At The Prime Meridian

Britain has produced a lot of world-renowned musicians over the years. That often leads people to assume that we (people outside the country) know all the famous British musicians. But no: there are some artists that make it big in the UK but not in the rest of the world.

I’ve always been amused by the fact that the British themselves are kind of oblivious about this. You might see reporters on BBC World breathlessly reporting that Robbie Williams has hinted at a Take That reunion, unaware that much of the world has no idea who that is.

In most cases, the explanation of British-only stars is that there was an American substitute. For instance, Take That were around in the glory days of boy bands, so it’s not too surprising that they couldn’t pry Americans’ attention away from Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. But there are also situations where a British artist’s work just doesn’t translate well to outside audiences.

Which brings us to Blur. Music news sites have been buzzing that they have a new album coming out.

If you’re not familiar with the story, in the Britpop era of the nineties, Blur and Oasis were the two leading bands, sort of like, well, Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. Oasis made it big world-wide — like much of the western world, I still have “Wonderwall” going faintly through my head — while Blur scored a minor hit on the North American alternative charts with. “Girls & Boys.” Then, to make the story even weirder, Blur made a tongue-in-cheek fast rock song — "Song 2," probably better known as the “Woo-Hoo” song — and scored a transcendent, world-wide hit. So now most people around the world think they’re a grunge band, even though their music was largely a reaction to grunge, and this sort of odd band who would have been named, “Seymour” if the record execs hadn’t insisted on something more marketable, will forever be played in stadiums and included on lists of the best Jock-Jams.

If you listen to their music, it’s not hard to see why it didn’t translate outside the UK. It’s rather terribly British. Not British in the commemorative-royal-family-tea-set way, but in the dryly satirizing everyday life sense.

Of course, whenever I see something like this in another country, I naturally ask myself if there is any Canadian equivalent: If there can be a band so British that only the British really “get” it, can there be a band so Canadian that only we “get” it. Of course, we do have that: The Tragically Hip. Which then leads to the shocking revelation: The Tragically Hip is Canada’s answer to Blur? (Okay, The Hip started a few years earlier, so Blur is the U.K.‘s answer to The Tragically Hip, but still, the point is that it’s a weird comparison.) Really, they're bands that take very different styles to their music, with Blur's irony and satire and The Hip's cryptic can-lit and history references. It would be interesting to see someone take Blur's playful approach to life and focus it on Canadian culture. Although, arguably, those different levels of irony are themselves a reflection of the national identities of the respective bands. Okay, now my head hurts.

This leads me to wonder how many other countries are sitting on something like this: a band they love that never made it with the outsiders. Obviously, many countries have a language barrier that keeps local musicians from making it big world-wide. But this phenomenon even keeps some English-speaking performers local, even from countries that have produced world-famous musicians.  So I googled, “Australian bands that weren’t popular outside Australia” and found a list of the best Australian bands as voted by Australian musicians. In among the usual suspects, AC/DC, INXS, Midnight Oil, and Crowded House, there was Cold Chisel, whom I had never heard of. They’re described as a "pub band" who leaned in to the wild rock lifestyle of the 70’s-early-80’s and known for wild live shows. 

Reading the comments, Australians showed a feeling of nostalgia for their music that seemed reminiscent of The Hip, that they speak to the experience of growing up and living in the country. I guess every country does have that band that couldn’t be exported, even if they vary wildly stylistically. 

My Cup Runneth Away From Me

People make a big deal about the Maple Leafs’ half-century-plus since their last Stanley Cup win. While that’s bad, I have to point out that in a league that had 20+ teams for most of that time, not winning the championship in 56 years isn’t that embarrassing. You know what is embarrassing? It’s now been thirty years since a Canadian team has won the cup. 

That’s quite unlikely statistically, given that the Canadian teams have made up between a fifth and a third of teams during that time. We have a tendency to focus on the Leafs’ drought because we love piling on the misery for Leaf fans. But consider this: the last Canadian cup win (Montreal, 1993) is now closer in time to the Leafs' last Cup win than the present. And since the last Leaf cup win was also the last season of the Original Six, the 1993 cup win is now also closer in time to the Original Six era than the present. For that matter, the Canadian cup drought (30 years) is now longer than the Original Six era itself (25 years.)

But wait, I’ve got lots of these: How long is the Canadian Cup Drought?

• It's more than one quarter of the NHL's existence.
• When Montreal won that cup, they had to beat the Quebec Nordiques in the first round.
• Long-time coach Randy Carlyle was in the league in 1993 — as a player.
• He was one of five players without helmets.
• That season, there were a bunch of neutral-site games. They included games in Dallas, Phoenix and Miami.
• Gary Bettman had been on the job four months.
• Martin St. Louis, Paul Kariya, Chris Pronger, Marian Hossa, Daniel Alfredsson, Roberto Luongo, and Daniel and Henrik Sedin had not played in the NHL in 1993, and Jayna Hefford, Angela Ruggiero, Hayley Wickenheiser, and Kim St-Pierre had not played for their national teams yet. They're all in the Hall of Fame now.
• Speaking of the Women’s national teams, the Women’s World Championship had only been held twice. The Americans still hadn’t come close to winning it.
• Only two NHL arenas from that season are still in use.
• Fourteen American teams have won the cup since 1993. That includes four cities that didn't have teams in 1993. Regardless of who wins this year, Las Vegas or Miami will become the fifteenth and fifth such city, respectively.
• Worse, during the drought, both Colorado and Tampa Bay won a cup, rebuilt, and then won another cup with a totally different team.
• Since 1993, Canadian teams have won championships in the NBA and MLS, despite the fact that in 1993 there were no Canadian teams in the NBA, and the MLS did not exist.

For the first ten years of the drought, you could explain it through economics. Between a low Canadian dollar and the lack of a salary cap, most of the Canadian teams could barely stay in business, nevermind create or keep a winner. And two of the teams that had the money to compete — Montreal and Toronto — seemed content to shuffle along with mediocre teams and hope for the best. 

After the 2004-05 Lockout, the salary cap was installed, and the Canadian dollar recovered, putting teams on an even footing. And somehow that still didn't help. The salary cap is now 18 years old, the economics will even support a competitive team in Winnipeg, and we still can’t win a cup.

For a while I thought Canadian teams' lack of success was due to their tendency to tweak a mediocre team rather than go into rebuild mode. Canadians have a belief that hockey is all about heart so you just need to squeak into one of the last playoff positions then rely on the players' character to win the day. So there's always pressure to trade a draft pick for that one gritty winger. The result was that Canadian teams stayed in the good-but-not-great level. 

I'd also heard the explanation that the lack of media oversight of American teams was an advantage here. The General Manager of a Canadian team is constantly being asked about how they're going to make the team better right now. Whereas an American GM has to answer maybe three media questions a year, so if they want to undergo a thorough rebuild, there won't be much complaining. Once again, Americans have just the right amount of enthusiasm for hockey. 

But no, that's not it either. Toronto went through a complete rebuild, and to some extent most of the other teams have rebuilt, and the new highly-skilled teams have been no more successful than any hastily-thrown-together team of gritty veterans.

Another explanation you often hear is the difficulty of getting free agents to come to, or stay in, Canada. The reason being: your choice of weather, taxes, or the media fishbowl. But I don't buy that. For the most part, Canadian teams have been able to keep their stars together for several cup runs. Yes, there are nightmare examples like Johnny Gaudreau and Matthew Tkachuk leaving Calgary, but that probably had more to do with Coach Darryl Sutter's toxic culture. As for signing big-name free agents from elsewhere, that's not usually a route to success in the NHL. Even successful American teams are mostly home-grown and traded-for players. 

So I'm running out of ideas. One explanation I've heard is that even when a team like Toronto commits to skill, they still hedge their bets by complimenting the skilled core with traditional big old slow guys who hold the team back. So, let’s go with that for now.

It may well be that we're just cursed. That sounds reasonable - we've surely disrespected the game as much or more than the Red Sox selling Babe Ruth. And whoever the gods of hockey are, I suspect they are truly vengeful. 

We All Live In One Of Fifteen Submarines

Subway is really emphasizing new, pre-designed subs, instead of their traditional you-choose-the-toppings approach. You walk in, look at the list of "Subway Series" selections, hold up the line for ten minutes while you read through all the possibilities, then pick a number and order it. And then remember that you still have to choose a size and bread type. The point is, it's different from the way it always has been, where you select every individual thing that goes on your sub. It's the biggest change since they did away with the U-gouge bun slicing.

First up, I'm not really sure why. The ads I've seen are playing up the convenience of just giving a number and letting the sandwich artist do their thing. But I wonder if that was really a big problem for Subway. The choosing of the toppings has never been real time-consuming or mentally-taxing.

The other odd part of this is that the individual Subway restaurants don't seem too keen on the change. The first time I tried ordering numerically, the employee had to turn and look at the menu to know which sub I meant. The second time (at a different location) she rolled her eyes a little when I gave the number — and she was wearing a t-shirt that said, just order by the number. And every time I've gone with one of the designed subs, they nevertheless keep asking what I want on it, no matter how many times I assure them I just want the standard construction. Oh, and apparently, they call them the "recommended" toppings. They didn't like it so much when I called them "standard" like I was ordering a Buick Riviera.

Of course, this isn't totally new, this format of preset subs which I guess you can change if you really insist. That's what the pretenders to the sub throne Firehouse and Jersey Mike's have done. But hey, the number one in the market copying their competitors, throwing away the formula that made them successful in the first place? It has a New Coke stench to me. 

And now that I think about it, people have speculated that New Coke was a cover to switch from cane sugar to the cheaper corn syrup. And I have noticed that one commonality of the numbered subs is that the prices have crept up. So I wonder if this is a bit of corporate sleight-of-hand to hide higher prices. Unfortunately, a lot of companies think that raising the prices and moving up-market and overusing words like “premium” is an easy way to greater profits. But the fact is that it's quite difficult to convince the public that you have become a higher-price-higher-quality option, and not just the same cheap company with higher prices. I don't think the public's perception of Subway meshes with the idea of pricey designer food.

Electric Cars Infinity War

I recently asked what the future of SUV's is. Will be. Whatever. And it turned out to be intertwined with the future of electric cars. That's a bit of a complication, since our electric future isn't clear either.

It's been generally assumed that electric vehicles are the future. And car companies are preparing for it, investing huge sums in the technology and infrastructure. But at the same time, turning our back on internal combustion is the sort of huge revolution that doesn't happen without some turbulence. I figure there's still a few roadblocks to a complete electric takeover.

Range

Electric car costs have come down, and performance has been great, But range is still a problem. It’s improved, but not really enough to change anyone’s attitude. This problem isn’t new: for a long time now, we've been able to build electric cars that will easily have enough range for what the average person drives in a day. But, part of the reason for buying a car/truck/SUV is the freedom it gives you, so even if you rarely drive great distances (say, on vacation) you'll likely be reluctant to buy a vehicle that doesn't give you the option to driver greater distances when you want to.

So electric vehicles are fine, if you only ever drive within an hour of your home. But if you want to use your vehicle for anything more than a day trip, you’re out of luck. And don’t even ask about towing something while driving a long distance. Range has increased over the years, but the problem is that the vacation requirement is another order of magnitude farther than the daily-driving requirement. Even a big increase in range only takes a dent out of the vacation range problem. So we need either a huge range increase, or a huge charging-speed increase, to let people believe they can travel greater distances. Until that changes, there's a whole lot of people who won't consider an electric car.

Charging Infrastructure

The speed of charging has long been a stumbling block for electric vehicles. That's improved a lot too, but there's still the problem of where are we going to charge all these cars? If you live in a house, you can charge at home, but an increasing number of people live in apartments or condos, where charging isn't as easy. Yes, we can set up chargers in parking lots and garages of apartment and condo buildings, but that's a lot of infrastructure that still needs to be built, and it will be built by the landlords who won't (directly) make money off it.

And there has to be a solution for charging away from home. There are a fair number of public charging places, but they're mostly set up by either the car companies or public businesses like malls and stores . Those are both loss-leaders: the car company is swallowing the cost to make electric cars more appealing, or the business is swallowing the cost to attract customers. Either way, it's hard to imagine that scaling-up to being a solution for all of us charging our vehicles. I mean, I can't imagine GM — or Tesla, or whoever ends up on top — building a network of chargers big enough for all the cars in society.

The thing that makes me skeptical is that no one is making any significant money off of charging, and that’s usually what’s needed to get a big change like that happening in our society. Note that it doesn’t have to be switching our gas stations to charging stations. It’s entirely possible that the charging business of the future operates with small charging outlets here and there around a city. But they’ve got to make money off it or no one is going to go to all that trouble and expense to build the infrastructure.

Culture War

It's still relatively low-key, but a few people have targeted electric vehicles as a symbol of everything they hate. I don’t really see that going away. Some of the biggest hot-button issues for conservatives in recent years has been asking people to change behaviour. When you see the fury at being told to put on a mask or learn about slavery, it’s hard to imagine people just accepting that their cars are going to totally change whether they like it or not. 

Right now, that’s not an immediate issue: although buyers have ever-increasing choices for electric cars, there still aren’t any segments of the market where the internal-combustion options are disappearing. When we get to that point, there’ll be a lot more anger, and people taking “never electric” stances.

Big Oil

We're about at that point in the movie where it looks like the heroes will succeed, but you're watching, thinking it can’t be over yet, there's still a half hour left before the credits roll. And then the bad guy that you thought was dead reappears, and says, "You didn't think it would be that easy, did you?" Well, I’m still waiting for that from the oil industry.

Eventually, they've got to make a move against it. I'm kind of surprised we haven't seen much of a campaign against electric vehicles yet. Yes, they're only a small segment of the market so far, but car companies keep positioning themselves to be ready to move to mostly electric production. Surely Big Oil isn't just going to fold up and go home.

When I went looking for stories about the Oil Industry fighting electric vehicles, pretty much all I found was a lot of waffling about how they still make lots of money elsewhere, they'll invest in renewables to make money of the change, they'll sell more stuff at gas station convenience stores to compensate, etc.

Okay, fine, there are ways they can still stay in business and make tidy profits even after electric vehicles take over. But come on people, there's no way large corporations are just going to quietly give up a huge part of their customer base, or retool their entire business, when there's a chance that they can fight to keep things as they are.

They do fund the American Petroleum Institute, which publishes propaganda on their behalf, but most of its actions are just generic government lobbying; not the dirty tricks you'd expect from an industry fighting for trillions.

I've seen the odd story sowing suspicions about electric cars, like the recent one that the extra weight of electric cars will cause aging parking garages to collapse, but that just sounds like desperate casting about for anything that might gain traction. I probably did more damage earlier when I mentioned the problems using electric vehicles for towing.

But then, if they're trying to put together a major campaign to derail electric vehicles, it could be that they are going to get it stuck in the aforementioned culture war. If they can get a significant portion of the population committing to being personally against electric vehicles, adopting that as a part of their identity and world view, it will ensure that fossil fuels can have a foot in the door, preventing the electric domination tipping point for years to come. In that case, their campaigns would target the media of those most likely to buy into the anti-electric position. So it may just be something I haven't personally seen yet.

The McFlurry Is A Lie

I had a weird experience recently when I saw an ad on Facebook looking for McDonald's employees. That's odd to begin with: I'm a bit old for their employee demographic, and in general, Facebook is not a place to go looking for that demographic. But what was really surreal was that this ad came with a game. Click on the link, and you could play a game. What kind of game, you ask? Why, a game of working at McDonald's. It's a drive in Canada to hire 25,000 new employees with a game called Crush the Rush Crew.

In the game, you're looking down at a McDonald's kitchen, as new orders come in at the drive through. You then click/tap on the appropriate employees to have them make an item. And try to keep up. It was a bit dull, since you can only work on the next item in the order queue; you can't strategize by having the burger maker work on a Big Mac for the next order, while the drink maker works on the coffee for the next car in line instead of just twiddling thumbs.

But let's back up here. Depending on your experience with video games, this might seem like a bizarre game idea. But there's actually quite a history with these time management games. If you're my age, you may remember seeing Tapper in the 80's, and not believing that was a real game next to all its contemporaries. So let me shock you again: that genre has kept right on going, and there are now lots of people playing games based on seemingly stressful situations. So the idea of a McDonald's drive through management game is actually the least unexpected part of this scenario. But I would have thought McDonald's wouldn't like the idea of representing their work as a game.

So now I'm trying to wrap my head around this: we've created a genre of game about doing minimum-wage manual labor, and now a company is using one of those games to convince people to do those minimum-wage manual labor jobs. I don't know which surprises me more, that McDonald's embraced the concept to sell people on working for them, or that potential employees haven't just laughed at the concept. I looked at the comments under the Facebook ad expecting lots of vitriol, but there wasn't much. Some people complained about the difficulty of the game, and a few made jokes about how they already played the game in real life. But there was no how-dare-you-make-a-game-of-overworking-your-underpaid-employees. I didn't even see any comments about how unrealistic it was that the game's ice cream machine worked.

It all seems like something from a semi-humorous sci-fi dystopia like Ready Player One or Snow Crash. Though speaking of sci-fi, the idea of gamifying more serious things is not new. Perhaps McDonald's could specifically recruit those who do well in the game, like in The Last Starfighter. Of course, the next level would be if the game were the job; when you play it, your instructions are actually being sent out to some random McDonald’s somewhere in the world, like some kind of banal version of Ender's Game. Actually, that could be good: you do your part running a McDonald’s, and if you do a good enough job, you get a discount on your next purchase. Don’t have enough for a Big Mac Meal? Just take a few minutes to run up a new high score on the Decatur, Georgia drive-through.

Once again, it’s part of our weird future, where work is play, and play is work. I just wish they could find a way to make supermarket self-serve checkouts into a game.

SUV Endgame

A question people sometimes ask in the car world is, what is the SUV endgame?  That is, are we stuck with them forever? Will future generations just have SUV’s, with cars consigned to the history books? Or is the pendulum going to swing back, and we'll look back on the SUV era like the car industry's answer to bell bottoms.

See, the CEO of Citroen said that the days of the SUV are numbered. His reasoning was that in the coming age of electric vehicles, aerodynamics will be important in order to extend range, and that isn't exactly the forte for SUVs. 

I asked the SUV question a few years ago, and the answer I gave was that SUV's would get smaller and sleeker while cars would get taller, and we'd end up with this sort of in-between vehicle. At the time, I used examples like the Toyota C-HR. But since then, Toyota has introduced the Corolla Cross, and announced the C-HR will be discontinued in North America. 

The Corolla Cross is — as the name implies — just a Corolla stretched into an SUV. That's quite common; I hope you’re sitting down for this, but most SUV's these days are just adapted car designs. But usually they don't tell anyone, because they want SUV buyers to have the illusion that they have a rugged and wild off-road vehicle, not just a tall station wagon.

But by putting the name of that car in the name of the SUV, Toyota has shown us a rare moment of honesty from SUV marketing. So you'd think that if the car industry was going to start evolving a middle ground between cars and SUV's, this vehicle would be where it starts. 

And yet, the Corolla Cross is a boxy, stereotypical SUV, just smaller. It looks like the designers went out of their way to convince everyone that it's a big-boy SUV, even if that makes it look a little silly. So it seems that catering to the masculinity reinforcement needs of America overrules any other car priorities, and that doesn't look good for anyone expecting a non-SUV future. 

But there is one reason that Citroen CEO could be right, and electric cars could change the shape of SUV's. It starts with the little-known fact that there are a few reasons why manufacturers like SUV's, besides the obvious fact that consumers like them. One is that they are legally considered off-road vehicles in the United States, which means they are not subject to the same mileage requirements as cars. But to officially qualify for that off-road designation, they have to meet certain regulations, such as ground clearance, and the shape of body work around the wheels. 

But electric cars don't have to worry about mileage regulations. So there's no need to meet those design requirements, and the designers of electric SUV's have greater freedom in shaping the vehicles.  So far, electric SUV's and crossovers have been going away (a little) from the traditional SUV shape. Looking at models like the Jaguar I-Pace and Hyundai Ioniq 5, they're still taller than average cars, but also lower and less boxy than SUV's. So there does appear to be some effort to squeeze more aerodynamics out of them.

Of course, electric SUV's also give designers more freedom because unlike their gas-powered brethren, no one is buying one as an affirmation of masculinity — I assume that's part of the reason that they are a lot less angular and big-looking. They don’t look much like off-road vehicles. And is it just me, or do the Tesla model X and Y even look a bit like <gasp> Minivans.

If we get to the point that electric cars are completely taking over, this may change. In that case, electric cars will have to start appealing to everyone, not just people on the rich and green side of things.  We might even see electric vehicles get more masculine than conventional cars if electric vehicles have to work harder to convince mainstream buyers that they're not emasculating beta-mobiles. Arguably, the Tesla Cybertruck is already an example of this.  But for now, they're showing us a possible way forward into a future of more practical, only-sort-of SUV future.

There's A Swingin' Town I Know Called... Capital City

Looking back at some of my old posts, I came across one from 2015 about how Egypt was planning to build a new capital to replace Cairo. Well, to replace it as capital: I mean, Cairo would still be there, it just wouldn't be capital anymore. I was curious what became of that idea; the whole thing had seemed like a pipe dream, so I was kind of assuming that I'd find the project had been canceled years ago, or pushed to the back burner.

Nope, it's still happening. In fact, it's under construction as we speak. You can even see it on Google Earth.  It still doesn't have a name yet, so it's just the New Administrative Capital. It's also not really far from Cairo. When combined with some other new developments going on, they're going to end up with a really big continuous urban area. Egypt already looks pretty unusual from the aerial perspective, with the contrast between the desert and the irrigated area around the Nile, and now it’s also going to have a huge urban smear across it.

The other surprising thing I learned is that it's not even the only replacement capital under construction. Both Indonesia and South Korea have new capitals on the go.

South Korea has been moving government institutions from Seoul to the planned city of Sejong for years. It was only founded in 2007, but already has 350,000 people. It seems the idea of officially moving the capital is still controversial and may never completely happen, but even as it is, they've put a lot of work into it. 

Indonesia is building Nusantara to replace Jakarta. It's still early in the process, having only started last year. But they're being bolder, building it on a totally different island from current capital and largest city, Jakarta. 

So what's the reason behind these new capitals? In my previous post, I assumed that if a country is going to build an entirely new city to be the capital, it must be a case of vanity, or some kind of national mid-life-crisis. There may be some of that, but in each of these cases, there is a practical purpose too: a very large and over-crowded capital. Moving the government out will drag some of the people out and into another part of the country. I - the resident of a country where the capital is not the largest city - didn't think of that. Oh, and Jakarta is slowly sinking. And Seoul is uncomfortably close to North Korea. 

So maybe we'll see more of them in the future. There are plenty of over-stuffed capital cities in the world; starting over on cheap land somewhere else must be pretty tempting. Even if it does make geography quizzes harder worldwide.