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Ouch!

18 Monday Nov 2024

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I’m still smarting from Trump’s victory in the US elections two weeks ago. Not that I had any influence, being Canadian and all, but his assumption of, or resumption to, power will affect me, and not in a good way.

Obviously the American people can choose who they want as their President; they have their ways and their rights. It is galling, though, to see a man who lies so easily, who cheats (on businesses and wives), who is a convicted felon and who has sexual violence judgements against him, get elected to the highest office in that land. I don’t understand how a man with his track record could attract the Evangelical Christian vote, and I don’t understand how people saw his policies, such as they are, as a viable alternative to those offered by Harris. But maybe that’s just me.

Certainly, the American people have been deluged with Trump propaganda since 2015, and that must get tiring. From the ludicrous claims of 2016, to the incitement to attack the Capitol to prevent Biden’s assumption of office, to the even more ludicrous claims of “They’re eating the cats…”, it’s all been backed up and amplified by Fox News, and now Musk’s Twitter, so I get it that people have been bamboozled. What I don’t get, though, is the lack of critical thinking, the lack of anyone, from individuals to national broadcasters and newspapers, actually asking Trump, “Just how are you actually going to fulfil your promises to ordinary people?”. The voters wanted a change, saw an alternative to the current regime and voted for it, without asking any pertinent questions of that alternative.

Still, as I said earlier, it’s the American people’s choice. I hope they don’t live to regret that choice.

More Grave Thoughts

16 Monday Sep 2024

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It occurred to me that I hadn’t noted down any details of our trip last August to Fairfield County, Ohio, and the grave of Washington Franklin Mayne. We were in Columbus for the weekend on another matter, but couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit old WF’s last resting place.

Why? You may well ask.

Washington Franklin Mayne was the third child of Henry Collins Mayne and his wife Anna Robinson, and was born in Loudoun County, Virginia, in 1826. Henry and Anna had arrived in New York from Leeds, in the English county of Yorkshire, in 1822 and made their way to Northern Virginia to set up a farm. Henry’s father, Joshua Mayne, is my great-great-great-Grandfather. Not only was Washington Franklin the third Mayne born on US soil, but he was the last to be born in Virginia as the family moved westwards, to Perry County, Ohio, after his birth.

Not much is known about Washington Franklin as he grew up in the Zanesville Ohio area, but we do know that he studied at Ohio Medical College to become a Doctor and started a practice in the village of Basil, Ohio. As well as being a respected doctor, Washington Franklin acquired a lot of land in Basil and was a well known figure in the area.

The land acquired by Washington Franklin Mayne was on the original lands of the Shawnee, Mingo and Delaware peoples, and their ownership of that land is fully and respectfully acknowledged.

Washington Franklin married Eliza Jane McNeill of Ross County, Ohio, in 1865 and they became the parents of four children while living in Basil.

All that is by way of background as to why I would want to visit a small and very pretty little village in rural Ohio. Washington Franklin died in 1884 at the age of 56, and was buried in Basil Cemetery, just yards from the home and doctor’s office he built in the village. Eliza Jane died in 1924 at the home of her daughter Gertrude, in Piqua, Miami County, Ohio. Although buried in Piqua, Eliza’s name is engraved on the handsome stone memorial that marks Washington Franklin’s final resting place.

As we motored south from Columbus, it’s only a 35-minute drive, we both remarked on how similar this part of Ohio was to our part of Ontario; the same crops in the fields, the same buildings on the land. As we arrived in Basil we came across a town parade, an annual event for the people of Baltimore Ohio, the larger town that swallowed up old Basil. I thought perhaps they were out in my honour, but alas, no. We found Washington Franklin’s gravestone easily, stood and soaked up the atmosphere, and I felt really quite humble to be there at the place were one of the founders of the Mayne’s American dynasty had built his life, and the lives of his family.

Washington Franklin and his siblings were the start of a vast family network covering a good portion of the USA, from Indiana to Tennessee, to Kansas and to Colorado, and many places in between. There are many more graves for me to visit, particularly in Indiana, but for now the is trip to see old WF’s grave and the village he made his mark in will have to do.

Ah, Technology (Part 2)

14 Sunday Jul 2024

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I like maps, and modern digitized mapping is really quite excellent. Instant access to the maps across the world, satellite imagery and Street View, what could be better? Well, understanding its limitations would be a start.

Satellite based navigation for cars really opened up the possibilities, and now cellphone-based navigation systems are bringing in a raft of developments in route planning, especially with traffic information available pretty much in real time. So if I like it so much, where’s my gripe? As it happens, it’s two-fold.

Firstly, the visibility of the map on your hand-held or inboard device is quite limited, generally around 500 metres, even on the big screens available in modern cars. The whole premise of navigation seems to based on that 500m, and the designers of the systems appear to think that you don’t need any more immediate information than that. In a big city with intersections every few yards, I’d agree, but outside of the city, that 500m is pretty paltry. It’s probably just me, but I like to be looking way, way further afield so that I can anticipate things that the navigation system doesn’t let you know, like whether your turn two miles away is to the left or the right. You could argue that you don’t need that information, but I can’t drive without having a general idea of where I’m going. There’s the rub, of course, you may not need that information but without it you’ll end up having to make snap decisions and quite possibly mistakes, all that could have been avoided with more advance information.

The second part of the gripe is the way systems’ developers want to decide the parameters of your journey for you. The prime example is the manner in which systems will constantly suggest route changes as you’re driving, just so that you can potentially save a minute here or a minute there. Seriously chaps, why would be be bothered about single minutes? I drove in a rented car from Plymouth to Manchester and had the navigation system constantly suggesting route changes, to a point at which it became intrusive. I spent some time trying to get the system to stop making suggestions, but when set to “Quickest Route”, those suggestions were not optional. That particular system, in an Audi, sent us on three different routes on three different days between the same two points. Interesting for sure, but why? I couldn’t discern that any of the routes was better than the other. I can’t imagine a long(ish) drive where you did take up all of the system’s supposed time saving route alterations.

There are myriad stories of people being directed down inappropriate roads by their navigation systems and I can’t help thinking that with a bit more information, a wider view, people might not be inclined to blindly follow the instructions.

My solution is to peruse a map before I travel, paper or digital. That way I can get a feel for where I’m going, and use the navigation system to augment that broader information. Travelling across London (Ontario) yesterday, I had checked on a digital map to see that I’d need to be travelling from east west to catch a link road that ran north to south. The cellphone navigation system called out the turns, but I was at least able to follow the wider route I had lodged in my memory by making sure I was moving in the correct direction.

OK, it is me, normal people manage with navigation systems just as they are. Me, though, I still like that broader view.

Words are important

13 Wednesday Mar 2024

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I do like my football. That’s the game played with the feet and a ball, not hands and an egg; that’s Handegg and only played in North America,

Watching football on TV is very easy in North America, though, and it’s cheaper than if you were watching in the UK. The number of games on offer is very good, as is the quality of the video feed. Well, I say that, but here’s the rub, the commentary is awful.

Games from the English Premier League (EPL) are broadcast in Canada through a streaming service imaginatively called “FUBO TV” (named, I think, by some drunk marketing people after a good afternoon out at the pub). Fubo gets its video direct from the EPL using the “International Feed”, that is for broadcast in English speaking countries that are not the UK. The EPL use a variety of professional match commentators, who are journalists I believe, and a former professional player as a “Summarizer”. I don’t know that there are any rules on impartiality when creating this feed inasmuch as it will be going out to various non-UK countries and isn’t subject to the UK’s broadcasting standards. As a consequence, the commentary and the summarizing is simply awful.

You can bet Beglin was summarizing on this game at Anfield. Slippy Gerrard having a pop at Everton’s goal.

As an initial example, take the number of Liverpool games summarized by Jim Beglin. It seems that every time the reds run out in a televised game, good old Jim is there to provide the insight. That would be OK except that Jim Beglin played 98 professional games for Liverpool in the eighties, and he absolutely adores everything Liverpool, and Liverpool related. Cut him in half and he has the word Liverpool running through him like a stick of rock. (Google it). He has improved over the years and no longer relates everything to his Liverpool playing days, but he still roots for the reds and it’s frankly embarrassing to have to listen to him. Worse than that, the match commentators will often take the lead from the summarizer and amplify the outrageous partisanship. I can only assume that Jim lives in the North West of England somewhere, and finds it easy to get to Anfield. There can’t be another explanation as to why they let such favouritism go unchecked.

A far worse example is that of match summarizer Andy Townsend. Now Andy has played for my team Chelsea 110 times, but he clearly left under a cloud because it’s virtually impossible to get to hear him say anything positive about Chelsea, and it doesn’t matter who their opponents are. He’s being doing it for years, too, as I have bad memories of a game where Chelsea played Stoke City, in Stoke, and Townsend was all but coaching City for about two-thirds of the game. Chelsea won anyway, but I really couldn’t fathom why he was so negative. Things have continued like that for season after season, and the only time he relents is if Chelsea are winning well and there’s not much time left to play. The game with Newcastle United this past weekend was a case in point, with Andy disparaging everything Chelsea did, until they went 3-1 up and the game was sealed. We thankfully don’t get Andy summarizing as much as we used to, at least not Chelsea games.

I think the commentators and summarizers read the back pages of the tabloid newspapers before they start work. They keep regurgitating the current gossip and the speculation, 90% of which is nonsense, but I guess they do it for the same reason the tabloid hacks do it, to sell advertising space. Like the people who dreamed up “FUBO TV”, most gossip is formed in pubs by journalists with nothing better to do. I was going to mention the “Connor Gallagher to be sold” story, but it’s pure fiction so not worth mentioning.

More tabloid bollocks, this time from the New York Times’ The Athletic. Pure fiction.

Anyway, words are important and footy fans are not (all) stupid. They no more like to hear favouritism from the commentators than they enjoy seeing their own team lose. I shall be penning a furious letter to the EPL if I hear Townsend summarizing a Chelsea game again this season, but apart from me letting off a bit of steam, I really don’t think it matters to the EPL. Sad.

Twitter is now my X

20 Wednesday Dec 2023

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I’ve never been much of a fan of Twitter, but seeing that so many influential people (as opposed to the pond scum known as “Internet Influencers”) like to put their thoughts out there on a daily basis, I thought I’d have a go.

I am left-leaning politically, maybe physically as well, I don’t know, so I have “Followed” some people who I think I might find tolerable. Among them Jo Biden and Kamala Harris in the US, and Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh and Christia Freeland in Canada. All are centrists with a lean to the left, at least compared to the populists who occupy the news media these days.

People I don’t follow include Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor-Green in the US, and Pierre Poilievre and Marissa Lantsman in Canada, because they are all of that populist rightwing political genre mentioned above. It’s not that I don’t want to see stuff from them occasionally, but I don’t want my daily feed full of their nonsense.

Over the past three months I have had no posts at all come up on my feed from the politically friendly accounts I chose to follow. Not one. I go and look for their feeds and they’re churning tweets out daily. Hmmmm.

Over those same three months I have had daily tweets from all the people I don’t follow, all of whom have descended to the grotesque depths that Trump and Poilievre have been reaching into. I get updates from spineless fools like Ted Cruz, the Trump children, Mike Johnson, Dan Bongino and a host of other scurrilous US Trump apologists. From Canada I get Poilievre, Lantsman and even the vile trash that is the Toronto Sun. None of these accounts are people I follow.

I have resorted to blocking the worst of them because it’s the only way I can stop the flood. Are they replaced with tweets from people I actually follow? No, of course not, because now I get posts from other right-wing populists, all of whom I wouldn’t follow on Twitter in a month of Sundays.

If you’re ever in doubt that Elon Musk has seriously skewed the Twitter algorithms in favour of his favoured political stance, try it yourself, but be prepared for some awful, awful content.

I still dip into Twitter occasionally, search out people I follow (following is meaningless unless Elon approves, of course), and daily block more right-wing loons. Ah well, there are still the tweets from Canada’s foremost Trucking account to see, and I could watch bad driving videos all day.