Blocking Foul

I defy you to find a better symbol of suburbia than a minivan parked on a double driveway blocking the sidewalk.

Influence Peddling

Time magazine has a list of the 100 most influential people as this week's cover story. Whenever a newsmagazine has a list like that, you're naturally going to be skeptical of how accurate it is. But in this case, you never have to weigh that possibility, since you'll see the big picture of Beyonce before you'll see the headline. So you'll know from the start that this is one of them celebrities-we-like-most lists, rather than a serious attempt to find the most influential people.

But that made me think: just who are the 100 most influential people? There are celebrities that could be on the list. I don't really see Beyonce as one of them.

Politics is tricky too. The partial list on the cover includes President Obama and Rand Paul (one from each party, how convenient.) While I'd easily choose Obama out of those two, I really don't see him as influential. Even when he was more popular, I don't know that he was influential in the sense of changing anyone's opinion. As with Beyonce, the lesson is that popularity is not the same as influence. Indeed, a lot of people achieve popularity specifically because they don't ask us to be any different.

As for Paul, I'd ask the same thing. He and the Tea Party movement are hugely influential within the Republican Party, though it's often unclear how much control its political leaders have, and how much they are at the mercy of the movement's grassroots. Really, his namesake Ayn Rand should be on the list, even if she is dead.

They also included soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo. That will help them sell some European editions, and look real international and modern. But how influential are athletes? There are examples of athletes who have had a big influence on society; Jackie Robinson and Billie Jean King are a couple of examples. You could also include Michael Jordan and Babe Ruth as athletes who grew their sport and changed the way it was played. But most of today's athletes are made bland by their obsession with their sports. The only influence they have is in endorsing products, and in that case, the influence is really wielded by whoever has the money to pay for that endorsement. So I would imagine the biggest influence Ronaldo has on the world is starting a new dance craze with those weird hand moves he did after scoring today.

So the Time list is the cheapest of journalism: one step down from "read an interview with these people because they're famous," it's "read an article mentioning these people because they're famous." It would be interesting to see an actual, honest attempt to list the most influential people, people who can actually shape fashions, opinions, art and philosophy.  What famous people would actually make it?  What people we've never heard of would be on the list?  I don't mean to imply conspiracy theories, I mean there are a lot of powerful people who are not famous: business leaders, lobbyists, or economists.  I don't have an answer, but it's your research assignment for the day.

Do The At-Least-Slightly-Civilized Thing

There are times when it seems like our society may not be able to overcome the problems currently facing us. And then there are times when we're reminded that we haven't even solved the problems that used to be facing us. The past week was one of those times. First, anti-government hero Cliven Bundy turned out to have discussed slavery in a positive light. Then, LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling was recorded telling his girlfriend not to bring black people to the game.

No, I'm not naive enough to think that racism is over. But we've gotten used to the idea that today's racism is subtle. It's not a white boss refusing to hire a black person because the boss has a conscious belief that blacks are inferior. It's a white boss systematically passing over black applicants because they don't fit his mental picture of an ideal employee. But now Bundy and Sterling have been caught expressing rather overt distaste for African Americans.

To better explain, consider a scene from Do The Right Thing where one character mentions Magic Johnson as his favourite athlete, and Prince as his favourite musician, yet looks down on his African-American neighbours. That's what I expect from racism today: A person who's world view doesn't include the inferiority or subjugation of blacks, but has a persistent negative view of them in his everyday life. Coincidentally, Johnson is the black person that Sterling allegedly didn't want his girlfriend photographed with. So, Sterling apparently doesn't want to associate with any African-Americans, even if they're famous and successful. Or, to put it another way, this guy is more racist than the character that Spike Lee made up to represent White America's racism.  That's pretty damn racist.

On the one hand, you have to wonder how much these incidents represent the modern problems of racism. As author Teju Cole tweeted, these people are just distracting society from having a more mature discussion on race.

Normally I'd agree, but I'm starting to wonder. These two don't talk in the carefully-evasive language you would expect from someone who knows his views aren't accepted in society.  It makes me worry that they are used to being in situations where their views are shared.  That would indicate that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

If there is an undercurrent of overt racism in the U.S., it may start to feel empowered now that they have an idea that they may be more numerous, and start to get angry at how their new figureheads are treated.  We'll have to see in the coming months.

This Blog Still Costs $0 A Week

I'm getting sick of car ads fiddling with payments to make them seem cheaper. I can still remember when car ads would actually tell you the price of the car. Today they assume you're financing or leasing and just tell you the monthly price. The total cost is buried in the fine print.

But at least it used to be that we agreed on a month as the standard term.  You could compare monthly payments from one car to another, as long as you took notice of the length of the deal. Then a few years ago someone decided to make it biweekly. It might be that in our over-calculated world, months and their 28-31 day spans are just too irregular. But it's probably to make the payments seem cheaper. That's surely the reason, since some dealers are now talking in terms of weekly payments.

But now Volkswagen is running ads in which one of their walking-stereotype engineers tells you that you can have one of their cars for only six dollars a day, Emphasizing that it's just the cost of lunch. Is this trend ever going to end? Why not say a quarter per hour? Or about a cent every other second?  Actually, that sounds like a lot.

In The Future, Data Will Be Lost For Fifteen Minutes

This news came out yesterday that they’ve recovered a bunch of graphics files from Andy Warhol’s old computer. That may seem weird, since he’s more associated with the sixties. But he did live into the eighties, and used a computer. 

And get this, it was an Amiga. How cool is that?  Well, it's also frustrating, since that means they can't just load it up on Photoshop. It's not going to be in a format that is still used, so some computer students had to get creative to access the images.

This jumped out at me because years ago I read an article warning against this very situation: what if some famous person (in their example, an author) left behind potentially historic works on an obsolete computer system that is no longer used. Are they lost forever?

At the time, I didn't think the concern was warranted. Yes, technologies and file formats may come and go, but it's not like they are completely unique or undocumented. That is, a word processor file for, say, the TRS-80, may no longer be used, but it will be on a standard 5¼" disk, so someone will be able to read it, and with some knowledge of how word processors worked, you would likely be able to translate it into something modern. It won't be easy, but if it's for some important person, they'll be willing to put in the work.

Once again, because I'm living in the future, I can now rule on the accuracy of these concerns. And it looks like I was vindicated. Given sufficient motivation, people were able to make sense of a no-longer-used graphics format. And were rewarded with the surreal moment of loading a file called "campbells.pic".

Canadians Need To Stay Out Of Japan

Just the other day I was complimenting Japan, but now I find that as I was doing that, a couple of Canada's most famous citizens were embarrassing themselves there. Fortunately, few people noticed, because another famous Canadian decided to clean his pants.

First, Justin Bieber got in trouble for praying at a Japanese shrine. See, most countries with checkered military pasts have the good sense to make it well known that their war memorials are dedicated only to innocent victims and rank-and-file soldiers, not to the war criminals that led them. But Japan hasn't done this, and the Yasukuni Shrine memorializes the war criminals right along with everyone else.

Bieber apologized when this was pointed out to him. I may have criticized him in the past, but I find it hard to blame him here. Most of the other dumb things he's done were things he should have known better. But not knowing the controversial history of a shrine in another country? I can forgive him for that. What I find notable is that a twenty-year-old pop star with a history of bad decision-making handled the situation better than fifty years of Japanese politicians, who have visited the shrine unapologetically.

Meanwhile, Avril Lavigne has been accused of either racism or bad taste for her video for a song dedicated to Hello Kitty. I can't say whether or not it's racist, because the video was taken down from YouTube, and I don't want to watch it anyway. What it does tell me is: Lavigne's remaining fan base is in Japan, and there is no limit to how far she will go to stay popular with someone.

From the descriptions of the video, it doesn't sound racist so much as simplistic. We really need a term that can describe naive ignorance rather than actual hatred or prejudice.  People who think Mexico is full of Taco Bells.  Or more to the point, people who don't realize they don't know about a given country, and try to discuss it anyway.  It's annoying, but let's reserve inflammatory words like "racist" for people who have really earned it.

Don't Be A Nincompoop, You'll Ruin The Game

They're experimenting with new forms of golf, including one with a fifteen-inch hole. This is to stem the tide of golfers giving up the game. But this tide is probably just demographics: Baby Boomers caused the game to grow in popularity in the eighties, but now they're at retirement age and starting to hang up the clubs.

I don't think the big "pizza-sized" holes are going to help. I'm no expert on golf, but I was under the impression that the sport is balanced between driving and putting, with the player forced to be competent at both, but allowing a player to succeed if they excel at either. Having a giant hole takes the importance of putting out of the game, and makes it mostly about long shots. But surely that's the part of the game that older players have the most difficulty with. If anything, you would attract more elderly players with shorter holes (that is, have tees much closer to the hole.) Of course, if you're going to make the game more about the putting, they already have that: it's called miniature golf.

And that's why I don't like this idea. Even though I'm usually the guy advocating the discarding of sports tradition, I have to acknowledge that sometimes you're trying to change the sport into something it's not. So I'd say golf should stay the same and realize that if you live by the demographic shift, you die by the demographic shift.