My Wife Could Blog Better Than This

No, I haven't gotten married suddenly. Rather, that title is a reference a recent post-game speech by a college basketball coach, in which he said his wife could shoot better than his team, among other insults.  His rant has gone viral. At least, I assume it has "gone viral" in the sense that people are watching it online. I do know that it spread across television quickly. I don't think that's considered "going viral." Maybe we should call that "going bacterial" or something.

It was a weird experience seeing it repeated on sports news shows and updates. I believe it was the first time I've ever seen the progression of Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame in real time. At least, fifteen minutes was the amount of time it took me to get sick of seeing it. Ol' Andy didn't anticipate that fame would greatly outlive our interest. The coach's rant will live on in talk shows and recaps forever.

That got me thinking: There are some famous college basketball coaches, but generally they don't get a lot of mainstream renown. For instance, I'm something of a sports fan, yet I only recently realized that Mike Krzyzewski, Mike Shuh-shev-skee, and "Coach K" are all the same person. I've also heard of John Wooden and Rick Pitino. Beyond that, I can only think of Bobby Knight, and he's mostly famous for his tantrums too.

But this coach has just vaulted to the top of the list. There are surely other coaches that have accomplished great things on and off the court, but they remain anonymous, while some jerk with no sense of restraint (or coaching skills, it would seem) has become a celebrity.

My point is that it's unfortunate that fame so often comes from poor behaviour. Usually sports is - for better or worse - a meritocracy. But even there you can see The Ford Effect, where the biggest rewards are not for success but for being ridiculous.

Frozen In Time

When I recently had problems with my Internet connection, I got out my copy of The Internet For Dummies. Why would I, a computer professional, own such a book? Because I bought it in university when I first started hearing about this "Internet" thing the computer science students were talking about.

Here's the cover

Here's the 1993 copyright

 

11 pages on Archie, 10 pages on Gopher

...and 6 pages on the World Wide Web

Gregorian Rhapsody

Percent of people who use full-size wall calendars:

I'm thinking about 25%

Minus people who get free calendars from charities, companies, the milk marketing board etc.:

Knock it down to about 10%

Multiply by the population of the city:

That's about 400,000, so it comes to maybe 40,000 calendars to sell in the city per year.

But!

Number of calendars on sale at kiosks in local malls:

3,000,000 (approx.)

It's Such An Imperfect Ad

It’s become a trend in video game commercials to have ordinary people - presumably representing the average gamer - acting out the games, with the gamer plunged into, say, a battle-torn hellscape.

I think it started with this ad from a few years back:

Though in that case I'm sure it was less about trying to illustrate the video games as an immersive fantasy, and more about trying to enthral people with the idea that they can shoot Kobe Bryant.  Presumably they couldn't afford LeBron James.

Showing the average person in the game sounds like a good idea; they’re visually depicting the idea that the games allow you to do things you wouldn’t have the chance to do in real life. But really, it just looks silly. Today’s video games are already at the far end of believability, so putting a dorky guy in the middle of it just makes it look that much less believable.  In the above commercial, I have to stretch my believability as far as it will go just to accept the idea of a guy walking through a gun battle shooting in both directions at once without looking.  Making the guy a chef snaps my disbelief like a cheap elastic.

Or maybe the chef's Mario-like moustache was a dig at Nintendo.  It’s too bad Nintendo doesn’t do commercials like this. You could see ordinary people stamping on turtles, bashing their heads into boxes, eating mushrooms etc.

Old Fashioned Convertibles

It seems like there's been a sudden push to get us to by convertible laptops, or tablets with keyboards. It's like they're saying, you know that new thing that you want? Well instead, why not get something that's sort of like the new thing and sort of like the old thing it's replacing.

I notice that the companies getting rich in the current tech environment, like Apple and Samsung, are not the ones trying to sell them. It's mostly coming from companies trying to play catch up, like Microsoft and HP.  That makes me think that this is a desperate bid to stay relevant.

Did that happen in previous tech revolutions?  Did they try selling...

• A personal computer that also has a slot for you to feed in your typewriter paper?
• A car that also has a place to attach a harness so your horse can pull it?
• A television that also acts as a radio?

I'm not saying that laptops are going to disappear - I am typing this on one right now. But I'm not sure why it's so very important to have a device that is both - especially when you can buy a cheap laptop and tablet for the price of many of these convertibles. Or at least, a tablet and a keyboard.  Really, these manufacturers are banking on the old does-it-run-Word paranoia.  I think they'll find we've gotten over it.

Pope-ularity

I - like a lot of people - have to say that Francis is by far my favourite Pope. Again like most people these days, I only have three choices in my lifetime, at least since I've been conscious of what a Pope is. So how about if I call him my favourite fully-observant Catholic. Though that is also a pretty small pool.

Time has notably given him their Person Of The Year. However, I started writing this when I read this article which praises him as the leader we wish we had in other religions, and in our politicians.  At that point, I have to call apples-and-oranges.

It's a pet peeve of mine that comes up whenever someone tries to push the idea that some unelected person's popularity (a royal or a religious leader) somehow proves that they are "better" than any and all politicians.

When it comes to politicians, they have two distinct disadvantages compared to everyone else:

A high threshold for success

A politician has to win elections. So no one cares if you got a lot of votes, they care if you got the most votes, and that's harder than just winning over a few fans. As I've pointed out before, a TV show only needs a few percent of the audience to be a hit. A politician is a massive failure with only a third of people's support.  Or to put it in 1980's terms, more Americans voted for Walter Mondale than bought Thriller.

This Pope is just getting nice things said about him, by some people. And as a liberal leader of a traditionally conservative sect, he's getting soft treatment in the media.

No power

Everyone seems to be saying nice things about his pro-poor talk. But it's easy to support rhetoric. It's not like he's actually making you give to the poor, regulating capitalism etc. Once the issues start affecting people lives, suddenly people won't feel so warm and fuzzy about it.

You Haven't Got Mail!

We in Canada got the news today that our mail service is being greatly reduced. No residences will get mail delivered to home (we'll all have to deal with the supermailboxes) and the price of a stamp will go up from fifty-sixty-whatever-it-is all the way to a dollar.  It's all because no one mails anything anymore.

And because of that, I find myself not really caring.  I hardly ever mail anything, and the only mail I ever get are greeting cards, postcards, and bills.  This change will give me the impetus to finally switch my remaining paper bills to e-bills, and it might get others to go with e-cards.

That's the one thing that could go wrong with this move: Canada Post's reasoning is that mail volumes are way down, so they're trimming costs and increasing prices.  But that's just going to reduce the mail volumes further. The fact is, hardly anything needs snail-mailing any more, and I think we may have started to end it all together.

And once no people are mailing me, the only reason I'll ever check the mailbox is to empty out the advertising.  To bad you can't opt out of mail, the same way you can dump your land line.

But the real reason I'm worried about this is listening to old-timers complain about it.  I was already sick of hearing about how terrible it was that they closed the post offices and went with counters in convenience stores.  Now we're never going to hear the end of this.