Black Friday, future and present

Someday I will explain to my son that there was a time when the Friday after Thanksgiving was not commonly called "Black Friday." (This will come after explaining the day preceding Black Friday used to be called "Thanksgiving.")

The explanation won't be that people didn't go shopping on that day; it will be that the day simply was "the day after Thanksgiving." Certainly retailers were referring to it as "Black Friday" out of a co-opting of that term from original negative connotations to suggest the accounting association of getting "in the black" (profitable). However, that was essentially industry jargon; one didn't see it used in advertisements. (At least, it's certainly my recollection that ten or fifteen years ago commercials didn't refer to it with such terminology; that may be more a flaw of my memory than actuality.)

Given the way things have progressed I fear by this theoretical time in the future my son will be incredulous there was ever a time when commercials didn't expressly reference the day's events as "Black Friday" sales. As one can see now they do so with the full presumption the public knows what that means (which, it stands to reason, by now they do) and it seems highly unlikely that's going to change between these days when it is ubiquitous and when he is old enough to notice such things.

Here's hoping he won't ask why his father was spending some time putting this on the internet rather than being out shopping with the hordes.

Vexed by lack of vexing in the Super Bowl

In the impending "Big Game" I must admit I'm not sure for which team I'll be rooting.

AND WE ALL KNOW THAT'S NOT RIGHT. One should have an unhealthy allegiance to one side or the other over a contest that holds no actual significance but will be viewed by more people than anything else. What the heck is wrong with me?

On the surface it seems I'd fall back on my childhood allegiance to the Seahawks (who came into the league when I was eight, and whose uniforms I liked... which is really all an eight-year-old requires). However, when I watched part of the AFC Championship I found myself actually a tiny bit excited when it became clear Denver's victory was ensured. I think part of me is rooting for Broncos' quarterback Peyton Manning to get a second ring, if for no other reason than it might cause the sports punditry to shut up about how his relatively poor post-season success detracts from his legacy.

On the other hand, if Seattle pulls out a victory (on the strength of their defense) it will give the Lombardi Trophy to a franchise that has never had it before, and a championship to a city that hasn't had that to celebrate in "the big four" sports since 1979. (Their WNBA and MLS teams have won their respective leagues multiple times in the past decade*, but unfortunately the state of sports in America still doesn't give those their due.) And the kid in me finally gets to cheer.

The hidden sexism of preparing for babies

In preparation for the baby my wife and I have attended several classes. Last week we went to a class on breastfeeding. One commonality in all the classes was a couched (or overt) plea by the instructor to the expectant fathers to do more of the housework both toward the end of the pregnancy and after the baby has arrived in order to take that pressure off the mother (while she is finishing gestating and then is recovering and then is getting little sleep with feeding the newborn).

No duh.

Important lessons from 'Breaking Bad'

If I've learned anything from Breaking Bad it's mostly that I was inadvertently prescient not to retain too much from high school chemistry (all those years ago), so if I ever got a terminal disease I would never have the skills (whether I had the inclination or not) to pursue cooking up decent meth.

Knowledge is power, but sometimes that power is more than it's cracked up to be.

And if I did attempt to get into the illegal drug game I'm certain I'd get myself killed within the first month.

Sometimes our smartest decisions are when we choose not to be too smart.

Our hopeless, Affleck-ted species

I'm not saying that signing a petition to prevent Ben Affleck from portraying Batman is the best way to prove our species is undeserving of our intellect and ostensible role as dominant on the planet, but it probably does a pretty good job of suggesting it.

Come on, nerds--this is why you have blogs.

p.s. Youngsters:  It didn't work against Michael Keaton 24 years ago either.

Coming out after Collins

NBA player Jason Collins came out in a Sports Illustrated cover story last week, the first openly gay pro in any of the major sports. It was a brave move, of course, and to be applauded certainly. The encouraging thing is that he wasn't met with the undiluted bigotry that Jackie Robinson encountered; it wasn't even that much of an event—sure, it was newsworthy, but there wasn't a backlash in the sports community. The Daily Show even lampooned how it wasn't treated as such a big deal, suggesting that society's acceptance of homosexuality is (to borrow the phrase) out of the closet.

Prior to coming out, Jason Collins was unlikely to be a household name. That's not suggesting he did so as a calculated ploy for fame (I don't believe that was why he did so); it is merely the reality of what has happened in the wake of what he did.

But is it so bad that he gets the highlight given that this should contribute to bringing this vestige of latent homophobia—professional male sports—out of its dark ages (so to speak)?

I'd say that's far more worthy of being known by the general public (rather than merely by NBA fans) than anything any Kardashian has ever done (or not done, as it were).

Google Kinks It Up for Chromebook

I Will Dare's Jodi recently lamented how the Kinks' song "Father Christmas" was used in a commercial for Google's Chromebook (their foray into the world of notebook machines). It's not about the now outdated notion of selling out by the artist, but the egregious misappropriation by the advertising agency that made the ad. The lyrics even in the chorus are not something that could be interpreted as upbeat; it's all about the underprivileged mugging a street corner Santa, telling him to give all his toys "to the little rich boys." Here, listen for yourself:


And now, listen to how that was surgically butchered to hawk the computers:

Some election day thoughts

Above is a shot of all of the election-related mail we received just over the last couple weeks. Regardless of which candidates and propositions get the most votes, the winner is the print shops who were hired by the campaigns.

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Get out and vote. You only get so many opportunities for your ignorance and personal biases to influence the running of the country; don't squander them.

Olym-picks

I have this vague recollection of some international event in the recent past that caused me to be emotionally invested, but now I cannot quite remember what or why.

You'd think that something that so dominated my attention for a couple weeks would have a lingering effect, but apparently not.

Only the stakes of nations competing can draw us in to obsessively follow the sports that lack powerful organized leagues. The rest of the time it's merely athletes trying to do their best for themselves, and how can we care about that?

Problems of the internet age: Olympics humor edition

At some moment over the weekend, after seeing my wife search on our TV box for Olympics coverage by typing in the term "XXX" and noticing the results in the guide were listed as "XXX Summer Olympics" I'd been meaning to make the rather obvious quip about that on the blog/Facebook/Twitter. In fact, I likely would have conceded it as being so obvious that I'd have phrased it thusly: "I'm not the only one who looks at 'XXX Summer Olympics' and thinks the events should be ones unfit to be shown on network TV, right?" However, being one who doesn't live on those sites (and who had his computer die a week ago and has had to devote time to getting a new one up to speed), that thought merely ran through my mind, escaping out the other side without inspiring me to actually go to the computer and put it out there.

(As noted in the last post, this is an era when such things must be shared, mustn't they?)

Something I must share with you

The other day I saw something posted by a friend, which was a graphic with the text "I always wanted the power to read minds, then I joined Facebook and got over it."

It's nothing new to suggest the various online outlets allow for no shortage of "over-sharing" where a fair number of thoughts that perhaps would have been better kept to oneself get aired in a public (or at least semi-public) forum. It seems pretty clear that genie is out of the bottle, and short of unplugging the entire internet we're not going back to some world where that isn't the norm. Obviously that is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, for a problem that is only a problem if one chooses to engage in the social media/blog/comments realm. One can turn off one's devices or not go to particular sites (or not scroll down to the comments section) to avoid that if one so wishes.

The thing is: We don't.

Stupor Tuesday: Skipping the campaign

Does the way the presidential campaign stretches out for months (and really, years) before the election result in the country electing the better candidate? Does it serve the nation's interests? Would the electorate be better informed by the media covering the current activities of the already-elected officials than telling us what those vying to be Commander-in-Chief say they would do? And does what the media reports really lead voters to contemplate the complexities of the candidates' positions before casting their ballots, rather than going with that gut feeling when in the booth?

In order: Probably not, unlikely, perhaps, and I doubt it.

The point of "guilty pleasure"

[This is kinda sorta in response to, or at least inspired by, this post on I Will Dare. FYI.]

It's been proffered that in pop culture there should not be such a phrase as "guilty pleasure" (by at least Chuck Klosterman, and probably others), because anything that elicits enjoyment should not be bring with it guilt. Still, the expression caught on because there tends to be consensus amongst those who appreciate a given art form about what is justifiably worth appreciating and what's not. There's some quality that Thing A has that Thing B lacks and therefore to like Thing B is something about which any self-respecting appreciator of Thing A should feel ashamed.

Eradicating racial bias at the source

Today at lunch I read a New Yorker piece from their Book Bench blog that talked about a guy who started a Tumblr site collecting all the tweets from people who were from dismayed to outright aghast at how in the movie adaptation of The Hunger Games the characters from District 11 were played by black actors. Even though in the book they are described as dark-skinned, that didn't stop a lot of fans of the book from envisioning sweet little Rue as blonde-haired and blue-eyed. And then some of those people were willing to share those disappointments on the internet.

The thrust of the piece was about how characters in books tend to be envisioned as white unless explicitly identified by the author as otherwise (and the hurdle that minorities face in society in general out of that connotation of white with innocence). Certainly it's a fine idea to work toward a world where Caucasians aren't the default race in the collective mind, but rather than merely identify the issue, how can we achieve that?

Why the designated hitter going to the NL is good for people who hate the DH

With the move of the Houston Astros to the American League in the 2013 season the major leagues will have an equal 15 teams, but because that's an odd number per league there'll need to be interleague games happening throughout the season; since the introduction of interleague play in 1997 those games have been scheduled in specific blocks in the middle of the season, with almost all teams in each league playing teams from the other league during the same period.

A recent article in Sports Illustrated postulated that this move toward uniformity in MLB and the constant interleague play eventually will bring about a change to the structure of one of the leagues: the adoption of the designated hitter in the National League.

Baseball purists will scoff, considering the DH to be an abomination to the game, but given that the American League has been operating with this one player who only hits and doesn't play defense since the '70s and in the National League most pitchers are fairly abysmal with a bat in their hands, there's little justification for arguing the game is still "pure" and at all close to the contest Doubleday* came up with.

In praise of stupidity

There's long been rhetoric in politics and society in general about the importance of education, but let's face facts: No matter how much we lead a horse to a book we cannot make it learn. No matter the opportunity presented some will be disinclined to integrate knowledge.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not suggesting we give up on our public education system. It's far from perfect but it's still important that we offer it so all children (and heck, adults) get a chance to develop their minds.

But for those who won't, let's acknowledge that they provide society with an important function as well.

When did Groundhog Day go mainstream?

There was a time, long ago, when I'd really pay attention to Groundhog Day, but that was when the relative absurdity of the celebration seemed worth appreciating. Also, that was before the Bill Murray film came out. I'm not saying the movie put the holiday on the map, as it did receive modest attention in the media before that, but it probably put the 2nd of February and a forecasting rodent more in the public eye (at least more than I noticed prior, but it's entirely likely I may not have noticed it as much back then). I suppose there was something that seemed to be out-of-the-norm to liking Groundhog Day outside of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania that made it worthwhile.

However, in the era of the internet and Twitter, etc., it's clear there's lots of attention heaped on Phil and whether he spots his shadow, and frankly, any novelty has long since worn off.

Same old Old Year's Day post

Happy Old Year's Day. Again. (That still hasn't caught on. Oh well.)

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The end of the year approaches, and as with everything else in life that holds significance only because we choose to impart some onto it; the calendar of the dominant economic and/or military powers over the last two millennia has its last day before the year changes coming in a few days and our proclivity is to consider that as some cosmic reset button having been pushed.

There are calendars that some observe that do not end upon December 31, but those aren't used by society in general so we won't bother with them; if one is not part of a community where those have significance they're merely an excuse for a celebration (if one is so inclined).

Well, okay, to be fair, New Year's Day is ultimately nothing more than an excuse for a celebration; it's not religious or cultural, but just a national holiday that corresponds with the changing of the calendar.

What does this say about us?

Preparing for the future direction of the U.S.

We cannot get our country moving in the right direction because: a) we cannot agree on what the right direction is, and b) a lot of people in power are willing to ruin everything as long as it thwarts what the other side supports.

Stock up on canned goods and fresh water, ladies and gentlemen, and get a "Mandarin for Dummies" book to read in your basement or bomb shelter. You'll need to be able to converse with who's around when you emerge.

Not paying close attention to the news...

So, this week, Netflix announced it's splitting into two companies and that brought down a satellite. Also, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was discontinued by the U.S. Armed Forces, inspiring Facebook to continue their policy of not asking whether people want change and not telling people when they're going to change. And the president's job's plan killed off Charlie Sheen's character on Two and a Half Men.

That's what happened, right?