I'm No Charlie Dumbbucket!

 Here's a good example of how I roll:

Anybody know what that is? You might by now but on the day I took this pic (March 14th) only a few serious cardboard collectors knew what I'm about to tell you. I was one of them. 

Like Connor McDavid's career as a kid, Connor Bedard's was followed with interest by a few people. I would say most were trying to think of ways they could cash in on him and I am slightly guilty of that myself. I saw McDavid playing against kids much older than himself and skating circles around him between periods of a hockey game I was watching. Even Don Cherry said he was goina be a "beauty." At the time I remember thinking about getting his rookie card. It was mostly my hobby of collecting hockey cards but I admit that to some extent it was to make up for once pulling a Wayne Gretzky rookie card from a wax pack of 79/80 O-Pee-Chee hockey cards. I remember trading it away after getting off the school bus and walking home. I can't remember what I got for it but it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life. One just recently sold for 3.75 million bucks. I only traded that card because I didn't know what a star he was going to be but the guy I traded it to was more knowledgeable and made a good trade. I was hoping I could do that with McDavid's rookie card. 

As fate would have it I was in China and missed all the McDavid rookie card fun. His Young Guns can be bought now for $1500. If it's graded a 10 maybe 4 or 5 thou. So I have no McDavid rookie cards and I don't believe I've opened a pack of 15/16 Upper Deck Series One to even have a chance at pulling one. I COULD buy a box for $1700 or a case of 12 for $22,000 but... now there's a NEW guy whose career I followed closely making his way up the ranks playing for the Regina Pats and the Canadian Jrs. I planned on getting in on HIS rookie card action to make up for missing out on Gretzky AND McDavid. I planned on buying a case of hobby boxes. They were going for around $1200 at one point. I figured his YG to be selling for a grand (which it DID for a while) so I'd get my money for the case back by selling one Bedard. Anything else would be gravy and in a case there is sure to be some gravy. But things did not go well in my year in Canada and I never had 1200 bux. I missed out on that just like the Gretzky and McDavid.

An Upper Deck hobby box costs $350 right now and that gives you a 6/50 chance to pull this card:

It's what all the hype is about. It was selling for a grand a couple weeks ago but now it's dropped to $650-$700. I regularly watch guys open cards on YouTube and I'd been noticing that the Series Two tins (pictured above) have 4 Young Guns each. So at that price (Walmart) of 90 bux a tin, I could buy four for $360 and have 16/50 chance of pulling this card! That's ten extra chances and with my hockey card luck I needed them! There are 50 young guns so that's where I get those fractions. If you buy a case (now going for $5,000) you will likely get one and I've seen some cases with two. Yer pretty much guaranteed one but not two. Why? Why would anyone spend that kind of dough on hockey cards? Well there are other Bedard cards. Some short prints are worth considerably more than a grand. In fact THIS happened:

Dave & Adams (who I hate) put a bounty on the outburst gold one of one. Here's what an Outburst Bedard YG looks like: 

You get one of those graded a perfect mint 10/10 and you can sell it for 10 grand! I've seen some Outburst reds for even more cuz they're rarer and even saw a YG Exclusive going for $543,539. Now there were pretty low odds of getting any of these sweet, sweet cards, but I wanted to give myself a chance. In fact the card I want the most is this one:

The one on the left has Bedard AND Leo Carlsson who is also supposed to be good. This is where I am a collector before a businessman. I want the one on the left MORE than the one on the right even though it's about 30 bucks compared with 700. So that's good for me! I reckoned I had a good shot at this card, Carlsson's YG or a couple other good ones like Zach Benson, Connor Zary... and there are usually some dark horses. You never know.

So now that I've lost 99% of the people who will read any of this, I will tell you that March 14th was the day before payday. I went back the next day and asked like half a dozen people for the key to the display case in the toy section. They're all morons, I'll just say that. But by the time I got to the area where the cards were the day before... not even 24 hours before... they were gone. Not just the cards, not even just the display case, the whole fucking toy section was gone!!! So I asked and found out it had been move way over to the other side of the store. I also asked that person for a key to the display case and she too said she'd take care of that for me. I got to the case and here's what I saw:

ALL UD Series 2 GONE! I waited forever for someone to get the key and even asked two more "workers" there and they said, "Yes, she has the key." then walked away. I didn't buy anything although I'm thinking I might just go online and buy his FIRST rookie card. Just like with the YG checklists, I sometimes disagree with the opinion makers in the hobby. I think THIS:

is the TRUE Connor Bedard rookie card because O Pee Chee came out before UD Series 2. It's the first card released with him marked as a rookie in his Chicago uni. At least I THINK it is... Anyhoo, I can just buy this card online for 40 bucks and save myself the agita of trying to get lucky and pull a Bedard. I'll probably buy that checklist too. And while I'm at it I might just buy Connor McDavid's YG checklist card with Sam Bennett. They're safer, cheaper, and cooler, at least to me. 

What do I mean by "safer?" Well there are all kinds of shenanigans like there always are when something good gets fucked up by greed. My favourite hobby is a good example. Here are some of the things that are just despicable that are taking place right now:

1. That bounty? The thing that has made collectors and people who have never bought a pack of hockey cards and probably can't even pronounce "Bedard" all feel like Charlie Bucket from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That golden ticket (the one of one gold Bedard Outburst) has probably been found and it wasn't an innocent, poor Charlie Bucket that got it. It was Augustus Gloop or Veruca Salt the rich, spoiled, gluttonous, greedy characters who got it. Some Charlie SCUMbucket followed Walmart trucks around and bought all the boxes, tins, and blasters before anyone else even had a chance. The golden ticket was probably found before the bounty was offered. But why would Dave and Adam publicize their purchase? They also SELL hockey cards and this would cause prices to plummet. Of course there's no chance of finding that golden outburst but Charlie Dumbbuckets and Charlie Badluckbuckets all over the world are still blowing money on boxes that are being sold at hideously marked up prices. In fact Dave and Adam probably found the lucky person who pulled that card, paid him/her 100 grand and THEN put out the fake bounty so they (and every other hobby shop in the world) could shamelessly price the poor and the REAL collectors right the hell out of pulling a Bedard rookie card. 

2. Charlie opened three chocolate bars. One for his birthday, one his grampa bought and one he bought with money he found in the street. If a person were to go into a hobby shop and buy three loose packs of the sets with Bedard rookies or McDavid rookies or even Gretzky rookies, the odds would be a LOT worse and the prices would be a LOT higher than they should be. You see, cards are NOT randomly inserted into packs or boxes or cases. The world just isn't comfortable with random people getting rich. Upper Deck packs cards in a way that makes it easier to predict which boxes or even cases are going to be the good ones. When you pull certain OTHER cards that are commonly grouped with the Bedard Young Guns, you don't sell the unopened packs or boxes. You wait till you pull Bedard. THEN you can be hostile and sell the other packs or boxes knowing the odds are drastically reduced that you'll find ANOTHER one. 

3. When the market was hot and Bedards were selling for a grand all the Charlie Scumbuckets were flipping them like there was no tomorrow knowing that the market would correct itself once it became flooded with these cards. I must admit to having a plan to do this myself but only for ONE card so I could pay for most of my case. I also found out that it's not possible for just any Charlie Gutterbucket to do. You have to pre-order the cases months and months in advance and even if you know a place to do that, they will probably tell you the cases are sold out if they don't know you. Or if they want to just buy them all for themselves. I suppose I could have tried to buy cases online directly from Upper Deck - I just didn't have the money at the time.

You might not believe this but what irritates me most about all of this is that so many of us will look at the situation and say, "I can't blame Upper Deck or Dave and Adam or the hobby shops everywhere. It's just business. If they didn't do it..." and yaddah yaddah blabbety fuckin blah. We're so Pavlovian! We KNOW this is wrong but we just shrug it off. It's so sad to see!

So anyway, for the third time, for the three biggest names in my favourite hobby, I lost out. I mean I COULD go out and buy $350 boxes or even a $5000 case. Bedard looks to be the real thing and I might get some good cards other than his YG. Maybe even enough to make the prices worth it in the long run. But I'm no Charlie Dumbbucket, I like the cheaper cards better than the cards that are being hyped right now. I'll just lose the thrill of PULLING them. 

Having said that... the prices of O-Pee-Chee boxes have gone way down since UD Series 2 came out. I might go out and get some of those and try to pull what I reckon to be the REAL Bedard rookie card.

Now that I've said that those boxes will all disappear and the price will jump up again. I just can't win...

However, I am now finished my 10th master's course and aced it. Another mark in the 90's. Probably 95. I am going to finish my online teaching certification from Avenue either today or tomorrow and that will help me land one of the new courses that will be up for grabs at the end of the month. With increased hours I will be able to get a place of my own (hopefully, and hopefully near the school). They got a taste of what a guy like me can do when he isn't forced into the pedantic, didactic, overcontrolled "teaching" we are forced to do where I work. We can do fun stuff like this:

We were talking about excuses for missing work or being late or not going to a party and I thought we should have more situations when you might need an excuse so I gave the class these and told them to think of excuses. I was asked about an excuse I had made in the past so I told the class my story about my 75 dollar Honda Civic (note the fabulous artwork). It was my first car and I bought it in Calgary in '95ish. I washed it during a Chinook (warm winter wind) one day and by the next morning it was no longer warm. My wet car had frozen. I couldn't open either door but the hatchback opened so I crawled in and tried to start it up and go to work. It wouldn't start. I tried to get out to do something but neither door would open and the hatchback doesn't open from the inside. I was trapped. Right in front of my Mom's place (where I was staying for a while). No cell phones back then really. I just sat in the car and froze for a while till I saw Mom look out the window. She was on the phone with my boss, the ornery Stuart Bruinsma who never really SAID anything while we worked together, he just YELLED. So I got busted outta my car, got it started and drove to work. I thought Stuart would chew my head off but he just laughed. (The class laughed at the story too) Then they got to work in groups thinking up excuses for the scenarios I had found the night before on the internet. Could I do this in a normal class? Hell no! We have to justify everything against PBLA benchmarks, competencies, and guidelines. I would also have to create an assessment and get it passed before putting it on CHAD our kinda LMS where we post all assessments and attendance and such. It's ONE of the many ways they keep track of everything we do.

 I know at least one of my students will be talking to the big bosses about how good my teaching is. Maybe more. So I may have that working for me cuz the new classes will not be overlorded by the PBLA. We can teach normally. That will also make them extremely popular among the other teachers so there will be heavy competition for those classes. I'm hoping there won't be any shenanigans like with Upper Deck. I'm hoping I won't have to settle for keeping my one class and shrug it off saying, "Oh well, that's business." I'm hoping there won't be favouritism or sexism or some other kind of ism that keeps me from getting one or two of these classes. I can't get benefits if I don't get at least two of them. So I may not be able to keep the job if I don't.

I should be finding out soon if I get a new class or not.

For now it's just finish the online certification (which is supposed to take 4 hours but will take considerably more) then I'm off till April 15th.

Hopefully I'll be working full time by then. Over a year and still not able to find a full time job. And folks wonder why I keep hightailing it outta this country. It could happen again.

We shall see...

Modern Day Privateers

 You've GOT to be kidding! ANOTHER post about Telus? Well this is basically a continuation of the previous post but it won't be about Telus exactly, more about pirates, and the general privateering business has become with the deterioration of regulative bodies orchestrated by the powers that be over the last... EVER.

It starts with my Telus situation. Yesterday's call was followed coincidentally (???) by like 7 notices about the IP address here at Rob and Terri's being used to download the TV show Survivor. The notices were sent by Telus saying that CBS/Paramount pictures has traced an illegal download of Survivor to their IP address. That was me. Guilty. I have been downloading TV and movies for quite some time on torrent sites because over in Asia they don't have the TV shows I like to watch. Or they have them on at times that I can't watch them or they have Korean commercials I don't want to watch, or whatever. I have also followed with interest the debate and court cases regarding torrent sites and whether they are stealing or sharing. 

"A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is the tension between the contradictory answers." This is a quote from Leonard Bernstein presumably about music but I think it applies to good debate topics too. I will admit to having a very biased point of view on the "tension" between the arguments of the business interests who believe sharing torrents of TV shows and movies is costing them money and the members of the public who believe that when people have paid for the TV shows or movies and want to share them with other people there's nothing wrong with that. 

I can already hear friends and family citing laws but let's not over simplify this issue in that way. Even lawmakers admit there are no perfect laws, we operate under the best laws we can devise, but even THAT is a laughably inaccurate statement. We all know of stupid laws that have remained "on the books" in defiance of any attempts by legislators to devise the best legal system they can. The number one reason these stupid laws remain is the number one reason for the majority of that which is evil on this earth: somebody's getting greased. 

So let's not be naive about copyright laws. They can be and have been abused by greedy folks, the issue at hand today is whether downloading Survivor from a torrent site is one of those examples. The torrent site I used is called Pirate Bay. If you're like my brother Rob you might feel that the very title of the site should be a red (or maybe skull and crossbones) flag. But if you're like me, and again, I AM totally biased cuz I get free shit from Pirate Bay, but I see the name of the site as ironic. Calling themselves pirates cuz they're not the real pirates. We were born in Hamilton, the steel city of Canada. That's why Rob's a huge fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers. So if he got into baseball, would he choose the club from that same city? What are they called again? The Pirates. But they're not real pirates. If you wanna see some REAL pirates, keep reading.

I think Pirate Bay started in Sweden and there was a court case about whether it was right or wrong and several times Pirate Bay was shut down, and several times it was back up again. The case went through many stages of appeal and in the end the guys who were behind it were found guilty of copyright infringement. End of story right? Well, why is it still up and running? And if I don't want these alerts from the cable company about downloading Survivor, all I really need to do is turn on my VPN and use a "pirated" IP address. Are VPN's illegal? Are they complicit in internet movie and TV show (not to mention music) piracy? These are some of the "tensions" between contradictory answers I find intriguing in this case, but read on, the tension builds.

Surprise, surprise! It turns out that the main police investigator in the investigation that eventually led to the indictment had started working for one of the plaintiffs (Warner Brothers) before the date of the indictment. Also one of the judges was a member of a copyright protection group and another of the judges worked for Spotify! Conflict of interest much? Big money can make big things happen. Shenanigans like this are mainstream. Which adds to the drama and the ART, if you will, of the debate. 

Let's stay on the pirate thing for a bit longer because it brings up a useful analogy. In the opening paragraph I used the term "privateering." That's the same as pirating, isn't it? The history is quite interesting actually! Pirates were, and still are, just scurvy swine raping, pillaging, murdering, and doing other generally despicable things on the high seas. Privateers were different. They were private individuals commissioned by governments to raid enemy ships, but eventually the booty one could haul in as a privateer made the business virtually indistinguishable from piracy. So they were raping, pillaging, killing, and doing their skullduggery by permission of the King or Queen or ruling government. They were pirates with papers. The words "pirate" and "privateer" are now are used by most interchangeably. 

Let me ask you this: What has been the buzzword for business since time immemorial when they want to get meddling government off their backs? Privatization. Capitalists are privateers themselves. And in the past couple of decades "regulated capitalism" has been replaced by "neoliberal capitalism" to the detriment of almost all of us. In my opinion businesses today, ignobled by the steady removal of government regulation, are like pirates with papers - the privateers of today. Will they go off the rails and just become regular pirates like they did on the high seas of yesteryear? They already have.

So think of the largest companies in the world. Some of our modern privateers. Do you think they have not been involved in raping, pillaging, killing, and skullduggery? Well, maybe not so much raping but they more than make up for it in skullduggery! And I, with some assistance from Roget, might go so far as to add monkeyshines, jiggery-pokery, and chicanery. And if you use "raping" as a figurative term they're like the outlaw signing up for the gang from Blazing Saddles, a movie I downloaded many years ago from Pirate Bay.

HEY! How did I just do that? Didn't I steal the intellectual property of Mel Brooks and that plaintiff in the Pirate Bay court case Warner Brothers? Well now we're getting into another example of the tensions between contradictory answers and it has a name. It's called "fair use." I guess when I create lessons 100% from my head and use them in "schools" that slide into their contracts clauses that state that intellectual property created while in the employ of this business becomes the property of the business would qualify as "fair use" under the legal and commercial principles of the times. It has happened many times to me but my feeling is that if someone can use my lessons to teach another person, fine. Go ahead. I made them for the purposes of education. Ah, this re-exhumes that concept we brought up before. Money. Although artists make movies, music, and TV shows for entertainment, we're talking about the people who exploit the creators here, the business side of art which, like banks and telecom companies, has been made an essential part of life... at least in the entertainment industry. We're talking shinplasters, splosh, spondoollicks, wanga, moolah, mazulahs... money, and, as I find with so many of the issues I tackle on this blog, therein lies our problem. Filthy lucre. Forgot that one.

If I buy a car and lend it to a friend to drive and Chrysler or Ford or with luck Ferrari chase me down and say that I have exceeded their standards of "fair use" I think I'd tell them to suck my fat, white arse. I bought the car from them and it's now mine to do with what I please. "Well it's not the same with movies, TV shows, and music." Why not? Here in the land of Canada where we pay exorbitant rates for internet and TV, why can't a guy download and watch an episode of Survivor if he can't find it on TV? The internet and cable have been paid for here. And don't fall for that example of flimflammery you might have seen in an ad for Telus while watching on Telus. Canadians do pay high prices for internet. The fact that Canada is rich and the commercial tells us we can afford it conflates affordability with price and they got busted for lying to us. But businesses do this kind of scamming every day! They call it researching "what the market will bear." I call it charging too much. Potato - Potahto. In fact there ARE cheaper internet providers but Canadians are just so worn out fighting the capitalist price gauging to use them apparently. Just look at the surrender in the guy in this video! His face, his tone, his body language... he's a nub! "They raise the price. What can I do?" That, my friends, is a guy who's been raped and pillaged.

But technically it wasn't the internet provider that sent the message, it was CBS-Paramount. They are worried about me watching one episode of their show Survivor without paying for it. Actually I don' think that's quite the truth. I think they're worried about me watching it WITHOUT COMMERCIALS BEING JAMMED DOWN MY THROAT. What did this struggling company make from the Superbowl ads alone? $650,000,000! Just try to imagine what they make when you pay the cable company to watch their channel with commercials. Or what they make from their cut of the money you pay the cable company to watch their channel WITHOUT commercials. Boggles the mind doesn't it?

So what it comes down to is simple: It's got nothing to do with copyright laws or intellectual property or any of that shit. They want MORE money. And in this world of unethical moral relativism piracy is not right or wrong, it just depends who's doing it.