Taylor Swift Beat Me To The "Stevie Knicks" Pun

We just saw the NBA and NHL championships handed out on consecutive nights. I don't have much to add to the Carolina Hurricanes win, beyond pointing out that they now join Colorado and Tampa Bay on the list of places that have now won a Stanley Cup, rebuilt, and won another cup with a different team, all since the last time a Canadian team won the cup.

Speaking of long championship droughts, congratulations to the Knicks on their first NBA championship in more than a half-century. That should give the Leafs some optimism. Maybe.

But that brings up one unsettling aspect of their win. We've now seen a few teams end long championship droughts in the twenty-first century, and the feelings around them are a bit different. Obviously, the Cubs spring to mind as a team that had a long and painful futility streak. When they won a World Series, there were generally good feelings from those who didn't have a connection to the team. We were glad to see their long-suffering fanbase have their moment of success. After all, they were the Loveable Losers, people who took their misfortune with good nature. You felt like they deserved a change in fortune.

Contrast that with the Red Sox a few years earlier. Their World Series drought was also measured in lifetimes, but there wasn't such an outpouring of joy to see them finally happy. I'm sure some of that was their rivalry with the Yankees, and thus taste-makers in the media capital weren't so happy to see them succeed. But there was also a feeling that the Bosox weren't such loveable losers; rather than being seen having a laid-back acceptance of their fate, they came across as a little too intense and taking it a little too seriously. Their continued failure gave the rest of the sports world a bit of schadenfreude, and watching them finally have their day didn't give us nearly as much joy. 

So when it comes to long-suffering fans, there's differing levels of sympathy. To bring this back to the Leafs, they'll definitely be the extreme counter to the Cubs. Yes, plenty of Leaf fans have a Cub-like humour to their futility, but for every one of them, there are twelve with dangerous levels of obsession. Even as a Leafs fan, I realize that if they ever win a cup, no non-fans will feel good for them.

So what about the Knicks? Well, I found that this was one of those Medium-is-the-Message situations. Watching them win - clinching on the road - it was easy to feel good for them. A hard-working team, coming from behind, it all seemed to parallel a fanbase that has remained passionate through thick and thin.

Contrast that to the previous game, where they won in an exciting, record-setting comeback. But that was at home. Normally it's great for a neutral observer to see a home team win, with a passionate crowd cheering them on. But a Knicks crowd is second only to a Lakers crowd in celebrity sightings, and the director of the TV coverage was intent on getting a reaction shot from every famous person in the lower bowl after every decisive play. You could just imagine him in the control room shouting out the names in succession to cut to the close-ups, "Sandler! Seinfeld! McEnroe! Stiller! Swift!" 

I have nothing against any of those celebrities, but it does make it harder to cheer for the team. If I'm envisioning the long-suffering Knicks fan as some janitor from Queens, then I feel really good to see their sports dreams come true. But if it's Jerry Seinfeld, then it's harder to imagine that this team's futility has left a gaping hole in his life. 

So I hope that future sports broadcasts will think about this. Aside from the fact that you should really have more cameras showing the game than the crowd, you should also think about how that shapes the view of the team.

The Secret Life Of The Centre Square

 It's kind of depressing how fandom can come and go. I mean, there logically will be a last person alive who still misses Automan, what if it's me? That's why I find it reassuring whenever I see evidence of an old fandom. So if I come across Greatest American Hero fan fiction, I rejoice (but don't read it) because I'm glad to see passion for an older media franchise. And genuine passion too, not just someone name-dropping it to sound eclectic like I just did.

So recently, when I saw a personalized license plate that read "Zsa Zsa G," I found it reassuring. I was never a fan of the actress, Zsa Zsa Gabor, but I'm glad that there's still someone around who misses her. So much so that I'm not going to do the math on the likelihood that it really is a Zsa Zsa Gabor fan, vs just someone named Zsa Zsa G. I don't think there's a big Hungarian community in town, so I'll just go with my initial assumption.

By the way, it's as good a time as any to revisit those 70s-80s pseudo-celebrities. It might seem weird to current generations, but there was a certain type of D-list celebrity that hung around on game shows or did guest spots on sitcoms, or appeared on a talk show in need of a human punchline. Today, we often talk about someone who's "famous for being famous," but that just means they are famous for reality TV or social media. But back then, these people just kept showing up on our TV and we weren't always sure why. 

Of course, those were real people, and in the modern day, we've learned more about them. It’s sort of like  when Dolly Parton was only known for her bustline, and Betty White was just another frequent TV star. It'd be quite a tragedy if society had never seen beyond that. Well, I’ve since learned that Charo was actually quite a good guitarist. Fannie Flagg wrote Fried Green Tomatoes. JM J Bullock lived with HIV for much of his career and co-hosted a talk show with Tammy Faye Bakker. Which reminds me:

Things Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #46:

An actress will win the Best Actor Oscar playing Tammy Faye Bakker.

Anyway, it’s unfortunate timing for that generation of borderline celebrities. Today’s media landscape is just built for such people: Then, they had to make do with guest appearances, but today they’d have reality shows, Hallmark movies, and so many social media followers.

This Team Is A Pinto With 50,000 Miles On It

The big news in hockey this week has been the slow-motion firing of Vancouver Canucks' coach Bruce Boudreau. It's been rumoured that he was on the way out for a while now, and then it was leaked that the team was interviewing replacements, all the while with Boudreau trying to go about his job. It was a surreal, and - most observers agree, cruel - situation.

Although the team's behaviour was roundly criticized, I can't help but think that Canadian hockey journalists are still missing the bigger picture. For one thing, few people have mentioned that this is the second straight season with a mid-season coach-firing for the Canucks, something rarely seen in even the worst-run franchises. 

Then there's the question of the replacement. The coach that management really really wanted is Rick Tocchet. He has six years of experience, but his only playoff appearance was the Covid season where the playoffs were expanded so that three-quarters of the league qualified. Boudreau, on the other hand, has made the playoffs in all but one of his ten complete seasons. Yes, I know, it's become a standard of business that new management wants "their guy," but this stretches the concept to new depths.

My point is that if an NFL team were acting like this, then right about now I'd be writing a post about how I'm sick of the term, "dumpster fire," and we should really come up with some more metaphors for deep organizational incompetence. I don't know, "moldy basement," maybe? But in hockey journalism - in Canada, anyway - people aren't willing to call it what it is.

I see a parallel with how the media talks about players. I've noticed that even if they talk about a play being "dirty," they're unwilling to label the player who does the deed as a "dirty player." And this continues even when it's not his first offence. He's still a Good Hockey guy with lots of Character, just one who happens to make dirty plays on a regular basis. And now the same attitude applies to franchises. The Canucks are a First-Class Organization, that just keeps making stupid or immoral decisions. 

With Or Without U

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

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

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

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

SportsNet.ca:

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

TSN.ca:

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

CBC.ca:

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

GlobeAndMail.com

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

TheStar.com

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

NaitonalPost.com

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

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

Good Whill Hunting

In a recent interview, George Lucas revealed some of his plans for the third Star Wars trilogy, had he been the one to make it. He didn't make it, of course, having sold the franchise to Disney. And after hearing his plans, people are thinking that’s a good thing.

He revealed that the third trilogy would have gone into the microscopic world, looking more in depth at the midi-chlorians that no one liked from The Phantom Menace. He would have introduced another bunch of microbes, the Whills, who really control The Force and the universe.

At this point, I have to say that I’m not entirely sure that Lucas is being honest with us. Part of me believes that either:

1. He’s so tired of people criticizing the prequel trilogy that he’s trolling us by taking what people didn’t like about them and then expanding on that. If we discover that one of the Whills is a whiny teenager having an unconvincing romance with an older Whill royal, then you’ll know I’m right.
2. Like any decent Star Wars fan, he’s alarmed by the bigoted criticism the new trilogy is getting, so he’s running interference by putting out truly bad ideas for how it might have gone. Racist “fans” will be quicker to accept non-white-male stars when they realize that they could have gotten microbe stars.

But assuming that Lucas’ ideas were genuine, this stands as the most extreme example of a principle I heard once about why sci-fi/fantasy franchises often disappoint over time: that the creators probably have different ideas of what the story is about than the fans do. Unfortunately, I can’t remember who said that, but I think it was someone on a Battlestar Galactica after-show. That was another show that deviated from expectations as it went along. It became a convoluted origin story for the human race, rather than the parable of post-9/11 America that attracted many fans.

The midi-chlorians were a good example of this. It struck a false note with fans because:

1. The concept of The Force had seemed like a statement of mind over matter. The idea that great power could come from patience and understanding was an inspiring meek-shall-inherit-the-galaxy idea. The 98-pound weakling could watch the movies to escape from a world where he gets beat up by the school bully. But by introducing the midi-chlorians, it made it seem like just another genetic lottery. Now the 98-pound weakling realizes that in the movies’ universe, he’d just end up getting force-choked by the school bully.
2. Although Star Wars has always played fast and loose with science, at least it avoided using technobable as an cop-out story device, unlike a certain other Sci-Fi franchise.

Supposedly Lucas had the midi-chlorians in mind right from the start, so he perhaps didn't realize that the fans were building up a different mental image of the story's world than he had.

Ironically, another example of this is the aforementioned bigot fan contingent. A variety of incidents have exposed the fact that there are a lot of alt-right crossover in the sci-fi community. That’s a surprise to many, since Star Wars and Star Trek have, in their own way, made morality into a key ingredient. How that could possibly be compatible with tormenting a person for being of a different race is a mystery to most of us. And yet, these folks evidently have a great deal of passion for a franchise, despite not sharing some of its key values.

I guess you could make the argument that we all pick and choose what we want from a media property. After all, a lot of people are fans of Star Wars without being a fan of, you know, wars. We can absorb the story’s themes while glossing over the message that comes from the movies’ action, perhaps because action and violence are so ubiquitous in our media. There’s a similar concept in video games called Ludonarrative Dissonance, which is when the gameplay and the story have different messages, such as a violent game that tries to have a pro-peace moral. And I guess this can be a solution to my long-standing question of why far-right politicians often listen to music with a liberal message. Lefty lyrics often come with aggressive delivery, so you might well absorb one while ignoring the other.

That’s not to say that everyone has a right to get what they want out of our favourite media. We simply can’t all expect to get something out of it when we each see such different things in it. And if your experience is very different from either the creator or the rest of the audience, then you’ll be disappointed.

The Revolution Is About Basketball

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver gave an interesting interview where he talked about how the league uses modern media. For instance, the NBA encourages people to post highlights to YouTube, unlike some other sports organizations. First of all, they have an agreement with YouTube that they still get ad revenue from these clips, even if the NBA itself didn't post the videos, and secondly, they understand that clips on the internet aren't really competing with the game itself.

That's a refreshing attitude, not just in pro sports but in all of business. Most corporations have a knee-jerk reaction to stop any-and-all unauthorized usage of their product. While I can understand why a company would want to guard their intellectual property, there often seems to be no thought of a greater strategy that goes into the decision to send out cease-and-desist orders.

But what I found really interesting is that they've used their streaming service to learn about fans' preferences. They can tell how much of the game people are watching, and when they're turning off the game. I guess that can lead to privacy concerns, but in the modern world, the NBA knowing when you stop watching is pretty small potatoes.

What I find interesting is that this data contributed to their decision to reduce the number of time-outs this season. On the one hand, I could have told them to do that and saved them a lot of trouble. But it also makes me wonder what other insights the NBA and other leagues could learn about what excites and annoys fans.

It's also notable that Silver mentions that they find it easier to increase viewership by encouraging existing fans to watch more, rather than winning over new people. I'd like to see this approach applied to hockey, where there doesn't seem to be much focus about whether the sport should appeal to hard-core fans or appeal to new audiences, and discussion of how to appeal to each usually involves a lot of guesswork and stereotypes. It would be good to see some more certainty, even though I fear that it might push the sport in directions that I, personally, wouldn't like.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go subscribe to the NBA streaming service. Next year I'm going to use it to watch every game, but I'm going to stop watching every time there's a bad call against the Raptors.

Feel Good Ink

My parents asked me if I had bought the new book Fire and Fury. I had not, nor had they. It seems that we had each independently come to the same conclusion: it's a waste of money to buy the book, as you can just watch the news for a few days and they will read out the best parts to you.

Of course, you don't even need to do that much; the book can be summed up easily: Trump is an idiot. And you had probably already come to that conclusion. So I'm not sure why people are buying the book; you'll be reading anecdotes you've already heard, telling you something you already know. And apparently, it's now been leaked onto Wikileaks. I guess that site is trying to hurt the book sales as revenge for attacking their guy. And they're doing it by spreading a book that makes their guy look bad. Remember when the world sorta made sense?

An interesting aspect of the news around the book is a joke from cartoonist Ben Ward, who tweets as @pixelatedboat. He decided to spoof the bizarre anecdotes leaking out of the book by creating his own totally-exaggerated fake anecdote that was supposedly from the book. In his excerpt, it was alleged that Trump was very displeased that the TV in the White House does not have "The Gorilla Channel." This despite there never having been a gorilla channel. To placate him, aides created a fake Gorilla Channel by editing together Gorilla documentaries and feeding them on a loop to Trump's TV.

Of course, as many people are finding these days, it's pretty much impossible to ridicule through exaggeration. After all, making a fake cable channel is only a little beyond what we've heard White House employees do to placate their boss. I noticed that in one online discussion people were trying to assure themselves that the passage was fake, and the final convincing argument was not the content, but the fact that the author had put periods outside the quotes, which goes against standard editing practices.

What I found interesting is that Netflix tweeted a plea to stop asking them for the Gorilla Channel. By the same principle mentioned above, I have no idea if they are joking. But imagine if they aren't: here we all are making fun of Trump for wanting this channel that is quite silly and doesn't even exist. And yet, it turns out that given the chance, lots of people want the same thing.

And that's something that worries me in all this. Much as I don't like Trump, I worry that when we ridicule him, we let the rest of society off the hook. After all, the troubling aspect of his story is not the fact that he exists, but the fact that he has been allowed to take this much power. And to address that problem, we have to concern ourselves with the competence of our whole society, not just Trump. Reading about his exploits of stupidity makes us feel superior, but it allows us to avoid the need we all have to look at our inner Trump.

Still Working On Automating My Blog

There was a news item recently about Dominos experimenting with driverless pizza delivery. That's interesting, as it's yet another of the common things in our society that will be revolutionized with automation. There are so many things like that, where it's obvious once you think about it that self-driving cars will totally change it, but we just haven't thought it through. I mean, automated ice cream trucks.

Science Fiction author John Scalzi pointed out how this ruins Snow Crash, the Sci-Fi classic who's main character is a pizza deliverer. It's yet another case where we didn't think through how technology would work, imagining this futuristic world with a guy driving his own car. No, he'd be unemployed. That is, unless you believe the Dominos president, who said that the company's 100,000 drivers would take on "different roles" within the company. To put that in perspective, GM employs a little over 200,000 people in total. There's no way they need that many people tossing pizza dough. That is, in the unlikely event that it doesn't also get automated. You have to wonder just how many people a company like Dominos will employ in a few years.

But the thing that stuck out to me was how the whole story was presented as some sort of cutting edge research. The TV version I saw made it sound like Dominos was trying to build their own driverless car so that they could deliver pizza with it. Of course, developing their own self-driving technology would make about as much sense as designing your own car specially for pizza delivery. I'm sure you could make a pizza-optimized car, but no one did that, since the cost would be astronomical compared to just buying a general perpose car. Really, Dominos and all other delivery-based businesses will just use mass-produced self-driving cars.

Sure, there's a bit of work before they perfect automated pizza delivery, since you'll have to have the customer access the pizza themselves. But that's not really on the same level of research. Nor is it particularly newsworthy. Really, this is just Ford doing the self-driving research and development they would be doing anyway, but letting Dominos piggy-back by providing a cute task for their prototype to do. And Dominos gets the publicity when it becomes a news story.

...Do Not Talk About Anything But Fight Club

The last time there was a big, transcendent boxing match, I commented on the weird place boxing has in modern sports. It's usually invisible to the mainstream, but in a big match, it suddenly jumps onto the stage, and everyone acts as though is always been there.

In this case, there's the added narrative of a face-off between the new and old fighting sports, the uncertainty of an unprecedented match-up, and an awkwardly-timely racial undercurrent.

But I'm still surprised by how it's being covered. Granted, sports news has a thankless task of trying to satisfy many people with different tastes. They take advantage of the fact that while different people like different things, most people that like at least one mainstream sport will have at least an abiding interest in other mainstream sports. But smaller sports like boxing present more of a problem. Usually, they just do quick coverage in between other sports. We're going to talk about horse racing for five minutes, but then it's three hours of football. That's why the coverage of this fight is perplexing. It's been Superbowl-style, can't-get-enough coverage. The unstated assumption is that virtually all sports fans are interested in this fight.

I was shocked to see sports channels break away from programming to show live coverage of the press conferences. In non-sports news, that sort of saturation reporting is reserved for massive stories, the kind where they report it non-stop because it would just seem wrong to go to another story. So you report on the same thing, even when all you can show is an interview with some guy who's not saying anything.

It's been more bizarre when you consider that,

• The hype started so long ago. The world press tour was really early, seemingly a misjudgement.
• The match is a new level in boxing's metamorphosis into pro wrestling. The boxers' appearances have been chaotic and profane... wait, there's a word for that now, isn't there? Ah yes, "Trumpian." That's just added to the poor timing; a cascade of childish masculinity might have piqued interest for a week, but it can't really be sustained for a month.
• These contenders aren't really very marketable, outside their sports. Bad boys often sell well in the sports world, but there's a difference between controversial and unlikable.

So in short, we have two cult-following sports clash, each represented by a cartoonist man-child. I can see how that will find a big audience. But what's been a surreal experience is that it's shoved in front of all sports fans, with the assumption we're all in love with it. At least it'll be over soon.

The Men They Couldn't Hang, Stepped To The Mic And Sang

Both Sides Now

There's been a lot of work parsing Trump's unwillingness to single-out the white supremacist groups in Charlottesville.  Most of the focus I've seen is on his administration's long history of playing footsie with the far-right.  But I think that's misguided.  Trump isn't trying to reach out to Neo-Nazis; he's trying to appeal to the people who don't really like the KKK and friends, but are also really uncomfortable with Black Lives Matter and many other activist groups. In short, they don't like people disrupting the status quo .

In A Mirror, Darkly

Trump did his best to establish false-equivalence between heavily armed fascists and those protesting them. Some in the media fell for it, replaying his press conference antics without noting whether his claims were true.  But I think journalists are slowly getting wise.  Or at least, they've started running with the "Trump is nuts" narrative instead of the usual "one side against the other" narrative.

But what really worries me is a relatively small part of the press conference.  Trump didn't merely draw a parallel between the side, but he labeled the counter protesters, giving them the name that seemed the natural counterpart to the so-called "Alt Right." It's a name no one was actually using, and doesn't really make sense, since there isn't really any new force on the left, just the usual groups working harder when fighting the new efforts associated with the Alt Right.

You notice I'm not saying the new name?  That's because I think it's going to be the most dangerous thing to come out of this whole event.  A lot of people are laughing at the name; after all, it's defined as anyone who opposes Nazis, so that would seem to be most of humanity. But the problem is, it's an invitation for false-equivalence.  It invites people to group those countering hate together as though it was one group with its own agenda, rather than what it is: people acting on what most of our society believes in. It makes it sound like they are as much a separate group outside the mainstream as the hat groups themselves are.  In short, it invites the sort of world view I described Trump encouraging in the first section. So I cringe every time I here someone repeat it, even if it is to ridicule it.  It's such a dangerous idea that you shouldn't be giving it any publicity.

Working For The Clampdown

One strange aspect of Charlottesville was the focus of the anger.  Throughout most of my life, whenever bigotry has bubbled to the surface in America, it's generally been pointed at Hispanics, Blacks, or Muslims.  Yes, I know, there's more to it than that, but those are the big targets that you hear about from race-baiting politicians and conservative media.

And yet, when you wade through the ground-level coverage of the hate groups present, they frequently jumped straight to Jews as their hated group of choice.  I really didn't see that coming, since the march was supposedly about a Civil War statue, and their hero in the White House has generally left them alone.  During the campaign, I mentioned that Jews were staying away from Trump, and one explanation given was that they understood that they would inevitably be targeted by the movement.  They sure called that right.

But why are the haters so angry at Jews, despite no coaching from the media or politicians? Recently, an explanation was proposed in the Washington Post: Because they have the privilege to fight back.

Say, remember when "haters" just meant people who were really negative?  Taylor Swift used to sing about them?  Innocent times.

This Used To Be My Playground

There's a dispute going on about how to see Charlottesville. On one side, you have (mostly white) people saying things like "everything has changed" or "this isn't America." On the other side, you have (mostly black) people saying, "this is nothing new."

To some extent, this is a misunderstanding of nuance.  If a person says, "this isn't my America," it's not clear whether they mean, "I refuse to believe this hatred exists here," or, "my vision of this country is a society that's better than this."  The first interpretation is naive and ignorant, while the second is just very idealized rhetoric, and not really a problem.

The trouble is that in recent years, a lot of the most egregious incidents of racism in the U.S. have been disguised within government and corporate policies, hidden in societal norms, or covered over by the justice system.  So activists have gotten used to pointing out that there have long been problems that most of the population just isn't seeing.  That's become enough of an instinctive reaction that even after an incident that seems like a game changer, they're still telling everyone that it wasn't that big of a deal.  I can understand why they would feel that way, but I don't think that's the best message to be putting out there right now.  At a time when white America is finally ready to believe that racism is a problem, you don't want to be telling them that no, it's business as usual.

Negativeland

There have surely been many news stories lost in the United States in the midst of the Trump tumult. Different aspects of the main story are in danger of getting lost; what hope is there for other news?

One story that should be noted is the shooting of an innocent Australian woman in Minnesota. Of course, there have been many stories of innocent people killed by police in recent years. But this event is different.

Strangely, what sets it apart is not what happened, but what didn't. Police didn't defend their actions or deflect blame - the chief even resigned. The media didn't demonize the victim.

I'm sure you can see where this is going. In this case, the victim is white. Observing it is infuriating: it's provided confirmation of just how differently blacks and whites are treated by American police, media and politicians. So really, it's a big story, but only in the negative; the story here is that there is no story. Even if the media had both the inclination and space to report on it, it's hard to point to the absence of events.

And even if you are paying attention to it, it's hard to know how to take it. Seeing what's going on now might be anger-inducing, but it's important to remember that it's not the treatment this case is receiving that is the problem - after all, this is how it's supposed to be. Let's not forget that this woman's death is still a tragedy.

The situation is similar to that of Trayvon Martin. Defendant George Zimmerman was found not-guilty in large part because of lack of evidence. As I mentioned at the time, really that was the right verdict; the frustrating part was not that, but the knowledge that a black defendant would never have received the same allowance.

These inverted news stories are an obstacle for anyone trying to get the message out about poor treatment of African Americans. In order to really illustrate it, you need to call attention to these nothing-to-see-here-folks incidents. It takes some effort to try to demonstrate to a skeptical audience what is happening.

Filtering Facebook

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

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

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

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

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

Hal, Tell Them About Doritos

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

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

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

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

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

You Quite Literally Can't Handle The Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The NeverEnding Story

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

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

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

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

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

Try To Keep Up

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

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

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

Mighty Vocal People

With the baseball season winding down, people are talking about who's going to win the MVP awards. Of course, I was hoping that Toronto's Josh Donaldson would win for a second straight year, but he fell out of the running after he joined most of his teammates in taking September off. My next choice would be the Astros' Jose Altuve, since he is, like me, both short and not a member of the Boston Red Sox.

But like any discussion of MVP awards, we also have a debate of the definition of Most Valuable Player. You might think that it is tantamount to the best player. But the "most valuable" player could just be the player who makes the biggest difference to their team. But then, the player that makes the biggest difference could just be the only good player on a bad team.

It can be a frustrating argument. Yes, I know, part of the fun of sports - especially baseball - is the arguing about it. But in this case, it's arguing about what we're arguing about, and that's never fun. But it gets worse, because in the past few years, a lot of people go into the baseball MVP discussion with the argument that Mike Trout is the best player in baseball, so he be MVP. That's despite the fact that Trout trails probable-winner Mookie Betts in just about all offensive categories.

I've heard a few people make a similar argument in basketball, calling for LeBron James to be the default MVP as the best overall player, even if Steph Curry had the best season. Essentially the argument is that James and Trout should win the award year-in, year-out, until another player surpasses them in general talent.

So the MVP could be the player who had the best season, the player who made the biggest difference, or the best overall player, even if he doesn't have the best season this particular year. Just what we need, a third definition.

I guess this idea is a result of our celebrity culture, where the designated star gets to be the centre of attention, with details like reality not mattering. But another contributing factor is the weird place baseball occupies in American culture right now. As I mentioned once before, baseball has become a local game, where fans care about their own team, but not the sport in general. That's unfortunate for someone like Trout: as a generational talent in a popular sport, he should be the most popular guy in America. But most baseball fans care more for their own team's utility infielder.

This situation seems to be frustrating baseball journalists. They're trying to give credit to a star player, but no one seems to be listening. And they have to worry for the long-term health of a sport that's traditionally been defined by individual stars. So sometimes their efforts to laud young talent at every opportunity sounds a bit heavy handed.

Fill Ms. Fission And Charge Up The Flex Resistor

I want to assure you that I’m not going to talk about cars for a third straight post. This is about technology and media, and it’s only tangentially inspired by cars.

Earlier this week I wrote about the big rumour that Apple would buy McLaren. That was reported all over the net, but the Yahoo! article attracted attention for the wrong reasons. Their article referred - both in the headline and the article - to McLaren being vaulted to fame when their car was used as the time machine in Back To The Future. Of course, car fans, movie fans, children of the eighties, and pretty much everyone else, knows that was a Delorean. It’s hard to imagine that you could confuse the two: McLaren was only making race cars when the movie came out, but wouldn’t go into street cars until more than a decade later, by which time Delorean was long gone. Also, McLaren been pretty profitable, and haven’t yet had any cocaine scandals. Pretty much the only thing the two have in common is five of the letters in their names.

So it begs the question of how this could have happened. I mean, I think of myself as having a good memory, and I’m not getting paid to do this. Yet if there’s any chance that I’ve misremembered a fact, I look it up to confirm it. Why do I do this? Because it’s the Internet, and you can look up anything in five seconds. So it’s hard to imagine the mentality of someone who is evidently writing about topics they don’t know well, but doing it all from their flawed memory. In fact, the article somehow stayed up for at least another 24 hours with the incorrect reference (it’s down now.)

Of course, Yahoo! had something else on their mind for those 24 hours: news that they’d been hacked two years ago, exposing the information of the whole half-billion people with an account, and they didn’t even know about it until now. Many people asked how they could have made such a mistake, but I was thinking yeah, I can see that.

But let's not make it all about Yahoo!; Really, this is part of a bigger problem that the news media doesn't value knowledge. I'm not sure what exactly they do value, but it's clear that the people in front of cameras and keyboards don't know more than most people. It's also a good reminder of the work needed in Internet news. During the current election campaign, I've been increasingly believing that the current media establishment is doing more harm than good, and that I can't wait for new media to paradigm-shift it out of existence. Well, perhaps that new media isn't ready.

Lies, Damned Lies, And Satire

Jimmy Fallon is taking a lot of flack for his interview with Donald Trump, in which he ruffled Trump's hair, asked him a bunch of softball questions, and generally made him look like a regular human being.  That might not seem fair, given that he hosts a talk show, and a fairly light-hearted one at that.  But at the same time, in our Post-Stewart world, the lines between satire and news reporting have been blurred, and we're used to the idea that humourists often say the things that reporters are afraid to.

But there's a bigger issue here, and that is that politicians and voters have blurred the lines between entertaining and campaigning.  As this American election keeps proving, most people vote based on feelings rather than anything logical.  An oft-used test is that people are looking for the candidate they'd most like to have a beer with.  When you look at it that way, you realize that even a relaxed talk show appearance is image construction. It's more important to the candidate as any hard-hitting interview with a journalist, because it has more of an impact on what the public cares about.  So really, even entertainers like Fallon have to consider the political impact of politicians on the show, since the candidates are considering the impact of the show on their campaign.

Another campaign media development got people talking, though this was in the more traditional news media.  It was a New York Times report on the now-infamous press conference in which Donald Trump relented on the Birther issue, but then tried to pin it all on Hilary Clinton and take credit for putting an end to the controversy.  As you hopefully know, Clinton has never had anything to do with the Birther concept, so that was a brazen lie, even by Trump's standards.

What was interesting in the Times' coverage was that they just came right out and said, in their coverage on the front page, that it was a lie. That's unusual, because the way journalism has operated recently is that the media reports what both sides say, without any implication as to who is right, except perhaps on the op-ed page or some other in-depth reporting deep within the paper. It was only a small thing, but it represented quite a philosophical shift, so this could be a big turning point for the paper, if not all of journalism.

And now let's put together those two topics of talk shows handling the election and the discarding of journalism's misguided attempt at neutrality. Often is seems as though late night hosts are having the same struggles as journalists: they're trying to be even-handed, joking about both sides equally.  For one thing, that's proving difficult.  For all her imperfections, Hilary Clinton isn't a goldmine of comedy, as David Letterman's interminable pantsuit jokes proved.

But the other problem is the same one journalists face, that it's hard to hit both sides when one is a whole lot crazier than the other. It's interesting to see how they handle it. The venerable Daily Show hasn't always handled it well.  Of course, they've gone after Trump far more often, but they tend to stick to the idea that this is just a weird election.  Compare that to their alumni Samantha Bee and John Oliver, who take an approach that's more like, "I can't believe this is happening, am I the last sane person in America?"

Not to speak ill of the dead, but I was really turned-off of The Nightly Show in its final months as they struggled to find a position on the election.  Their writers and cast were firmly in the Bernie Sanders camp, and it often seemed like they were working harder against Clinton than against Trump. And speaking of Daily Alumni, Stephen Colbert seems a bit undecided about how to approach this election.  At times he seems to be able to put together the clever critiques that made him famous, and you can really feel how he's feeling more comfortable with the material than he is trying to do light chatting with the band leader.  But at other times, Colbert tries to walk the line and appeal to everyone. He tries desperately to channel Jay Leno, but it just isn't him, nor is it what we need right now.

The big pleasant surprise has been Seth Meyers.  For one thing, it's surprising because he's at NBC, which is also the home of the aforementioned Fallon, and fellow Trump pawns, Saturday Night Live.
It's also surprising because I had thought he was a bit of a lightweight contender in this golden age of televised political satire. But he's often the most effective voice when it comes to calling Trump on his antics. That's in terms of both humour and in drawing out precisely what is wrong with that day's controversies.  It makes me sorry about the post last year when I accused him of nerd-self-hatred.

My Tiff With TIFF

It's time for the Toronto International Film Festival, or TIFF. I kind of dread hearing about it. Sure,  I like movies, and I'm proud that we've got one of the world's biggest festivals here in Canada.  What I hate is how the Canadian media goes all star-struck and treats it like a big celebrity get together.

Yes,  there are a lot of celebrities in town, but the whole event is about movies, so that should be the focus of the reporting,  not whether you saw Leo on the red carpet.   And I realize that there are plenty of people out there who want to hear about celebrities, but we've created specialized outlets for those people.  They aren't watching the news I'm  watching, they're watching a bunch of celebrity-focused news programs I could try recounting the names of, but won't for fear of embarrassing myself.

So CBC News Network shouldn't be excitedly reporting celebrity sightings first and movie news second,  since the viewership has different priorities.  If got really cared about fame,  you shouldn't be working at the national broadcaster, you should have sold your soul and gone to work at CTV.