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Every time the Olympic Games come to a close, there’s always that twinge of sadness, of let-down.  It’s to be expected, for it is a melancholy moment when the torch is extinguished.  As each Olympics has ended I’ve always felt the same way: “Is that all? Over so soon? It feels like we were just getting started!”

I used to think this feeling of dissatisfaction, of un-satiation, was normal — but no longer.  I’ve come to realize that, along with exemplary sportsmanship, tales of tragedy and triumph, and edge-of-one’s-seat finishes, there’s another common factor to every Olympics I have ever watched: the dismal television coverage of the National Broadcasting Company.

This is not the first time I’ve ranted about NBC’s Olympics coverage, and I’m not alone.  This time around I’m joined by the CEO of Business Insider, Henry Blodget, who among his several incisive articles on the topic included the most concise summary of the problem: “right now, for us, NBC isn’t the network that brings us the Olympics.  It’s the network that prevents us from watching the Olympics. And we hate NBC for that.”[Business Insider, 15 February 2010]

Blodget’s right.  Not only did NBC deliberately not show events live — even on weekend afternoons, when its potential viewers had a genuine expectation to watch them — its agreement with the IOC meant that it could actively prevent people from watching in any other way.

I used to think that maybe NBC had good reason for wanting to tape-delay the Games.  When they were in Sydney, and the action was happening in what was the middle of the night for Americans, it kind of made sense.  Kind of.  So too — but to a lesser extent — the ungodly early-morning hours Athens engendered.

But when the west coast of the United States, sitting in the same time zone as Vancouver, is forced to wait an extra three hours, while the east coast watches the smattering of evening events that NBC did carry live, just so those events will air during prime time… well, that’s just asinine.

The good news: ESPN will bid for the 2014 Winter and 2016 Summer Games, and in doing so has pledged to “discontinue the tape-delay template.”   John Skipper, ESPN’s executive vice president for content, stated the obvious: “I don’t think nonlive is sports fan-friendly.”   God bless you, ESPN.  I pray that you do everything you possibly can to win this bid.

The bad news: “With 25.2 million viewers watching the Winter Olympics in prime time, NBC Universal feels vindicated by a strategy that features tape delay of some events and shows nothing live in the Mountain and Pacific time zones.”[The New York Times, 24 February 2010]

I feel the need to respond to several of the points in the Times‘ article in turn.

“835 hours of programming, including 50 hockey games, can be challenging to navigate and [NBC has] tools in place to help direct viewers,” said one NBC marketing exec.

I take exception to both parts of this statement. It need not be “challenging to navigate”, with the proper user interface.  Moreover, NBC’s “tools” were distinctly unhelpful.  Its TV listings web page gave viewers a timetable listing the various NBC channels, with unlabeled grey boxes showing when and where Olympic content would air.  Viewers had to roll over these grey areas to trigger fly-out boxes containing info on what events were included.  This resulted in hunting through numerous fly-outs to find the event they wanted to watch, usually in vain.

One pundit wisely suggested that the better navigation tool would be a timetable of all the sports events, rather than the network channels, so viewers could start with the sport they were interested in.  The fly-out information would tell which channel was airing it.

That might work, except for one little problem: NBC shows so very little of the Games that finding an active fly-out link in that grid would be a rare island of success in a sea of futility.

“Despite the restrictions, nearly 35 million unique users have visited NBCOlympics.com and 62 million page views have been delivered to mobile devices.”

These figures do not address what percentage of those unique users visited the site in the hope of finding out how to watch the Games live, only to be sorely disappointed.  They also, in my estimation, are bolstered by the number of page views that were page refreshes caused by glitches in the Silverlight viewer.  I lost track of how many times NBC’s live feed of a curling match would either freeze completely, or go to a commercial break and never return, playing the same goddamned Lexus or Edward Jones advertisement ad nauseam et infinitum.

“NBC is expected to lose at least $200 million on the Vancouver Games.”

You know, I hear this number a lot.  Folks used it in comparison to the perennial cash cow that is the Super Bowl.  The recurring question that was asked was, how can the Olympics lose so much money when the Super Bowl is so lucrative?

The fact of the matter is that NBC has not lost money in its last six airings of the Games.  And although it paid the IOC a lot more for the rights this year than it has for Winter Games in the past, total U.S. ad sales have steadily risen over the past four Winter Games as well.

The results of Vancouver 2010 are yet to be seen, but here’s a notion: perhaps NBC did not actually lose money on this.  Maybe that prologue was part of a plan to guilt-trip viewers into saying, “oh, poor NBC, with its pretty peacock, and its cute little Costas, and its ‘must-see’ glory days all but over, we should try to help it get back on its feet.”

“It’s very challenging to capture the American audience for 17 days,” Gary Zenkel, the president of NBC Olympics said, “and many of us have been doing this since 1992, some since 1988.”

The problem is, it’s not 1988 any more.

In the past, even as recently as the 2008 Beijing games, I tried to enter a daytime news blackout so that I might be able to watch the prime time highlight reel with some semblance of anticipation.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes not.  Either way, it was unfair that I might have to remain unaware of the day’s other important events simply because an ill-timed glance at a television or computer screen, or twist of the radio dial, could spoil that evening’s pending entertainment.

Now that social media are all the rage, it is absolutely impossible to enter that bubble.  And there’s absolutely no reason to do so.

I mentioned before that NBC actively prevented Americans from watching the Games live.  Only hockey and curling (and an incomplete selection of both) were available online.  If a fan tried to go through the official Vancouver 2010 web site to find a live feed of their favourite sport, even if they tried to pretend they were in another country they would ultimately run up against an IP-based blockade, with a “this site is restricted” placard instead of a live stream.

I was lucky to find a number of bootleg streams online.  I won’t mention them by name — I’m hopeful they’ll still be around for London 2012 — but they were an adequate alternative to, well, to seeing nothing at all.  Sure, the commentators were often speaking in a language I was unable to place.  And sure, their feed of Eurosport cut away from the alpine slalom events long before last-seeded Marjan Kalhor could make her historic runs.  (First Iranian woman ever in the Winter Games! and she finished all four of her runs so, technically speaking, she beat USA golden girl Lindsey “DNF” Vonn in both events!)  But even with those limitations there was nothing on NBC to compare with the immediacy of the live feeds.

In addition, after Shaun White’s coach dropped the s-bomb prior to Shaun’s “victory lap,” NBC put everything on a delay, with a censor standing by the “dump button.”  During NBC’s (surprisingly) live airing of the men’s 50K cross-country event on the final day of the Games, I found that even though the online feed had to pass through Eurosport’s transmission, get encoded by a bootlegger, travel bit-by-bit through the wires from Europe, bounce through my wireless network and get reassembled through a buffer in my video player, it was still appearing on my laptop screen a full five seconds earlier than the broadcast on the television screen.

“The market has told us loud and clear that it places the most value on the big, diverse audience that gathers in front of the television at night,” Zenkel said.

Fine.  Keep the one-size-fits-all prime time highlight package, with its inexplicable diversions of blind sled dogs and “sustainable” logging camps.  Just give actual sports fans something to watch, live, as it’s happening.  Please, NBC.

It’s important to note that what Zenkel calls “the market” is not the audience — it’s the advertisers.  No matter how many thousands of people post on Twitter with #nbcsucks and #nbcfail hashtags, NBC can call them a “vocal minority” — a statement that is, sadly, quantifiably true: TechCrunch’s analysis that shows a 73% negative rating of NBC’s coverage came from a sample of nearly 20,000 tweets and 5,700 blog posts or forum comments; this represents a mere 0.074% of NBC’s total viewer numbers.

As long as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola and the rest are willing to pay them big bucks, NBC has no reason to care about dissatisfied viewers.  I suppose our only recourse as viewers is 1) not to watch, which would be a drag; and 2) boycott those advertisers.  I want to recommend the latter, yet admittedly I continue to subscribe to DirecTV and use my AT&T-locked iPhone, and I haven’t pulled the plug on my Cisco router.

The bottom line is, 25.2 million people — myself among them — watched the Olympics on NBC in prime time, and NBC is using that figure to claim that people want to watch the Olympics the way NBC wants them to.

Here’s the thing.  If you lock people up, with a tantalizing view of a supermarket across the street through the bars of their prison window, and once a day you give them a sandwich made of stale bread and dog feces, sooner or later some of them will wind up eating it.  A reasonable person will say it’s because the people are starving, and they have no other choice.

NBC will say it’s because people like to eat shit.

I am not a curler.  I have never thrown a curling stone in my life, never even attended a match in person.  My understanding of curling strategy is rudimentary at best.  I am, suffice it to say, an armchair skip, and a cursory one at that.

But I’ve been a casual fan of curling for twenty years — and of the Olympics for even longer — and from this uninvolved distance, perhaps it’s easier for me to read the writing on the wall than it is for some of the players, as well as some of the decorated former champions doing the commentating at this year’s Games.

It’s the dawn of a new era in curling, and I’m not only talking about the sartorial splendour of the Norwegian men, although their argyle-print pants are, one hopes, a hint of the new livelihood being brought to the sport.

The Vancouver 2010 Games have shown us the future.  The days of the smoker with a beer gut who can compete at the elite level are over. So too the days of the part-timer, the player who squeezes in practice time during lunch breaks from some full-time job.

This year curling has shown itself to be a true Olympic sport, and like all other sports at this level it’s going to require dedication, strength, stamina, and a lot of hard work:

• Weight training and a diet regimen — fast food is not “the breakfast of champions.”
• Sweepers with the upper-body strength to redeem with vigorous brushing nearly any stone, no matter how off-weight and off-line it might be.
• The mental and physical tenacity not to flinch when, as one is about to release a stone, the crowd erupts into cowbell-ringing chaos over some action two sheets away.
• The stamina to play nine games over an eight-day stretch, even if it means facing top challengers Canada and Sweden in the same day (as Debbie McCormick’s USA women did, losing both games by a combined total of 18–5).

It’s a noisy new era, too.  Take the Saturday, 20 February, women’s match between Russia and Sweden.  Sweden, led by veteran skip — and defending Olympic champion — Anette Norberg, were bested by a Russian team whose average age is 21 and whose skip is merely 19. The final score was 10–1, with Sweden forced to concede after just seven ends.  It was an utter rout.

Norberg, for one, looked distinctly perturbed by the boisterous atmosphere in Vancouver Olympic Centre.  Meanwhile the young Russians were reveling in the attention (they are, to put it mildly, quite photogenic), and are likely unfazed by anything with decibel levels not approaching those of a Moscow rave.  On top of that, in play they’re willing to take chances that more seasoned teams would not consider.

That game aside, Russia’s women were not contenders this year.  Their inexperience leads them to make strategic mistakes — but their youthful audacity often leads to spectacular results.

The World Curling Federation has expressed mixed concerns about the noise level in the Vancouver arena.  On one hand, the clamor has proved distracting and intrusive to some players; on the other hand, spectator excitement is an important necessity for the sport’s growth.  (Chalk one up for the Scots — er, I mean “Great Britain” — at being such good sports when play was interrupted by the crowd spontaneously breaking into an on-key recital of “O Canada”.  GBR skip David Murdoch called it “hilarious”, “great to see”, and “not something you’ll ever see ever again.”  He could be wrong about the latter.)

Most of all, now that it’s an Olympic sport, the champions of the past — Scotland, Canada, pretty much all of Scandinavia — have to move forward with the clear understanding that other, upstart countries have begun to take curling very, very seriously.  For one, if there’s anything the 2008 Beijing Games demonstrated, it’s that China has only one goal when it comes to all things Olympic: utter world domination.

Curling became an official Olympic sport in 1998.  Twelve years is about the right amount of time to start a crash program, develop young talent into well-trained competitors, and hand-pick a decent team.

The 2010 Games in Vancouver are the first in which China has managed to field teams, and though the men narrowly avoided joining John Shuster’s Team USA in the basement, the women are contenders and have qualified for the semi-finals.  I would only expect them both to improve substantially in the years to come, and for new challengers to arise as well.

After all, when it comes to the medal count leaderboard, a gold medal in curling is exactly the same as one from the so-called “premier” events like alpine skiing.

In the wake of the Super Bowl, with a slate of advertising that was among the weakest ever, Google is getting all the press for having the “best ad.” Never mind that “Parisian Love” wasn’t a new ad premiered for the game, and had already been available on YouTube for three months. It’s a cute ad (or perhaps une annonce très mignon), in its minimalist way, and certainly does a fine job of showing off Google’s core competency.  Still, it was not my favourite ad of the day.

In every review I’ve seen, the Kia Sorento ad — with a gang of oversized toys (Muno from Yo Gabba Gabba, a teddy bear, a sock monkey, a robot, and what looked to me like a cheap Halloween-costume amalgam of Hamburglar and Cousin Itt) on the loose in Vegas — gets nary a mention.

Maybe that has something to do with the ad blitz Kia ran in the weeks leading up to the game.  Over and over they played 15-second teaser versions using clips of the bowling and bull-riding scenes, cut short with a “see us in the 3rd quarter of the big game” placard.  But the teasers played so often, by the time the complete ad finally rolled around, people might have already been over it.

Too bad, because it’s a fun one.  Certainly the music track, “How You Like Me Now” by The Heavy, was the best of any ad all day.  The visuals were at least mildly absurd, and even if the toys’ antics were somewhat mainstream, at least the ad led the viewer to think: “hey, that thing has plenty of room for an enormous cyclopean red rubber alien and four of his friends, maybe it has enough space for me and my fishing buddies.”  So in my opinion, the ad worked, both as entertainment and as sales pitch.

Okay, in retrospect the reveal is a plainly obvious one.  Of course it’s all the sock monkey’s dream.  Still, I’ll admit to having laughed out loud at it.  What can I say — I like monkeys, and I like trouble-making monkeys.  That’s how I roll, having been raised on Curious George.

As I watched and thought to myself cheerily, “that’s a bad monkey,” I realised there’s a subtext to this ad.  It’s probably unintentional, but I hope it’s not.

About midway through the ad, the monkey gets a tattoo.  It’s stitched on, which is easily the best sight gag of the ad.  It’s a classic tattoo: the name “Mom” in a heart.  It’s funny, and yes, tame.

Except that sock monkeys don’t really have mothers.  They’re created out of whole cloth, pardon the pun.

Here’s what I think: the sock monkey has the hots for the blonde soccer mom that’s driving the Sorento at the end of the ad.

Bad monkey!

Recently a friend invited me to join a Facebook group called “I will not attend another wedding until marriage is legal for everyone”.  My initial thought was “I agree that marriage should be legal for everyone, I should click the confirm button.”  At first, my only hesitation was caused by my reluctance to join any groups on Facebook simply on the basis of the inherent privacy issues of doing so.

But then I got to thinking about this group a little more, and the statement it makes.

By declaring this boycott, who is really being helped? And who is being hurt?

The last wedding I attended was a commitment ceremony for a gay couple.  A rabbi presided, throngs of family and friends attended.  It was a truly beautiful ceremony.  The love in the hall was palpable.  It was a heartfelt,  spiritual, joyful service.

In my mind, this event was every bit a wedding.  When I asked myself, “what was the last wedding I attended?” that was the answer that immediately came to mind.

Unfortunately for this couple — as for so very many others — it was not a state-sanctioned, legally binding ceremony.  They are not “legally married.”  They are not entitled to all the legal rights that any married hetero couple (loving or otherwise) receive as a matter of course.  They probably can’t include each other in their health care benefits, or avail themselves of the income tax breaks of filing jointly.

Does that suck? Absolutely.

Would my not attending their wedding — or anyone else’s, for that matter — have changed that fact?  Hardly.

This is based on the eggnog recipe from the one cookbook I consider completely indispensable: the America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. Through trial and error and personal preference I’ve modified it slightly (my notes in parentheses).

6 eggs
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
4 cups whole milk
1 vanilla pod
1/2 cup bourbon
1/2 tsp freshly ground nutmeg

(These are the standard amounts, but I recommend to double them — a double batch still makes only a little more than a half-gallon.)

In a large saucepan, whisk together the eggs, extra yolks, and the sugar.

Slowly whisk in the whole milk.

Add one vanilla pod, split lengthwise.

Heat slowly over low-medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture is between 160 and 180 degrees Fahrenheit and is thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon. (160 is needed for safety, but go past 180 and you’ll have scrambled eggs. Use an instant-read thermometer to monitor the temp. I use the same digital thermometer with a probe on a long cord that we use for roasts; I thread it through the handles of a binder clip attached to the side of the saucepan to keep the probe tip from touching the sides or bottom, for a continuous, accurate, and hassle-free reading.)

(Pull up a chair, you’ll be stirring for a while. It should take around 25–30 minutes, but my first time I was overly cautious with the heat and spent nearly 2 hours.)

Strain the mixture into a large mixing bowl. (Straining gets the spent vanilla pods out and also removes some of the larger bits that might have congealed. I usually have to give it a little encouragement with a rubber spatula to push it through the strainer.)

Add the nutmeg and bourbon, and blend thoroughly for a few minutes with a stick blender or hand mixer. (Blending really improves the texture. Fresh-ground nutmeg is a must — pre-ground nutmeg is no better than sawdust. For bourbon, no need to waste the top-shelf stuff. This year I used what I usually choose for a mixed drink — Jim Beam — and it was at least as good as last year’s batch with Maker’s Mark. Also, the amount listed here is a fairly low-octane amount, so spike it to taste.)

Cover with plastic wrap, pressing the plastic right down onto the surface to prevent it from skinning. Chill for at least 3 hours. (Overnight or two will really bring out the flavor.)

Shake well or blend one more time before serving.

(America’s Test Kitchen wants you to fold in some heavy whipped cream at the last minute before serving, but I find this makes it much too rich. For a fancy presentation, top the glass with a dollop of whipped cream and sprinkle some nutmeg on for garnish.)

I hope this recipe doesn’t sound overly complicated, because it’s really very simple — and the results are so very worth the effort.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
Quite possibly my all-time favourite book, I re-read it every few years and each time I get something more out of it. An investigation into the concepts of truth and quality, sprinkled with commentary on Western academia, it uses the metaphor of a motorcycle to explain logic and rational thought. Though the book uses the narrative framework of a cross-country trip, the motorcyle one is taught to maintain is not the piece of hardware on which the author rides: it is one’s own self. Here’s an odd book report.


“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard P. Feynman
Here’s a book report.


A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin
If you only ever read one book on the Space Race, this must be it, the book that was the basis for the award-winning HBO series From the Earth to the Moon. Chaikin explains the events and difficulties of the Apollo project with such detailed understanding that one might think he was himself one of the astronauts, except that no astronaut ever had such a gift for storytelling. Both the exhilirating highs and the disastrous lows will bring tears to your eyes.


A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Winner of a Pulitzer prize, published posthumously by the author’s mother. I won’t even try to summarise it. A masterpiece of pure genius. Here’s a book report, if it can be called that.


Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson
A guidebook for self-programming what John Lilly called the “human biocomputer.” Wilson uses his incomparable humour to explain the eight-circuit model of the brain and how each circuit is imprinted and conditioned. Mental games and exercises help the reader to understand the “programs” unintentionally imprinted on one’s brain during various stages of development, and enable one to rewrite detrimental programs and augment beneficial ones. You’ll find lots of quarters, too. Avoids the whacked-out zealotry of Timothy Leary, who pioneered the eight-circuit model.

The Straight Dope by Cecil Adams
When I was in high school my grandfather gave me an early printing of this book, and it has remained one of my most prized possessions ever since. It’s not so much because he died not long after, but because I’m still curious to know what prompted him to give me a book that tells the true story (and, of course, the bawdy rumour) about Catherine the Great and the horse, as well as the caloric content of human sperm. These are just two of the hundreds of questions unabashedly and caustically answered by Uncle Cecil in this book and its sequels. What are the original lyrics to “Louie, Louie?” Why is there no Channel One? How many Eskimo words for snow are there really? Hilarious and informative, truly a “Compendium of Human Knowledge.”

The I Ching, or Book of Changes translated by Wilhelm/Baynes
Both an oracle and a philosophy. I have read several different translations of this classic. Some are overly New Age. Some are so cryptically and tersely written that you’re probably better off learning Chinese and reading the original. This version is a bit academic and has a definite European cant, but it conveys some nice poetry and contains extensive commentaries on each of the 64 hexagrams.


VALIS by Philip K. Dick
This is (partly) a semi-autobiographical attempt to come to terms with an inexplicable mind-altering experience that PKD had in the early ’70s, which among other things allowed him to diagnose a life-threatening congenital defect in his young son that had gone undetected by physicians. Could it be that the “living word” of early Christianity was really an intelligent, symbiotic information packet which, when learned under the proper conditions, gave a person immortality? Could orbiting satellites be capable of firing pink laser beams of information directly into a person’s mind? These are but two of PKD’s many theories on the origin of his strange visions.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
Even before the moment in 1933 when Leo Szilard stepped off a curb and had his epiphany of nuclear fission, the Atomic Age was inevitable. Rhodes’ Pulitzer prize-winner makes the difficult concepts of physics and chemistry understandable without oversimplification, and explains the background of each discovery as well. This could have made for a dull, tedious read, but Rhodes uses honest drama and solid characterizations to create a ripping good tale. No other book covers both the history and the morality of this subject better.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Plenty has been written about Chicago’s disastrous parking meter deal, so I need not go into how the asking price was almost criminally low, how the aldermen were railroaded into endorsing the deal without even knowing its terms, how our new parking overlords are raking in more than a million dollars a week.

Instead, I have something to share that I noticed a few weeks ago.  To me, it illustrates in microcosmic form the parking meter deal as a whole: its purpose is poorly conceived, its ramifications are unclear, and ultimately it screws the citizens of Chicago.

It is an example of some typical signage, from the 2100 block of West Division Street.

The problem with these two signs lies with their arrows.

On the bottom sign, denoting the edge of a daytime loading zone, the arrow tells us in which direction the zone extends from this point.  This is the purpose with which motorists are familiar, having seen it many times at the edges of no parking zones and the like.

The arrow on the recently added top sign, however, tells us in which direction the nearest pay box may be found.

Because the two arrows appear on the same signpost, it is not unreasonable to infer that they have similar meanings.  Indeed, the arrows are not merely similar in appearance, they are identical.  The “pay box, thataway” arrow is the same size and shape as the “zone starts here, goes thataway” arrow.  Therefore these signs, in combination, could easily lead motorists to believe that the pay zone extends to the left, and that once the loading zone expires at 6PM the free-but-very-short-term parking spots to the right become free-and-stay-as-long-as-you-want.  (Or, at least until 8AM the next morning.)

I’m not being overly sensitive about this, or over-thinking it.  I noticed this signage in the first place when I overheard a group of women, having just parked their car in the loading zone after 6PM, debating this exact question.  They had come to the erroneous conclusion, and were about to walk off and get their evening underway.  Fortunately, before some random stranger (that is, I) could accost them and politely set them straight, one of the women noticed other, marginally less-obfuscating, signs on the block and convinced them to return and pay the fee.

The women seemed new to the neighbourhood, unfamiliar with their environs.  They probably were there for their first time to try out one of the trendy Division Street restaurants they’d read about in Chicago magazine or some such.  Lucky for them, one of their party was paying enough attention that they didn’t finish their Big City meal to find that it cost them upwards of $75 more than they had expected.

By the way, the icing on this cupcake is the fact that the pay box sign is pointing the wrong way.  The next available pay box in that direction — if in fact there is one — is at least two and a half blocks away, past the windswept open wasteland of St. Mary’s Hospital and Roberto Clemente High School, and across busy, seven-lane-wide Western Avenue.

It’s time for some simple arithmetic…

Amount of budget cuts announced by the mayor this week, in wage freezes and unpaid furloughs for nonunion city workers: $44 Million. [source: Chicago Tribune, 20 Oct 2009]

Amount the city will admit to having spent on the 2016 Olympics bid, despite independent estimates that go much higher: $50 Million. [source: New York Times, 8 Apr 2009]

Hmm. Those numbers not sufficiently coincidental for you? How about these…

Amount of the city’s FY2010 budget deficit: $550 Million. [source: Chicago Sun-Times, 15 Oct 2009]

Amount the city’s tax increment financing districts diverted in property taxes in 2007, the most recent figure available: $555 Million. [source: Chicago Reader, 6 Nov 2008]

Can anyone tell me what two plus two equals? Anyone?

I went looking for a particular book the other day, and started in my usual place: Amazon.com. Turns out the book is long out of print and somewhat uncommon, but of course Amazon had several used copies to offer, from various bookstores throughout the country.  Since I wasn’t looking for a pristine, mint copy, just one in decent shape, I spotted one that fell into the sweet spot of price and condition: “Very good” at $39.95.

Then I noticed that the bookseller, coincidentally, is an actual bricks-and-mortar shop here in town that I have frequented many times in past years.  Occasionally I’d pass by it and think, that place is great, I should stop in again sometime.  So when I saw the name in the Amazon list I figured, what the heck: I’ll stop in and buy it direct, get the book sooner and save the shipping cost.  And I’ll have an excuse to browse an interesting place and support a locally owned business.

The result: disappointment.

This afternoon when I walked in, there was a spirited conversation going on at the front counter between the proprietor and a customer, which sounded to me more like bickering than dickering.  They had clearly been at it for a while, and almost certainly this was far from their first time.  It wasn’t exactly ugly, just strained, and it cast an odd pall over the place. Meanwhile, as I looked around I had a sense that the place had changed.

This shop has long had a reputation as being almost impossibly cluttered, but this was usually considered to be part of its charm.  In the past when I’ve shopped there I would find interesting books jumping off the shelves at me (fortunately, only figuratively).  This time, however, it was as if everything had reached a state of calcification, as if even if I’d spotted a book I really wanted I would have been unable to remove it from the shelf as it would be fused with all the books surrounding it.

Then again, maybe that impression was just a side effect of the vibe at the front counter.  In either case, I grew impatient for the bothersome customer to finally leave so that I could ask the proprietor about my quarry.

And so I did.  He thought for a long moment, querying the catalogue in his head, and replied, “Ah, yes… I know the book.  I believe I have that for sale online.”

I nodded, agreeing.

He gestured none-too-vaguely at a massive pile to his right, giving me the sense that, even though their spines were not facing him, he knew exactly which anonymous book in that stack we were discussing.  “I believe I had that listed for $100.  It’s been up there for a while.”

I asked, “Was that on Amazon?”

“Yeah,” he said, brightly.  “Did you see it?”

I nodded again and said “I noticed it was you selling it and figured since I’m in the neighbourhood, I’d just stop in.”

“Did you happen to see what it was listed for?”

I pondered for a moment, not so much trying to remember what the price had been but debating whether I should try to lowball him.  I decided to play it straight.  “About $40.”

“Oh,” he said.  Then he went into some digression about how he might have lowered the price once or twice, because it wasn’t moving, and something about how his prices on Amazon are 20% lower because he has to pay their commission — which maybe I misunderstood, because that makes absolutely no sense.  Then he said, “Can you call me tomorrow?  I need to check on the listing first.”  He started to jot down a reminder to himself on the notepad on the counter.

“Well…” I hemmed slowly, “I’m going to be kind of tied up tomorrow…” My uncertainty was meant to give him the chance to change his mind, to decide that he was willing to sell me that book, and to take the few minutes needed to locate it.

I guess he didn’t hear me.  “Yeah, call me tomorrow, I’ll let you know.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, and left.  Which really meant: not a chance.

The way I see it is this.  He tried to take me to the cleaners for a hundred bucks, for a book that I just don’t need all that badly.  I offered him forty, a more than fair price that he passed on — even though if I’d pulled out my mobile phone and punched up Amazon in its browser and ordered the book from him through that, I would have paid a few bucks more for shipping — but a considerably smaller portion of that same forty bucks would have made it into his pocket.

I guess he wasn’t really interested in the $40 cash I was ready to plunk onto his cluttered countertop.

No matter.  After checking out another used book store in the area (where I found a couple of very interesting items), I came home and ordered the book from Amazon.  My book is on its way… from a shop in Oregon.  And I won’t be back in that cluttered bookshop again — not so long as its proprietor has no interest in actually selling books.

I remember when the Sears Tower was completed in 1974.  I remember my grandfather giving me a cardstock kit that I folded with care and assembled into a little model of it, which I then managed to flatten through overly exuberant play.  I remember noticing when the rooftop masts were first extended with taller antennae, and being drawn into an Abbott-and-Costello-style repartee with my Uncle David when I commented, “they’re a different height” (than they were before) and he replied, “no, they’re the same height” (as each other).  “No, they’re different!” “They look the same to me.”  Et cetera.  (Hey, I was maybe ten years old; it was funny at the time.)

So yeah, the Sears Tower has long been a memorable fixture in my life.  And when it was announced in early 2009 that new tenants had bought the naming rights, I was aghast, appalled, disappointed.  “They can’t do that!” I said.

But of course they can.  And in the bigger scheme of Chicago history, perhaps it’s appropriate that they do.  After all, Sears abandoned their own namesake tower to move out to the suburbs.  It is, in the final analysis, nothing more than a corporate name.  These things change.  Just ask Alvah Roebuck.

Renaming a building as iconic, as symbolic of Chicago, as the Sears Tower is — a building that stood for decades as the tallest in the world — is somewhere on a par with renaming, say, the Chrysler Building in New York, or the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco.  Unfortunate, sure.  Inappropriate, perhaps.  Fair game?  Absolutely.

Nevertheless, I still call the Aon Center by its original name, the Standard Oil Building.  Because that’s what it was called when I first visited it as a kid.  That’s what it was called when I took a picture of it at age nine, with a Quaker-Oats-can pinhole camera that I made myself at the Art Institute. Besides, I like calling it by its nickname, “Big Stan.”  Of course, this archaism means I always have to correct myself when speaking to anyone new to Chicago (“new” as in arriving any time within the past twenty-plus years) who only know it as the Aon Center, or perhaps remember it as the Amoco Building.

Anyway, this is supposed to be about the Sears Tower and its new name, Willis Tower, of which I am not a fan. I know I have a lot of company with this sentiment. (On the other hand, although I don’t care for its new name, I have to admit to enjoying the nickname that is already gaining traction: “Big Willie.”  But I suppose a lot of Americans are oblivious to the British naughtiness of this.)

Nowhere is the controversy and distress of this change more apparent than on Wikipedia.  The day the name change was announced, editors immediately began to jump the gun and put the name in place throughout the site.  These were routinely reverted with the admonition: “the name change hasn’t happened yet.”  Which meant, of course, that when July 16 rolled around and the new signage was unveiled during a mid-morning ceremony, editors fell over each other in trying to be the first to make the change.  Even then, the page move was premature: it went from Sears Tower to Willis Tower on July 15 at 16:07 UTC, a full day early.

Then came the reverters, as well as the confusers.  Some were opposed to the name change, and tried to move it back to Sears.  Others were overenthusiastic about it and changed all references throughout Wikipedia from Sears to Willis, at the cost of rampant anachronisms.  For example, it’s accurate to say “the Standard Oil Building was surpassed by the Sears Tower as the tallest in Chicago,” because it happened in 1974.  It would be incorrect to use the Aon Center and Willis Tower names in the previous statement, but it is apropos to say “the Aon Center is third tallest in Chicago, after Willis Tower and Trump Tower,” since that is a statement of current fact.  This distinction is lost on many editors.

A full week after the page move, on Wednesday, July 22, a newbie editor (having created his account just one day earlier) started a campaign to return the Willis Tower page to Sears Tower.  Being inexperienced, he bypassed standard page-move protocol with a cut-and-paste job (cut the content from Willis, paste it in Sears, and change all the names in both pages); being an inappropriate edit, this was quickly reverted with a comment that Wikipedia’s “Requested Moves” process was the correct method to use.

The editor began that process that same day, and now two days later the discussion has just about run its course, with interesting results.

The nominating editor cited the “Common Names” guideline as such: “[it] is emphatically clear: ‘Title an article using the most common English language name of a person or thing that is the subject of the article.’”  He used various Google news searches, as well as the usual editorials and news blurbs that discussed peoples’ natural resistance to the change, to infer that Sears remains the “common name” of the building.

His supporters jumped on with more of the same: it’s an icon, it’s like changing the name of the Brooklyn Bridge, etc.  Meanwhile, those opposed (i.e. in favour of keeping it at Willis) responded with variations on “the name has changed, Wikipedia must change too.”

I jumped in with the contention that the “Common Names” guideline is not the one in play:

As far as guidelines go, WP:COMMONNAME is not specific, but WP:Naming conflict#How to make a choice among controversial names is: “Is it the official current name of the subject?” (emphasis added) In fact, WP:COMMONNAME appears to defer to this guideline when it says, “Except where other accepted Wikipedia naming conventions give a different indication”. [...]

Many — including myself — consider this to be an asinine, money-grubbing decision by building management to change the name of an icon; but change it they have, and it’s not our place as Wikipedians to argue against that change. That said, I’ll call it Sears Tower until the day I die, just as I do with the Standard Oil Building — but I won’t feign confusion if a tourist asks me how to get to Willis Tower or the Aon Center.

He quickly responded with:

Well the policy you cite above refers specifically to naming article to avoid POV; there isn’t really an NPOV problem here.

To which I replied:

I disagree.  Nothing personal, but the passion with which some people are resisting this change strikes me as very POV.

My position was soon seconded:

The statements by Forsyth [et al.] clearly state the primary flaw in this nomination, which is the claim that a move from Willis Tower to Sears Tower is supported by a guideline phrase where “WP:COMMONNAMES is emphatically clear” about this issue. Pulling a single sentence from the lead when that sentence has paragraphs of explanation following which cover multiple scenarios can be misleading, which I think has been the result here. In continuing to staunchly support the move, the nominator has also used arguments which have been repeatedly and effectively rebutted.  [One] sees similar arguments listed as arguments to avoid in deletion discussions, including reliance on Google hits to determine what title to use, and comparing this article’s title to those of other articles in an illogical way which is akin to the What about X? line of reasoning that is discouraged as well.

One might think this would begin to settle things, but then an administrator threw a wrench into the proceedings — eight days after the original move — by reverting the move as having been done “without consensus.”  He was soon overruled by another administrator who said it should “remain at this title pending close of move request.”  Clearly, even the upper echelons of Wikipedia lack consensus on what precedent should be set, and the discussion raged on.

The discussion then turned absurd. An editor opposed moving back to Sears by citing — WP:COMMONNAME!

Most of the articles I find in Google News that came after the renaming call it the Willis Tower and mention that it used to be called the Sears Tower. This Chicago Tribune article calls it the Willis Tower without even bothering to mention that it was the Sears Tower [link]. No one can seriously believe news sources are going to keep calling it the Sears Tower even though that is no longer its name; that’s just wishful thinking by people who don’t like the change.

Despite these cogent remarks, both refuting the use of “Common Names” and using it in opposition of the original argument, editors continue to push for Sears under the premise of that guideline — mostly with variations on “it’s what people call it!”  At the 48-hour mark, the discussion still lacked consensus, but was trending 5-to-3 in favour of Willis:

Sears Tower (supported) (9)

Willis Tower (opposed) (15)

Quite frankly, this will play out in one way and one way only: the page will keep the name Willis Tower, at least as long as the building does; people will attempt to revert and rename for just as long, if not longer; and much more editorial energy will be spent in cleaning up those recurring changes than in making genuine improvements and updates to the Willis Tower page.

And, if not — if the page returns to the title of Sears Tower — my first action will be to use the Request Moves process to nominate a move from Aon Center (Chicago) to Standard Oil Building.  I won’t need to use spurious comparisons to Myanmar, or Muhammad Ali, or Menara Kuala Lumpur.  I will simply cite an evident and utterly equivalent precedent: the Sears Tower.  Current Google results: “Standard Oil Building”, 19,200; “Aon Center (Chicago)”, 15,200.  My path is clear.