Month: January 2013

Hockey’s Back: The Fans Have Spoken!

IMG_00000061As most of you are probably unaware, the National Hockey League of North America was in a labour dispute for nearly half of this season.  You’re unaware of this because ice hockey fans are far more devoted than they are numerous.  The very nature of hockey dictates that it’s a regional sport.  In order to play the game properly, you need large sheets of uninterrupted ice.  Since most of our planet — outside of Canada and Russia — isn’t frozen for half the calendar year, hockey has never caught on worldwide.  Besides, like tennis, jai alai and Grand Prix auto racing, hockey is an affluent sport.  Children, in a playground, don’t spontaneously play hockey.  The game needs some forethought.  One needs equipment: skates, sticks, pucks, body armour and, of course, that sheet of uninterrupted ice.  In reality (despite the myth of the backyard rink) if you’re not middle class and above, you’re not playing hockey.  Of course, none of this is important, now, because the labour dispute has been settled and the world’s finest professional ice hockey league is back in business.

So, what’s the big deal, you might ask?  Of the seven or so billion people on this planet, at a conservative guess, six billion of them couldn’t care less whether it’s game on or puck off in the National Hockey League.  This is true, but the recent labour dispute and its resolution gives us an unique insight into a part of the human experience – the sports fan.

Police_VersoJust a little background.  Humans have always had professional sports.  It was probably SRO at the Roman Coliseum during Slaughtermania IV in the 2nd century.  However, the only reason the Flavians could pack them in, back in the day, was they had a product to sell – in this case, mass homicide – and people who wanted to buy it.  Flash forward two thousand years, and we still have guys like Ronaldo, Lebron James and Joe Flacco who spend most evenings and weekends playing with their balls because tons of people are willing to pony-up unholy amounts of money to see them do it.  Professional sports have always been dependent on the fans (incidentally, the word “fan” is a diminutive of fanatic) and that includes hockey.

There was one telling feature of the recent hockey league labour dispute, though.  Even as the billionaire owners were fighting it out with their millionaire employees to see who gets the lion’s share of the fan’s folding money, the fans (those same faceless nobodies who pay the bills) were treated like crap.  Both sides made a show of being crocodile tear sorry for shutting down the league, but everybody knew neither side was all that sincere, including (there are those folks, again) the fans.  In fact, every word I read, saw or listened to during the entire dispute that even mentioned the fans (there weren’t that many) essentially said they were getting screwed – again.  My point is nobody (owners, players, the media or Marge the traffic cop) made any attempt at disguising the fact that the National Hockey League and its employees didn’t give a rat’s left buttock for fan loyalty, fraternity or any of the other “tys” they so proudly expound.

Fast forward to the end of the lock-out.  Gary Bettman, Commissioner of theIMG_00000060 NHL, walked up to the microphone and said, “Sorry!” and that was supposed to make it all right.  Ready for a shock?  It did!  Less than a week later, every pennant-waving, jersey-wearing, overpriced-beer buying, “I’ve just been treated like dirt” hockey fan was back at it, as if nothing had ever happened.

I know there are thousands of people sitting in classroom all over the world right now, studying sociology and the behaviour of groups.  Save your money, folks: it’s obvious human groups are stupid.  It would have taken exactly one hockey game with zero attendance to scare the National Hockey League into treating their fans properly — three hours of silence, after four months of getting pooped on.  Not a bad use of the fan’s enormous purchasing power; unfortunately, nobody even considered it.  Instead, hockey fans all over the continent were literally standing in line to start shelling out their coin again.  This proves, beyond all argument, that in groups of more than a dozen, sports fans haven’t got a brain cell among them.  I suppose that’s why they’re called fan-atics.

I Love Urban Legends

urban legendI love Urban Legends.  The first time the stupid gringo couple bought that rat in Tijuana and tried to import it as a Chihuahua, I laughed myself stupid.   I always look for the dead mouse in the soda pop.  And even though I’ve never seen the Ghost Hitchhiker, I know a woman whose cousin worked with her neighbour.  The neat thing about urban legends is, like Rembrandts, it’s so easy to spot a fake.  Street gangs do not have the patience nor the elaborate forethought to drive around town with their headlights off, looking for victims.  Petty little sneak thieves don’t take the time and trouble to do unmentionable things with your toothbrush.  And regardless of how many people have declared they are Jedi on the census form, the federal government does not recognize it as an official religion.  (I checked.)  That’s why it’s so cool that the latest urban legend has surfaced as a legitimate news story.

If you missed it, too bad, but here’s the Peanut Gallery version.  Apparently, this six-figure American computer programmer, who conveniently works out of his house, decided that rather than working for a living he would pull a General Motors and outsource his job to China.  Basically, he hired a Chinese national to do his work for him — at a fifth the price.  The Chinese technician is living large in some place called Shenyang, and our boy is fat, smart and happy, getting 80% of his salary for doing nothing.  According to all reports, he spends his days watching cat videos on YouTube.  Pretty sweet, huh?

Of course, when you think about it, a bunch of WTF questions come to mind.  Like how did our American programmer find this Chinese guy in the first place?  A want ad in Wired?  Or how come the company didn’t notice when there was a daily log-on from China?  These are little things, but they raise some serious red flags (no pun intended.)  But the telling moment in the whole “news’ story is there’s no who, when or where!  The programmer, the company, the timeframe and the city are not named.  The only hard “fact,” in any of it, is Shenyang, China, and go ahead and try finding a particular programmer in that town.  There’s absolutely no way, from the information given, to check just how true this “news” story really is.

That’s the thing about Urban Legends; they seem plausible.  They could be true.urban-legend1  A maniacal killer could, on occasion, lurk in the back seat of a car.  Dead people could wander rainy midnight roads.  And American workers could outsource their jobs.  These things are all entirely possible; they’re just not probable.

Yet urban legends are more than simply the lies the Internet tells us.  (BTW, Dream Whip™ and ping pong balls do not have the same molecular structure, and Coca-Cola™ was never laced with cocaine.) They are contemporary fables; teaching stories and cautionary tales.  They remind us that, as Hamlet once said, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” and tell us to be wary of our world.  For example, there’s an urban legend that Kentucky Fried Chicken changed their name to KFC because the USDA discovered that the company had genetically modified their product to such an extent that it could no longer legally be called chicken.  Apparently, Kentucky Fried Mutant would have been a marketing disaster, so they went with KFC.  This is 100% false (again, I checked.).  However, it does demonstrate that there is widespread concern about GMOs and just exactly what is happening to the food we eat.  Similarly, our enterprising computer programmer shows us that people are worried that North American jobs are, like the elves of Middle Earth, leaving these shores.

Urban legends are genuine folk tales.  Like Aesop’s fables,they give us an allegorical insight into our world and reflect contemporary concerns and attitudes.  As sophisticated as we may believe ourselves to be, we still fear the unknown.  This is why so many urban legends have a supernatural or demonic element to them.

urban legend2Unfortunately, as our society gets more complex, so do our urban legends.  Real stories get mixed in with the fakes.  We might laugh at our computer programmer outsourcing his own job, but what about my sister’s gardener’s brother, who had his identity stolen when terrorists used Face-recognition software on his Facebook profile picture? Then, when he went to collect his lottery jackpot, he was arrested for terrorism…. You can never be too careful in this world.

Children of the Net

facebook3There’s a funny little thing happening right now that is going to change our society forever.  However, unlike most changes history has encountered, this one is not the deliberate result of layers and layers of knowledge.  This new phenomenon is merely an unintended by-product of what was once called the Information Superhighway.

If you are of an age, you remember the family photo albums.  These were where the hard copies of your family’s memories were warehoused.  They had pictures of aunts and cousins you’d never heard of, a bunch of black and white faces with no names, Christmas trees, birthdays and even the vacation from hell.  They were a permanent record of you standing there like a bow-tied midget at some wedding, or flashing your baby bum.  All of the good shots and geek shots of the life that was yours.  The photo albums were the repository of you and your family’s consciousness, collected and bound and hidden, as if they were precious, in a closet somewhere.  And precious they were.   There is more than one story of parents braving natural disasters to save the photographs or divorcing couples arguing over baby pictures.  As sentiments go, pretty much everybody prizes photographs above all else.  They were yours.  They belonged to you.  In essence, you owned your own memories and could distribute them (share, if you will) as you saw fit.  But that was then, and this is now.

Siblings using laptopsSince the time of the photo album, our society has gone through some radical changes: the Internet, digital cameras, email, texting, smartphones, Facebook and Twitter.  As the children of the Internet were exploring these new Apps and devices they were recreating themselves as public personae – picking and choosing the best and the brightest for their public faces.  Straddled across generational lines (their earliest pictures might still be in the photo albums) they could maintain a semblance of privacy in a tsunami of social networking.  Bad hair days were deleted, not uploaded; shoes were shined and despite the ubiquitous “duck face,” everyone put their best foot forward.  However, even as they were shaping their newfound publicity they were also growing up and starting to have children of their own.

The children of the children of the Internet are being documented as no other generation.  Even before they were born, they swarmed through cyberspace as baby bumps.  (God, I hate that term!)  Now, as they teeth, talk and waddle around the coffee table, smartphones are snapping every move they make, and with a few finger stokes, uploading their antics across the planet.

facebook1This is the Facebook Generation.  They are the first generation to be born in the Internet fishbowl and raised in the public domain.  Nothing is sacred.  They can neither run nor hide.  Every developmental step and stutter is being recorded, and the results are available to anyone with a Web connection.  As of right now, their individual collective memories, so guarded and cherished by past generations, are no longer their own.  For the first time in history, an entire generation will not have the option of deciding for themselves how they want the world to see them.  They’re already on permanent display.  This will have a profound effect on their future.  To them, privacy will no longer be a question open to debate; it simply will not exist.

Without thinking, we have sacrificed our children’s privacy on the altar of Social Networking.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  The situation is what it is, and there’s no turning back the clock.  However, by denying our kids the right to stumble and make mistakes in private, we have condemned them to live their lives in the public eye.  At this point, there’s no way of knowing how well they’re going to handle this relentless public scrutiny.  However, I, for one, am glad my teenage friends couldn’t download the details of my potty training and Elizabeth McTavish never saw me looking like a toad in that stupid sailor suit.