their product with the song, so you'd think they'd shy away from songs already associated with a different product. Yes, "Good Morning" seems like the ideal music for an orange juice ad, but don't they know we've been trained to associate that song with Viagra?

But the worst is "It's Your Thing." Already made annoying by Ramada, now both Phillips and SlimFast are using it. Strangely, the latter seem to be building their whole campaign around the song, using the title for their website and hashtag. With all the music in the world, why would anyone reuse psychologically-polluted songs like these? I can only assume it's because the folks who own the rights to these songs are much quicker to sell permission than most. Indeed, "It's Your Thing" was by The Isley Brothers, who also recorded "Shout," another song abused by commercials.  So, Messrs Isley, please have some self-respect and raise your rates

I Definitely Mean This

I'm really getting tried of the phrase, "_____ like you mean it."  It's no surprise for KFC to tell me to "Eat like you mean it." But when the CBC is telling me to "Holiday like you mean it," you know it's gone too far. Yes, it's an unfortunate aspect of pop culture that reckless aggressive entities get to use the memes when they're still cool, but the awkward ones that have trouble expressing themselves end up using them later, oblivious they've gone stale, and end up sounding like a dad trying to be cool.

But why is like-you-mean-it so annoying? Well, it's always frustrating when advertisers want us to believe that their product is the best way to express ourselves, like it's somehow a purer expression of our true spirit than everything else in this numbingly artificial world. One made numbingly artificial by all the mass produced products we're constantly being sold.

But in this case, we have an added dose of macho competitiveness. We're not just accusing you of living half-heartedly, we're making it sound like you're a wimp for not putting some effort into your life. Have some self-respect you wuss, and watch Frosty the Snowman.

So I am giving "_____ like you mean it" the "______ is the new black" award for phrases that have outstayed their welcome. Thus, I can now say, "Like you mean it is the new black." This causing the saying to disappear into the linguistic vortex in an implosion of cliche.

Is He Ever Going To Swing?

You may have seen the quick news item that Jerry Dior, the creator of Major League Baseball's iconic logo, has died.

It's a pretty nice design.  It's recognizable, bright but not gaudy, and it gets across the message of baseball in America. And it's aged fairly well - I had no idea how old it is (since 1968, apparently.)

But it's also led to imitation.  The NBA has a similar logo, featuring a silhouetted player that even borderline fans like myself seem to know is Jerry West. I don't know which league had the idea first, but fine, they both use it. Then someone started using it with a skateboarding image on t-shirts. Still fine: I appreciate pop-art references as much as I like lists. Then the Indy Racing League couldn't think of a better idea for its logo. When the National Lacrosse League used a similar symbol, it's clear that this is some sort of default league logo. Is it even still iconic anymore? At what point does it become a visual cliche?

So please: pop artists and fledgling sports leagues alike, come up with something else to rip off.  Perhaps the NHL crest, or whatever that new MLS thing is.  Or just copy FIFA.  They won't sue you; I hear they're distracted right now.

Please Forward This Post To Demonstrate What Happens When People Forward Posts

It was many months ago - maybe a few years - that I saw a picture passed around on Facebook, of kids demonstrating how far things can spread online. They had a sign saying that as part of a school assignment they were asking everyone to keep forwarding the picture, to see just how many people it would reach.  That seemed like a cute idea.  By the time I saw it, it had already been shared and liked thousands of times.  The point was made, to the kids and the many who saw it.

Get that?  The point was made.  There's no need to keep repeating the same experiment.  I keep seeing more and more of them.  Frankly, I didn't think this really needed demonstrating in the first place.  To see the power of social media, you don't need to set up a photo with pleading children, you just need to watch what you are consuming online.  Just in the last 24 hours, that bad Robert Downey Jr. interview has gone viral.  So don't set up your own demonstration, just imagine he's holding a sign asking you to consider how stories spread on the Internet.

The irony is that the copycat viral media demonstrations are casting doubt on their own thesis.  If these pictures were so widely spread, people would realise just how redundant they've become.  You want to show kids how far viral stories go?  Then you must not have seen the last twelve people who did the same thing, which means they didn't really spread that far.  It's sort of like those ads you see on benches and bus shelters that say, "You Just Proved Advertising Works."  Yeah, and you just proved that you're having trouble selling ad space.

Choosy Moms Choose Portable Network Graphics

There's been an explosion of GIFs lately. There are times when the motion capabilities of a GIF are useful. But really, those are few and far between. Most ideas that don't require a video of any appreciable length can be depicted perfectly well in a static picture. The number of things that can be depicted well in a clip measured in seconds is small.

You see, you can depict motion in a still picture.  Take a look at this Cheetah chasing a gazelle:

"Cheetah chasing Thompsons gazelle crop" by Original uploader was Profberger at en.wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia; transferred to Commons by User:Richard001 using CommonsHelper.. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.

Wow, that looks fast.  See, we don't assume that the cheetah and the gazelle are standing still just because we can't see them moving.  It's actually pretty amazing how we can imply movement.  Take a look at Umberto Boccioni's Dynamism of a Soccer Player:

"WLA moma Umberto Boccioni Dynamism of a Soccer Player 1913" by Wikipedia Loves Art participant "shooting_brooklyn" - Uploaded from the Wikipedia Loves Art photo pool on Flickr. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It's not even a picture of anything, except the movement.  My point is that we aren't living in Harry Potter's world where everyone expects every picture to move.

Sometimes movement can be useful.  There's that GIF of the ice-cream-sandwich machine which is fun to watch, and the occasional blooper or cat video. But now people are using GIFs to show moving clips of things that don't really require it. If I see a picture of a great white shark, I get it, I don't need to see it biting something to get the full effect that one gets from a picture of a shark with its huge, toothy, mouth open. But worse, now you see clips of people talking in movies even though GIFs don't have sound.

I'm not complaining about GIFs because they're new technology (for one thing, they aren't) but rather because they, like most technologies come with a price that needs to be weighed. In this case, it's the bandwidth needed to send the GIFs. Video is, after all, a series of pictures. And unlike other forms of video, GIFs don't have a way of conserving memory by reusing the data for parts of the image that don't change from frame to frame. So adding a moving GIF to your blog or web page is like adding dozens of similarly sized pictures. That's fine if you have a fast Internet connection, but if you're like many of us - particularly in rural areas - a page decked out in gratuitous moving GIFs take forever to load, with little payoff.

The sad part is that this problem is just repeating the same problems the web had always had: too many people treat web design as an attention-getting collage, with no consideration for the consequences, both technical and psychological. Moving GIF are just the latest incarnation of the blink tag, Java applets, frames, and Flash.

An Appeal To The Easily Bored

I'm a big fan of being tired of things.  That is, I get sick of trends and tendencies quickly.  But you knew that because I complain about them a lot.  And I'm glad when I see others complain about being tired of things.  If more people are vocal about societal trends they dislike, it will push decision makers to do something about it.

But this week I've seen a number of people in the U.S. and Canada saying that they are tired of yet another attempt to pretend to care about the World Cup.  This usually comes with sweeping statements that no one here cares, they're just pretending to be interested and so on.

That bugs me because it simply isn't true.  A lot of people in our two countries do care and watch.  Certainly it isn't a large number compared to our favourite sports, but it's not an insignificant number either.  And that's why I'm particularly disappointed in my fellow curmudgeons.  Usually, when we complain that some fashion or fad has gone to far, it is because we are pointing out that not everyone in society has the same tastes and priorities, and that some of us are displeased with the trends of the mass-market.  By discounting the soccer subculture, you're trampling the desires of those very people. 

I think this all comes from the fact that soccer is at a very awkward point in its history here.  It's moved beyond the obscure curiosity it once was:  the MLS is still in business, and European soccer is popular enough to merit showings on sports channels.  But on the other hand, it isn't huge: MLS still operates on a much smaller scale than the big pro leagues, and most American sports fans would be hard pressed to name a European soccer team other than Manchester United.  That level of partial success is unusual for us in our high-stakes sports world.  Sports success means superstardom to us, so we're not sure what to do with a sport that has essentially a cult following.

It should be obvious: we do what we do with all other cult followings:  The mainstream occasionally makes awkward reference to it, but mostly ignores it.  And we curators of the obscure admire and praise it, glad that it brings some variety into our culture.  So if you care about a diverse culture, get over being tired of it.

Uncivil Twilight

That's it! I can't take it any more!  Every daylight savings shift, people start saying we're just kidding ourselves, we're moving time around and thinking we're getting more.  I've become accustomed to that, but I expect better from Neil deGrasse Tyson:

What would aliens say if told that Earthlings shift clocks by an hour to fool themselves into thinking there's more sunlight
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) March 9, 2014

Sure, he's probably intellectually exhausted after weeks of talking Seth MacFarlane out of writing fart jokes into the new Cosmos.  But still, usually he's the one convincing the great unwashed that experts know what they're doing. Now he's contributing to it.

So let me explain.  Here's a chart showing how the hours of daylight change through the year.  Daylight hours are in orange, night in blue.  This is based on New York, but the principle is the same anywhere:

Now I'll overlay the typical person's waking hours (represented by the black striped hours.) I've picked 7:00am to 11:00pm.

As you can see, that has the effect that in the summer, there is a fair amount of daylight that goes by before this person even gets up.  That's rather unfortunate, given that the person also has several waking hours after the sun goes down.  How can we take advantage of that extra "wasted" daylight?

One way is to change your waking time through the year, getting up with the sun.  But that's inconvenient, since we are creatures of habit, and many parts of our days can't be easily shifted (like working hours.) 

Another way would be to shift our entire day forward.  Wake up at, say, 4:00am each day throughout the year, then going to bed at 8:00pm, and splitting our non-working hours between before and after work.  But that doesn't seem to fit human nature: for whatever reason, we have a strong preference to doing our work first and recreation afterwards.

So the only remaining approach is to shift our day forward in the middle of the year.  That moves our waking hours earlier, so that we're awake for more of the daylight.  Here's what that looks like, again with the black-striped area representing a typical set of waking hours:

See?  Now less of the daylight hours goes unused.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying daylight savings time is perfect, or even that it's a good idea.  For instance, one could argue that we should just shift the day an hour or two forward and leave it there all year, and we just learn to deal with getting up in the dark in the winter.  Just stop it with the obtuse arguments that science/the government/Ben Franklin thinks we're getting free daylight.

This Won't Work

See what I did there? Or rather, see what I didn't do there? I had a great opportunity to make a twerking pun, but I didn't take it. I didn't take it, because the topic's really been taken too far.  We'd already taken it too far a couple of weeks back, but I finally snapped when I read today's comic strips.  Yes, the Capp Gap has gone by, and now we're reading comic strips making twerking jokes.

Now you may wonder: Jason, you appreciate satire - and you hate pop culture - so wouldn't you want lots of humour about a popular (and silly) trend?  Well yes, I do like jokes about popular culture, but hardly any jokes are actually about twerking. Mostly they fall into one of two categories:

• Generic references to the new tend without any apparent knowledge of it. These are the late night monologue jokes for grandparents who have heard the term but don't know what it means. E.g. "President Obama and John Boehner met to discuss the budget, but they didn't make much progress because they spent most of the time twerking!"
• Fearful references to the trend as something you wouldn't want to see. They assume you know what it is, or at least have decided you're not comfortable with it. E.g. "I missed the Nobel Prize ceremonies this week, but that's alright.  Who wants to see the opening number with Richard Dawkins twerking?"

So yes, I welcome real jokes about twerking.  Ridicule the idea that a woman miming sex using items she appears to have found in a younger sister's closet is supposed to be sexy.  Make fun of how were getting worked up over badly simulated sex twenty years after the Internet went mainstream.  Heck, even make fun of that poor middle-aged mother trying desperately to keep up with the times who confuses the words "twerk" and "tweet" at the worst possible moment.  But let's forget the brain-dead fill-in-the-blanks jokes. They are, to satire, what twerking is, to sex.

Please. Stop. This.

There's a certain trick of writing that I keep seeing.  It's the practice of emphasizing by separating each word in its own sentence, like, Oh. My. God.  Guys, it's just been overdone. 

I'm not sure how it began.  It might have been someone trying to ridicule William Shatner's speaking style.  I think it might have been that classic "Poochie" episode of The Simpsons, where the Comic Store Guy declares the latest Itchy And Scratchy to be the Worst. Episode. Ever.  I'm not sure how everyone seems to know he was speaking each word in its own sentence, but that's how I've always seen it spelled.

By the way, I learned in school that you are supposed to italicise the name of a TV show, as opposed to say, a song, whose title is quoted.  But what about a show within a show?  They never covered that, and the mundane entertainment of the time didn't require us to know.

Anyway, the thing that pushed me over the edge on this one-word sentence thing was an op-ed piece today about Thomas Mulcair.  It's bad enough that the writer used this abused technique to describe an unexciting politician, but he was actually trying to emphasize the very fact that he is unexciting.  So that's it, it's the period that broke the camel's back from now on, if you want to emphasize something in print, you'll just have to us all-caps and exclamation marks, just like us poor souls on the Internet.

A Tweetpost on My Blogpage

I just recently recognised another thing I'm sick of:  People ironically referring to the Internet as "The Internets" or "The Interweb."  Okay, I get it, you're making fun of the way a person's out-of-touch uncle who's never been online might describe it.  But what you have to understand is this:

• People have been making fun of the off-line since the Internet started to go mainstream twenty years ago.
• There's hardly anyone left who's oblivious to the Internet, so you're just making fun of people from the past, so you're humour is about as current as a joke about Betamax users.

And no, enhancing it to "Teh Internets" just makes it worse.  If you have to do some retro Internet humour, why not dig out "Information Superhighway" again.  I haven't heard that phrase in at least ten years; I don't even feel nauseous when I type it.

Stuck in a Holding Pattern

The flying car is a bit of a sore spot for many, since it was something that was promised to us from long ago.  And it seemed so believable.  No one really expected to see Warp Drive in their lifetime, but a flying car seems to just be rearranging inventions we already have.  Yet for a variety of reasons, it just didn't work out.  And now, between those expectations and our disappointment, there seems to be an overreaction every time some hint at auto-aviation arises.

Sometimes this comes from Mr. Paul Moller, an engineer focused on the challenge.  I first read about him in an article on new technologies coming in the 1990's.  It virtually guaranteed that he would deliver a practical flying car by the end of the decade.  Since then, I've seen similar articles about him and his technological quest every few years.  The articles are always portraying his production of a flying car as an inevitability that's right around the corner.  The oddest example of this naive optimism was in the middle of a job-hunting book in which the author went off on a tangent about how the government is wasting our money on public transit because Moller is going to answer all our transport problems in just a few years. 

I don't think Moller is trying to defraud people.  There's an old joke about asking an engineer how complete his current task is, and he says, "90%."  A week later he's asked how complete the job is, and he says, "95%."  A week later, 99%.  A week after that, 99.9%.  It's a common mistake to over-estimate how complete a new undertaking is (I've been guilty of this enough times.)  Moller is just an extreme example.  That or the car companies are sabotaging him.  Conspiracy theorists, start your engines.

But the latest flying car red herring is TerraFugia.  In this case, it's quite real and practical.  It's just that it's only technically a flying car.  Have you seen it?  It's really just a small plane that has wheels, and thus could conceivably be driven on the road.  I suppose that could be useful in a few cases; an amateur pilot would be able to store the plane at home and drive it to an airport.  But should a product useful to a few small-time pilots really get mainstream media attention?  No, we're only being told about it because it technically comes under that magic "flying car" label. 

It would be like if a jet-engine manufacturer created an engine small enough that a single person could carry it to the plane for installation using only a specially designed, back-mounted harness.  Conceivably useful, but limited in audience.  However, once they call it a "jet pack" it'll be on every news report on earth.

Striking Writers

A few years ago there was a TV writer's strike, and talk shows had to go off the air.  I was actually surprised to find that they were written by writers, rather than simple computer programs.  I assumed Jay Leno just had a rack of computers backstage scanning the news wires.  When there was a story about, say, children, it inserts Michael Jackson into it and calls it a joke.

Anyway, my point is: enough with the Mitt Romney dog-on-the-car-roof jokes.  I'm not a fan of Romney or dogs, but still, the next comic who tries a lazy joke just because there's an animal in a news story is going to find out what it's like being strapped to the roof of a car headed for Canada.

Keep Calm and Something Ironic

I was going to write a rant about how I'm sick of the "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters and their various spoofs.  After all, the whole phenomena has really run its course.  Beyond the original, there's really only three more permutations you can try: satire ("Get Panicky and Go Mental,") weirdness ("Keep Calm and Have a Donut,") and gratuitous subculture references ("Keep Calm and Han Shot First.")  Now people are scrounging for variations and the results usually aren't funny or meaningful.  Often, they can't even be bothered to get the font right (Humanist, people!  It's the only font they have in Britain.)

But then I realised that there is another avenue that hasn't been explored: other countries.  The reason the poster was so amusing in the first place was because it was so distinctly British.  It's rare that you see an artefact that sums up a culture's qualities (well, best qualities) so perfectly.  So I thought, what would the equivalent posters in other countries be?

Greece:

 China:

Canada:

The Limits of My Tolerance

It's not often that I'm conscious of the moment something becomes annoying.  There are a lot of things in our world that are overdone and overused, but started out as good ideas.  If you're my age or older, you may remember the first time you saw a minivan.  What a great idea: a van (which, as of the early eighties, was still inherently cool) but for families.  Then one day years later, you're looking for a parking spot at Wal-mart, find yourself cursing an entire row of spots all taken by minivans, and you realize that at some point you learned to hate them.

I just noticed that the same thing happened to me with Stan Lee cameos.  It used to be fun, you felt like you were in on a subcultural connection if you recognized him in one of the X-Men movies.  But watching the latest Dr. Pepper ad, I groaned internally at their chummy attempted in-joke.  Maybe the concept has been done to death, maybe Comics Culture has gone too mainstream to have inside jokes, or maybe it's just the fact of a months-ahead tie-in commercial.

On the other hand, I know exactly where I was when I got tired of those child-drawing family stickers in the back windows of cars, SUVs, and the aforementioned minivans.  Just a few days ago they seemed cute, but then, as I walked through a mall parking lot, I saw one, something snapped in my mind, and they just started getting on my nerves.  They're as boastful as the "Baby on Board" signs from the eighties, but without even the pretense of having a useful purpose.  They've also been hurt by the lack of variation: Usually a trend that lasts this long gets spoofed.  You'd think that by now, bored children in the back seat would find a way to combine the family stickers with one of the Calvin peeing stickers you see in the back of pick-ups.