Monthly Archives: September 2010

The fight to become Lord of the Centre of the Universe

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I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but there’s an election going on to determine who will be the king of the MEGABIGHUGECITY of Toronto. And as with most things about the municipal government of Toronto and the things it’s in charge of, it has turned out to be disappointing and depressing. It wasn’t always this way. In the earliest stages of the race, soon after David Miller, the current mayor of Toronto, announced that he would not seek re-election, everyone was like wow, maybe we’ll have an interesting and exciting race!

Back then, George Smitherman and John Tory were the frontrunners, with Adam Giambrone not far behind. Rocco Rossi seemed like a respectable candidate, while Rob Ford and Sarah Thomson were the lololol candidates. Then, one thing lead to another and John Tory decided he didn’t want to be liked by everyone but lose another election while Adam Giambrone was forced out because he cheated on his girlfriend. And so we are left with…

Rob Ford

Rob Ford is currently the councillor for Ward 2 – Etobicoke North. He is famous for being angry at city council and saying terrible things. He’s pretty much adopted the McCain-Palin campaign strategy, because, well, he is essentially the embodiment of McCain and Palin.

He’s got McCain’s strange fixation on inconsequential spending while not having any sort of real plan to deal with, you know, real problems. He’s also got Palin’s knack for saying weird and dumb things and being irrationally angry at government. He’s got the bonus of just being an angry person in general.

Why is this depressing? Because at this point, he’s leading by a fair margin.

Joe Pantalone

Joe Pantalone is currently councillor for Ward 19 – Trinity-Spadina and the Deputy Mayor of Toronto. He seems to be the most experienced and competent of the candidates still in the race and as a bonus, he’s the progressive of the bunch. Unfortunately for him, he’s one of Miller’s biggest allies on council, so that means he isn’t palpable with rage and is overshadowed by the other four candidates who are, they will assure you, very angry.

Rocco Rossi

Rocco Rossi used to be the national director of the Liberal Party of Canada, but has never been elected to any public office. He started off the race seeming to be a decent alternative to John Tory. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, he felt the need to up the ante and that has lead him to make a bunch of insane announcements, like needlessly antagonizing anyone who doesn’t use a car or building a tunnel from Allen Road to downtown Toronto, evoking memories of some other failure in Toronto’s history.

George Smitherman

George Smitherman was the MPP for Toronto Centre and Deputy Premier of Ontario, while holding a bunch of high-profile cabinet positions in Dalton McGuinty’s government. In the earliest stages of the race, he was the frontrunner until he actually had to start campaigning. I guess he figured it’d be easy or something because his campaign sucks and was totally blindsided by Rob Ford. Now, he’s trying to out-angry Rob Ford or something.

Sarah Thomson

Sarah Thomson was a publisher and CEO. God only knows why she’s running for mayor, but somehow, she’s managed to stay above Joe Pantalone in the polls. She is slightly less angry than Smitherman or Ford and is slightly less insane than Rocco Rossi.

John Tory’s ghost

Hilariously, even after John Tory announced that he would not be running for mayor, John Tory is still the most popular candidate. John Tory is essentially one of those candidates that’s really popular and everyone knows he’s competent and wishes he’d be the guy, but for whatever reason, on election day, no one actually votes for him. This trend has occurred in the 2003 Toronto mayoral election, in the 2007 Ontario general election both as an MPP and as the leader of the Progressive Conservatives, and finally in the 2009 by-election in Haliburton-Kawartha Lakes-Brock. I guess he decided that he didn’t feel like losing again so he’s punishing us by letting Rob Ford win.

At this point, if it were really close between Smitherman and Ford, I’d vote for Smitherman, because he’s not Rob Ford. Otherwise, I’ll throw in a vote for Pantalone and proceed to move to K-W forever.

f(Angel Beats)

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I guess I forgot about this for a few months.

Ideally, the plot of a story is some function that resembles a parabola, where we have exposition and rising action leading up to a climax and then the following slope back down. Presumably, given multiple arcs, you’d see multiple parabolas, together forming some sort of sine wave of action against time. So we can take say n of these points on this function of a typical plot diagram and call these events at some time t.

My problem with Angel Beats is that its plot diagram does not look like this. Instead, take those n events we just chose from our typical plot diagram and randomly permute them so we have a new sequence of n events. It feels like Key just took the best moments from their previous stories, cut out everything that happened between those moments, and randomly permuted those events into whatever sequence of events the show has. As a result, Angel Beats bugs the hell out of me because it feels so jarring from episode to episode.

Incidentally, it’s this series that made me realize that I am not exactly a Key fan. The only thing I’d say that I’m really a fan of is Clannad. I thought Planetarian was pretty good and Kanon was okay, but Air and Angel Beats don’t really do it for me. Of course, we’ll have to see whether I’ll have to take that back when some form of Little Busters is available for consumption.