Fa la la la la

I'm a fan of rock music — everything from Sarah McLachlan to Metallica, Elton John to Tool. There are other kinds of music I sometimes listen to: I don't mind some country now and again, some blues, and I even have a couple of musical theatre soundtracks - yes, I admit it, I listen to show tunes. I'm not a fan of hip-hop / rap, and adult contemporary (Celine Dion, Michael Bolton) puts me to sleep. I don't listen to jazz either, but I can appreciate their talent — jazz guitarists and drummers are among the best musicians around. I just can't get into the electronic stuff either; generally, if there isn't a real guitarist or real drummer in your band, I'm not interested. If your "band" consists of three keyboardists, a DJ, and a drum machine, I'm not even going to listen.

One form of music I've never been a fan of is Christmas music. I think it's because after 30-some years, Christmas songs all start to sound the same. It's like there are a bunch of Christmas songs available (some religious and some not), and if you want to record a Christmas song, you must pick one of them. God forbid you write a new one. That's not always true; every couple of years I hear a Christmas song I've never heard before, but usually when someone releases a Christmas song, it's just their version of existing song that has already been done to death. Just yesterday, I heard a "new" version of the Beach Boys' "Little Saint Nick" (I don't know if they wrote it, but the only version I know is by them), but the "new" version was an almost note-for-note copy. Why bother?

Two of my least favourites are "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" and "Jingle Bell Rock". Both have "rock" in the title, and that's part of what makes me not like them — neither has anything to do with "rock". What does Brenda Lee know about "Rockin'", anyway? And what the hell is the "new old-fashioned way"? "Jingle Bell Rock" isn't as bad, and I have nothing against Randy Travis (I just can't say his name without dropping into a southern drawl - Rrrrrandy Travis), but if he can cover a song without (a) changing his style or (b) changing the song's style, it ain't rock.

I suppose I have been mellowing in the last few years. I like the Barenaked Ladies' version of Jingle Bells (it starts off very slow and lounge-y, then suddenly blasts into this high-energy fun song). Tom Petty has a pretty good one ("Christmas All Over Again"), and Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime" is OK. Now that I think about it, John Lennon's "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)" is a really good Christmas song. I'm even learning Silent Night on the guitar. I'm not going out to actually buy any of these (for myself, anyway, I've bought some Christmas music for Gail), but I don't cringe whenever I hear them.

Strangely, it doesn't seem that there have been many attempts to write a hard rock Christmas song. AC/DC did a song called "Mistress for Christmas", which was just dumb. And there are NO death metal Christmas songs. I guess I won't hold my breath waiting for Cannibal Corpse's version of "What Child is This?" or "A Very Slayer Christmas".

Musings on McGwire

Mark McGwire is on the ballot for the baseball Hall of Fame. A lot of people are saying he should not get in because of steroid use. Now, I'm a strong believer that steroid use in pro sports is cheating. I think it goes against the principles of sport in general; athletes are supposed to compete against each other physically, and in many cases mentally, but not chemically. Also, it teaches our young athletes that becoming the best you can be is not good enough on your own, you need drugs as well. Not only does this damage their self-esteem, but it puts them at risk because steroids can be dangerous, even deadly. So on that basis, I think McGwire should not be in the Hall.

On the other hand, it has never been proven that McGwire took steroids, nor has he ever admitted to it. Also, steroids were perfectly legal in baseball until after McGwire retired, so even if he did take them, technically, he never did anything wrong. His stats are unquestionably worthy, and his home-run race with Sammy Sosa in the late 90's gave baseball a much-needed boost in interest (only a few years after the interest-killing strike), so maybe he should be in the Hall.

On the other hand, the criteria for being in the Hall includes your conduct off the field, and McGwire has repeatedly refused to answer any questions regarding steroids, including questions in front of a Congressional inquiry. This refusal could be seen as an admission of guilt, or at least qualifies as detrimental behaviour, so maybe he shouldn't be in the Hall.

On the other hand, baseball has far worse people in the Hall of Fame. Ty Cobb was a racist who once fought with an umpire (after a game), and stabbed a man to death during another fight. Kirby Puckett was arrested for groping a woman and was accused of other "lewd acts" (according to Wikipedia). Those are just two examples, but given that, does taking legal (at the time) "supplements" qualify as detrimental enough? Maybe he should be in the Hall.

Should McGwire be in the Hall of Fame? I dunno. I'll let the baseball writers decide. I'm happy sitting here on the fence.

"Post" of the "day"

Here is a Flickr photoset containing images of signs containing unnecessary quotation marks. This is something that's always bugged me. In a previous job, I walked to work every day, and I passed a gardening business. On the side of their trucks, they had the phrase A "cut" above the "rest". I never figured out why "cut" and "rest" were in quotes. I just chalked it up to bad grammar — people who had never figured out when to use punctuation properly. I, on the other hand, have always been anal pedantic about such things.

If I see Breakfast "burrito" on a menu, I read that as "It's not really a burrito, but it's kind of the same, so we're calling it one anyway". Generally, I just ignore the quotes, but you never know — it could be that they really do know what they're talking about, and it's really not a burrito. Just make sure that you use the little "finger quotes" signals when you order it.

Gives new meaning to "Bad customer service"

I just read a story on boingboing.net about a guy who got seriously screwed over by the Bank of America. To sum it up, this guys sold a couple of bikes online for $600, and the guy who bought them sent a cheque for $2000, telling him that the extra $1400 was to cover shipping costs and his "trouble". He was suspicious, so when he went to the bank to cash the cheque, he told the teller that he wasn't sure if the cheque was real. She checked it out, the cheque was not real, and the guy was arrested and thrown in jail. Note that he did not write the cheque, he received it from someone else and tried to warn the bank about it. He's since been forced to spend over $14,000, in bail and, presumably, legal costs. The Bank of America refuses to apologize or reimburse him.

Since then, many people have closed BofA accounts in protest of this, totalling over $50 million. I don't have a BofA account, and I suspect the majority of people reading this are Canadian, but if you happen to have a BofA account, please consider closing it, and make absolutely sure to tell the branch manager why you're doing this.

Free-as-in-beer music redux

About a year ago, a Seattle-based band named Harvey Danger released their latest album, "Little By Little", and made headlines by making the entire album available in MP3 format on their website for free. I'd never heard of the band, but I figured the price was right, and I could just delete the files if I decided it sucked. (I even blogged about it.) Well, it didn't suck, and I grew to quite like the album. A month ago, I decided that I liked it enough to actually purchase it, since I felt kind of guilty that I was enjoying listening to this album, while the band was getting no benefit from my enjoyment. So I went to the web site, entered my address and credit card number, and got an error, saying that my zip code was in the wrong format. Well, Canadian addresses don't have a zip code, they have a postal code, in a different format than US zip codes. Yet another US-based web site that doesn't know that people exist outside of the US. Sigh.

Anyway, I emailed the "webstore" address asking if they could confirm that either (a) my credit card was not charged, or (b) it was, but the CD will be sent to me. I never heard back, and promptly forgot all about it.

Yesterday, I received my credit card bill, and lo and behold, there is a charge for US$19, and I have no CD. I emailed them again, stating that I was charged, so could they please send the CD? This morning I got a reply, saying that the CD was sent last weekend, and if I don't receive it soon to let them know. The funny part was that the email was sent by Jeff J. Lin (Note: inactive blog), who happens to be the guitar player for Harvey Danger. You know you're not dealing with a big-name band when the guitar player is also responsible for shipping. You wouldn't send email to u2.com and expect to get a reply from theedge@u2.com. After reading some of the stuff on his rather sparsely-populated blog, it looks like he's a geek like me (he specifically mentioned "my CS profs" in one entry), so he's probably "the website guy" as well as the guitar player.

Anyway, I thought that was cool. I encourage you to go and check out this album, if you like their style of music. I'm not sure how to describe "their style of music" though, other than to say that they have been described as "college/alternative". You can hear short clips of a couple of their songs from their Wikipedia page.

Star Wars - comparing the trilogies

Wil Wheaton (who I'm beginning to think of less as an actor and more of a writer and blogger) wrote a blog entry as well as an article (SFW) at suicidegirls.com (NSFW - I only read it for the articles) about Star Wars, what it means to "my generation" (I'm only a year or two older than Wil) and why the fact that the new trilogy "sucked so hard" made him not just disappointed, but downright angry.

I didn't hate the second trilogy (I'm going to refer to the trilogies in the order in which they were released, i.e. the first trilogy is episodes 4, 5, and 6, and the second trilogy is episodes 1, 2, and 3), but it certainly didn't mean the same thing to me as the first one did. I'm sure that part of it was the fact that I was 8 when Star Wars came out, and my friends and I were all into playing with the action figures and such. I think part of it is also that there had never really been a movie like Star Wars - the effects were state of the art, and unlike Star Trek, the aliens were truly alien, not just humans with different coloured skin or bumps on their foreheads. It created a whole new generation of science fiction fans, and paved the way for innumerable other space movies. It was also one of the first movies to really cash in on the toys and merchandising - I wonder if Lucas made more money fom that then from the movies themselves. Basically, the first three movies were not just great movies, they were groundbreaking in the world of cinema.

Then, 16 years later, along comes "The Phantom Menace". The special effects were, once again, state of the art, and zillions of people (myself included) were excited to be entering the world of Star Wars once again. They even had big name actors like Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor involved - how could it fail? Well, it didn't, financially, it made zillions. But the movie itself wasn't up to what I expected:

• First and foremost was Jar Jar Binks, the most annoying movie character since ... well, since the beginning of time.
• There were the obvious comparisons between Darth Vader and Darth Maul, and while Maul looked menacing and was really slick with the very cool double-ended light saber, he had maybe two lines in the whole movie, and ended up being nothing more than a hitman. Vader, on the other hand, was the very personification of evil in the first trilogy.
• The dialogue was bad. Really bad. Anakin asking if Padme was an angel made me cringe, especially once we realized that the two of them would, (ahem), "get together" in the second or third movie - that was kind of creepy. Another classic bad line: "Let's try spinning, that's a good trick".
• Qui-Gon insisting that Jar Jar (ugh) accompany them because of his life debt seemed like a desperation ploy to keep Jar Jar in the movie. Qui-Gon telling Obi-Wan "we may need a guide" was just laughable. Also, Jar Jar had no idea who these Jedi were, and yet immediately led them to the "hidden" Gungan city. Later, he led them to a special (also hidden) place that Gungans go when in trouble. If they have a hidden city, why would they need another hidden "special place"? And after telling them that Gungans don't like outsiders, why would he lead outsiders to these hidden places twice?
• The midichlorians were these microscopic life forms that live within our cells and give us knowledge of the force. Why, George, why? The midichlorians served exactly one purpose: Lucas wanted a way to quantify how strong Anakin was in the Force. It wasn't enough to just say "this kid is really strong", he needed to prove that the kid had potential beyond that of any known Jedi. But without an actual number to quantify that, there was no way to make that point, so he came up with the midichlorians. Now he could give an actual number and specifically say that Anakin's number was higher than that of Yoda. I didn't like this idea, but I can't say why. The best I can do is to say that making the midichlorians some kind of intermediary between people and the Force seemed to reduce the coolness factor somewhat.

It did have some good points too - the lightsaber fight between Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon and Darth Maul and the pod race were both good, though I suppose that's mainly because of the visual effects (and sound during the pod race).

I really wanted to love the movie - like I said, I was (am!) a huge Star Wars fan, and was really excited about it. I remember leaving the movie feeling like I was "betraying" Lucas by not loving it. It never occurred to me at the time that Lucas was actually betraying us, the fans, by making it. I'm still not sure that I feel that way about it, but I know some, like Wil, do.

I'll post my thoughts on Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith later on.

Squeak squeak swish

I went to my first Raptors game in about 10 years last night - Raptors vs. the Atlanta Hawks. Last time I went to a Raptor game was around '96 or '97 with my old company - we went to a Raptors-Celtics game (fitting, considering the amount of time we spent in Boston) at the SkyDome. They, of course, play at the ACC now, and I know a little more about the game than I did then, which was precisely nothing.

I'm still no basketball expert by any stretch, but I can recognize bad defence when I see it, and the Raps were brutal in the first half. Chris Bosh couldn't hit anything, and I think he might have had 4 points at halftime. He did have a bunch of rebounds though, but that doesn't matter much if you miss the follow-up. The Raps quickly took a 2-0 lead in the first, then Atlanta tied it, went ahead, and never lost the lead for the rest of the game. The Raptors played better in the second half, and got to within 2 points of the Hawks a couple of times, but no closer.

I'm going to two more Raptors games next month - one with Ryan, and one with my friend Jeff. Jeff co-owns season tickets to the Leafs, and he's taken me to a number of Leaf games, and never lets me pay for the ticket, so I think a Raptors game is the least I can do!

Breaking News

Attention all single men! The news you have all been waiting for has arrived: Britney Spears is filing for divorce! This means that Britney is available! For those of you who are on the prowl for a rich and famous woman who is stunningly beautiful (when she's not skanky-looking), marginally talented, and has the IQ of molasses, this is your lucky day. I'm happily married, so this news has no effect on me.

On the other hand, Halle Berry is also single...

Update: So is the über-cute Reese Witherspoon.

Movie Review: Nacho Libre

Gail is away for the weekend, so it's just me and the boys. We rented a couple of movies: The Wild (which the boys liked, I thought the other-movie-with-the-same-plot Madagascar was better. I did like Don Cherry's cameo though) and Scooby-Doo for the boys, and I decided to get something for myself that Gail would have little interest in seeing. I decided on Nacho Libre, since I like Jack Black. Well, let me say this: Nacho Libre is easily — easily — the best Mexican wrestling movie I've ever seen.

Comparing it to non-Mexican-wresting movies, however, is not so favourable. There were some funny moments, but in general, it was kind of boring. The cinematography was weird (like a Mexican movie? I dunno), as was the soundtrack. It seemed to me that both would have been less grating if I were more familiar with Mexican culture, but watching a parody of something that you're not familiar with is just not funny.

What is it with studios that they release movies with very similar plots around the same time? The Wild and Madagascar were released about a year apart, and both dealt with New York zoo animals escaping and making it to their natural habitat, with which they are unfamiliar. Antz and A Bug's Life were released around the same time, both dealt with computer-generated ants. Armageddon and Deep Impact, both about meteor strikes. Volcano and Dante's Peak, both about (you guessed it) volcanoes. Especially weird were The Truman Show and EdTV, both of which had what I would normally have considered a very unique plot. It would seem to me that one studio gets wind of an idea that the other studio is working on, and rushes to get their own "version" out first. Come on, writers, this is why you get paid the big bucks — write your own damn movie.

Top Ten Signs That You Edit On Wikipedia Too Much

1. Whenever you find a spelling or factual mistake on any web page, you immediately look for the "edit this page" button
2. When you see a spelling mistake on your own web site, you immediately look for the "history" button to find out what moron added it
3. Putting hyperlinks in HTML documents is such a pain because typing [[whatever|link]] is so much easier than <a href="http://whatever">link</a>
4. When writing plain-text email, you try to emphasize a word using '''word'''
5. You wish your email client supported categories: being able to add multiple categories to an email would be so cool (All joking aside, this would be quite a cool feature^*)
6. You see a short web page lacking in content and want to add {{stub}}
7. You see something on a web site that doesn't seem right, and you want to leave a message on the talk page asking about it
8. You eye your kids' toys, wondering if they really play with them anymore, whether they'd notice if they vanished, and how much you could get for them. Oops, wrong list — that should be on the Top Ten Signs You Use eBay Too Much
9. You wish the web had a "watchlist" so you could find out which web pages have changed recently without having to actually visit those pages (though I suppose that's what RSS is for)
10. You click on a hyperlink that takes you to a 404 error page, and you wonder why the original link wasn't red

^* I have frequently been looking for a particular email and cannot remember what folder I saved it in. Wouldn't it be great to be able to "save" it to multiple folders without replicating the message numerous times? If I'm looking for a message from my boss regarding IPv6 in SuSE Linux, did I save it in a folder called "Mark"? OK, so that would probably have been dumb, but was it "IPv6" or "Linux" or "SuSE"? If I could mark the message with a bunch of different tags (eg. "Mark IPv6 SuSE Linux"), then I could look in any one of those folders and find it. Blogger.com just added this feature for blog articles, and I love it; it's also similar to the way you can save bookmarks at del.icio.us. Are you listening Thunderbird or Outlook people?

I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out

Don Cherry was on the radio this morning, talking about how fighting is required in hockey, and he was going to convince me, the listener, why this is true. I'm not a fan of fighting in hockey (or lacrosse), so I waited to be astonished by his insight. He proceeded to tell stories about how so-and-so star player (Gretzky et al) were "untouchable" and if anyone "looked sideways" at them, someone would take them out. He called this "protection". As I've stated before, I don't have a problem with sending your resident goon out after someone if he hits your star player with a cheap shot. But what Cherry and Kypreos and others who advocate fighting don't seem to "get" is that Wayne Gretzky and other star players are not just stars, they're hockey players, and part of hockey is getting checked. If you're a star player like Crosby or Malkin or Nash and you're heading towards the offensive zone with the puck, you better expect to get hit. If that's too much for you and you need this much "protection" (not from cheap shots but from legal checks), then you have no business being in the NHL. This notion of having "untouchable" players is just silly.

Cherry even told one story he told about someone who bumped his star player accidentally (and Cherry agreed it was accidental), and got beaten up anyway. He actually laughed when he said that his goon grabbed the other player by the hair (no helmets in those days) and slammed his head into the boards. Yo Don, does the name "Steve Moore" mean anything to you? Cherry's entertaining and all, but what an idiot.