Get Ready For "Toryonto" Puns

Many people are looking at the polls in Toronto's mayoral race and wondering what is going on with Doug Ford staying close to the lead. Urban Studies Professor Richard Florida has been asking a further question: Is Toronto really as conservative as the polls seem to show.  John Tory is leading, and he is about as conservative as the Fords. Essentially, he is Rob Ford without the crack. Or the bigotry. Or the shamelessness, public drunkenness, bullying, or drunk and distracted driving. The point is that all told, about three-quarters of Torontonians are intending to vote for a highly conservative candidate.

It would be easy to discount Florida's questions as those of someone who can't accept that his own views aren't as popular as he'd like. But he does have a valid point that these polls are very unusual compared to any other North American city. All other large cities are more liberal than the areas around them, yet the choice of candidates here would indicate that Toronto is much more conservative than Canada as a whole.

But I think there are some good explanations for the polling:

• There's probably a sizeable Anybody-But-Ford sentiment in Toronto. So a lot of people planning on voting for Tory may be doing so only to keep Ford out of office. My own politics are closer to those of Olivia Chow, but if I lived in Toronto, I'd be seriously considering voting for Tory.
• The Fords have been the focus of the election all along. When that happens other candidates don't get the close inspection a major politician usually gets. It's entirely possible that many Tory supporters don't know much about the mild-mannered candidate's platform.
• It's naive to believe that all Ford's supporters are attached to conservative ideals. The Fords are populists, and people are drawn to populists not for politics, but for personal connection to the candidate.
• Thanks to amalgamation, Toronto includes a lot of its suburbs.  In most big Canadian or American cities, the itself is just the urban bit in the middle.  The suburbs - which may make up most of the population - are different political entities.  As Mike Harris showed, the suburban and satellite populations can get really enthusiastic for conservative economics.
• Expanding on that, the fact that Toronto has been amalgamated for a while now has caused some resentment and tension between its urban and suburban aspects. Probably a lot of people who normally would consider candidates from the middle of the spectrum are looking for some political vengeance.

Let Me Tell You How Much You Like This Blog

The hockey season is back, and with it are the TV commercials reminding us how much we love hockey.  Of course, you could understand any advertiser using the country's favourite sport to reach the Canadian heart.  But for some reason, it's no longer people associated with hockey telling us how great the product is; it's people telling us how important hockey is to Canadians.  Ron MacLean is coming to your hometown to tell everyone how much the town loves the sport.  That kid on the Scotiabank ad gives us a rousing speech about the imagined benefits of hockey to everyone.  And it's only a matter of time before Nike does another montage of players of all ages taking the ice, while the narrator talks about how passionate we are for hockey, yes all us Canadians like Nike can't get enough hockey.

I wonder if it's like this for other countries that have a big national obsession/sport.  Say, Indian ads reminding everyone how much they like Cricket. That would be strange, especially if it's done as a big musical number.  At least, I assume their commercials are just like their movies. 

While You Wait

I made a discovery in a Doctor's waiting room today:

Yes, that grey seal on the right shows that it's an official "Waiting Room Copy." No, I don't know what that means. I didn't go through it too carefully, but there didn't seem to be anything special about it.  But they've obviously put some effort into it - just look at the generic person in the logo reading the magazine, legs crossed impatiently.

Why would they need special waiting room editions of magazines?  The cost of publishing is so high, it must be expensive to have a run of special editions.  Maybe it's made of extra-strong paper, so it will survive its decades-long stay on the waiting room table.  Or they could be trying to cut down on theft of magazines from waiting rooms: this is the equivalent of the ink-filled tag on clothing.  No one would be caught in public reading a magazine with this logo telling everyone that it was stolen.

I guess I can understand their wanting to keep their magazines in the office.  I just wish they'd work harder on keeping the germs from leaving the office.

Diane, Something Strange Happened Today

I've mentioned in the past how I've been left out of some of the most discussed TV shows of recent years.  I've tried to make the case that these shows are not as widely viewed as their fans and the media think they are.  But the fact is that I've drifted away from TV as an entertainment medium.  Maybe the Internet has made me expect more bite-sized entertainment.  At a time when so many dramas are linear and progressive, I've found it harder to commit to a show and stay with it week after week.

So it was quite a switch today when the news came out that Twin Peaks is being revived.  People on Twitter were scrambling to watch the show or finish watching it.  And I was like, that was so twenty-years-ago.  Spoiler Alert, I can tell you who killed Laura Palmer.  Not that we knew what spoilers were at the time. 

(Dis)Unity

I've been experimenting with the Unity game engine. It's pretty impressive, but there's a problem, and that is the name. Any programming tool you use is going to occasionally leave you with questions, so googling for answers is a constant activity for the modern programmer. That's fine if you're working with software that has a unique name. If you consult Google on "jmonkey file opening procedure" there's nothing else you could be looking for.

But "unity" is a pretty common word. And worse, it's used on another piece of software: the controversial user interface for Ubuntu Linux. So if I Google "unity tutorial" I could get an introduction to either one.

And now it's just getting worse: the latest game in the Assassin's Creed series is coming out soon, and it has the subtitle "Unity". So now we'll have three different pieces of software competing for Googlespace.

Worse still is that I'm working with a programming language called, "Boo". There are lots of languages that are named after an English word, but languages like Java and Python have more web pages dedicated to them (at least in English) than the other things they share their names with. So you can Google "python guide" knowing that you won't get an introduction to snake grooming. But Boo is a fairly new, and not widely used yet, so there aren't many web pages about it yet. So if you Google "boo guide" you'll probably find a bunch of episode guides to Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.

So I've tried to make my search terms as specific as possible. For instance, it helps to use "boo language" instead of just "boo". Although that doesn't always work either, as it may just lead to pages offering to translate the language spoken by Honey Boo Boo and family.

The Endless Wait For Chinese Democracy

China's rise out of poverty has been good to see, but the way it has played out has been a little depressing. If you're my age, you remember the Tiananmen Square protests, which seemed to be - along with the freeing of Eastern Europe - part of a global revolution against totalitarian governments. Although those protests were ended by force, the people's desire seemed so strong that it would not be denied.

And yet it was. In the twenty-five years since then, the Chinese government had delivered only token democratic reforms, and yet their popularity is high. Of course, it's all because they've delivered prosperity.

And that's why the whole rise of China has been so depressing: it's demonstrated just how little we humans care about abstract concepts like freedom of speech.

On the one hand, it's understandable. According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, people will want to be lifted out of poverty before they concern themselves with intellectual freedom. And a big mistake in the rebuilding of post-cold-war Russia and post-gulf-war Iraq was delivering on those abstract freedoms first with little consideration for building a system that would get people the necessities of life.

But China has, in many regions, gotten to that middle class level, and there still doesn't seem to be much push for democracy and rights. It looks like the government has succeeded in buying the complacency of the populous. Of course, many totalitarian governments try that, but few have the economic growth to pull it off. So although I could understand the starving giving their complicity in return for sustenance, it's shocking to see people knuckle-under just to get the same middle-class lifestyle we're starting to find so soulless.

But apparently there are some people who do care about this, and they are predominantly young people from Hong Kong. That makes sense: these are people born around the time Hong Kong was handed back to China. So unlike the rest of China, they have had a constantly good standard of living, and unlike the rest of Hong Kong, they haven't had any joy at being reunited with the rest of their culture. In that case, we might see more Chinese dissatisfaction with their lack of democracy, but it will have to wait for a generation that has grown up in the current Chinese economic success.

Pub Reporter

I'm always surprised at how people see pubs. I have a British background, so they're part of my cultural heritage. But I thought that even the most myopically North American had the basic idea: it's like a bar, but built around taking, eating and drinking, rather than dancing, dating and drinking. It's more classic than modern, they have food you've never heard of, and fries are called chips.

And yet, people throw the name around to mean pretty much anything. In university, I wrote an article for the math students' newsletter lampooning the university's food services for listing gyros under the heading "pub grub". That lead to someone writing a snarky letter pointing out that the university's pub served gyros. That didn't seem like much of a justification, since that establishment didn't seem very pub-like either.  Yes, I know I'm sort-of committing the True Scotsman Fallacy, but I don't think that a place University students go to get drunk is an exemplar of pub culture.

And now Chunky soup has a line of "pub inspired" soups. I'm sure they have soup at pubs, but it's not the first thing you associate with them. A quick search for "pub food" seems to confirm that in most pubs, the favourite soup is not Chunky, but Guinness.

And the flavours don't even pretend to fit pub culture. Alehouse Shepherd’s Pie is fine, but Blazin' Roadhouse Chili-Style? Chipotle Sirloin Burger? Meatball Bustin’ Sausage Rigatoni? And stranger, they're marketing these soups as an antidote for emasculation. Apparently, there's a big market for products that help men convince themselves they are men, but Chunky is really stretching it. Also, pubs don't seem like centres of masculinity, at least on this side of the Atlantic. And soups aren't real masculine as foods go. It seems like marketers drew topics out of a hat and thought they could associate them together through sheer repetition.