Forgive The Umpire!

Here's a question to start arguments among sports fans:  Which sport has the worst officials? 

In terms of sheer number of mistakes, it would have to be baseball, but that's hardly fair since the umpires have to make far more calls than the officials of any other sport. 

It's easy to criticize hockey refs, but the fact is everyone in the sport wants the rules to be only sort-of enforced.  The officials (at least in the NHL) call the game the way people want it called, so branding them ineffectual is like criticizing pro wrestling referees.

Soccer is something similar.  It's a terribly officiated game; between missing fouls and falling for dives, the referee might as well be a magic eight-ball.  But we are talking about one guy looking for illegal activity amongst 22 people spread over nearly two acres.  It's an unreasonable task, but the world's religious affection for the sport prevents anyone from acknowledging it.

Football officials make mistakes, as San Francisco fans have been claiming since that fouth-and-goal play at the end of the Superbowl.  But after seeing the fill-in refs at the start of this season, no one else will be joining Niners fans in their complaints.

What I'm getting at is this: basketball has the worst officials of any sport.  And if you knew me to be a fan of the Toronto Raptors, you had probably long since guessed that as the purpose for this discussion.  This year the Raps have been on the short end of several bad calls by the officials, several costing them games, and a couple even resulting in apologies from the league. 

I don't want to turn this into a rant that the league is against Canadians.  Well, to be honest, I'd love to turn it into a rant that the league is against Canadians; I just don't think it would be credible.  What I think is really happening here is an extreme demonstration of the NBA officials' well-known bias to better teams and players.  This year's Raptors are in an unusual position: after a terrible 4-19 start, they've been 14-13 since then, for an overall record of 18-32.  In other words, they're playing reasonably well, but have the record of a bottom-dweller.  That's my theory, that a team that looks to most of the world like a league doormat - but is actually competitive in most of the games they play - is exactly what will best expose the official's favouritism of the league's elite.

Help Me, John McClane, You're My Only Hope

Avatar is the highest grossing movie of all time.  Or, if you take inflation into account, Gone With The Wind is highest.  But I've often wondered what the most seen movie is.  That is, the movie that the highest percentage of people have seen at least once.  For a long time, I would have said it was Star Wars, but I suppose there's now a lot of young people who have never seen it.  Perhaps it's one of those much-celebrated feel-good movies like The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, or It's a Wonderful Life.

Even if Star Wars isn't the most seen movie, it is surely the most discussed and referenced movie.  What I'm getting at here is: If you are one of the few people who has never seen Star Wars, should you bother?  I mean, add up all the spoofs, jokes, friends talking about it, the toys and trinkets.  Even if you haven't seen it, you probably know most of the story, a lot of the memorable lines, all the major characters, and what most of the sets and props look like.

I say this because there are a fair number of pop-culturally big movies that I haven't seen.  Take Die Hard, since it has its umpteenth sequel coming out soon.  I know the basic premise, who the protagonist and antagonist are.  I even get the "yippee ki-yay" references, and why they're not using the complete quote.  It's almost enough that I could believe I actually saw it and forgot about it.  For instance, I saw Howard the Duck (What? I was young and foolish) and I remember less about it than I do of Die Hard, even though I haven't seen it.

I understand that Die Hard was a very good action movie, and while I do enjoy action, it's not my biggest passion when it comes to movies.  So I have the same dilemma as people who haven't seen Star Wars: I'd probably enjoy it, but there's also better ways I could enjoy two-hours of time.

No Sir, I Don't Like It

Here's a local business with a curious choice of name:

Seems nice enough, but I'll comparison shop at over Stimpy's Pet World.

Axial-Tilt Blues

We're slowly building our way from one solstice to the next, and the days are getting a bit longer.  It's about time.  The short days and long nights have been getting to me.

Reduced winter daylight never used to bother me.  As a child I would be parked in front of the TV before six anyway, so I hardly noticed the shifting of day lengths.  They say lack of exposure to sunlight can contribute to depression, but it never seemed to have any effect on me.  The winter semester in university where I had no classes before 2:00, so I never got up before noon.  The February I worked in a cubicle facing away from the windows, so I only saw the sun on lunch break and weekends.  None of it seemed to get me down (at least no more than the rest of my life.) 

But this year it has bothered me.  It'll be, say, 4:00pm and it hits me that we've got only about an hour of day left.  That'll seem kind of depressing, in spite of the fact that: a) I've always been a night owl, and b) artificial lighting is readily available throughout the developed world.  So maybe this is a sign that I'm becoming more in tune with nature.  We'll see if I start getting the urge to get up with the sun too.

I Am Not Amused

I previously mentioned that I've been using Google Now on my phone.  That's Google's artificially-somewhat-intelligent personal assistant app.  For the most part, it just sits in wait and occasionally offers a helpful hint, such as the time it will take to drive home under current traffic and weather conditions.  But there have been some strange moments.  For instance, on February 1st, it told me I'd walked 16 miles during the month of January, up six miles from December.

But the real head-scratcher came with the traffic predictions.  Generally it's been pretty good at understanding which places I drive to on a regular basis.  But recently I got a warning that it was time to leave for an event listed in my calendar.  This was an hour and twenty minutes to go, which seemed odd since I had set the event's location as "Victoria Park", which I live within sight of.  I had been planning on leaving ten minutes early.  The warning came with a place on the screen to press for driving directions, so I tapped it just to see what kind of circuitous directions it would give me.

It turned out that it had ignored the Victoria Park I live next to.  Instead it had assumed I meant Victoria Park in London, Ontario - a city I don't often get to, and I don't think I've ever been to its Victoria Park.  All this in spite of the fact that I did a fair amount of those 16 miles of walking in this Victoria Park.

The Latest Super Bowl Preview You'll Ever See

The Super Bowl is coming up tomorrow.  We've been through the usual progression of non-football hype:

• talking about the ads without actually telling us anything about the ads
• how much the ads cost
• the effect on the host city
• the effect on bars in your city
• how much media hype there is
• how much food you're going to eat
• what it means to the two cities whose teams will meet in the game
• even more about how much hype there is

I've never really understood the amount of interest there is outside the sports world.  For instance, every newspaper food section has recipes for snacks you can serve while watching the game.  Even though anyone whose main interest is anything other than sports will likely be sick of the football talk and ready to hear about anything else.  Even here in Canada, where the Grey Cup always gets better ratings than the Super Bowl, the wider culture recognizes the Super Bowl far more readily.  The local supermarket doesn't break out the football-field-decorated cupcakes for the Grey Cup, but they had them this week.

Like most people, I don't have any rooting interest in either team, so I have to make an arbitrary decision on the team I'm going to rest my emotions on.  I've decided to go with the Ravens.  Why?  Well...

• As a Rams fan who came of age in the 80's, I still find it hard to cheer for the 49'ers.
• I've always felt sorry for any player who gets blamed for not personally carrying his team to a championship, such as quarterback Joe Flacco
• Their team colours of black, purple, gold and white are a combination my high school and university's colours
• I like the idea of a football team named after a poem.

So that's good enough for me.  The team I have arbitrarily chosen to be associated with for the next twenty-four hours will kick ass against the team I narrowly chose them over!

Digital Utilization

Definition: the portion of your technology's usefulness that you actually use. 

I've just used this MacBook Pro for playing Bejewelled, so my digital utilization must be pretty embarrassing.