More on TTS (or maybe it should be Moron: TTS?)

I've never done this before so bear with me while I figure out exactly what I want to say. I'm sure I have written bad blog entries before (this is where you say "No! Absolutely not! This was your first! Well, not that it was bad really, just not up to your usual standards. What were we talking about again?"), but I'm not especially happy with parts of the one I wrote on Thursday night. It's not that I've changed my mind on how silly the NY Times article was, but my article focused on the fact that the technology to read the books is simply not there yet (as Wil Wheaton's test proved beyond any doubt). But upon reflection, I think I missed at least some of the point of Mr. Blount's article, so I'm going to post a semi-rebuttal to my own article.

The fact that the technology isn't there yet isn't really the point. I'm sure Mr. Blount would acknowledge that right now, a computer reading a book is not the same thing as a human reading it, and that right now the Kindle's TTS (text-to-speech) feature is not a huge threat to the audio book industry. Not to put words in Mr. Blount's mouth, but I think his issue is that in five or ten years, the technology may have advanced enough that it will be much harder to distinguish between a computer-read book and a human-read book. As hard as that is to believe, it could certainly be yet another in the long list of things that we take for granted today that would have been difficult to imagine a few years ago. If that happens, then computer-read books might pose a real threat to the audio book industry, and so he wants to head that off before it becomes a problem. I can understand that, but history is full of new inventions that were supposed to kill off entire industries and didn't. Remember how the VCR was going to kill the movie industry? Remember how PVR's were going to make commercials obsolete? MP3 players have reduced sales of CDs, but they haven't killed the industry entirely. Even sharing of digital media and places like Pirate Bay haven't killed music sales or movie revenues. There have been many movies made with completely computer-generated characters, and the animation is getting better all the time, but I don't hear the actor's guild advocating that filmmakers abandon the use of computers.

The Amazon people could easily change their TTS feature to only read blogs, newspapers, and magazines, and would not read books, which would solve the problem of the guy listening to the newspaper while in the car. I don't know the numbers for sure, but I'm sure there are thousands of books available for the Kindle that are not available as an audio book, so people who want to listen to those books are screwed.

It's possible that the best solution to this "problem" is for the audio book industry to expand their advertising and PR to make sure that people know that audio books exist and how cool they are. They need to make sure that they stress the point that they have talented actors (sometimes the authors themselves) reading the books, not just some nobody off the street. Once people are hooked on audio books, the thought of having a computer read to them will be unthinkable, regardless of how good the technology gets.

Stephen Hawking performs Wil Wheaton

Roy Blount Jr., the President of the Authors Guild, has written an article^* in the NY Times about the Amazon Kindle, and its built-in text-to-speech feature. He says that this feature essentially takes money out of the hands of authors and publishers because it's essentially turning any book you buy for your Kindle into an audio book, without paying audio book royalties. This is ridiculous beyond belief.

^* I originally read the article without logging into NYTimes (since I don't have an account there), but now when I visit that link, it says I have to log in. Don't know why. If you don't have a login, you can use "bugmenot555" as the user and "bugmenot" as the password. Thanks bugmenot.com.

Wil Wheaton, an author and audio book performer himself, wrote a blog post about it today, in which he attached a ten-minute audio snippet. The file contained a short portion of his latest book which he read himself, and then the same portion read by some software on his computer. Not surprisingly, there's just no comparison. The text-to-speech software was actually more impressive than I expected. It wasn't just words said in a monotone computer voice, it did almost sound like someone reading it aloud, complete with pauses where a comma would be found. The intonation (not sure if that's the right word) was mostly correct, meaning that the person's voice went down at the end of a sentence, and things like that. There was even the sound of someone taking a breath at the beginning of sentences. But it was still obviously a computer voice.

Wheaton's reading was just so much more expressive. In some cases, there were pauses missing in the computer version, and even though there was no way for the computer to know that there was supposed to be a pause there because there's no punctuation, the way the sentence or paragraph is written makes it obvious to a human reader. The one part where Wil talks semi-sarcastically about a Walkman being something like a iPod "that used these things called “cassette tapes”" — to a human reader, it's obvious that that sentence should be read in a slightly different tone than the surrounding sentences, but there's no way to encode that in the text passed to the software. You just gotta know.

While reading the Times article, my first thought was "I guess I shouldn't be reading to my kids at night", and Blount indeed addresses this at the end of his piece:

For the record: no, the Authors Guild does not expect royalties from anybody doing non-commercial performances of “Goodnight Moon.” If parents want to send their children off to bed with the voice of Kindle 2, however, it’s another matter.

Why is it another matter? If I'm reading to my kids, I'm being as expressive as possible. If someone in the book is happy, I try to sound happy. If someone is unhappy, I try to sound unhappy. I even sometimes try accents (though that got old really quick during the first Harry Potter book, when we realized that almost every character would have an English accent. I always did it for Hagrid though). So my "performance" would be a lot closer to the one you might get if you bought an audio book than the one the Kindle would give you. Wouldn't that be more "threatening" to the audio book publishers?

The other obvious point that Mr. Blount missed is that the Kindle can read any text that it has. Once the Authors Guild provides an audio recording of every book available through the Kindle, plus the daily newspapers (New York Times, Wall Street Journal), weekly magazines (Time, Newsweek), and over 1000 blogs, in real time, then maybe Amazon will remove this feature. Until then, I cannot believe that authors really feel threatened by this. People who like audio books are not going to stop buying them because they can get their Kindle to read them. It's just not the same. The people using this feature are people who might want to listen to the newspaper during their morning commute or while riding the stationary bike at the gym. I imagine this would be a great feature for the blind (though as Blount points out, using the on-screen controls would be impossible for the blind anyway).

I've bought a couple of audio books, and they're OK. (I joined audible.com for a while (got a free book because I listen to TWiT, and then bought another), but I quit it because the way their accounts work, you have to buy a book every month. If I could be a member and then just buy books whenever I wanted to, I might do that.) Either way, the computer voice is just not real enough for me to listen to a computer read me stuff for any length of time. I think the technology still has a long way to go before it's even going to be remotely comparable.

Stupid people shouldn't be allowed to drive

I saw a bumper sticker yesterday that said:

Evolution is a theory
Creation is a fact

Sigh.

The Fab Four, and some really old CD reviews

Over the last couple of years, I have become a pretty big Beatles fan. I've always liked the Beatles; my parents have an audio recording of me singing "Hey Jude" when I was about 3. My dad had the Red and Blue albums, and I remember being fascinated by the two pictures of the Beatles looking over the balcony, eight (or so) years apart:

I have the first Anthology CD, but it's a lot of the older stuff — Love Me Do, Please Please Me, I Wanna Hold Your Hand, stuff like that, and I'm more into the later Beatles. I also have the "1" album, which is yet another "Best Of..." album. But other than the hits (of which there are several), I never really knew much else.

I was going to start off the first sentence of this story by saying "I'm not really sure why", but that's not true — the reason I'm such a big Beatles fan these days is because of my guitar teachers over the last couple of years. I've had three different teachers, and the last two were huge Beatles fans. My current teacher, who is probably ten years younger than I am, knows how to play just about every Beatles song there is (though Eleanor Rigby might be challenging on guitar), and a few months ago we went through and played about three quarters of the Abbey Road album. Something, Here Comes The Sun, and Blackbird are some of my favourite Beatles songs to play.

Thanks to him, I've become more interested in the rest of the Beatles catalogue. Gail gave me Let It Be for Christmas, and this past week I bought Revolver, Magical Mystery Tour, Rubber Soul, and the White Album on eBay (and was outbid for Anthology 2 and 3). I also have (illegal... shhhhh) copies of Abbey Road and the Red and Blue albums, although I intend on buying those too.

I'm also really interested in Beatles trivia, and I love reading the Wikipedia entries on various albums. I don't know what it is about Beatles trivia that makes it more interesting to me than trivia about the Stones or the Who or any other band. Things like:

• the drums you hear on "Back in the U.S.S.R." were played by Paul because Ringo had temporarily left the band when it was recorded.
• John hated Paul's song "Ob-la-di Ob-la-da", and came into the recording studio one day claiming to be more stoned than any of them had ever been, and sat down at the piano and played the opening that was used on the recorded version. (A lot of people consider that to be the worst Beatles song ever, but I kind of like it. It's better than Revolution 9, anyway.)
• Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was based on a picture that Julian Lennon drew while he was in kindergarten and had nothing to do with LSD. Some real fanatics have gone through the history books, and figured out who Lucy really was.
• George Harrison left the band for a week or so during the recording of Let It Be, and the remaining Beatles considered asking Eric Clapton to replace him, but then decided that if anyone left the band, it just wouldn't be the Beatles anymore. They were right.
• At various times, each of John, George, and Ringo left the band, only to be coaxed back by Paul. But the Beatles disbanded because Paul left.

I look at some famous musicians and marvel at what a great piano player or guitar player or whatever he is. It's even more amazing when that person has other musical talents, like singing or songwriting. You can look at Eric Clapton, and he's one of the best guitar players ever. He's a pretty good songwriter as well, and he's a decent singer, but as far as I know can't play any other instruments. Elton John is an amazing piano player, and a good singer, but only writes music, not lyrics, and doesn't play guitar or bass or drums. The amazing thing about the Beatles is not just that they have someone like that — George Harrison is also an excellent guitar player who can sing and has written some really great songs — but then they also have two more who are even better. Paul McCartney and John Lennon both play guitar, they both play piano, they both play bass, Paul plays drums, they are both great singers, they are both great songwriters (music and lyrics), and they work very well together as well as individually. And then there's Ringo, who I've complained about before. He can't sing, wrote a total of two songs during the entire life of the Beatles, and plays no instruments other than drums. But there's no denying that he's a very good drummer, and I've heard of tons of modern-day rock drummers who cite him as an influence.

You don't often see CD reviews that are not of recent releases, and very rarely of albums that are over forty years old, but here are a couple:

Abbey Road

Abbey Road is not considered one of the best rock albums of all time for no reason. It's certainly got its share of big hits (Come Together, Something, Here Comes The Sun, Octopus's Garden), but most of the other songs are just as strong. Maxwell's Silver Hammer is a little silly, but kind of fun. I love Paul McCartney's Oh! Darling — it sounds like the kind of song that John Lennon would normally sing, but Paul does a good job with it. I Want You (She's So Heavy) is a little repetitive and the end goes on a bit too long, but different stanzas using the same lyrics with different musical styles is kind of cool. The only songs I'm really not thrilled with are Octopus's Garden, because Ringo is a crappy singer and Because, which is just a little too dreamy and psychadelic.

Most of the second side (going back to the record days with that terminology — I don't suggest turning the CD over) is a medley of short songs. It almost seems like they took a bunch of half-written half-recorded songs and mashed them together, which I believe is what they actually did, but it really works. Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight, and The End are simply fantastic, containing both a drum solo (the only one Ringo ever did) and a triple guitar solo. It's hard to believe while listening to this album (which I have done numerous times over the past month or two) that the Beatles were barely even a functioning group at this point.

Let It Be

Let It Be was recorded before Abbey Road but for various reasons was released after. It's kind of too bad, since it would have been nice for the Beatles to end their run with an amazing farewell album. Instead, we got Let It Be. This is kind of unfair, since it is not a bad album by any stretch, but is just not as strong as Abbey Road. The title track is one of my favourite Beatles songs ever, despite being very repetitive, which is something I generally dislike (George Harrison's "Got My Mind Set On You" drives me batty for that very reason). The Long and Winding Road, Two of Us, Get Back, and Across The Universe (even with the indecipherable chorus "Jai guru deva om") are also really great songs. I really like One After 909, at least partially because it's so different from the other tracks on the album. I was about to write that it sounds more like a very early Beatles song than the rest of Let It Be, and then I checked the Wikipedia entry and found that it was indeed written by John Lennon more than ten years earlier, even before the Beatles were the Beatles.

I should receive the CDs I bought sometime next week. I'll give them a few listens and then post my thoughts on them sometime after that.

Steroids in lacrosse

Former NLL player Ted Jenner wrote a column on nllinsider.com yesterday about steroids and how nobody in the NLL is taking them. Before I say anything else, let me say that I have no proof, evidence, or even the slightest hint that any NLL player is on steroids, HGH, or any other banned or controlled substance. It wouldn't surprise me if the percentage of juiced NLL players is far less than the other major sports. But the reasons that Jenner gives for believing this are either naïve or blindly optimistic.

I don't think it would surprise anyone if 70% of all NFL players were taking some sort of performance enhancing drug. The number of baseball players taking them has dropped dramatically in the last few years, but Alex Rodriguez is one of 104 players who have apparently tested positive during 2003, and nobody believes that number has dropped to zero. I have heard no steroid stats about basketball, but that's a sport for mutants anyway, so nobody's going to look twice at a six-foot-ten two-hundred-eighty pound man with raisin-sized testicles. The NHL, for some reason, is convinced that their sport is clean, and that seems to be what Jenner is saying about the NLL. The question for the hockey and lacrosse people is: what makes your sports so different from the others?

Sure, being a big bulky mass of muscle (see Mark McGwire or the "after" picture of Barry Bonds) would not help you as a hockey or lacrosse player. But that's not what steroids always do. They don't make you bigger; they allow you to train harder and recover faster. Some allow you to retain muscle while losing fat. There is no reason to believe that lacrosse players wouldn't benefit from some use of these drugs.

From Jenner's article:

There is no room for steroids in the 'little brother of war'. It goes against everything the game stands for... But more importantly it's about having that sense of Zen and being in a sort of Nirvana like state. A clouded mind can only hamper a lacrosse player's ability to play at the top of his game.

First off, the whole "it goes against everything the game stands for" is nice to say, but a little idealistic. Does he honestly think that every single one of the 250+ NLL players has such a deep respect for the history and traditions of the sport that they wouldn't consider taking a substance that could make them perform better? This is almost laughable. I'm sure that's true for some, but for others, lacrosse is simply a fun sport that they are good at. If there's a way for them to get better, illegal or not, some are going to jump at that chance. There have been frightening surveys of young athletes preparing and hoping to make the Olympics — when asked if they would consider taking a drug that would guarantee them a gold medal but would also kill them within five years, the majority of athletes surveyed said they would take it. It's kind of a meaningless survey, since no such gold-medal-guaranteeing drug exists, but the thought processes of these athletes is clear.

Secondly, to my knowledge (and I could be wrong here), HGH and steroids don't have any kind of "clouding" effect on the mind. We're not talking about weed or LSD here. And give me a break with the "Zen" / "Nirvana" crap.

I think the one saving grace for the NLL here is that they don't make a ton of money, so the incentive to abuse your body or risk your health is far less than if you were making millions as a football or baseball player. Someone who wouldn't normally dream of taking steroids might change his mind for the possibility of a ten million dollar contract. The highest paid players in the NLL make about $25K a year. But there are high school students who are not athletes who take steroids simply to look good for the girls. These guys are highly competitive by nature, so who knows what lengths they will go to to give themselves or their team a slight competitive edge?

I'm not saying that NLL players are juiced, and I honestly think the majority of them aren't. I believe that the vast majority are simply great athletes and work hard to take care of their bodies without drugs. But honestly, it is highly unlikely that that there are no NLL players taking steroids. Jenner's deluding himself if he thinks otherwise.

Update to prove my point: The other day (May 2010), a Google search hit this article. The search was "what roids would i take to become better at lacrosse".

Dumb question of the day

I am investigating a couple of compression libraries, and comparing both their compression and speed. zlib is what we use now, and is moderately fast and gives pretty good compression. fastlz is blindingly fast, but doesn't compress quite as well, and the code isn't "stable". lzma is one that I just started looking at, and my initial tests were abysmal. It gave the best compression ratio, but compression took over sixty times as long as fastlz (0.27 seconds vs. 16.47 seconds for the same 11 MB file). I posted a question on their forum asking what I was doing wrong, and got this reply (emphasis mine):

What do you compress and why do you need it faster?

Excuse me? Your algorithm runs an order of magnitude slower than the others I'm looking at, and you are seriously asking why I need it faster? To his credit, the suggestion he gave me did speed it up so that it was about 3.2 seconds; still the slowest of the bunch, but at least it's now acceptable. And it did still have the best compression ratio. I'm just stunned that any software guy would ask such a question.

Fighting in hockey

Today's Pearls Before Swine:

The most wonderful time of the year

Every year, in the middle of February, comes an event that men across North America and indeed, the world, look forward to all year long. Feelings of love and lust may be renewed and heightened, and many men spend a great deal of time learning new things about the objects of their affections.

Women, on the other hand, don't generally care much about this event, and some women even have very negative feelings about it.

Yes, I must admit, I am one of the men who enjoy this event every February. For me, it occurred last Thursday, and once again, I was not disappointed. That's when my copy of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition arrived.

The New OS from Micro-apple

I recently started using sitemeter.com to measure stats on my blog — which pages are read, where people came from (the vast majority from google searches), how long they stay, stuff like that. Sitemeter can also give you information on each visit, like what kind of browser was being used, what OS, even what screen resolution. But this one puzzled me:

What exactly is "Macintosh WinXP"?

Hotwash.... ain't so hot

For Christmas about three years ago, Gail bought me a thing from Canadian Tire called "HotWash". It's a device that you insert between the windshield washer fluid pump and the wipers, and it heats up the wiper fluid on the fly to help melt ice and snow from the windshield, and it also helps get rid of bug juice in the summer. Great idea, right? I thought it was. Did it work? I still don't know for sure.

When I first got it, I looked over the installation instructions and figured I could install it myself. After a half hour in the garage with the hood up, I decided that I should probably let a professional do it, since I'm no auto mechanic. I can change my air filter and wiper blades, but that's about it. I took it into Canadian Tire and had them do it, and figured I was all set. We had a relatively warm winter that year, so I didn't get to really try it out for several weeks. It did eventually get cold and snowy again, and driving home from work after a day of snow and ice, I remember hitting "wash", ready to watch in amazement as the ice on my windshield quickly melted away. Never happened.

When I got home, I remember standing in the garage for about ten minutes, repeatedly spraying the windshield and feeling how warm the spray was, but I never noticed a temperature change. According to the manual, once you spray it the first time, it takes 10-15 seconds to warm up, and then if you spray again after that, everything is warmed. The actual temperature was a mystery — it was listed in the manual in at least two different places, with two vastly different values. One said something like 60°C — warm enough that you should see steam (I never did) when you use it on a cold day. I don't remember the other number, but it was different from the first one by a significant margin, and wasn't simply 60°C converted into Farenheit or anything like that. Either way, the water coming out of mine was no warmer than the air temperature. The thing just plain didn't work. I took it back the next week and told them it wasn't working. They had a look and told me that it was, but that the manual was wrong — the fluid is heated up to above freezing so that it will still melt the ice, but it's nowhere near 60°. I decided that this was why I didn't notice a difference in temperature and assumed that everything was OK.

Over the two years, everything seemed fine, but I was unable to notice any kind of difference. I then had to bring the car in for service a couple of times for an unexplained power loss — the engine would just stop while I was driving. I'd quickly put the car in neutral, restart it, and get back into drive. Only once was I not able to restart it this way, and that was in the parking lot of a Canadian Tire. Three different Canadian Tire stores (Waterloo, Kitchener, and Burlington) were unable to find any problem. Finally I brought it into a local shop in Waterdown, Al's Auto Service, and he basically unplugged a bunch of things and plugged them back in to make sure the fittings were all tight and weren't corroded. He found no problems either, but after he did that, the problem vanished and I never had it again. Then last winter I brought the car into the brand spankin' new Canadian Tire in Waterdown. They fixed something (don't remember what) but while doing that, they noticed that my HotWash wasn't plugged in. I have no idea how long I'd been driving with the thing unplugged (and therefore doing nothing), but I suspect that during his investigation of my problem, Al unplugged it and simply forgot to plug it back in. They re-enabled it and once again, I didn't notice any difference.

Finally a few weeks ago, I noticed a big ad in the local paper saying that Canadian Tire was recalling the HotWash things for safety reasons, and were giving full refunds of the purchase price. Ironically, the problem was that they were overheating, which was certainly not the case with mine, which never got warm in the first place. I brought my car in earlier today and asked them to remove it, which they did. They also refunded the purchase price and the cost of installation, so when I picked up my car from the service desk, they gave me about $92. When was the last time you got your car serviced and they gave you money?

Why I respect A-Rod... well, kinda

Alex Rodriguez, one of the best players in the baseball, has been accused of taking performance-enhancing drugs. OK, so nobody's jaw hit the floor because of that, but be prepared to let it drop for this one: he's admitted to taking them. The fact that he took the drugs shouldn't surprise anyone — this was from 2001-2003, and everyone was doin' it — but the fact that he has taken the high road and stated publicly that he took them is a little surprising. In fact, my respect for Rodriguez actually increased a little because of this whole event, and I'll tell you why.

Aside: Don't you hate when people end a statement with "and I'll tell you why"? Why bother telling me that you're going to tell me why? Why not just tell me why? <shakes head> Anyway, here's why.

I'm not a huge fan of A-Rod. He's probably the best all-around player in the game today, and likely one of the best of all time, but there have been a couple of incidents since he joined the Yankees that have tarnished my image of him. There was the one where he was running down the first base line and slapped at the glove of the first baseman who had already caught the ball. Then there was the incident in Toronto where he was running from second to third and yelled "I got it" while running behind the Toronto third baseman who was waiting to catch a fly ball. The third baseman, thinking the shortstop was calling him off, moved out of the way and the ball dropped. These are both silly and childish, and wouldn't be tolerated in a Saturday beer league, let alone the majors. You can maybe see some rookie pulling stuff like that, not a multiple MVP-winning superstar who just happens to be the highest-paid player in baseball. Then again, firing his agent and negotiating his own contract with the Yankees was a bold move — anyone who tells Scott Boras to go F himself gets a thumbs-up from me.

There's been a lot of talk in the past year or so about his relationship with Madonna, but I have no interest in his love life. Maybe he left his wife for Madonna, maybe his marriage was over anyway and he and Madonna hooked up after, I don't know and I don't care. I don't really understand why anyone else does either, but it seems that a lot of people care about a lot of these types of things that have no bearing on anything. If that weren't the case, what would Perez Hilton do with his life?

As for the steroid thing, my impression of A-Rod didn't get any worse after hearing this, mainly because it's almost an assumption that at the time, everyone was taking something, so this is hardly a revelation. But (I'm "telling you why" now) at least Rodriguez had the stones to say "Yes I did it. It was stupid and I'm sorry" which is more than you can say for the likes of Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa. Yes, he was interviewed last year and specifically asked whether he took the drugs, and he lied. I'm not absolving him of that, but you can understand that nobody is going to admit to something like that if there isn't any proof. But once the allegations came out, he did the same as Andy Pettitte and immediately came clean. With Clemens, Bonds, et al, there is proof, or at least very strong evidence, and still they deny taking the drugs. Who do they think they're fooling?

Is it possible that A-Rod doesn't regret a second of it and is just saying this because it's what people want him to say? Absolutely. But even if his regret is fake, it still takes balls to say it knowing that now that he's admitted it, thousands (if not millions) of baseball fans will never forgive him. Barring injury, Rodriguez likely has at least seven or eight years left in his career (there's nine left on his Yankee contract) but is already a lock for the Hall of Fame. For someone in that position, admitting something like this could have serious repercussions on whether he gets in at all (just ask the aforementioned Mr. McGwire, although McGwire was never a lock in the first place even without the drug scandal) — as someone on SportsCentre said this morning, "sports writers have long memories". For someone who has aspirations of entering the Hall of Fame (and what ball player doesn't?), this kind of admission takes courage.

Now, it could also be argued that once the allegations came out, A-Rod had two options:

1. Admit taking the drugs and look like a cheating douchebag, or
2. Lie about taking the drugs and look like a lying douchebag since nobody would believe him anyway

so it's not like he just called up SI out of the blue and said "Hey guess what? I did steroids!" But not only did Rodriguez do the "honourable" thing and admit wrongdoing, he did not blame his trainer or doctor or anyone else. He did not say that someone gave him this stuff without his knowledge or consent, or told him it was legal. He took responsibility himself, saying that he didn't know exactly what the stuff was (i.e. the names of the drugs), but he knew full well that it was illegal (though technically not banned by baseball at the time) and he took it anyway. He specifically said during his interview that he did not take responsibility for every substance entering his body, and that was his own fault. While I can't respect what he did, I do respect him for telling the truth, unlike so many of his fellow players.

Becks and Bucks

On Prime Time Sports the other day, McCown and Brunt were talking about soccer, and how David Beckham is currently "on loan" from the LA Galaxy to an Italian soccer team. Now there is talk that he or the Italian team will ask the Galaxy if he can stay permanently, presumably dissolving his $20 million/year contract with MLS.

So let's go over this: Becks signs a contract that makes him one of the highest paid athletes in the world, rivalling baseball players like Alex Rodriguez. This in a league where the minimum player salary is $11,000/year. Becks makes 15 times the salary of the second-highest-paid player in the league.

He played in MLS for one year. He was injured for much of the season and when he did play, he didn't play very well, or at least not head and shoulders better than everyone else. His team finished tied for last overall. Then after the season, he went to Italy and has been playing like a star again, and now he may not return to the Galaxy at all.

Brunt says that the Galaxy may actually let him go, but the thing that stunned me was him saying that even if Beckham never returns to MLS, the deal was worth it because of all the publicity they got, as well as extra tickets sold and stuff. "They sold a lotta t-shirts", Brunt says. How is the deal worth it? Sure MLS made a ton of extra money last season by signing Beckham (I'm assuming here that the extra revenue brought in last year was more than the money paid to Beckham), but what's the long term impact? There were a lot of people who bought tickets and t-shirts last year strictly because of Beckham, and I'm sure that some of them will return as MLS fans this year even if he doesn't come back, but I suspect that those that do return will be in the minority. ESPN has already cancelled their regular Thursday night soccer telecast because of declining ratings, and that was with Beckham in the league.

It's all about perception. From an outsider, like me and the vast majority of North America, it looked like once Beckham got to the US, he realized how low the level of play was compared to Europe and as soon as a European club gave him a chance to play there, he bolted. If this happens, the league will look like a joke, and the MLS people will look like idiots for giving him this immense contract that turned out to be such a colossal failure that they cancelled it after only one year.

I suspect that if Becks does not return, MLS revenues next season will return to their pre-Beckham days, meaning that other than the windfall of extra cash brought in during 2008, the long-term impact of the Beckham contract was precisely zero.

Movie Reviews: Inkheart and Hotel for Dogs

We saw a couple of movies in the last week with the boys. Last Friday we saw Inkheart, based on a very popular book series. Gail's read the first book of the series, but I knew nothing about it going in. We were a bit concerned about this one, since Ryan is pretty sensitive when it comes to movies — he doesn't like anything scary, and tends to really empathize with the characters, so if something bad happens to them, he gets pretty upset. Gail and I rented a movie called Bridge to Terabithia a little while ago to see if the boys would like it — we thought it was very good, and there were certainly parts that the boys would like, but one very sad thing happens in the film, and Ryan would have cried for a week. We won't be suggesting that movie to him anytime soon. Anyway, like I said, we were a little concerned that this one might be too scary, but they were fine.

The plot was interesting — there are people who have the ability to bring characters out of books by reading the books aloud. Unfortunately, when they bring someone out, someone from our world goes in. Brendan Fraser is one such person, but hasn't read anything aloud in nine years, after bringing characters out of a book called Inkheart and losing his wife into the book in the process. The character he brought out has been chasing him ever since, trying to get Fraser's character to read him back into the book. Gail said that a bunch of things were cut from the book or rewritten, as pretty much always happens when making a movie from a book. Since I hadn't read the book, I figure I shouldn't have been able to tell what had been changed, but there were a few instances where I could, usually because things that should be quite difficult and time-consuming happened quickly and easily - Elinor's change of heart for example, as well as convincing Fenoglio (who was very English for a guy with an Italian name living in Italy) that characters had been pulled out of his book into the real world.

ObNit: OK, this one is really pushing it. It's never revealed where Fraser's character and his daughter live, but considering they hop in the car and drive to Italy on a moment's notice, it's likely somewhere in continental Europe. (The book is German, so presumably the book's characters live in Germany.) After twelve years of living in Germany, wouldn't the father's American accent change somewhat? And why would his daughter have a British accent after living in Germany with her American father (her British mother has been gone since she was three)? I agree, in terms of plot holes, that's one pretty thin.

I thought the acting was very good, particularly Paul Bettany, who was excellent as Dustfinger (and completely unrecognizable from his Silas character from The Da Vinci Code). Fraser is no Dustin Hoffman, but he has become an actual actor, not just the doofus from George of the Jungle. Eliza Bennett (I got a kick out of the actress's name) was also very good, though she seemed older than the twelve her character is supposed to be. Andy Serkis was suitably slimy as the bad guy Capricorn, and Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren were also good in smaller roles.

For a while, whenever I heard the name Brendan Fraser, I thought of movies like Encino Man, Airheads, George of the Jungle, Blast from the Past, Dudley Do-Right (to be fair, none of which I have ever seen). I would see his name on a movie poster and immediately think "OK, there's a movie I can skip". I remember wondering if I could ever take him seriously as an actor. But after The Mummy series, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and now Inkheart, he seems to have done a pretty good job of reinventing himself as a real actor, not just a goofy guy that does physical comedy.

The other movie we saw was Hotel for Dogs, which we saw specifically because the kids wanted to see it. I had precisely zero interest in seeing this movie, but hey, when you're a dad, that's what you do. But it turned out to be a pretty decent movie. Lisa Kudrow and Kevin Dillon (Matt's brother) are very funny as wanna-be hair-rocker foster parents, though how they would remain foster parents once any child care worker sees their apartment is beyond me. The movie did have its silly parts (which is why the kids liked it), but the poop humour was kept to a minimum, and thankfully, there wasn't a single scene where the dogs talked or winked or raised their eyebrows or otherwise had their faces digitally enhanced and anthropomorphized. I hate that. If you're want to have an animal with human characteristics in your movie, make it animated (Bolt, Finding Nemo, a zillion others).

I do wonder why more wasn't made of Bruce's ability to conjure up crazy devices for entertaining the dogs. Bernie really couldn't find foster parents to look after a sweet and caring girl and her genius brother? I also thought it was awfully nice of the unseen pet store owner to let his employees leave the store and use the van whenever they wanted. And where did the kids come up with the hundreds of dollars to buy all the required dog food? And who arranged (and paid) for the dumpster full of "doggy doo" to be picked up? Did none of the strays they found have fleas or any other condition that might require the services of a vet?

Near the end, when Bernie stood up and looked like he was going to make a speech, I was kind of hoping that he would explain some loophole in the law that got the kids off, or that he had purchased the hotel and so the dog catchers were on his property, or something like that rather than making a "Come on, everyone, just look at these adorable dogs! They're a family!" type speech, but no such luck. But overall, this was less of a kid movie and more of a family movie. Don't bother going without the kids — it ain't that good — but kids and parents alike will enjoy it. Not like Curious George, during which Gail and I both fell asleep.

I suppose I really should just shut up and enjoy movies, rather than continually pointing out flaws. But I can't.

Out go the lights

I've written a couple of times in the past about environmentalism (here) and energy conservation (here and here), and it's becoming a bigger and bigger issue. Humans have apparently used up about half of all the oil reserves on Earth. Not only are we using oil at an ever-increasing rate, which means we're going to burn through the second half (see what I did there?) much faster than the first half, but second half of the oil reserves are much harder to get to than the first. Since we've only really been using oil since the industrial revolution, this means that we might have a couple of hundred years of oil left, probably much less. If we don't find sustainable and renewable sources of energy by then, well, pardon my French, but we're pooched. And then there is the added complication of global warming and carbon emissions. There are some that say that global warming may be happening but is not caused by humans. This is certainly possible, and I don't pretend to be an expert on it, but I cannot imagine that the chemicals we're regularly dumping into the atmosphere in unbelievable amounts are having no impact.

And yet, there are still people who don't get the message, and we as a society don't seem concerned. It's February, for crying out loud, and there are still houses in my neighbourhood that have their Christmas lights on. I'm not talking about lights still being up (ours remain up until spring, when it's safe to climb on the roof to take them down), I mean actually on.

We were in Brantford on Friday, and on the way home (around 9:30pm) we drove by a garden centre on Hwy 5 that had a big illuminated sign out front that said "Closed for the season". I understand that they want to keep their business in people's minds so that in the spring, people will remember that garden centre on Hwy 5 and go there. If the sign is off all winter, people might think that it's closed permanently, or might simply not see it and therefore not register that there's a garden centre there. In that respect, it's in the business's best interest to have the sign lit.

But the garden centre is closed from roughly October until April, so it's possible that for seven months of the year, this sign is on all night every night, advertising a business that is closed. I suspect that the number of people who drive by that sign at 3:30am and think "Hey, there's a garden centre here! I'll have to come back here in the spring!" is pretty low. Perhaps I'm not giving the business owners enough credit; it could be that the sign comes on at dusk and goes off around midnight rather than staying on all night. This is certainly not unlikely. And perhaps they're using very energy-efficient lighting — also not unlikely. And maybe there's a little solar panel on top that gives some energy so they use less from the power grid. Hmmm.... possible, but probably not. Or maybe there's a big solar panel on top that provides all the energy and this sign is completely off the grid. Now we're getting into pipe dream territory.

On a somewhat-related note, the men's bathroom at work used to have a sign by the door asking people to turn the lights off when they leave if there's nobody there. For a few months, this worked — most of the time when I entered the room and it was empty, the lights were off. (There's one light that stays on all the time, but the switch controls three or four other lights. I think that one light is fine by itself, so I almost never turn the lights on anyway.) Then the sign by the door fell down and vanished, and now when I enter the room, the lights are on about half the time. People: just because the sign isn't there anymore doesn't mean you need to leave the lights on!