Well That's Just Weird

Uhuru Kenyatta was elected president of Kenya this week.  Kenya/Kenyatta, that sounds like a coincidence.  Hey, former Winnipeg Blue Bomber Tom Canada, have you considered politics? 

But seriously, I seem to remember that Kenya was named after its founder, so I wondered if Mr. Kenyatta is related.  News reports didn't say anything, so I went to Wikipedia.  I found that he is indeed, the son of Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of Kenya.  And (unless pranksters have simultaneously hit several sites around the net) it turns out he is also second cousin, once removed, to Tom Morello, guitarist of Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave.

(And Kenyatta is named after the country, not the other way around.)

We Must Be Cursed

Remember when Harry Potter and friends went to see the World Cup of Quidditch in (pause while I look it up) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire?  That made me wonder, what the Canadian Quidditch team would be like.

I'm not holding much hope for them.  I'm picturing a rag-tag group of part-time wizards, maybe the Sasquatch too if he's allowed to play.  And instead of using the advanced brooms like the Firebolt or Nimbus 2000, they probably get by with brooms from CCM, or Canadian Tire's Magicmaster brand.  Or maybe they just use enchanted curling brooms. 

How can I know all this?  It's the simple formula that it's a Canadian team playing a sport that involves neither ice nor Christine Sinclair.  As such, we just don't seem to have a chance.  I say this after my latest exasperating experience cheering for the red and white, when they're playing on the green. 

Yes, today we lost our opening game of the World Baseball Classic to Italy.  Yes, that Italy, the one in Europe, the continent where most people don't know what baseball is.  And the game ended in the eighth inning because of the mercy rule.  Yes, the rule that prevented you from getting humiliated in grade five gym class, and was probably put into this tournament to protect teams like Italy from us, was invoked against us.

What I'm getting tired of is not our inability to win championships - I'm a realist, I know we're not going to knock off Japan.  I just wish we could occasionally overachieve.  Or at least live up to expectations.  Or not go away embarrassed.

Five (Paragraphs) For Fighting

In this week's game between the Maple Leafs and Senators, I was left perplexed by one of the fights.  In it, the Leaf's Frazer McLaren fought the Senator's Dave Dziurzynski.  What was unusual was that it ended in a knockout; when McLaren connected with Dziurzynski's chin, the Senator fell flat on his face.  He was revived, but had to leave the game with a concussion.

What surprised me was people's reaction: it was treated as a very sombre moment.  Throughout the night, analysts mentioning the incident all seemed to say variations on, "you don't want to see that happen."

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I just don't understand hockey culture.  I don't mean that in the sense of, "I don't understand how anyone could like that."  I accept that people may want something different out of the sport than I do.  But you need to at least have some logical consistency.  Take Mixed Martial Arts for instance.  I'm not a fan of it, but I at least understand where the fans are coming from.  Some people like seeing violence and gore, so they go watch fights with few rules, violence and gore ensue, and the viewers rejoice.

But in hockey, people love the fights, yet they are aghast at the result of the fight.  I'm left wondering what exactly hockey fighters were trying to accomplish by pounding each other in the head all these years.  That seems to be a pattern in hockey culture: there's a razor-thin distinction between what is encouraged and what is condemned.  Sometimes I feel sorry for the players who run afoul of these mysterious expectations. 

Rather than get caught up in discussions of when and if fighting should be allowed, it would be more valuable for us to decide what exactly we want out of this game. 

You Don't Expect A Green Ferrari

Ferrari has a new supercar out.  It's a hybrid, and it's called LaFerrari.  My reaction upon seeing the name was to think of the Renault LeCar, the compact that bedevilled French teachers and its owners in the early eighties.  The LaFerrari - see, just sounds weird - is their entry in the expanding market for $1,000,000+ sportscars that are only barely faster than the $200,000 sportscars.

So Ferrari has trouble naming things.  Or at least, whoever names things for them hasn't spent much time on this side of the Atlantic.  Last year they tried to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the modern Italian state by naming their Formula one car the "F-150" and were quickly informed by Ford's lawyers that they've been using that name for their pick-up for nearly as long as Italy has been around.

A lot of people outside the automotive press will make a big deal about this being a hybrid, since we've had it pounded into our heads that hybrid or electric cars are inherently about efficiency, in much the same way that the car buying public gets confused if they find that an economy car is turbocharged.

The fact is that if a technology makes a car get better use of its fuel, you can use that technology to either increase mileage with the same power, or more power with the same mileage.  And electric motors provide more torque at low engine speeds, so it provides better acceleration.  So while the lefty in me may appreciate the mass market electric and hybrid cars like the Prius, Volt and Leaf, the realist in me feels that high end cars like this Ferrari are going to do more good in getting new technology to market.

Who Needs The Taster's Choice Couple?

A while back I talked about the recurring couples you see in TV commercials, with special emphasis on the couple in the Rogers ads.  Well now I'm confused because the latest ad has a couple that features the same woman, but with another man.  That sure was fast.  Why did she leave the other guy?  I hope it wasn't because she was suspicious of him working late; we know he was really just watching soccer on his coworker's laptop.

The focus of the new ad is that the new hubby has non-masculine tastes in television.  Because if you can't show men in commercials as stupid, you have to at least make them effeminate.  And if him watching ice dancing is too subtle, they even have him protest his masculinity by mentioning TV shows about beards.  Ooh, what edgy humour.

One More Chance To Use The "Oscar" Tag

There's been plenty of criticism of Seth MacFarlane's hosting of the Oscars this year.  I can't comment on the claims that it was sexist because I didn't see much of the show, particularly the now infamous "We Saw Your Boobs" song.  But a lot of the criticism is just about him not being funny, and there I think people need a little perspective.

It all reminds me of when David Letterman hosted in 1995.  I've never been a big fan of Letterman's humour, but I couldn't help but feel sorry for him.  As I saw it, here's what happened:

• Letterman host a talk show.  He and the show are widely praised.
• His humourous reputation gets him a gig hosting the Oscars.
• He hosts the show, doing exadtly the same kind of jokes he does on his talkshow.
• His hosting of the Oscars is considered an embarrassing failure.

MacFarlane follows much the same pattern of host-gets-criticised-for-doing-what-got-him-the-hosting-job.  It all underlines the problem that even the organizers of the Oscar show don't seem to get: being considered funny by everyone in modern society is really difficult, and getting near impossible.  In the 500 channel universe, there really aren't any Bob Hope-like pan-cultural comedy touchstones anymore.

A few people pointed to Tina Fey as a possible host.  I think she's one of the few people who might actually be able to pull it off.  Unfortunately she has flatly refused.  And I can understand that, given people's high expectations.  So the job of Oscar Host could become like the job of Republican Presidential Candidate: anyone with the skills to be good at it will also have the skills to realise it's a thanklessly impossible job.

Bloggiversary!

Yes, it's been one year that I've been maintaining this blog.  This isn't the anniversary itself, though.  I had to be weird and start the blog on February 29, so it doesn't have an anniversary this year.

So what have I learned in a year in the blogosphere? 

• I surprised myself at how much and how regularly I can write.
• Based on Blogger's stats, people browsing Russian pharmacy sites have a strange interest in my life.
• If I had signed up to put ads on the site, I could have made two or three dollars by now.
• I'm wordiest in early evening.
• It's surprising how much you can type on a touch-screen keyboard.
• I'm the only person in the world who can't figure out how to import pictures from Google Drive.
• Blogging seems more natural for me than Tweeting.
• It takes more than a year of blogging to get a book or movie deal.

Thanks everyone for reading!