I had the good fortune to accompany some good folks, all of whom work for Mozilla*, to a Blue Jays game. They are currently in the midst of a series against the Boston Red Sox, so around 30 per cent of the crowd was cheering for the other guys. Annoying, particularly when they’re winning.

But as I sat there, watching a troglodyte in a red and blue jersey celebrate the prowess of a particularly steroid-soaked star, I started to think about the virtues of cheering for the home team and what it says about you as a person. Baseball, perhaps more than any other sport, is fueled by metaphor and allegory. Its ability to illuminate the dark corners of human nature is therefore more powerful than any other professional athletic endeavour; still, I think the following principles apply to any sport.

Before proceeding, we need a typology of the variety of  “cheering for the visitors” fans. Since the image of the slavering Red Sox devotee is fresh in my mind, I will use them as an exemplar for my analysis. There are three main varieties:

1. The “Couldn’t get tickets at Fenway, so drove up from Boston to see them play in Toronto” fan. I actually don’t have a problem with these folks, since they embody the kind of home-team loyalty that I respect. Nevertheless, they should bear in mind that they are in my stadium, and should limit their cheering to demure applause. They should also accept my heckling with a good-natured and resigned silence.
2. The “Born and raised in Boston, but I now live in Toronto” fan. Again, not a huge problem with these guys. But if you’ve moved to Toronto, and plan on staying here for a long time, at some point you should probably switch your allegiance. Sure, keep a little soft spot for ol’ Beantown. But you’re a Torontonian now, and you should damn well act like one.
3. The “Born in Toronto, but I cheer for Boston because they, you know, win and stuff” fan. For me, these people are beneath contempt, a form of animal life lower than protozoa and about as intelligent. Why? Allow me to explain.

When you cheer for your home team, no matter how badly they’re doing, you ally yourself to certain principles. Loyalty. Community. Pride in your city. You also conform to the unspoken rule of sports: if your place of residence has a sports team, you should support that team, because that’s how sports works**. If people were encouraged to choose teams with no reference to where they lived, the perennial dogs of Baseball would have no fans, and the MLB would look a lot like the CFL: eight teams playing each other over and over again. Given the number of games in the baseball season, this circumstance would push the sport to baffling levels of inanity.

Conversely, when you cheer for the out-of-town team, you basically announce to the world that you are fickle, disloyal, and wont to ally yourself to the most powerful contender at any given moment. To use a wildly innappropriate historical analogy, this is rather like Britain observing the  effectiveness of the German Blitzkrieg and saying, “OK, this is clearly the winning team, let’s cheer for them.” The consequences of this behaviour, in both war and baseball, are monstrous.

Of course, it isn’t easy to cheer for the home team in Toronto, an athletic black hole from which no light – but plenty of talent – escapes. But to once again pillage the past for a convenient rhetorical device, a great President once said “we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Cheering for the home team in Toronto is an excruciating exercise in patience and self-mortification, all in the vainglorious hope that somehow, someday, the Raptors/Jays/Argos/Leafs*** will do something. Anything. As Buddha once said, true enlightenment comes through suffering. If that is true, then Toronto fans are all geniuses. But whatever the outcome, sticking by the home team is an act that demonstrates character. To do otherwise hints at a profound failure of the human spirit.

So go home, Boston fans. You don’t belong in my stadium because you’re bad people. It’s as simple as that.

*Which is in itself amusing; they are all passionate people who know a lot about the interwebs. And they have fabulous conversations about it, which I barely understand. All I can do is pipe in with an occasional “one billion downloads, eh? Woot! Am I right? Am I right?”, which elicits pitying looks all around.

** My fanatical loyalty to the Pittsburgh Steelers is an exception. Since Canada has no NFL team, I have the rare luxury of choosing any team I want. And Pittsburgh is the obvious choice because they are awesome.

***Of course, if you’re a Lacrosse fan, Toronto is a veritable paradise. But then, you’re still a lacrosse fan.

Ah, physics. You bring teh crazy.

Via BoingBoing.

Accordion Guy posted this photo up, and I’m sharing it for two reasons.

First, it’s a clever and funny way of taking the piss out of the bat-shazbot crazy nutters protesting at Obama’s healthcare town halls. Second, the placard to the far right really ticks me off. It says:

STOP: YOU’RE STARTING TO SCARE GEORGE ORWELL

No, Obama is not scaring George Orwell, for the notable reason that Orwell is dead and well beyond scaring. Say nothing of the fact that public health insurance is conspicuously absent from Orwell’s grim vision of totalitarianism in 1984.

So, random dumbass, leave George alone. And yes, I have proclaimed myself defender of Orwell’s legacy. Consider yourselves warned, you loose-lipped, dim-witted appropriators.

On January 15, 1919, a huge, poorly constructed molasses tank burst in Boston’s North End. It unleashed 8.7 million litres of the sticky brown liquid that raced through the working-class streets at 35mph. Twenty-one people died, mostly by drowning. While the molasses was only two feet deep, its inherent gooeyness made it impossible for the hapless victims, knocked down by the force of the torrent, to stand up and clear their noses and mouths.

I bring up the Boston Molasses Disaster by way of finding an historical analogue for my experience of reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. I feel much as those Bostonians did some 90 years ago. drowning in a flood of sticky, purple language unable to extricate myself. Now, you may conclude from this that I’m not enjoying my Randian sojourn. This is not exactly true. Rand’s ideas – at least as a personal philosophy – have a strange appeal. Everybody wants to feel like Superman, and she is more than happy to oblige. For me, reading The Fountainhead is a process of crossing great fjords of expository description to find the little islands of insight.

Also: the rape scene? Not cool. You can justify it any way you like, but it made me feel gross.

And now, the metrics:

• Rage at the depredations of strangers: 3/10
• Rage at taxes: 4/10
• Consideration for others (where the lower the number, the greater the consideration): 4/10
• Extent to which romantic relationship has become a titanic struggle: 1/10
• Sense that I am being dragged down by mediocre society: 9/10
• Desire to build tall buildings: 7/10
  

It’s early yet, but overall I would have to say that The Fountainhead is not having an appreciable effect on my overall jerkiness. The most of the metics are static, or bounce around within a fairly limited range. I am, however, growing increasingly irritated with the mediocrity of society at large. This hasn’t manifested itself in my behaviour yet, but I’m curious to see which way I go with it. Lead a revolt? Retreat into solitude in a remote cabin? Only time will tell.

Wow. Just wow.

There are a lot of idiotic banner ads floating around out there. But this one takes the cake:

I will attempt – attempt - to break down this insanity.

1. The “Classic” – The “before” and “after” shots clearly depict different women. This type of chicanery is common to many of these “lose inches in hours” and “yodel your way thin” ads. But this is a particularly amateurish attempt. The women have different colour hair, different bikinis, and vastly different skin tone. Somebody went fishing for images on the Internet to produce this ad. Too bad that person was an idiot.
2. Grammar Shenanigans – This ad is cursed by a rather perplexing headline: 1 Sexy Stomach Rule: Obey. The location of the colon suggests that whatever follows it will, in fact, be the aforementioned sexy stomach rule. But instead of a handy weight loss tip, we get a one word imperative. OBEY. Obey what? The ten commandments? Your parents? National Socialism? I’ve seen a lot of diets in my day, but this is the first that seems to contain an implicit endorsement of totalitarianism.
3. The Clincher – In themselves, the first two problems add up to a seriously defective advertisement. But this last one kills it: THE WOMEN IN THE FIRST PICTURE IS OBVIOUSLY PREGNANT. So what are we supposed to conclude here? The sexy stomach secret is to give birth to the child growing in your womb? I don’t debate that childbirth is a spectacularly effective way to instantly lose ten pounds, but I suspect this will only work for the proportion of the female population who, as they say, “is with child” at any given moment. For everyone else, going through the trouble of getting pregnant, carrying the child to term, and then birthing it seems like a curiously circuitous and unnecessarily complicated weight loss program. And once you add “OBEY” into the mix, this whole thing just gets upsetting.

So bravo, unknown ad creator. Your sheer incompetence has created one of the most perplexing visual riddles in the history of human communication.

I’ve warmed to Twitter over the past few weeks, mostly because I downloaded TweetDeck. This handy app allows me to parse through my feeds a more efficiently, and minimizes my frustration at Twitter’s ability to flood you with ephemera. But I still think people are way, way too excited about the utility of this social medium.

I’ve posted before on research that shows Twitter is male-dominated, and features a small number of users who account for the vast majority of Tweets. And now, here’s a handy info-graphic that underscores this point nicely:

In other words, 20 per cent of accounts are inactive, half of the accounts are seldom used, and only five per cent of users have more than 100 followers.  But more problematic is the fact that five per cent of users now account for 75 per cent of the tweets. So, in some crucial respects, Twitter is less of a community and more of a channel for individuals who are already “popular” offline, or users who have been successful in using Twitter to create a one-way network.

This is not to say Twitter is not useful, or that this imbalance won’t correct itself over time. However, we should be wary of techno-evangelists who call Twitter a “game-changer” or hypothesize that it will change journalism. Let’s not forget- the most vocal proponents of Twitter are also it’s most active users, a perspective that distorts their assessment of the network’s social performance. When you break it down, only about 10 per cent of Twitter (probably less, since I’m likely double-counting across categories) represents anything close to an engaged community. That’s only 500,000 people. Not insignificant, but certainly not the sea-change people make it out to be.

Via Gizmodo.