1. Most exciting home game in a long, long time.
2. The Czar scored his 100th career power play goal. Congrats, Your Majesty. He celebrated with a classic fist-pumping Kovy crouch.
3. How Nikolai Khabibulin isn't Chicago's #1 goalie remains an inpenetrable mystery. That guy is excellent.
4. Kari Lehtonen was also stellar, all night.
5. Did I mention how exciting that game was?
6. To the Russian girl who was sitting next to me during the third period: I know you're reading. Go ahead and dial me on the email-phone. We could be friends. It doesn't matter if you speak no English.
7. To the Russian dude who was sitting next to me and filming the entire game: I fully expect to see a portion of your oligarch fortune when this video makes a bunch of Internet Money. My abusive screams are all over the soundtrack, and I even appear in the frame now and then. 5% will be fine.
8. To all the Russians sitting next to me: Don't take what I said about Khabibulin's love of the Vodka personally. I don't go in for the Russian Stereotype business. We can all still be friends, right?
9. Refs were either wicked or soft in the brain.
10. Thrash = one well-sculpted bird. What a fine feathered physique. Makes me jealous.
(Bonus)11. The Thrashers are terrible. I have no idea why I continue to go to games. Probably because the Atlanta Spirit have spent years with behavorial psychologists studying ways to drain Mortimer Peacock of his (already scanty) money. Remind me to break up with this team.
P.S. It's not so much that the Thrashers are terrible (which, make no mistake, they are) as the fact that I really don't have the Cashmagic or the energy to do this kind of thing anymore. I love hockey, and I heartily sympathize with anyone who loves any sport, but at some point one also has to acknowledge the dark side of modern sports: the fact that, as a smart and funny fellow (and rabid sports fan) puts it: "sports promote greed, conformity, tribalism, and social distraction." Couldn't agree more. Doesn't mean I'll stop watching, of course. It's just necessary to point out that if you invest a huge amount of your time, emotions, and income in a professional sports team something in you has to be barking insane.
2. The Czar scored his 100th career power play goal. Congrats, Your Majesty. He celebrated with a classic fist-pumping Kovy crouch.
3. How Nikolai Khabibulin isn't Chicago's #1 goalie remains an inpenetrable mystery. That guy is excellent.
4. Kari Lehtonen was also stellar, all night.
5. Did I mention how exciting that game was?
6. To the Russian girl who was sitting next to me during the third period: I know you're reading. Go ahead and dial me on the email-phone. We could be friends. It doesn't matter if you speak no English.
7. To the Russian dude who was sitting next to me and filming the entire game: I fully expect to see a portion of your oligarch fortune when this video makes a bunch of Internet Money. My abusive screams are all over the soundtrack, and I even appear in the frame now and then. 5% will be fine.
8. To all the Russians sitting next to me: Don't take what I said about Khabibulin's love of the Vodka personally. I don't go in for the Russian Stereotype business. We can all still be friends, right?
9. Refs were either wicked or soft in the brain.
10. Thrash = one well-sculpted bird. What a fine feathered physique. Makes me jealous.
(Bonus)11. The Thrashers are terrible. I have no idea why I continue to go to games. Probably because the Atlanta Spirit have spent years with behavorial psychologists studying ways to drain Mortimer Peacock of his (already scanty) money. Remind me to break up with this team.
P.S. It's not so much that the Thrashers are terrible (which, make no mistake, they are) as the fact that I really don't have the Cashmagic or the energy to do this kind of thing anymore. I love hockey, and I heartily sympathize with anyone who loves any sport, but at some point one also has to acknowledge the dark side of modern sports: the fact that, as a smart and funny fellow (and rabid sports fan) puts it: "sports promote greed, conformity, tribalism, and social distraction." Couldn't agree more. Doesn't mean I'll stop watching, of course. It's just necessary to point out that if you invest a huge amount of your time, emotions, and income in a professional sports team something in you has to be barking insane.
6 comments:
It can also promote social unity and a level of happiness and escape. Some people have crap lives, then, when they step into the ballpark or the arena they can get away just for a moment, just like how one can do it by stepping into a theater or listening to music. People can get lost into things, but you just have to balance.
Monsieur-
It's true that the important thing is, as you say, balance.
But I also think this is worth thinking about: if someone has a crap life (which many people do)and uses sports as an escape and a glimmer of fun and happiness, perhaps it's time to ask WHY his or her life is so crap.
Again, don't take this the wrong way. I love hockey and I'm not about to stop watching it; it's just that I also think we'd all benefit if people spent a fraction of the time and energy they spend on sports guillotining Bail-Out CEOs.
It's a long hard revolution, comrades. But sports is great, yes indeed, no doubt about it.
I'll leave the guillotines to someone else. Right now I just try to move forward with the current situations. I can't complain right now about the Thrashers because I'm not delusional. I know we aren't going to make it to the playoffs as you know as well. I know we probably aren't going to make them next year. I hope we are like the LA Kings eventually in terms of a team gradually moving forward. I'm not going to sit here and be upset about losing to one of the best teams of the NHL. How are we going to compete with men down and a forward playing sick (Little) going against Kane, Keith, Seabrook Toews, Sharp, Havalat, Campbell and Khabibulin?
Sitting around talking like this is like saying "I'm not even supposed to be here today" - Clerks. I'm well aware I like a team that sucks, but I like to think one day it'll payoff like when being Boston Red Socks fan paid off. The Thrashers are going to take a bit.
Right now I'm not concerning myself with guillotines and nor am I going to start wearing cloaks and calling myself Cicero. I'd rather stick to the Dylan mentality in these situations, in life and hockey. But when I go electric don't hack my guitar cord.
And honestly I'd rather focus my time on a shit hockey team than CEOs as terrible of human beings they are. Right now I take more pleasure talking about the Czar, Dustin Brown, Milan Lucic, and Grapes honestly.
Which "Dylan mentality" are you talking about? The mentality that drove him to write Masters of War and A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall and The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll? And the Hurricane? Dylan was hardly apolitical. He just can't be easily classified politically, which isn't the same thing.
And the point of my post wasn't to say that it's awful to spend your time following a hockey team or talking about Lucic, Grapes, etc. It was a simple acknowledgement that perhaps rabid sports fanaticism (remember where the word "fan" comes from) and evil CEOs are linked. One aids and abets the other, to some extent.
But what do I know, being a pretentious wannabe Cicero/Dante from Clerks who should mind his Truck Nutz and shut up.
The Cicero comment I hope you know has nothing to do with the Romans. It wasn't alluded to then but to when the French Revolution happened they all started wearing cloaks and called each other by Roman names because they didn't know where to go to from there.
I'm talking about the social conscious Dylan that was political but subtle in his words. You know what I'm talking about. In reality though, I'd rather go at it in either the somber Cohen Biblical mentality which is so romantic and moving or the Nick Cave mentality where I'm just going to off my hinges and go into O'Malley's Bar and take everyone out.
Hey we all need a Randal, and he has the best lines in the movie.
I would think my call for guillotines is along your Nick Cave-approved lines.
Cohen is great, but I'd add that--to shift the focus--there are endless examples of great poems that are expressions of unsubtle political wrath, written from all kinds of perspectives: monarchist and republican, Catholic and Protestant, left-wing and right-wing, even fascist and communist, etc..
I would name names, but no one would know what I'm talking about.
Oh hell, why not?
Brits, Micks, and Great Americans (I use the phrase without irony): Milton, Marvell, Pope, Blake, Burns, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Clare, Tennyson, Browning, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Lowell, Rexroth, Oppen, Reznikoff, Zukofsky, Duncan, Levertov, Snyder, Tarn, Heaney, Hughes, Muldoon, Amiri Baraka when he was still LeRoi Jones...
Furreners: Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Brodsky, Celan, Bachmann, Enzensberger, Milosz, Herbert, Zagajewski, Holub, Neruda, Paz, Hikmet, Darwish, Adonis, Amichai, Bei Dao...
The list goes on. I'd recommend "A Christian Looks at the Warsaw Ghetto" where Czeslaw Milosz, though a member of the anti-Nazi resistance in real life, wonders whether he too is among "the helpers of death, the uncircumcised."
And for an example of out-and-out Kill the Bastards political fury, I'd recommend John Milton's "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont:"
"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones/ Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;"
Great fucking stuff.
What were we talking about? Hockey? I like that Alex Frolov. He can Fro my Lov anytime.
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