Grown-Up Pains

My thoughts after watching fifteen minutes of Growing Pains on one of the rerun channels:

• It's really hard to watch the show now. Boner is dead, Kirk Cameron is a fundamentalist, Alan Thicke's son is a pop star. There hasn't been a distracting post-show divergence like that since Al Franken and Dennis Miller were on Weekend Update.
• It's the eighties, and the father is named Jason, but the child is named Carol. Don't these people know anything about names?
• Who would have believed that Thicke's real son would be in a sexually suggestive dance with the biggest teen sitcom star of their generation? I wonder what Cameron thought about that.
• By an unfortunate coincidence in the cycle of life and fashion, Alan and Robin Thicke have had disturbingly similar hairstyles at the height of the fame.
• Here's a thought: Miley Cyrus is the anti-Kirk Cameron.

The Blogging Dead

And now, by relatively popular demand, here's my thinking on this commercial:

First of all, it's good to see Matt Smith getting work after Doctor Who.  Way to overcome typecasting.

But my main question is: what's with the present fascination with zombies? Yes, I know, there's The Walking Dead. But if pop culture were determined by popular premium-cable dramas, we'd also have ads with meth dealers and motorcycle gang members trying to get phones.  The last time I surfed past the country music channel slowly enough to see what was on, it was a video based around zombies.

So I feel sorry for zombie fans, because it's pretty much played out.  When New Country and phone providers have capitalized on a trend, it's over.  In just the last half-decade, we've gone through vampires and zombies.  Assuming succubi are still not going to get their turn, it's down to werewolves.  Who knew the new Teen Wolf was ahead of the curve?

When I originally searched YouTube for this ad, I accidentally searched for "Verizon Zombie Commercial"  rather than Sprint.  So, Canadian Wireless industry, consider your mission to demonize Verizon successful.  Though they are continuing their attack ads even after Verizon announced they're not entering the Canadian market.  So, who's the zombies there?

And I Thought I'd Never Use The Word "Frosh" Again

Usually I don't notice Frosh week now that I'm out of university.  But this week, it was hard to miss in Canada, thanks to the frosh event at St. Mary's University featuring an offensive chant.

It used to be that frosh week was unregulated and anarchic.  But by the time I went through froshdom in 1992, it was starting to be tamed, and there was more oversight and regulation added in the next few years.  You might think the student body would find that intrusive, but most people I knew welcomed the changes, as there seemed to be a general perception that frosh week really wasn't all that fun.

What I'm getting at is that I'm not at all surprised that this chant existed, or that it had been used for years.  What was surprising was the fact that it was still in use.

This is the sort of story that encourages news outlets to get the public's opinion. Normally I hate it when the news talks to the person on the street, or reads out tweets and e-mails on the topic.  But in this case, I think it is called for, as the disparity of public attitudes is the real issue here.  One tweet the CBC read on the air was from a person defending the students, saying, "You can’t sneeze without offending someone."

First of all, while I understand the basic point that it can be hard to avoid hurting anyone when some are quick to take offence, why is it that people with that viewpoint always seem to complain at the worst possible time?  Really, you feel inconvenienced by the idea of not making fun of raping the underaged?  That's really limiting your topics of conversation?

But that quote stuck out for me because it's a problem society is encountering in a lot of places.  If you're a geek, you're likely aware of controversies arising from behaviour at conventions dedicated to sci-fi, gaming, and technology.  There's an increasing number of women at these places, and suddenly behaviours that were once accepted are now frowned on, and the people asked to change feel hard done by.

We're going to have to accept that a more complex society will have more rules.  The more groups that are interacting with each other, the more likely we're going to offend one another.  Certainly there is a flip side, where groups will have to relax their impulse to be offended (hello, Muslim cartoon readers!)  But asking not to make light of rape is definitely in the category of legitimate offence, and if women are going to be equal partners in society, it's not asking too much to stay away from it.  If that's your equivalent of sneezing, then you're just going to have to find a good antihistamine.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Everyone says history repeats itself.  That's a good thing.  Not that everyone says it - that's kind of annoying - but it's good that it repeats, since we can be a little more ready the next time.  But the other advantage of history repeating is that it allows us to understand the past better.  We can understand the emotions and motivations better by seeing them in light of current events.

In other words, I'm not going to waste time admitting I don't know what to do about Syria. Instead, let's use this opportunity to better understand Rwanda.

First of all, let me say that in Hindsight, we (the West) should have intervened.  Not even wussy limited I-promised-no-boots-on-the-ground kind of intervention; I mean something decisive, likely at great cost to everyone involved.  So to the many people who have criticized the West's actions (or lack thereof) I'm not going to disagree with that basic premise.

What I do have a problem with are the many people who turn that retrograde regret into a moral condemnation, implying that the correct course of action was obvious, that our inaction could only be due to apathy, self-interest, or racism.  We should have known what was going to happen, so that proves the West doesn't care about Africans.

To anyone who still hangs on to that idea, I invite you to look at Syria today.  See the confusion:  We don't know how far each side will go.  If we intervene on the side of the rebels, what will they go on to do?  How much time does Assad have left, and how far will he go to keep power?

That uncertainty is how Rwanda looked twenty years ago.  The powers that were at the time made a decision based on the situation and it turned out to be horrendously wrong.  We should examine that incident and learn from it, but a wrong decision based on an uncertain situation is not an indication of laziness or prejudice.

5 September, Year Of The Depend Adult Undergarment

It's been announced that the next version of the Android mobile operating system will be code named Kit Kat.  As some people pointed out, that announcement seemed to eclipse the fact that Microsoft bought Nokia.  (This graphic should help indicate why the latter announcement didn't set the world on fire.)

If you're confused as to what that means: Android is like most pieces of software in that the versions are given numbers.  It's also like most software in that the developers get tired of using the numbers and thus give the versions code names, with all the names having a theme.  Often, the users or marketers start using the code names too.  One of the best known examples is the Mac operating system, which for years have used names of large cats (Lion, Leopard, Cheetah etc.)  It's been like that for years in the software industry; old-timers will remember how we discussed Windows 95 as "Windows Chicago" prior to its release.

Android's code name system is that each version is named after some sort of dessert or snack, beginning with successive letters of the alphabet.  (The latest is "Jelly Bean," prior to that were "Ice Cream Sandwich," "Honeycomb," and "Gingerbread."

People who care about such things were wondering what they would do, given the paucity of sugary things that start with K.  I had heard someone mention Kit Kat, but dismiss it, given the trademark problems.  The smart money had been on Key Lime Pie.  But no, Kit Kat it is.  And it's not merely a case of Google scooping up a bucket of cash and throwing it at Nestle to pay for the license; there's actually going to be cross promotion here: You can win Android-based products, and credits on the Google Play store in specially marked packages of Kit Kat.

So that does it.  Even insider code names that weren't originally meant to be seen by the public are being sold.  There's nothing left that's off limits.  I will now be listening to offers to put brand names in the programs themselves.  Where I would have written:

if(x == 5)

I'm now willing to change it to:

if(pepsi == 5)

for reasonable prices.  The possibilities are endless: recipes, blue prints, storyboards.  And once everything in public is sponsored, and everything not in public, we'll have figured out how to do dream product placements.

Hey, Bale

The big new in the sporting world (and for once I do mean "world") is that Real Madrid is buying Gareth Bale from Tottenham Hotspur for €100 million. (Translation for North Americans who didn't understand a word of that: big Spanish soccer team pays $130 million to get up-and-coming star from biggish English team.  And I just learned Android phones do have a Euro key.)

And this is a regular occurrence.  As soon as a great player emerges , they'll be off to a bigger team.  My family's own Aston Villa has a budding star in Christian Benteke, and its already a foregone conclusion. That he'll be gone by next year.  It's like what happens in baseball but even faster.  Fans of the poorer baseball teams worry that they only get star players for four years before the Yankees snatch them up?  That's nothing: in European soccer your lucky to get one year.

So each country's league has only a few real teams that win each year.  Some have suggested that it would be better if these top few teams in each country left their domestic leagues and joined one pan-European league.  But even that wouldn't work, since the two Spanish leaders, Real Madrid and Barcelona have emerged as the dominant teams of the continent.  Even other massive teams like Manchester United are really just working with star players that couldn't quite make the Spanish giants.  I'm not sure why Spain emerged as the ultimate hirer of European talent .  They don't seem to be any more soccer-mad than, say, Italy or England.  And they definitely aren't awash in money.  Maybe it's just because their two teams are based around two dominant cities, representing two cultures.  That would concentrate fan loyalties - and thus, fan wallets - unlike more arbitrary rivalries.

Every time a player transfers from a feeder team to a big team, I think maybe this is the point that they're finally going to realize how stupid their system is.  But it appears that nothing will provoke a change, and we'll one day see the top twenty-two players on Earth facing off in a single game, arbitrarily representing the two largest cities in Spain.

If You Believe They Put A Man On The Moon

People sometimes ask, "if they can put a man on the moon, why can't they (Insert complaint here)."  I've never done this though.  For one thing, the moon landings were all before I was born, and of course, anything that happens before you're birth seems like it's always been there.  Of course we put a man on the moon, we've always been able to put a man on the moon.

But there's also the fact that it doesn't really feel like a technical achievement any more.  Looking back at it from my perspective: the moon program was a huge accomplishment at the time, and was a result of making full use of our intellectual capacity, thanks to an alignment of political motives.  Since then, we've had the ability to go to the moon, but haven't because of a lack of political necessity and cooperation.  So from my perspective, the moon landing is a testament not to human technology and ingenuity, but to the fickleness of human motivation.

You know what has always stood as the they-can-do-this-so-why-can't-they-do-that example for me?  Cookie Dough Ice Cream.  That's always seemed to be the silliest, most childish achievement I've seen in my life.  But in our society, the taste whims of middle class North Americans create huge motivations for invention, while the lives of many others offer little to no incentive.  Heck, even other North American consumers don't rate high enough to get their own products.  I'm still waiting for smaller, "single guy" packages of food that I can get through before it spoils.

It's that motivation that is the real driver behind change in our society.  The lack of technological change no longer surprises me; I'm only disappointed if there is an innovation that would please large numbers of desirable consumers.  So tonight, when I asked myself, why can't they invent a crouton that you can poke with a fork without breaking it, my mind when to Cookie Dough Ice Cream, not a man on the moon.