May I Label These Envelopes Please

Did you know that there’s only three days in the year that North America’s “Big 4” team sports do not have any games? Okay, probably, because we’ve just had them: they’re the tree days around Baseball’s All-Star Game. In recent years, ESPN used this break as an opportunity to have their annual award show, the Espys. But for some reason, they had it a few days early this year, so I was unprepared to publish another instalment of suggested awards. Previous suggestions are here from 2014 and here from 2015.

Baseball

• Most creative way to point out a no hitter without actually mentioning it
• Least embarrassing ceremonial first pitch
• Least confusing score bug
• Most nonchalant front row spectator
• Most sweat-stained cap
• Most elaborate hairstyle hidden under a cap
• Most gratuitous old-time ballpark feature in a new stadium
• Best performance by a player asking the dugout to request a review

Football

• Best performance by a player introducing himself and his college
• Most innocent-sounding explanation for not signing Colin Kaepernick
• Most gratuitous use of cable cam
• Best performance by a coach angrily taking off his headset after a bad play

Basketball

• Best performance by a fan in the front row berating a player without provoking a fight
• Most subtle way for a commentator to question officials' competence
• Best wood floor pattern

Hockey

• Best performance by a league official pretending to care about concussions
• Most consecutive questions asked of John Tortorella without him losing it
• Most dramatic announcement of a goal-review result
• Most gratuitous pre-game ceremony (separate divisions for original-six and expansion teams)
• Best special effects in an animated virtual board ad

Soccer

• Most miraculous use of the magic spray
• Best performance by players wasting time taking a corner, throw-in etc.
• Best performance by in-studio analysts hyping a relegation game
• MLS fan group that looks most like it could win a riot against European fans
• Best interpretive dance moves while running up to a penalty

Tennis

• Best attempt to have a McEnroe-style tantrum despite the existence of review technology
• Best performance by a player packing up their bag and leaving after a loss
• Subtlest grunting

General

• Most money conned out of local government for a new stadium
• Least-awkward in-stadium marriage proposal
• The Ref-Cam Award for best dumb-sounding idea
• Highest office job given to a retired player with no experience
• Roughest play at an All Star game
• The Broken Clock Award for best prediction by a loud mouth debater. 
• Fastest performance of The Star-Spangled Banner
• Saddest story of a veteran dealt away from a championship team as part of a deadline deal
• Most realistic superimposed ad
• Most compassionate "oooh" by a crowd watching an injury in slow motion on the jumbotron
• The St. Joseph’s Cancer Center Award for strangest thing advertised on a sports broadcast
• The Eric Lindros Award for highest expectations placed on a prospect who hasn’t played in the big leagues yet.

20,000 Leagues All Over Me

In many ways, I reject traditional masculinity, but in other ways I embrace it. One obvious way is sports. I counted it up, and I now have items of clothing to indicate my team of choice in no less than seven different sports leagues. (MLB, NBA, NHL, CFL, NFL, MLS, and the latest addition, the National Lacrosse League.)

That's nearly all of my teams. Okay, there are some leagues where I have a favourite team based on something like a weird name. (Forced to choose a team among Indian Premier League cricket teams I'd go the Kolkata Knight Riders, but I can't pretend to be passionate about them.) Among teams I truly care about the only ones missing would be the family soccer teams, Aston Villa or Birmingham City. And I point that out not entirely as a gift idea for friends and family. 

But now I realize that this manifestation of my masculinity is about to get even more complicated. And ironically, it's because of the rise of women's sports. I jumped on the bandwagon of the Toronto PWHL team, but since they don't have a name yet, I have a reprieve before buying any merchandise. But as soon as they become the Toronto Narwhals or something, I'll be heading to the stores. And now Toronto is getting a WNBA franchise, so that will need another piece of clothing with their presumably non-plural name splashed across it. 

The fact is that we're entering into a more complex sports world. The days of just hockey in Canada and just baseball in the US are long gone. We've even moved beyond a Big-3 or Big-4 team sports. I'm wondering how that's going to change fandom in the future. Because at the same time, the ways of spending on your team has increased too; clothing is just one aspect of it. Above, I was just talking about cheap t-shirts and hats, but if you're going to go for the replica uniform route, you could be spending a thousand dollars on your full collection of teams, before we even get to the jackets, lamps, novelty home scoreboards, etc. And that's before we consider how much you might bet on your teams of choice. 

So I'm thinking that sports fandom could get watered down: The days of looking into the audience and seeing half the fans in the team uniform could be numbered. After all, it wasn't that long ago when such fans were a lot less common.  Maybe we'll return to those before-times of more casually-dressed spectators, and the current era of monochromatic crowds will seem like an awkwardly-obsessed outlier.

Or, we could see fans concentrating more on individual sports. Instead of just automatically maintaining fandom of all the teams from the local metropolis, fans may choose to specialize. That would be odd, because now we just assume that teams from different sports in one town are kind of allies, since their fans are mostly the same people. But if they have to fight to be the object of local fans' obsessions, that could get ugly. You think it's hard to back a team between Lakers-Celtics or Dodgers-Giants, how about when it's Dodgers-Lakers? Rich teams fighting over entitled fans? That's no fun. I'd be willing to keep buying sports merchandise just to keep that from happening.

The Secret Life Of The Centre Square

 It's kind of depressing how fandom can come and go. I mean, there logically will be a last person alive who still misses Automan, what if it's me? That's why I find it reassuring whenever I see evidence of an old fandom. So if I come across Greatest American Hero fan fiction, I rejoice (but don't read it) because I'm glad to see passion for an older media franchise. And genuine passion too, not just someone name-dropping it to sound eclectic like I just did.

So recently, when I saw a personalized license plate that read "Zsa Zsa G," I found it reassuring. I was never a fan of the actress, Zsa Zsa Gabor, but I'm glad that there's still someone around who misses her. So much so that I'm not going to do the math on the likelihood that it really is a Zsa Zsa Gabor fan, vs just someone named Zsa Zsa G. I don't think there's a big Hungarian community in town, so I'll just go with my initial assumption.

By the way, it's as good a time as any to revisit those 70s-80s pseudo-celebrities. It might seem weird to current generations, but there was a certain type of D-list celebrity that hung around on game shows or did guest spots on sitcoms, or appeared on a talk show in need of a human punchline. Today, we often talk about someone who's "famous for being famous," but that just means they are famous for reality TV or social media. But back then, these people just kept showing up on our TV and we weren't always sure why. 

Of course, those were real people, and in the modern day, we've learned more about them. It’s sort of like  when Dolly Parton was only known for her bustline, and Betty White was just another frequent TV star. It'd be quite a tragedy if society had never seen beyond that. Well, I’ve since learned that Charo was actually quite a good guitarist. Fannie Flagg wrote Fried Green Tomatoes. JM J Bullock lived with HIV for much of his career and co-hosted a talk show with Tammy Faye Bakker. Which reminds me:

Things Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #46:

An actress will win the Best Actor Oscar playing Tammy Faye Bakker.

Anyway, it’s unfortunate timing for that generation of borderline celebrities. Today’s media landscape is just built for such people: Then, they had to make do with guest appearances, but today they’d have reality shows, Hallmark movies, and so many social media followers.

Things The Teenage Me Would Have Found All Too Believable About Life In The Future

There’s a service where a small business can get a name and logo made for them by Artificial Intelligence. Such uses of A.I. in creative industries is quite controversial. And yet, a TV commercial for this service sidesteps the controversy, and instead shows a young proprietor of a small business explaining the concept to her older business partner. The partner exclaims, “A-I-Like-It!”

Get The Parity Started

It’s amazing how the colour of a product makes such a difference in price. In our world where there’s often not much differentiating one product from another, the colour can make all the difference. Of course, I’m going to use examples from cars and technology, but you can find examples everywhere.

That’s the reason why cars have taken a turn for the gray in recent decades. It’s affected by what car buyers desire in their own cars, but also their concern for resale value. So they’ll prefer an inoffensive gray car that they can easily flip a few years later, not the green one that might turn off other buyers. I suspect it’s also that car companies know people are very choosy, and colour won’t win them many sales unless it’s absolutely perfect, but an offensive colour will lose them many, so they stay neutral. Personally, I think that’s a shame; I like colours, but I’m not married to any in particular. So I’d like to have a nice colour for the sake of some colour in my life, even if it’s not my favourite. But I seem to be in the minority on that, so gray it is.

I’ve also seen the colours having an effect on prices in the technology business. I’ve been looking for an external hard drive, and Samsung makes their external drives in traditional black, but also in blue and red. I’ve noticed that one colour is sometimes on sale, but not the others. They’re identical other than the colours, so I’m assuming that when one falls behind in sales, some algorithm somewhere decides it’s time for a discount. It’s hard to believe that colour can have that kind of effect on the purchase of something few others are going to see, but apparently it does.

But then I went looking for a game controller. They’re traditionally gray or black, but often available in other colours. So after my experience with the hard drives, I wasn’t surprised to find that the red XBox controller was five dollars less than the original black. I was set to order it and congratulate myself on my colourful frugality, but then I saw it: A pink controller, for fifteen dollars less than the original.

That’s ironic, because of this concept called, the “Pink Tax.” That’s the phenomenon where products aimed at women are more expensive than similar products aimed at men, even though they hardly differ. Often, the only difference is that they’re pink, hence the name. They aren’t really more expensive because they’re pink. After all, pink paint and dye is not particularly expensive. Instead, it’s factors like how much consumers want and need products. I’m assuming that because women are under more pressure to look good, their hygiene products are more expensive because of higher demand.

So in other contexts, pink might cost more, but the roles have been reversed here. You might be surprised to see them even trying to sell something pink in the world of video games, but let me remind you: 

1. Surveys show female gamers are now close to 50% of the market.
2. We are just coming out of The Year Of Barbie. 

Having said that, it appears things weren’t working out the way Microsoft marketing wanted, and the pink controllers were deeply discounted. I don’t know, maybe the Barbie-gaming crossover wasn’t as much as they’d hoped. But I suspect the real reason is that female gamers may choose the black or the pink, while the males will only buy the black.

(And if you’re wondering, I only saw one colour that was more expensive than the original black controller: a dark purple. Purple seems to be having a moment right now.)

For me, even when I put aside traditional symbols of masculinity, pink is not one of my favourite colours. I don’t mind it, as long as it’s taken in reasonable quantities. You know, less than the Barbie-aisle-at-Toys-R-Us levels. And whatever need I have to reaffirm my masculinity is tiny compared to my desire not to over-spend on electronics, so: I ordered the pink controller.

It’s not much of a consolation for high-priced women’s products, but there are times when the Pink Tax turns into, let’s say, the Pink Subsidy. And I’m pleased to be gaming with both confidence in my masculinity, and an extra fifteen dollars in my pocket.

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #45

 You’ll read this headline and understand it:

Welcome Back, Victoria

This is Victoria Day weekend. I'm not sure how to explain this to non-Canadians. Obviously, it's a day celebrating Queen Victoria, who was the British monarch at the time of Confederation. As a few modern Canadians have pointed out, Nineteenth-Century Canadians had an unhealthy obsession with her, as you can see from the sheer number of places in Canada that have a Victoria Park. Or, just look at this inscription on a statue of her in a Victoria park near my home.

Suddenly the adoration of Elizabeth II seems tame by comparison. So it's not too surprising that those folks wanted to celebrate her with a major holiday. 

But now, Victoriamania has worn off, so we're left with a holiday with no meaning behind it. It's kind of appropriate that we often refer to it as the Two Four weekend as a wink to the amount of beer that each person consumes, and which has become the true focus of the weekend. 

Anyway, aside from beer and lapsed monarchism, the weekend is also known for fireworks. And it's a chance for me to reflect on the changing place of fireworks in our society. 

When I was a child, there were official, professional fireworks displays for major holidays, but personal fireworks were banned. Of course, that changed, and pop-up fireworks stores became a feature of summer long weekends. But now many cities are banning personal fireworks within the city limits. So I've now seen an entire cycle of changing legislative attitude. It goes like this:

• Start with a ban that seemed a little pedantic
• Ban is lifted, is a seemingly sensible move
• There's a brief interlude of reasonable use of fireworks
• One group of people realizes that there's nothing stopping them from going overboard, and another group of people realizes there's a lot of money to be made selling to that first group of people. 
• People get tired of hearing fireworks each night of the week leading up to a holiday
• Cities start banning fireworks.

Presumably this will be followed by a slow shift to enforce the ban. And then it's right back to square one. I'm kind of curious how long it will take to forget the reason for the ban and legalize fireworks again. I suddenly have sympathy for the banned and legalized things over the years. Next time you’re wondering what the Prohibitionists were thinking, just remember fireworks.