HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2012-11-01, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2012. PAGE 5.
As I type these words the NHL
lockout/strike/labour action/five-on-
five power play is entering its umpty-
seventh consecutive week.
A nation yawns.
It is hard to work up enthusiasm over a
back-alley donnybrook in which millionaires
face off against billionaires. Vincent
Lecavalier, captain of the Lightning, a team
which plays out of that hockey hotbed,
Tampa Bay, isn’t getting paid during
the lockout but he’s probably got enough
stuffed under the mattress to get by. Vincent
has an $85,000,000 contract to chase a
rubber disc in various arenas for the
Lightning until 2019. He’s by far the best-
paid NHL-er but the rest of the players aren’t
living on table scraps. The average salary
tops out at just under 2.5 million simoleons a
year.
I stopped seriously following NHL hockey
about four decades ago when the average
salary was $25,000 a year. Star players like
Bobby Hull and Gordie Howe did better – they
were up in the $100,000-a-year range – but
tears must cascade down their heavily-scarred
cheeks when they hear that today the most
tangle-footed, knuckle-dragging bench-sitting
goon in the league makes 25 times as much as
they ever did.
How can NHL owners shovel out that kind
of money for salaries and still manage to be
rolling in dough? The answer’s a simple one:
advertising. In 1972 all teams in the NHL
played on a rink surrounded by blank white
boards and the single sponsor was Imperial
Oil. Check those boards now. They are
festooned and bespackled with ads for
insurance companies, hockey gear
manufacturers, banks, mortgage firms,
department stores, beer, deodorants and cough
medications. Likewise, the telecasts are
splattered with ads for everything from tires to
potato chips.
That’s why each year media moguls go into
vicious feeding frenzies trying to outbid each
other for the privilege of putting hockey on TV
– and by extension into the living rooms of
millions of hockey fans, AKA consumers.
The fans pay the ultimate price and not just
for the blitz of blurbs, plugs, jingles and 30-
second spots that plague the at-home viewer –
those ads dictate the pace of the game. First-
time attendees at a live NHL game are often
stunned at how often the on-ice action is
unexpectedly halted for several minutes during
which the players from both teams skate
around in aimless figure-eights, waiting for a
daisy chain of TV commercials to cycle
through the broadcast.
The NHL holds no monopoly on hockey
advertising. A photo in the sports section of
my newspaper shows Boston’s Joe Thornton
streaking up the ice, but not in a Bruins
uniform. Instead he’s wearing the colours of
HC Davos, a European pro team based in
Switzerland. Thornton, along with dozens of
other locked-out NHL-ers, is trying to stay in
shape by playing overseas for the duration of
the lockout.
But it’s not Thornton’s uniform that caught
my eye – it’s what’s plastered all over
Thornton’s uniform. Advertisements. I can
decipher ads on his skates, on his hockey
stockings, his hockey pants and gloves. There
are at least a dozen ad patches on his hockey
sweater and undoubtedly more on the back
side of it. His helmet carries a banner flogging
Skoda automobiles. Thornton looks like he
just skated through a garbage bin full of
advertising flyers.
Ironically, in the same issue there’s a picture
of Paul Henderson holding up the hockey
jersey he was wearing when he scored the
most famous goal ever – the one that gave
Team Canada its triumph over the Russians
back in 1972. The jersey features a large red
abstract leaf, Henderson’s number, 19, the
word CANADA – and that’s it. No ads, not
even Henderson’s name.
But that was four decades ago. Back when
hockey, not advertising, was the name of the
game.
Arthur
Black
Other Views
The good old hawking game
One of my favourite television shows, as
stupid as it may be, is Judge Judy. That
Judy is a smart woman and she has a
way of explaining things to people so that
everyone can understand them.
One of Judy’s favourite analogies is the
“eating of the burger” which she often uses
when someone doesn’t pay for a service
rendered, which no doubt ends up in court to
be dealt with.
For example: a couple hires a DJ for their
wedding. The couple feels the DJ does a
terrible job, but because they don’t want to cut
music off at their wedding, they let the DJ
finish out the night, pay the DJ and then put a
stop payment on the DJ’s cheque.
It sounds silly, but things like this seem to
happen more often than you might think.
So Judy’s analogy to the couple, who will no
doubt end up as defendants in a lawsuit (as the
DJ sues them for his money for services
rendered) is that if you go to a restaurant and
order a hamburger and you take one bite,
dislike the food and send it back, then you’re
entitled to your money back. However, if you
eat the burger and then ask for your money
back once you’re done, saying it wasn’t to your
liking, that’s too bad. You ate the burger, you
have to pay the restaurant.
I was reminded of this analogy last week at
Central Huron’s Committee of the Whole
meeting where the purchase of 10 iPads was
authorized from the municipality’s office
equipment reserve. The move is meant to help
council go paperless, which would help cut
down on paper and labour costs in the long run.
It sounds like a good move. It also sounded
like a good move the first time they did it,
earlier this year, when the municipality
purchased nine Samsung Galaxies. The new
iPads are over $500 and they are purchasing
10.
The hope is that the municipality will receive
up to $175 for each of the Galaxy tablets
through selling them. However, no buyer has
been lined up and they could end up never
being sold.
Going back to the hamburger analogy. The
burger has been eaten and now we’re ordering
a steak to wash it down.
Councillor Brian Barnim said the tablets
simply aren’t working for what council needs
them for.
To me, however, that seems like something
that should have been cleared up before
purchasing the first round of tablets.
If the first tablets can’t perform the task you
bought them to perform, that seems like
something you should have checked into
before you signed on the dotted line.
When I was a kid and I was out shopping
with my dad for, let’s say, a new baseball
glove, he always told me not to rush into
anything.
If I made an impulse buy and asked him to
buy me the first glove I saw, when we walked
past the next store and I saw a glove that was
better suited to my needs as a player, he
certainly wasn’t going to buy me that one too
and he probably would have scolded me for
being so shortsighted.
It seems a little unfair to Central Huron
taxpayers for councillors and staff to not do
their due diligence and a little research to find
out what the tablet can and can’t do before
spending their money, being disappointed and
then going shopping again.
One has to wonder if it wasn’t taxpayer
dollars being used to buy the iPads, how many
councillors would spend their own hard-earned
good money after bad.
A galaxy of spending
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
F or people of my generation, there are
some serious offenses being committed
against some of the greatest stories and
trademarks of our (my) childhood, or at least
they feel that these crimes are being
committed.
To be honest, I do believe there have been
some absolutely horrible things done to
intellectual properties of the past. Greedo, for
example, did not shoot first. If there’s one
lesson I hope I can pass on to the next
generation, it’s that Han Solo shot first in Stars
IV: A New Hope.
Why, is that so important? Well it means that
Han was morally dubious before he began his
journey to becoming a hero. Going from being
a lovable scoundrel to a hero isn’t much of a
hero’s journey, but, going from dubious man
who murdered someone to avoid paying a debt
to someone responsible for overthrowing an
empire, saving a princess and destroying not
one but two space stations capable of
destroying planets is.
Whether it’s Transformers, G.I. Joe, Star
Wars , Star Trek or the most recent recreation;
The Evil Dead, it seems my childhood is being
dredged like a river for new ideas.
Now, while some may feel that The Evil
Dead is one film franchise that shouldn’t sit
with the rest of those “A-List” films, it is a
strong franchise with a cult following.
Centred around an original film which was
an homage to horror films in general, the series
follows Ash, brought to life brilliantly by
Bruce Campbell. Campbell has become a cult
hero in his own right thanks to the films and
his other works.
The film, however, is being recreated with
the input of Campbell and director/creator
Sam Raimi and, having watched the trailer, I
have to admit I’m scared of what’s being done
to the franchise.
Sure it’s survived one kind-of reboot which
lead to the creation of Evil Dead III: Army of
Darkness (which I believe to be the most
memorable of the series), but it was amazing
because, while campy, it was filled with
intrigue and enough one-liners to base entire
video games on (which was done, several
times over).
The new film seems to follow the trend of
“gore is unsettling, so it must be scary” that
many other film series these days have gone
with.
I’m not going to say the first Evil Dead
wasn’t gory, but it wasn’t good because it was
gory. It was good because... well just because
it was.
It had that magical combination of camp and
crazy that was added to by the goriness of it. It
didn’t rely on the goriness to fill in holes.
I don’t think I have to point any further than
the success of the Saw franchise in which
Jigsaw, the main enemy (or some offshoot of
him through his teachings or... who really
knows?) tests the limits of humanity’s will to
survive by making them maim or kill
themselves and others to escape elaborate
situations to show that this kind of
entertainment has somehow become popular
and successful.
Anyway, that’s a topic for another day, the
degradation of humanity through the
showcasing of people pushed to irrational
disgusting limits.
Right now, I want to focus on the reality that
these movies, these “reboots”, “reimaginings”
and re-purposing of my childhood represent
one of the lowest forms of entertainment.
(Even below puns, which, while I have a great
love for them, were ever described by a
roommate as the lowest form of entertainment.)
They represent a lack of imagination.
The recycling of old ideas isn’t a bad thing
to do. Obviously we have story archetypes that
must be repeated time and time again because
those are the kinds of stories people like to
read about or experience.
We need the arc of the hero; from meager
beginnings to failure to triumph. We need
comedies where, despite all the adventures and
misadventures the world keeps spinning the
same as it did before. We need tragedies
where the world branches off into something
wholly new. What we don’t need, though, is to
repeat the same stories of heroes ad nauseum.
Yes, the story of some heroes, say Hercules,
can be told and retold through different lenses
and continue to be exciting because there were
so many stories about Hercules to draw from.
Transformers, though, is one static fight;
Decepticons versus Autobots, and that kind of
fight can’t be reimagined no matter what you
do with it.
They could have replaced the Transformers
in the movie with nearly anything; aliens,
human-created artifically intelligent robots or
mutants and it still would have been an
interesting movie.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked it, I loved it
actually, but there will always be something
missing in these modern adaptations.
Filmmakers are looking to capitalize on
people like me. They know these films will
grab new audiences because they’re flashy and
interesting.
But they want the old audience as well as the
new. They want to double dip the chip or take
another bucket from the well. They want to
show something that I’ll have to see because I
want to know how it stacks up to the original.
What they fail to realize is that, regardless of
their ‘artistic licence’, there will always be a
part of the original beyond them: the sense of
wonder of seeing things for the first time.
Ash fighting off a demon or cutting off his
own possessed hand in The Evil Dead are
images I will never forget because it shows the
lengths he went to protect himself and others.
Seeing some other person do it will never have
the impact the original did.
Just like seeing a digitally remastered Jedi or
a computer generated Transformer will never
feel the same as seeing the original or the
cartoons. I don’t have that same sense of
wonder.
Recreations, reimaginings not ‘groovy’
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den