Oh, Capitaine Crouche!

Today I heard a DJ say that French music always sounds sexy.  That surprised me.  A few francophone musicians have made headway in English Canada, and it's always seemed to me that they don't fit any linguistic stereotypes, and are no sexier than your average anglophone indie musicians.

But I've always thought that the inherent sensuality of the French language was a pretty silly concept. For one thing, I thought that in today's more open world, we're surely more sophisticated about the vast amounts and variations of things people find arousing. "French is sexy" seems like rather childish once you've seen the full extent of Rule 34.

But there's also the worldliness of today's society. French people aren't just a caricature; they're actual people we can learn a lot about. They aren't always sexy.  The whole world has watched the people of France blocking highways with tractors to protest government cuts, patronizing Eurodisney, or voting for racists. Really they're just as unsexy as the rest of us. And after their apoplectic anti-gay-marriage protests in recent years, surely they've dropped right off the list of sexiest countries. For any thinking person Germany, with their rough language but permissive attitudes, has actually become sexier.

But what really surprised me about this is that it's coming here in Canada. Usually, we're free of other countries' French stereotypes because French is so ordinary for us. You can't get romantic every time you happen to see the other side of the cereal box.

Wikimandias

When I recently mentioned Harold Ballard, I linked to his Wikipedia entry for anyone outside Canada or too young to remember the former owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Having looked him up, I skimmed through the entry for a trip down memory lane.

Why would I reminisce over such an unpleasant man? I find it's reassuring to see the mighty that have fallen. So often, there are unpleasant things in our society that are so heavily entrenched that it seems they will never be defeated. So revisiting such forces of the past reminds us that there is hope for tomorrow. For instance, Amazon.com may seem like a bullying monopoly right now, but one look at the current state of Microsoft shows that they will get their comeuppance eventually too.

Sure, the Leafs still haven't won the cup. In fact, here's a depressing thought: Ballard became majority owner of the Leafs in 1971, not long after their last Cup in 1967. Then he owned them until his death nineteen years later in 1990. But that was twenty-four years ago! So he's not even mostly responsible for the Leafs' futility anymore.

So I was reading the list of selected Ballard incidents. Usually, the wikieditors frown on that sort of thing in their esteemed site, but with Ballard they seem to have conceded that there's no way to describe him; his personality had a Zen quality that must be explained through examples.

And as I was reading through these incidents, I was struck by the similarities between him and Rob Ford, another Torontonian that you could never really describe:

• hugely antisocial, but has somehow made enough connections to climb the ladder
• Doesn't even pretend to be civil
• Acts like a stereotypical business man from fifty years earlier
• Many people love him for his entertainment value
• Will drop to any level to insult or slander enemies

So there is hope here too.  For all his votes and radio shows, one day Ford too will be just a series of bizarre anecdotes.

Unsafe At Any Size

Last week, you might have seen a headline like this one from the Buffalo News: "Small cars, save for one, fail to make ‘good’ in crash tests."  That's a bit misleading.

The crash test that they're talking about is the Small Overlap Frontal test, in which a car hits something that's one-quarter the width of the car.  So it simulates hitting a small but solid object like a tree or a post.  It's counter-intuitive, but that sort of collision is harder for the car to withstand than hitting a larger object such as another car.  When you hit a large object, the front of the car is crushed, absorbing the energy of the crash.  But with a smaller object, less of the car is crushed, so it's not as able to absorb the energy.

But this article wasn't written because small cars did particularly badly, it is because all cars have problem with this relatively new test, and small cars just happen to be what they were testing lately.  I know this because I saw a previous article about how cars were having difficulty passing it.  In that case, the cars being tested were luxury cars.  Now that's surprising: small cars have less material to absorb impacts, so it does take more work to make them safe.  But if luxury cars are also doing poorly in the test, it's apparently about more than size.  Probably cars won't do well on this test for several years, until new models have been introduced that have been designed from the ground up with the new crash standards in mind.

I don't want to sound like I'm making excuses for the manufacturers - after all, they did mostly fail the tests.  But when you read a headline like the one above, it seems to contain two facts:

• small cars failed general crash tests
• the problem is specific to those cars

In fact, neither of those facts are true.  The cars failed one particular test, while passing all the others.  And this is true for cars of all sizes that have done the new test.

My Relationship Is Pre-Alpha

So now there's a trend for beta marriages. That's living together for a year or two before actually getting married. Get it? It's just like beta software: trying it out before it's ready for public release.

You're probably also thinking, how is that new? Didn't we get over living-in-sin generations ago? The name is cute, and surprisingly descriptive.  (Funny aside: when I used Bing to search for "Beta Marriage" it included a link to this page on Betazoid Marriages.)

It's another example of the media bending things to support their narrative of millennials as an alien breed warped by technology. Here's the current generation just doing what the last several generations have done, but we attach a technology-related name and treat it as something new.

Having said that, it seems to be a common phenomena for us to act like generations each invent the world anew. For instance, it was hilarious when Baby Boomers were horrified that their teenage kids were having sex. Had they already forgotten what they did in their youth?

So let's come to terms with it: generations aren't that different, people do have sex before marriage, and it's been happening for so long that no one gets credit/blame for inventing it.

Bills Bills Bills

The bids to buy the Buffalo Bills are in, and one of them intends to bring the team to Toronto. Another comes from Donald Trump, and the third presumably comes from sane people.

I'm still on record as saying that the move to Toronto won't happen. But with so few people who think that the Bills are worth half as much as the Clippers, who knows?

Today on TSN, two of their designated experts discussed the question of just how big a team in Toronto would be. I'm sure I wasn't the only one surprised when Dave Naylor jumped right in with a claim that they would be as big as the Leafs (albeit with the "if they're competitive" caveat.)

That's not as crazy as it sounds. Toronto sports media occasionally reminisce with amazement about how in 1985, the Leafs had trouble getting any media to come to the press conference where they introduced first-overall draft pick Wendel Clark. 

Today, a Leafs first-overall pick would have to go into hiding to avoid the media glare. But remember:

• This was in the darkest days of the Harold Ballard era, when finishing fourth-of-five in the league's worst division was the most they ever achieved.
• It was only 18 years since the last time the Leafs won the cup. Most of the fan base could remember the last win, and it all seemed less desperate.
• In the years before sports networks, blogs, and dedicated sports radio stations, there was less obsession with the Leafs
• This was during The Drive Of '85, the Jays' first playoff run, and that was by far the biggest sports story at the time.

The point is that Toronto can really throw itself behind a winning team, and that its obsession with the Leafs is in large part a product of the modern media environment. So, he does have a point.

Having said that, we've seen how a mediocre Jays team can fade into the background. And the usually-bad Raptors can fill seats, but not really enter the public consciousness. If a Toronto Bills were as successful as, well, the Buffalo Bills, they wouldn't put a dent in the Leafs' support.

The really shocking part of the debate was when they addressed the question of locals' dedication to other teams. There's plenty of NFL fandom in Toronto, but that didn't translate into success of the Bills in Toronto games. And that's largely because most of that fandom is spread among the league's 32 teams, rather than behind the Bills. Would that still be a problem if the team were permanently in Toronto? I doubt it, and Naylor did too. But the bizarre part was that he made the point by drawing on the experience of newer NFL teams, like Carolina and Jacksonville. That's strange, because Jacksonville has been the league's least financially successful team for years. They have famously had to tarp-over thousands of seats in their stadium so as to reduce the seating capacity, so the team will sell out and avoid blacking out their games locally. Indeed, I thought Toronto's best chance at getting a team would be if the Jaguars were also available. So the Jags were a terrible example to bring up, since they are the counterexample to the assumption that NFL teams will be successful everywhere.  If a team deep in the heart of football country is having so much trouble drawing fans, it has to challenge the assumption that a team will be successful in Toronto.

Let's Have Congressional Glasnost

I can't believe I'm only now hearing the phrase, "cold civil war" to describe the current state of the USA. Supposedly it comes from that master of naming modern things, William Gibson. It seems like such an apt phrase, especially if you've seen the various maps comparing current voting trends to nineteenth-century slavery laws.

But speaking of nineteenth-century slavery laws, America's civil war was itself preceded by a cold war of sorts, as they tried to find a compromise where there was none. That's one reason why so many of the presidents in the early 1800's are not too famous: they either failed to find a compromise on slavery, or found a temporary solution that has been long-since forgotten.  Well, that's the impression I get, having learned American history one sentence fragment at a time on Jeopardy.  And The Simpsons.

Sorry, I couldn't find a clip that just has The Mediocre Presidents song, so just fast forward the video to 3min, 48s.  To this day, I can't hear William Henry Harrison's name without adding to myself, "I died in thirty days."

Anyway, The Cold Civil War is an apt description. The division is deep, there's not much room for compromise, and the divisions are based around the same lines.  I'm not implying that the Americans are headed for another civil war. But the issues do seem intractable.

What's really weird is that when I went searching on the Internet to see if people were actually using the phrase, I found examples from both sides of the divide.  Since the Civil War didn't end well for one side, you'd think there'd be a reluctance to analogise current cultural conflicts to that one. 

California Cleavin'

There's campaign to split California into six smaller states. I'm sure I'm like a lot of people in that I only heard about it last week when it received The Colbert Bump. There have been a number of proposals over the years to split up states. It might be a big and diverse state like California, Texas, or New York. Or it might be a geographically separate part of a state, like Long Island or Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

As a geography nerd, this sort of thing really interests me. It's obvious that the subdivisions of countries often make no sense. Does it really make sense for Vermont and New Hampshire to be separate? And a number of people have tried to sort things out.  Here's a particularly detailed proposal for the U.S.

Here in Canada, I'd say our provinces make even less sense. Ontario and Quebec are not only much bigger than the others, they also have very different northern and southern parts. Manitoba and Saskatchewan don't game many differences, despite what they may say about each other. And P.E.I.? Really?

Buy much as of love to redraw the borders of North America, I have to point out that we should first decide what we want to accomplish with this layer of government. Should a state/province be a single, largely autonomous entity? That is, they are part of a unified country, but you could say that help from the central government should be avoided as much as possible. Or should it be a representative of a group of people with a lot in common?

The two approaches are kind of mutually exclusive. If you orient states around people with commonality, it will be economically weak. For instance: if a state is all rural farmland, it will be able to create policies that are great for farmers, and the state's presidential vote will be an undiluted voice of rural America. But, whenever times are tough for farmers, the state will be serious financial trouble.

Something that will really impact the direction to go, is how strong an ability the country has to transfer money around to mitigate localized economic problems. Right now, there's not a lot of appetite for equalization measures, so you'd be better off with states that have diversified economies.

So California - as it is now - is relatively well laid out due to its diversity. It's current financial problems ate mostly the fault of its overly-indulgent referendum system. Bit under the split plan, it would be split into a bunch of homogenous states. Some - particularly Silicon Valley - would be healthy, others not so much.  Overall, the state is better off together.  Though the San Andreas Fault may have other ideas.