Category Archives: Sports

Primarily talk about the San Jose Sharks, San Francisco Giants, San Francisco 49ers and Oakland A’s. Occasionally some other random sports tidbits like the Olympics may find their way here.

P-P-P-Playoffs!

I’ll be keeping an eye on tonight’s Dallas/Vancouver game (the last one in the first round from the only series to go seven games) because it will directly determine who the Sharks play in round two.

Basically, with Detroit taking care of the Flames yesterday, if Dallas Vancouver wins tonight the Sharks play The Red Wings in round two; otherwise they get Anaheim. Neither team is likely to make round two particularly easy on San Jose, but I think I’d prefer to play Detroit and let Vancouver have a crack at eliminating the Ducks. As strong as Detroit is, they gave Calgary a chance to win or at least make the series more interesting than it was so I think the Sharks can exploit some of that. The Ducks/Sharks games in the regular season were exciting but I felt too often that the Sharks came up short against them and I’d prefer to have an extra round for Ron Wilson to iron out some of the Power Play issues they had against Nashville before we have to face the hated SoCal squad. Plus, assuming the Sharks can get past Detroit and the Ducks can handle Vancouver, how great would the conference finals be if it were Sharks vs. Ducks?

Meanwhile over in the East it’s going to be Ottawa vs. New Jersey and the Rangers against the Sabres. Interestingly, if Vancouver can’t pull it together tonight that will make the Senators the only Canadian team left in the hunt for the Cup. The Sens handled the Penguins pretty adroitly but then again, the Pens weren’t even supposed to make the Playoffs this year. The dangerous Lightning proved that you can beat Martin Brodeur (they scored 14 goals against him in six games) but it seems like their netminding wasn’t up to the task (Holmqvist’s 18 goals allowed is tied for the most in the playoffs). The question there is going to be if perennial playoff busts Ottawa can ride their momentum through the Garden State. They certainly outplayed Pittsburgh, but it probably would have meant a meltdown of epic proportions for them to not come out on top in that series. New Jersey is likely to be their first legitimate challenge.

As for the NY matchup, it’s kind of tough to say. I’m inclined to give the advantage to the Sabres despite the Rangers’ strong sweep of Atlanta… mostly because the 4-0 series final doesn’t really do justice to how badly the Thrashers played. Not that the Rangers were slouches, but as with Ottawa, this is probably going to be the first real round of playoff hockey they have to face and I suspect that Buffalo is pretty hungry to move forward.

At least for now I’m thinking San Jose vs. Anaheim and Buffalo vs. New Jersey in round three. In the west, anything else will be a huge disappointment and in the east it really could go any direction. But honestly, as much as I want the Sharks to take home the Stanley Cup, I think that any Ducks/Sharks matchup will be more or less the series to watch in all of the playoffs. As long as they outlast the Ducks, I’ll at least be content—if not completely satisfied.

Slow Transition

I know I haven’t been too forthcoming with the posts; my time has been monopolized by our month-long move from the old apartment to the new condo. Or townhouse. The consensus seems to be a bit fuzzy on what the classification of the new place should actually be. Regardless, we’ve had some stuff to do.

Friday Nik and I made the hour-and-a-half trek to the nearest Ikea to spend the smaller of our two tax return checks on some new stuff. We picked out a bedframe, nightstands, a sofa and matching chair, a dresser and a new desk for the computer room. Of course when we got to the warehouse the sofa wasn’t in stock and we were told they would be getting three more in the next morning on a first come, first served basis. Also a pivotal piece for the bedframe was also temporarily out of stock so we got everything else and I steeled myself for an early Saturday morning.

For once in my life I was actually on time and I arrived at Ikea expecting a parents-at-Christmas style rush for the three available sofas, possibly involving fisticuffs or at the very least, a few German suplexes. Instead I was the only person in the warehouse since the rest of the earlybird shoppers hadn’t been there marking their shopping cards with Aisle and Bin numbers twelve hours prior.

Somehow I managed to muscle the couch into my truck on my own and since it decided to rain on what I had been hoping would be the Ultimate Moving Day in this lengthy process, I had to cover it with several tarps. Actually the couch transition went down pretty smoothly, but they still didn’t have the part of the bed we needed so I’m planning one last trip today after work in hopes that I can get all this money spending out of the way.

The couch is kind of a deep plumb color that looks brown in most artificial light, a fact that I think dismays Nik a little because she was hoping for more with the brown and less with the red. Personally I think they look pretty cool either way. Compared to the green/nasty-yellow-stuffing colored horror show we call a sitting device now, it’s practically a work of art.

We did come to one key determination with all this Ikea assembly work in our present and future: Electric screwdrivers or drills are mandatory. The angry red blisters on my hands are evidence enough, and those came from putting half the desk together. We tried to cheap out on the mechanical assistance with a little $5 battery-operated number, but it scarcely has enough torque to put a hole in drywall, much less offer the kind of power necessary to put a load-bearing bolt in place. If I wasn’t so cheap and resistant to buying things I don’t actively desire, I’d just go buy a real electric drill. Now that I have a garage you’d think these kinds of things might leap closer to the top of my list, but no.

In any case, most of what remains is little stuff like a few dining room chairs and some computer equipment plus everything that we’re getting ready to throw away. Besides that there are a couple of items I can’t physically handle by myself like the TV and the desk that used to hold the computer but will now be out in the garage serving as my workbench, plus our mattress which we can’t really move until we get the bedframe.

Well, technically we could move it and complete our living transition to the new place, but Nik is reluctant to sleep in the new condo alone so I’ll probably wait until Wednesday afternoon to drag that over. Ideally that will give me time to put the frame together anyway so we don’t have to sleep on the mattress just lying on the floor.

I have to say that despite it feeling at times very epic or unending, the slow move has been one of the least overall stressful that I’ve ever undertaken. Having the month overlap has given us a very welcome ability to select the pace and also allowed me to get as much as possible done without having to request anyone else’s help. Considering that Nik has well chronicled back issues and now HB is having severe back problems probably stemming from a recent car accident, that has been a big relief from my mind. I do have Doza stopping by on Friday to give me a hand with those few items I mentioned, but I’m hoping his role won’t have to last more than an hour or two.

Quick Playoff Note

I did get a chance to catch the first two Sharks playoff games in Nashville and I wanted to make a couple of comments. First, the Sharks broadcasters were pretty riled up about Nashville’s apparent game plan to take key Sharks personnel out of the equation by any means necessary. Granted, Nashville has been pretty cheap in a lot of their shots but for all the hubub, I gotta say, I don’t think that’s their problem.

The problem is that they just haven’t played that well in either game. That they came out of Nashville with a split is pretty miraculous—they looked like they were trying very hard during the game one overtime to lose that match. The second game they pretty much got what they deserved and the fight at the end was not a make-up for their uninspired play throughout. Look, when you get a five minute major power play and then a 5-on-3 and you give up a shorthanded goal and don’t score you deserve to lose. And it mostly comes back to the same things that have plagued the team during every one of their slumps and losses all season: They don’t clear the zone when they have the chance to, they can’t hold the offensive zone when they start getting a rhythm down and they try to be too cute with the passing instead of shooting the stupid puck. I concede that they’ve been playing reasonably physical hockey, but Nashville is out there playing insanely physical hockey that borders on dirty, which is exactly what Edmonton did to them last year.

The second thing is that the Sharks need to stop messing around with these guys. There is absolutely no reason why they can’t mop the floor with the Predators. They’re plainly a better team, even with Forsberg playing for Nashville. But they need to act like they’re actually in the playoffs and that means Nabby or whomever has to stop every lame little shot, the D needs to stop scrambling and trying those loathed backhand clear attempts and the offense has to pepper Vokoun with 50 shots per game and prove that they deserved the title of 2nd best power play in the NHL. We’ll see how they far at home tonight, but it had better be a dominating performance or I don’t see them making it past the second round, if they can even get that far.

Shark Bit

This season I haven’t talked all that much about the Sharks, despite the fact that I’ve followed them pretty closely all year. Part of it is that they have been oddly inconsistent in some respects. Just when I think they’ve either got it all put together or they seem to have completely fallen apart, they have a game or two that defies the trend. But as the stretch toward the playoffs sets in, it bears examining what they’ve done, what they’re doing and how they might fare in the postseason.

Part of the things I wanted to say are covered by Mark Purdy’s recent Merc column in which he evaluates some of the things the Sharks have been doing lately. He notes that they have been uncomfortably lackluster on home ice, despite being pretty solid on the road. Road wins are good, no doubt, especially since they are unlikely to have home ice advantage come first-round time. But the Tank has typically been the one bright spot for the Sharks even when they are otherwise miserable. And on paper they are anything but miserable this year. But their better record away than at home causes concern because in the playoffs you really have to take advantage of the opportunity that home games represent.

Purdy also mentions how the Sharks potent offense from last year has been less than stellar at times this season. I think it’s a bit unfair to compare the dream stretch that Thornton and Cheechoo had last year with this; as good as both players are, Cheech has always been somewhat streaky and Thornton was hurt early in the year plus he also no longer has the luxury of playing in a conference that isn’t used to seeing him so frequently. Other teams have made appropriate adjustments to both players that has impacted their overall dominance. But it is still hard to ignore that it is no longer reasonable to expect that each shift Thornton steps on the ice will result in at least some sort of offensive opportunity if not a goal.

I do, however, disagree with Purdy’s assessment of Bill Guerin. While unfortunate that he hasn’t contributed tangibly thus far, I think he has provided some interesting sparks to the San Jose offense mostly by putting a welcome end to the pass-and-grind fests that the Sharks fall victim to and just hucking the biscuit at the net when possible. Plus his right-handed orientation has helped noticeably with some of those far side digs along the boards and has helped set up plays that at least give the opponents another look to think about. Assuming he can continue to contribute in ways that may not always show up on the scoresheet, eventually the stats will follow.

But thinking about some of the other changes from last season, I think it is safe to say at this point that adding Mike Grier was about the smartest thing they could have done: The guy is quickly becoming one of my favorites. He reminds me of Mark Smith out there in terms of work ethic only with a lot of talent as well. The only real weakness I see to Grier’s game is his finishing: He gets more breakaways and opportunistic chances than any two other players on the roster but those chances don’t wind up as goals as much as I wish. Maybe Grier’s shot isn’t the best in the world but you have to admire his ability to get into situations where he is testing the opposing goalie.

Another guy I started taking notice of this year is Patrick Rissmiller. He seems to be cut from the same cloth as Smith and Grier (although probably falling more on the Smith end of the spectrum when it comes to raw talent) and it’s fantastic to watch him out there busting his tail on the forecheck, through the neutral zone and all the way back low trying to clear pucks from the defensive end. For all the remarkable talent some of the other guys have out there, it irks me to see guys like Clowe and Pavelski coasting—or worse, standing—around in their own end hoping a puck will fall in front of them.

Which is not to say the Sharks have been slack on defense this year. I’ve been rather impressed all season long with how many pucks aren’t ever even getting to the crease because the whole team seems perfectly willing to block shots coming off of sticks. But where their defensive fortitude has been impressive, their ability to handle the fundamental task of clearing the zone has cost them dozens of points against all year. To some extent I chalk this up to a coaching thing: I think someone has told the forwards to spend too much time swinging sticks into lanes and not enough time telling them to get bodies on dudes. It doesn’t matter how diligently you work to cover passing lanes, if you let the point man stand around up there for thirty seconds without challenging him, eventually he will find a play to make and then you have to start all over again.

I’ve said it about a hundred times but the Sharks have always, always been 200 times better when they play physically than when they try to be cute. I mean, the team was specifically built to be imposing since so many of their players are these massive, yet quick guys but they stand there in the defensive zone and wait for the other team to make a mistake? I don’t get it. When the Sharks have their forecheck down they seem to spend hours in the offensive end because they muscle guys off the puck in the corners and keep it deep where they can use their size to protect until something develops. It stands to reason that if it works on one end of the ice, it ought to at least help on the other end.

Speaking of coaching, another thing that has started driving me nuts is Wilson’s obsession with line juggling. Have the Sharks ever had consistent line combinations this year? It’s not like they’ve been wracked by IR-level injuries this year that have forced the changes, but I guess Wilson doesn’t believe in line chemistry because he never bothers to let it develop. Listen, Ron, it ain’t that tough: Guerin, Thornton, Cheechoo; Michalek, Marleau, Clowe; Bernier, Rissmiller, Grier. See how easy that was?

Going back to some of the changes this year, I think we can all safely say that Mark Bell has been a total bust. Even if you’re content to ignore the DUI hit and run (which I’m not), the previous two years had Bell scoring 20+ goals and 40+ points; this year he has eight goals and fifteen points so far and isn’t likely to go on a big run here to close out the season. He’s never been too hot on the plus/minus side of things (suggesting he’s something of a defensive liability which the Sharks don’t need considering the relative experience level of their defense) but his -11 is the worst on the entire team. Why he made it past the trade deadline I’m not sure but I think I’ll be unhappy if he’s still around next season.

When it comes to the goaltenders, the Sharks’ inconsistencies take a turn for the bizarre. On one hand you have Toskala who, before getting hurt was far and away the better netminder with a 24-9 record. At the same time you have Nabby barely putting a .500 season together and yet he hasn’t been that bad, really. For one thing he has had remarkably limp goal support, and if you ignore the last four games he’s had he was 14-16-1 with four shutouts. In fact, of his sixteen losses this year, nine of them have been by either one goal or one goal against (with another goal into an empty net) which means if the rest of the team had done their jobs even just a little bit, Nabby’s record could easily be 18-12-1 or 19-11-1. Heck, the Sharks lost two games 1-0 with Nabby in the net. There is absolutely no excuse for having your goalie keep the opponent to a single goal and not being able to pick up at least a tie.

Granted, Nabokov has also been responsible for a couple of real stinkers, including the 8-0 loss to Phoenix and the 7-4 loss to Calgary but I wonder if Wilson’s strict every-other-game policy had something to do with it. Look at the last week: Nabby is finally healthy and getting regular starts so what does he do? He goes 3-0-1 with three shutouts and gives up only one goal in twelve regulation periods for a .981 save percentage overall. It’s not a simple situation though because Toskala has been sharp all year. Maybe Vesa works better within the switch-off system than Nabokov does or something, but it also can’t hurt that the Sharks’ offense has given him a little more than four goals per game on average to work with while Nabby gets nearly half that. If the team just flat plays better in front of Toskala, it bears investigation as to why that might be.

In the end the Sharks will likely make the playoffs but their position in the post-season isn’t likely to change very much. Unless they get red hot in a big way and Anaheim falls apart as the season winds down, those ten points with only a single game in hand are going to be tough to make up. The only other team they might look to unseat to get a better playoff berth is Detroit, but the margin to overcome is identical there and the Sharks do not have a game in hand over the Red Wings. Plus, both Detroit and Anaheim are tied for the fewest regulation losses in the entire league so it is likely the Sharks will fall somewhere in the middle of the pack and could face a number of teams including Minnesota, Detroit, Dallas, Vancouver or even Anaheim in the first round.

If nothing else, it ought to be interesting.

Seriously

I’ve only been a subscriber to satellite radio for about six months, and the first several were for Nik, I only experienced the service peripherally. But, that level of exposure was sufficient to entice me and I now have my own receiver and subscription.

(As an aside, the linked article also has a follow-up that is very down on the Stiletto. To an extent I can’t argue with the complaints: As a portable Sirius player it requires a very bulky and ugly set of special headphones and even then the reception isn’t that great. But on the other hand, the portability factor probably shouldn’t have been pushed as a big selling factor to begin with since satellite radio, in my experience, is a limited use product. By that I mean that the beauty of it isn’t necessarily in just having it on, but in having the entirety of it available. Specifically, the 100% commercial-free music is fine but I find that, as with AM/FM radio, one is rarely stuck on a single channel for music anyway since inevitably they will play something you don’t like sooner or later. But having dozens of channels each with the possibility of playing something good and not having any of them hampered by being “on commercial” when you tune in gives a pleasant, seamless experience that is ideal in a car where switching channels is pretty much second nature by now. Outdoorsy people hoping the Stiletto would approximate that will be disappointed in the same way they would find trying to listen to terrestrial radio disappointing, because channel-surfing on a portable device is rarely as simple as all that. In a home or car, satellite radio shines: Elsewhere it was only ever destined to be a novelty.)

Ever since satellite radio came onto my radar, people have been talking about the two major providers, XM and Sirius, merging. Now the talks have surfaced again, this time with more veracity. Personally, I don’t really care either way. I’ve experienced both services and I vastly prefer Sirius (hence the choice) but I doubt much would really change with a merger since the focal points would be the premium content channels (mostly stuff like Howard Stern, Oprah Winfrey, major league sports and so on) which has, to this point, been spread between the two.

But were a merge to take place, the things I would want to see happen are as follows:

  • Leave the music programming to the Sirius guys. The XM channels—especially in my primary genres of choice such as Alternative, Rock and Indie—pale to the point of albanism compared to Sirius. The new 90s Alternative station on Sirius is a prime example of how well that company understands what actual people want to listen to.
  • I wouldn’t mind seeing some “talent” shake-up, however. One thing that XM seems to have over Sirius is less offensive DJs (or Stream Jockeys—SJs—as the forum lurkers call them). I could certainly live the rest of my days without ever hearing Jason Ellis, Madison or Bam Margera blather on in a lame attempt to connect with listeners. In my opinion, for a service that bills itself as a smart choice for savvy consumers over the alternative (FM), they seem to have carried over the worst parts of it in some cases.
  • Anything that could be done to improve overall reception would be most welcome.
  • Do not, under any circumstances, even think about making the sports content require an additional monthly fee. Should a merge happen I’d finally get all the major sports on one service (right now MLB is only on XM) and I would be happy. If they try to charge me for hockey games, I’ll cancel my subscription, sell my Stiletto on eBay and write as many nasty things about the executives and their heritage as I can think of.
  • Now get off my lawn.

On the Random Tip

Because you never demanded any such thing, I offer… more bullet points.

  • I hereby decree the end of the trend on the following phrase and all its variants: “…because that’s the way we roll.” It was funny for a while, but it isn’t anymore.
  • You know what I think the XBox 360 controller should have? A jog wheel. Think about it: The D-pad is only ever used in modern games for inventory or issuing orders to squad members or that kind of secondary input. Wouldn’t a jog wheel be easier to use than a clunky eight-point pad? Plus if they did that they could replace that atrocity with a real D-pad akin to the one on the DS. As it is that thing is almost unusable, even for games that need it like the old arcade classics ported over to XBox Live Arcade. It’s a shame, too, because other than that D-pad, the 360 controller is one of the best ever.
  • Why do french fries go so well with dessert? My favorite food from McDonald’s (the word “favorite” is being loosely applied here): French fries and apple pie.
  • I’m sorta learning to play piano after acquiring a very nice keyboard (free!) from HB. Currently, I know four chords: C Major, F Major, G Major and A Minor. That’s not a lot of musical variety… but I can at least play them with over 100 different sound effects! They sound really cool with swooshy 70s-style synth sounds.
  • I guess Norv Turner is going to the Chargers. I think it’s dumb that they had such a great record in the regular season and because they lost a playoff game the coach gets the axe. By that logic they should fire/trade LaDanian Tomlinson, too, right? Anyway, it’s kind of weak for the 49ers because Alex Smith seemed to be doing much better under Turner than he had before, so it will be interesting to see what happens now with Mr. First Round Pick.
  • Rhetorical Question of the Day: Why is it that when you have no use for change, it’s everywhere, as if it were multiplying like Tribbles all over the house, car, couch, etc. But the instant you need a few coins, you can barely find two pennies to rub together? Also, it seems like the more paper cash you have on hand (ie, the larger the denominations of your bills), the less change you can actually find.
  • They’re showing that professional fisherman (*snort*) on ESPN tonight who gets all “extreme” when he does his thing and, like, yells at the fish he catches. He literally taunts them as though they were some kind of crafty opponent instead of near-mindless beings so far down on the food chain from us that we’re like a dot to them (metaphorically speaking, of course). It seems like he may as well be talking smack to his Wonder bread, you know?
  • “I totally pwned that whole loaf, man! Did you see that? It was like 24 slices vs. just me and I ruled over it like a malevolent dictator! Woo!”
  • This just in: Professional athletes take themselves too seriously. Film at eleven.
  • You know what I don’t understand? TV shows of radio shows. Like, Getty and Armstrong or Mike and Mike. They literally just put a camera in the radio booth and show the people talking into a microphone. Even that tweaker Jim Cramer basically has the same “format” except he acts like a raving lunatic in the studio. What’s up with that guy?
  • It was slow at work last night so I was fiddling with the TV that is supposed to show CNN and I ran across TNT showing a 24 hour marathon of Law & Order. Turns out I can stand about five episodes in a row before that incessant “bah-BONG!” sound goes from semi-cool to completely grating. Also I decided that the show was best when it had Chris Noth and Jerry Orbach on as the detectives. Carey Lowell was the best ADA, even though she never overlapped with the Noth/Orbach pairing.
  • Here’s what I don’t get: When you order a hamburger with no mayonnaise at a restaurant, you get the driest slab of shoe leather stuffed between two Sahara-like buns. When did mayo become the de facto moisture apparatus on a burger? Mayo, to me, is like raw eggs: It has its uses but as an ingredient in and of itself? No thanks. Let’s try to work with something that actually tastes good on its own, hm? Ketchup: Think about it.
  • Also? I hereby decree the official end of the idiotic spelling “catsup.” Whatever the origin of that term is, it no longer applies to anything. From here on, it is “ketchup” only.
  • Although, “ketchup” is kind of a random term anyway. It ought to be something more descriptive like “tomato goo.” Either way, it turns out “catsup” is not in Firefox’s spell checker so maybe someone beat me to the punch in declaring that spelling invalid.
  • Way to go, Firefox spellchecker guy.

Why Can’t We Seem to Keep it Together?

An unanticipated side effect of night shift working has been the speed at which time passes. Considering that from about 10:40 on Saturday night until noon on Wednesday my life is a blur of late-night news programming, unix systems administration, complicated charts monitoring various nigh-unintelligible technologies like ‘telephony’ and ‘database replication’, driving and poor sleep patterns it’s maybe not all that remarkable. That doesn’t mean I expected it though.

My weekends, such that they are, therefore involve a lot of chores and sleep catch-up plus a smattering of social activity and other recreational pursuits where they fit in. The end result is that I stand up and by the time I sit down several weeks have passed, usually without me updating the site.

I vowed awhile back not to waste a lot of time writing about not writing or making lengthy posts trying to excuse my absences. If I update, I update; if I can’t or don’t that’s the way it goes. No one cares one way or the other so it’s just alternating self flagellation and excuse-making which is boring and pointless.

If it’s cool with you I’ll pretend that isn’t par for the course around here.

Anyway, I have a smattering of thoughts and commentary now, which is at least something.

  • So the Colts won the Super Bowl. Good for them, and good for Peyton Manning. I know lots of folks are down on him for various reasons but I’ve liked watching the guy play ever since he orchestrated a marvelous comeback on Monday Night Football several years ago. Usually I don’t really admire non-Bay Area teams’ players, even if they’re really good. But unlike Peter Forsberg or Tom Brady or Alex Rodriguez who are good but often also surrounded by other really good players, I can honestly tell that the Colts—despite having good players aside from Manning—would be a shadow of their championship selves without Mr. Laser-Rocket Arm back there draining the play clock and reading defenses and generally quarterbacking as opposed to just being a guy who can read his progression well and throw a tight spiral. I think what impresses me is that he’s certainly an athletic guy but he seems to play the game mostly with his head and I really only admire two things in professional athletes (whom I tend to think ought to have an extraordinary level of athleticism and talent merely as qualifications for being a professional) and that is hard work and a critical mind for the game.
  • Unless said athlete plays for a Bay Area team in which case I only admire one thing and that is the ability to win. By and large, I don’t admire Bay Area professional athletes very often.
  • Speaking of, I thought I should make a quick note of the Sharks, especially in light of their atrocious two game stand against Dallas. Sure, they were coming off a win streak but they looked really sad against a team that they have no reason not to beat. I mean, if they lose to Anaheim I’m certainly not happy but San Jose and the Ducks are supposed to be the teams to beat this year so games between them ought to be completely up for grabs. But Dallas is behind the Sharks in the standings which means, to me, they should be better than the Stars. They certainly didn’t look like it. A few very brief pointers for the boys in teal: 1) Shoot the puck. 2) Anyone on D who can’t hold the line (in any offensive situation but specifically on the Power Play) ought to get punched in the lips. I’m looking at you, Erhoff. 3) Stop trying to clear the zone with that little backhand bank pass. Here’s a clue: When it doesn’t work twenty-six times in a row, it might be time to try a different approach.
  • I finally felt like Heroes got back on track last night. I think the “revelation” of the identity of Claire’s birth father was kind of telegraphed but it wasn’t unwelcome. The actor who plays Sylar did a really good job in the episode, too, successfully playing the charmer and then making a chilling transition back into total lunatic. I can’t say I was too thrilled that HRG made it just in time to save the day since the wife/mom character annoys the heck out of me, but I guess it wouldn’t work to have Claire completely grief-stricken at this point in the game. I’m also really liking Claude, the invisible dude. His rationale for tossing Peter off the roof was somehow hilarious to me. Nice shout out to Star Trek with the license plate on Sulu Hiro’s dad’s limo, too. In fact the relatively serious plot thread with Hiro was a pleasant change of pace for him as well. And while I’m still no fan of Niki, for once I felt like they were actually doing something with her this week so I didn’t have that familiar urge to hit the fast forward button quite as much whenever she came onscreen.
  • On a different subject altogether, if you happen to have a hundred and fifty grand lying around, why not put it to good use?
  • While I’m linking stuff, this dude has some ideas to improve the NHL. He thinks having more USians in the league, widening the net, adding expansion teams and going to permanent 4-on-4 would do the trick, in a nutshell. The problem is that he’s demonstrably wrong. The MLS was designed to get Americans into futbol by having local players they could identify with but that certainly hasn’t seemed to matter. He says that bigger nets would mean more scoring and more “crowd reactions” which makes games more exciting and more attractive as entertainment options. But then he goes on to spit out a bunch of numbers about goals per season and TV viewership which seem to directly contradict this theory. Also, while we’re trying to get more Americans playing the game we should add two more Canadian teams? That does not compute. And as for 4-on-4, I agree that making the shootout more rare would be good so I’m down with the ten minute 4-on-4 overtime, but playing the whole game 4-on-4? Sure, it’s exciting but it also would basically eliminate the pure defenseman since everybody would have to score well. You’d end up with guys like Patrick Marleau being listed as a D-man. No thanks.
  • I was working on this sweet photo essay of the total weirdness of my workplace but my stupid camera ran out of batteries. In this whole building full of technological whizbangs I couldn’t find a single pair of AA batteries that would so much as power on my battery-devouring digital camera, much less allow me to snap off the last few shots I had in mind. Stupid electricity. I’ll have to try again tomorrow.

As a Matter of Fact, I Do Have a One-Track Mind

It’s Tuesday so you know I’ll be babbling about Heroes. I’m not original, but I am prolific.

“Nothing to Hide”

Mostly I have brief thoughts on last night’s episode, which overall I thought was good and if someone tuned in last night for the first time it seemed like it would have been a decent one to start with since it kind of took a half step back with each character—just enough so you would be more or less on the same page as people who’d watched from the beginning. Niki’s confession to her sister was a pretty succinct way to explain her Jessica alter ego; Peter and Nathan’s conversation revealed quite a bit about each of them; Hiro, DL and Claire all had short demonstrations of what they could do and of course Parkman had plenty of development that made it indisputably clear what his ability was. Interestingly they managed to do all that while still pushing the story ahead enough to make way for some inevitable plot thread resolution (just in time for sweeps, how convenient!).

So if you watched last night based on my urging, there are still a few characters who got little to no screentime including Isaac (reads/paints the future); Horn-Rimmed Glasses man (Claire’s adoptive father who keeps kidnapping the Heroes for unknown reasons) and HRG’s sidekick, a Haitian guy who seems to have some mental powers which allow him to block mind-readers (like Parkman) and also affect memories, wiping them out or something (incidentally, Nathan referred to HRG and the Haitian during his conversation with Peter but they got no actual screentime). And in case you’re wondering, the mobster referred to as being connected with the Petrelli campaign and who purchased the painting Peter wanted has yet to be shown on screen so you didn’t miss anything there.

Now, thoughts:

  • I think they’re spending too much time with the Parkman/Wife story. Parkman and the FBI agent’s pursuit of Sylar is interesting and Parkman as a character is fascinating but it just seemed too predictable for his wife to be cheating on him with his old partner. I’m not saying it can’t be salvaged as a storyline but I think the amount of screentime they’d have to devote to it to do it right would really detract from some of the other, more interesting stuff. And I really want them to get on with connecting Parkman to some of the other heroes, especially since it’s fairly clear that his ability will help get some of those unanswered questions at least asked out loud.
  • My other complaint is still with the Niki/DL/Micah thread. I don’t know where they’re going with Niki’s character but they need to do something other than make her utterly despicable and soon. At this point I’m hoping she turns out to be a villain because I want to see her get smacked around again. If she ends up as a hero I’m going to need something to draw on that helps me suspend that disbelief because right now she seems like she doesn’t have a heroic bone in her body.
  • Micah’s powers sure are interesting, however. It seems his abilities were foreshadowed way early on, perhaps the first episode (at least one of the first, when he fixed a motherboard or circuit board or something). He and DL make for an interesting story by themselves but as long as they’re still dealing with Niki I’m going to be tempted to hit the fast forward button whenever they come onscreen.
  • I was happy that they didn’t overdo it with the Hiro this episode. Hiro is great, don’t get me wrong, but as with any standout character on a show, the temptation to overexpose him must be pretty strong. This episode had just enough Hiro in it, and his line about wishing he had super strength, too, was classic. Especially considering that everyone seems to be in consensus that of all the powers shown on the series so far, his would be the absolute best/most useful.
  • The mystery of Peter continues. Some are now suggesting that he has supernatural empathic powers which may be related to his power leeching abilities (or presumed abilities I guess). I was unclear after the episode what role Peter had actually played in the passing of Simone’s father.
  • Speaking of Simone, I’m not sure if it’s the actress or the way she’s written, but I’m having a hard time pinpointing her approach to Peter. She seemed so ready to dismiss Isaac’s claims to powers he didn’t understand but she’s almost blindly accepting Peter’s nearly identical behavior and what most normal people would regard as delusions of grandeur. Maybe it’s because of Isaac’s drug use that she was so quick to dismiss him, but somehow it doesn’t quite sit well with me.
  • Am I the only one who didn’t understand Nathan’s conversation on the phone with Linderman in light of the discussion he had immediately after with Peter? It sounded from the one-sided conversation that Nathan had secured the painting from Linderman and was having it sent back to the gallery, but when he spoke to Peter about it, he said he wasn’t able to convince Linderman to give it up. What did I miss there?
  • Nathan’s description of HRG and the Haitian to Peter sounded important to me, like that Peter was going to have to remember that later when confronted with one or both of them. Although Nathan’s explanation of the Haitian as “Euro” was kind of weird, since most people don’t assume someone else is from Europe unless they hear them speak, which as far as I recall the Haitian never has.
  • Somebody on the writing staff has mother issues because two of the moms on the show are utterly abhorrent: Claire’s adoptive mom and Nathan and Peter’s mother. Both just absolutely grate on me.
  • Some people are postulating that because Claire is so careless about her abilities that she really wants to be found out, citing the fact that she sort of hung around while her hand healed instead of running upstairs to cover it up or something. I usually attribute this to the fact that the special effects show the healing process a bit slower than it actually occurs for the audience’s sake. I read a lot of people also whining about how Claire has had her behind trounced repeatedly and usually never says boo about it but this week she gets a staple in the hand and yelps like she had no powers at all. My thought is that she doesn’t feel pain the way most people do in that because her body knows it can heal itself, the pain receptors don’t fire the way they normally would (why bother?). However, she does experience the sensations of all her injuries which I assume are just kind of uncomfortable or bizarre feeling and not so much painful. In the case of the stapler, I think her reaction was more of surprise from unexpected sensation than pain.
  • The previews for next week finally start to suggest that HRG may not in fact be a bad guy. This kind of bugs me because up until now the assumption has been that he’s a bad guy not because of what he’s done (which is why some people still thought all along that he wasn’t all bad) but because the “previously on” voice over flat-out called him the “incarnation of evil” or some such. Look, it’s one thing to make his motives ambiguous and leave us guessing as to what he is, but to call him evil and then later come out and say, “oh, but is he or isn’t he?” seems very suspect to me.
  • It seems pretty obvious that Sprague’s comment about becoming an atomic bomb was meant to get the audience thinking along the lines of what his involvement in the imminent destruction of New York would be. But I think it is a red herring. I’m not precisely sure why I think that, but I do.
  • Stupid week until next Monday.

The Fremont A’s?

So I more or less grew up in the Bay Area town of Fremont. Now it looks like the Oakland A’s are moving from their miserable Raiders-hijacked stadium to a shiny new one in my hometown. Sweet. (Thanks, Doc!)

Bullet the Blue ‘Soap

  • According to the latest poll, very few people here are taking my advice and watching Heroes. Get with it people, I’m telling you: It rules. Of course now I said that and someone will tune in tonight and the episode will completely flop.
  • My resistance to continued griping about the officiating in the NHL this season can no longer win. What exactly are these refs smoking prior to the games? Cheechoo booted for boarding a guy he hit in the faceoff circle and lost contact with for at least six feet before either player came anywhere near the boards?! An awkward and dangerous fall, sure. Fortunate that he was okay, certainly. Game misconduct? Uh, no. Also, two goals called back including one from a penalty to Mike Grier in which the goalie went back to play the puck and fell over his own stick? So, just to be clear: Hitting a defenseless San Jose goaltender in the back and throwing his head to the boards is okay; a San Jose player being in the vicinity of a clumsy netminder: two minutes in the box for interference. Got it. Just wanted to be clear.
  • I’m grouchy today because I’ve had a headache since Saturday. Have you ever seen parents of an infant try to placate the mysteriously fussy child? They feed them, change them, play with them, try to get them to sleep, and the baby remains grouchy. I feel like that with my head. I’ve eaten plenty, I’ve tried taking naps, I’ve taken Tylenol and ibuprofen, I’ve taken warm showers to relax my muscles and so on and so forth. Nothing seems to work for longer than about twenty minutes. It’s not so bad that I can’t function normally, but it’s annoying as all get out.
  • I saw a friend of mine this weekend who isn’t around too often since he decided to move overseas. He has been pestering the old XBox Live crew to upgrade to the 360 to we can get our online gaming on again and he point-blanked me with the question, “When are you getting a 360?” The sad thing is that I’ve already been thinking about it quite a bit and even broke down and included it on my wishlist so his question nearly broke my spirit clean in half. On one hand I absolutely don’t need any more goofy toys and on that same hand I have a vacation coming up, Nik and I are getting ready to move for the first time in three years and Christmas is right around the corner so monetarily it isn’t going to fly. But on the other hand: Shiny graphics and online gizmos!
  • In preparation for leaving my current job I’m tasked with cleaning out my work-provided laptop PC. I had forgotten how annoying it is to try and clean yourself off of a computer you’ve used for any significant amount of time (for me that’s about two and a half days).
  • I bought a few CDs last week including the new Muse album and Wolfmother’s disc. Both bands have a kind of 70s throwback feel with Wolfmother channeling Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull while Muse can at times be likened to Queen and Rush. It’s sort of cool although occasionally Wolfmother crosses the line between homage and outright thievery but both were worth the somewhat abbreviated prices ($10 and $11 respectively from Rasputin’s). One strange thing though, I noticed that I very much enjoyed Muse’s work when played from beginning to end in the original album order. When I listened to it again later on random, it wasn’t nearly as good. I’ve never encountered that before, I wonder why that is?
  • Above I noted that Nik and I are gearing up for a move which has been necessitated by my new job acquisition since the distance from our current apartment to the new office is, according to Google, 66 miles compared to the 29 miles I travel now. More significantly, travel to the new office from our current location during normal work and commute times would require sitting it no fewer than five heavy traffic spots. If we end up where we’ve started looking, I’ll reduce that to three traffic spots and the mileage will be about halved to 34 miles.
  • Also regarding traffic and commuting, some relief is in sight since there is a strong chance I’ll end up working at least some graveyard shifts (which would basically eliminate the traffic concerns) although Nik is not exactly thrilled with the idea of having certain evenings entirely to herself. Even if I do end up exclusively working grave shifts, they do run a 4×10 schedule which will give me three nights at home per week (ideally Thursday, Friday and Saturday) so I’ll be home for a pretty large part of the week. We’ll be all backward in our sleeping schedules, but I’m confident some sort of arrangement can be made.
  • Tomorrow’s voting is going to be somewhat unpleasant since I have to get up very early in order to make it happen, being that I have two tickets to the Sharks game tomorrow night. The elections are really stupid this year with practically every ballot measure being some sort of smokescreen to bilk more cash out of Californians and (as usual) 98% of the candidates running for office being either schmucks or despicable wastes of oxygen. But I feel even more inclined to vote in elections like this when the options are all really lame because I honestly shudder to think what your average Californian would come up with on some of this stuff without my expert guidance.
  • So what is standard procedure when leaving a place of employment for handling all the lame company schwag they dump on you? As of this moment I have it all sort of sitting in my cube where it is of no harm to me or anyone else, but I have no need for a goofy (and highly illegible) desk clock branded with this company’s logo, nor do I need a laptop bag, a wine glass or a stress ball, all adorned with corporate branding. My inclination is to just toss it but I’m afraid that might be construed as excessively rude, so am I to take it home and then junk it there? How is that really better? I guess it’s a matter of plausible deniability; where they can go on thinking I cherished this stuff long after I departed when in fact it all ended up, blissfully out of their realm of knowledge, in a dumpster at my apartment complex. Still, a large part of me wonders what kind of doofus would actually care enough to keep track one way or the other.
  • I just learned that Lister got himself a Nintendo DS. Looks like local multiplayer goodness (as opposed to WiFi multiplayer goodness which Dr. Mac and I have had trouble co-ordinating) is about to be on.
  • Turns out I have nothing else to talk about. I guess it’s time to go back to counting the minutes until tonight’s Heroes episode.
  • Actually I do have one last observation: I am a total dork.

NHL Team Names

I had fun yesterday writing about stupid sports team names, so I’m going to do one more, this time for the NHL. Of course ice hockey requires somewhat different traits or attributes in order to be effective: Power, speed, skating, intimidation, toughness, balance, grace and so forth. But ice hockey also has another element that teams often try to capitalize on with their name which is the “ice” element. Being that it sort of separates the sport from others (like field hockey, lacrosse or even soccer, all of which have similar rules and comparable game mechanics but lack the ice and skating), I’ll give bonus points to team names that effectively incorporate the concept into their monikers.

Good Names

  • New York Rangers – An acceptable name for a team for the same basic reasons as discussed in the baseball dissection: Protection, strength, courage, etc. Why again with the red, white and blue I’m not sure, but colors aren’t the point here, the name is so it gets a pass.
  • Philadelphia Flyers – The name flyers, I presume, means “one who flies.” It conveys motion and speed which works for a hockey team.
  • Pittsburgh Penguins – This one is kind of questionable because I don’t know that penguins on ice are very graceful or fast… from what I’ve seen in nature shows they’re kind of clumsy and waddling. But penguins do slide on their bellies pretty smoothly and they swim like crazy, plus they have that ice connection that just works for a hockey team so I’ll let it (ahem) slide.
  • Boston Bruins – A bruin is basically another name for a brown bear so the team is essentially the Boston Bears. As has been established with the football team, bears are big, strong, imposing and at times quite cunning so it works, plus the alliteration angle is a nice touch.
  • Buffalo Sabres – I almost demoted this name because it annoys me that the team is the “Sabres” and yet they spend most of their time with logos and what not acting like they think their name is the “Buffaloes” since they’re always having buffalo imagery on their uniforms. One of these days maybe a team will play in Buffalo that just calls themselves the Buffalo Buffaloes and get it over with. Still, Sabres is a solid name and even manages to evoke some sense of hockey since the metal rail on a pair of ice skates is called the blade so I can’t fault them for stupid marketing. And even if it makes no sense, buffaloes are pretty decent mascots. (As a side note, this page suggests that the original founders of the team chose Sabres because they specifically wanted to avoid the common Buffalo/bison tie-in, so there’s some irony for you).
  • Carolina Hurricanes – Born from the relocated Hartford Whalers, they are located in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina which certainly sees hurricanes from time to time, so it has a local connection. Hurricanes are powerful storms that can bowl over anything in their path, so as a team name I’d say it’s pretty suitable for hockey or most any other sport I can think of.
  • Florida Panthers – As has been mentioned numerous times in these discussions, powerful carnivores of the animal kingdom are usually good team names. Panthers may not have any remote geographic link to Florida, but they certainly make for a quality team name.
  • Tampa Bay Lightning – According to the MSU page, Tampa Bay is the lightning capital of the world. Wikipedia disputes this and cites this article as evidence that Singapore actually has the most occurrences of lighting strikes per year. Wikipedia does however mention this tidbit: “The United States is home to ‘Lightning Alley,’ a group of states in the American Southeast that collectively see more lightning strikes per year than any other place in the US. The most notable state in Lightning Alley is Florida.” So let’s assume the name is locally appropriate, Lightning in an of itself isn’t such a bad name for a team, being intense, powerful and striking suddenly, without warning. That works for a hockey team so it’s a solid name all around.
  • Nashville Predators – Even if you dispense with the specifics, the general term for all creatures on top of their section of the food chain works quite well as a team name, especially in the NHL.
  • Colorado Avalanche – Originally the Quebec Nordiques (I won’t even bother with that one), they relocated to Denver and named themselves the Avalanche. While the MLB team in the same area went with “Rockies” to questionable effect, Avalanche is a nearly perfect name for an ice hockey team. Not only is it somewhat locally specific (again with the mountains, although I can’t find any specific data about how many avalanches really occur in Colorado on average) but it has the ice connection and an avalanche is certainly an intimidating, powerful force of nature that can absolutely bury you if you get in its path. Sounds fitting to me, even if the team doesn’t always live up to the name.
  • Dallas Stars – Considering that the original team name was the Minnesota North Stars and that Texas is the Lone Star State, it’s one of the best relocation name adjustments I can think of. Not only that but a star, in sports, is generally a predominant or exceptionally talented player so it certainly works to classify the whole team that way right in the name.
  • Los Angeles Kings – Unlike the MLB’s Royals, the LA team makes this work by being specific enough with their royalty to give the impression of power, control and to a certain extent victory. It’s not the best name in this section, but it works well enough.
  • Phoenix Coyotes – Locally specific (Arizona is commonly associated with desert areas and coyotes are likewise associated with the desert even though their habitats are generally much more varied) and a predatory animal at least when in the wild (coyotes are actually very adaptable omnivores who are usually scavengers in urban areas), despite some misconceptions about the animal, the general gist is on track and it works passably.
  • San Jose Sharks – The ice connection is tenuous at best (water/ice) so let’s ignore that, but there are plenty of sharks in the Pacific Ocean and sharks themselves are almost exclusively thought of as sly, dangerous, merciless predators. Local connection and effective imagery equals good name.

Marginal Names

  • New Jersey Devils – Similar to the MLB Angels and Padres or the NFL Saints, using theological concepts as team names strikes me as curious. Identifying yourself with the incarnation of evil seems less than ideal as well. But I suppose a “devil” would be frightening, intimidating and potentially powerful so it’s not a total loss but this one rides the line between marginal and outright bad because, really, does anyone want to root for a devil? Actually, the MSU page says the name comes from a folk legend about a sasquatch-like beast called the “Jersey Devil” thought to roam the Garden State’s Pine Barrens. Still, they use the iconic barbed tail and horns commonly associated with a more hades-based interpretation of the name so the origin may be true, but it has been superseded by marketing or common misinterpretation.
  • Atlanta Thrashers – Originally I thought the name was a very short-sighted use of a not-particularly-popular slang term which usually refers to a beating or an intense action of some kind (“Did you see Muhammad Ali thrash Foeman?”) but in fact the name is a reference to the Georgia state bird, the Brown Thrasher. Birds work pretty good as team names in some cases, but in this case the Brown Thrasher is a shy, rarely-seen bird who mostly hunts for grubs and seeds in piles of dry leaves on the ground. Brown Thrashers are mostly known for their singing which is considered to be quite beautiful, but quality singing voices isn’t much of a trait in hockey. Still, I’ll give them enough slack for locale-specific naming and the ambiguity of the name to keep them out of the Bad Names category.
  • Chicago Blackhawks – The MSU page says:

    Original owner Frederic McLaughlin named the team in honor of the Black Hawk Battalion he served with in WWI. The unit was named after a Chief Black Hawk. The name was merged to ‘Blackhawks’ several years ago.

    Blackhawks certainly sounds like it would be a good name, and the origin sounds pretty inspired, in truth it doesn’t really work since Chief Black Hawk, while a regional historical figure, fought against the United States in the War of 1812 and the subsequent Black Hawk War—which resulted from his refusal to leave his native lands—left most of his men dead and found him taken captive. Still, he was a more or less heroic figure for Native Americans but the use of his anglicized name as a sports team is a bit questionable. While the Blackhawks, as Wikipedia points out, have managed to skirt most of the controversy surrounding Native American-themed sports teams, their logo marks the Indian angle clearly; why couldn’t the logo be of a (literally) black hawk? Hawks would make for a good sports icon and the ambiguity of the name makes it perfectly acceptable to make this transition. Unlike other teams like the Redskins or Indians who would need to manufacture a whole new identity behind a whole new name, the Blackhawks could remain constant but lose any hint of offensiveness. Their lack of willingness to do so (probably based on some moronic sense of tradition) automatically drops them to marginal.

  • Calgary Flames – So originally it was the Atlanta Flames, so named from the fire set by General Sherman that burned Atlanta during the Civil War. Eventually the team moved to Calgary and kept the name. Now, “flames” as an element of fire can be sort of intimidating or at least dangerous but flames and ice hockey… well, let’s just say if you can abstract the team concept to a bunch of individual balls of flame trying to skate around the ice, you can imagine that they’d have a hard time winning very often what with all the melted ice which would likely extinguish any fireballs. So not a downright terrible name, but pretty dumb. MSU says the name is supposed to refer to Alberta’s petroleum industry now that they’ve relocated but there is but the thinnest of threads that can possibly link petroleum to fire (except that petroleum is a fairly decent fuel for flames, which is like saying my team is going to be the San Jose Rockets due to all the technology industries in the area), so no dice.
  • Vancouver Canucks – The MSU site says that they got their name from a Canadian folk hero who was supposedly a great logger and in his spare time played hockey named Johnny Canuck. I guess he was sort of an anti-Uncle Sam. The name is weird because it’s perfectly acceptable for Canadians to refer to themselves as Canucks. However, if used by a non-Canadian it can be seen as derogatory, almost like an ethnic slur. But in general I guess it’s like the New York Yankees which means it isn’t great but it just manages to not be so bad as to land in the Crummy category. What almost puts it over the top is the ridiculous logo they sport these days which is like… I don’t know, some sort of deformed seal being broken in half? Whatever it is, it’s stupid so it’s a good thing we’re judging team names and not logos.

Crummy Names

  • New York Islanders – Ha. Ha. Get it? New York is a bunch of islands. So they’re Islanders. Do you get it? Yeah, me neither.
  • Montreal Canadiens – This name is dumb like the Yankees only more so… kind of like the Houston Texans. The official name is “Le Club de Hockey Canadien” which translates literally into something like “The Canadian Hockey Team” which is just as stupid as the Mets only in French which makes even more annoying. Plus the myriad nicknames fans have come up with are annoying as well. I get that you are limited with your wit when your team name is Canadian Hockey Team but the Habs? It’s short for another French nickname, Les Habitants which was used sort of similarly by early French immigrants to the way early US immigrants used “Settlers” or “Pilgrims.” Originally the team only had players who were French-Canadians, but as anyone might have guessed, that is no longer the case. Regardless, it’s just a mess of a name and so it gets the big thumbs down.
  • Ottawa Senators – I can think of few things that strike fear in the heart less than elected governmental officials. Okay wait, I take that back. But generally speaking, a “Senator” does not evoke imposing visions of anything that might be beneficial in a hockey game, unless red tape suddenly becomes a new slang term for some kind of wicked hockey play. That they were named after an old school team is no excuse, old team names were often idiotic (see yesterday’s post regarding the Pittsburgh Pirates originally being known as the “Innocents”).
  • Toronto Maple Leafs – Okay, I see where they were going here. Maple leaves are region-specific, they’re a national symbol and they help clearly identify the team as Canadian. Fine. But for one thing, it’s spelled wrong. The plural of “Leaf” is “Leaves,” not “Leafs,” so deduct points there. Also, what’s so special in hockey terms about a leaf? Oh yeah, now I remember: Nothing. The MSU site says this about the team name:

    Two possible reasons: (1) Then owner Conn Smythe drew inspiration from an old Toronto team called the East Maple Leaves; (2) when Conn Smythe bought the Toronto St. Patricks, his first act was to rename the team after the Maple Leaf Regiment of the First World War, as well as for the maple leaf on the Canadian flag. Originally, the team was known as the Arenas, then renamed St. Patricks, supposedly to attract the Irish.

    Interesting, but being named after an army regiment only works if the army regiment had an imposing name to begin with. Which they didn’t.

  • Washington Capitals – See, Washington is the capital of the US, right? So they’re Capitals. Except a “Capital” doesn’t apply to a person or a team and a city or town that is the official seat of government has no connotations that are useful in hockey whatsoever. Possibly even worse than Senators in terms of team names.
  • Columbus Blue Jackets – Read this account of the Blue Jackets’ team name origin and I challenge you to come up with a rational reason why any of that should have resulted in such an insipid name as the “Blue Jackets.” A play on the insect yellowjackets? Because the team owner wanted the name to contain a reference to the color blue? Maybe as a reference to northern soldiers in the Civil War (incidentally, referencing the Civil War in any sport where teams exist from both northern and southern states is generally the stupidest thing you could possibly do when naming a team)? Whatever the reason, the name is horrible.
  • Detroit Red Wings – Supposedly named as an homage to another team, the Montreal Winged Wheelers and found to be suitable for Motor City, the end result doesn’t quite work. I grant that this name could easily be marginal instead of crummy because wings suggest flight and speed but how a specifically colored wing by itself is of any sort of value in hockey (or anywhere else for that matter) is not clear and therefore the name is, in my estimation, not good.
  • St. Louis Blues – Supposedly named after the W. C. Handy song of the same name, it works on a local level and as a clever re-use of the song name, but as a hockey team name? Blues is just as bad as Reds if referring to the color, and given that the Blues use a musical note in their logo, I guess they’re going for the musical style connotation instead. But this is just as bad because there is nothing about Blues music that would be hockey-related. Except as what their fans sing when they play like they have for the last couple of years. Oh! Snap! I went there! Okay, I’m done, and so is this name.
  • Edmonton Oilers – Named as a reflection of the importance of the oil industry in the area, the problem with the name is that an “Oiler,” whom I suppose is one who extracts or mines or otherwise deals with oil, is in no way shape or form fitting as a parallel or even an associate for a hockey player. Locally specific but contextually stupid.
  • Minnesota Wild – I admit that the name “Wild” isn’t as terrible as, say, the Blue Jackets. But still, it’s an adjective masquerading as a noun which bugs me and the Wild don’t even really act like their name should be the Wild because their uniforms, logo and marketing efforts seem to be more akin to the Minnesota Wildcats. Which would have been a perfectly acceptable team name. Instead they went with Wild and their team name sucks. What can you do?
  • Anaheim Ducks – I thought long and hard about this one because on one hand, there is nothing inherently graceful, fast, intimidating or tough about a duck. There is also, as far as I know, no special connection between Anaheim and ducks. But I understand where the name came from, because the team was originally owned by Disney who put out a movie called “The Mighty Ducks” about a junior hockey team and they also produced an animated series featuring hockey playing ducks who were I guess also superheroes. It was a product tie-in but when the Disney connection faded, the name didn’t work so they simply dropped the “Mighty” and became the Ducks. But, again, Ducks is a lousy hockey team name and I haven’t given other teams slack for their intentions so it’s officially a crummy name.

Of course you’re always free to disagree and offer your own opinions. The comments section is open.

MLB Team Names

My dad wrote a very funny piece about the appropriateness NFL team names. I thought I’d take the concept and run with it and examine baseball team names.

Basically the premise here is that team names should either be something that evokes a sense of something beneficial to the game being played (in the case of baseball: Speed, power, teamwork, cunning, heroism, etc) or it should be something specific to the home locale of the franchise so long as that evocation isn’t of something counter to those attributes that are beneficial. The Raleigh Sloths wouldn’t work, for example, even if Raleigh happened to have a lot of Sloths around because Sloths would be really pathetic at baseball.

Just ask Barry Bonds.

Anyway, here goes:

Good Names
  • Baltimore Orioles – I’m not sure if there are a lot of orioles in the Baltimore area, my online research yielded little fruit, but orioles are fast, clever birds according to several sites so it works for the game. It would be a bad football or hockey name, but baseball is more forgiving of wussier animal mascots than other sports, being physical but also quite cerebral as well.
  • Tampa Bay Devil Rays – The name is both relatively strong sounding as well as being a nickname for Manta Rays which work from the locale angle in Tampa Bay. Plus Manta Rays are fast swimmers, capable of impressive physical feats such as leaping high out of the water and sort of sailing for relatively long distances.
  • Toronto Blue Jays – Like the Orioles, this works from a speed angle (although I don’t know that Blue Jays are particularly clever, judging by the number of cat-kills I see around our apartment complex) and I’ll give Toronto the benefit of the doubt that they actually have a significant number of Jays locally.
  • Detroit Tigers – According to FactMonster.com they weren’t named after the jungle cat but instead named after another sports team, the Princeton Tigers football team based on the similarity of their socks. A stupid origin perhaps, but the adoption of a feral carnivore as a team moniker works for me and anyone else who wouldn’t think to look up how the Tigers got their name so it’s good.
  • Texas Rangers – Rangers are supposed to be protectors, soldiers or roaming guardians and the name has been adopted by lots of people to evoke these kinds of feelings of power, confidence, cleverness and capability. I don’t know that the patriotic uniforms of the Rangers really match their moniker, but the name works okay. If it was me they’d have camouflage uniforms.
  • Atlanta Braves – Their name actually refers to Native Americans (as evidenced by the tomahawk on their logo) but it is similar to using the term “Warriors” since that is what is meant by the term “Indian Braves” and while perhaps antiquated, it isn’t particularly offensive or inappropriate for the sport. Plus the name could always be changed to refer to the team as a group of people possessing the quality of bravery which is less as effective as a baseball name (courage in baseball is probably not the most useful trait although some memorable performances such as Kirk Gibson’s gimpy walk-off homer in the 1988 World Series could be classified as courageous or brave). In the end it’s a bit borderline, but we’ll leave it as a good name.
  • Florida Marlins – Regionally specific, Marlins are known to fishermen as putting up a heck of a fight which is a pretty good comparison to make to a baseball team so it works quite well.
  • Pittsburgh PiratesFactmonster says that the Pirates were originally called The Innocents (a terrible team name) until they signed a player away from the Philadelphia Athletics and that team’s fans started calling Pittsburgh’s team “pirates” as a slam to the way they had obtained a popular player from them. Eventually the name came to be more literal and Pirates suggest craftiness, stealing (such as bases) and terrorizing foes so it works out in the end.
  • St. Louis Cardinals – Missouri has a lot of Cardinals, they are fast and the name works from a local angle and as a strong symbol of the team. Good name.
  • Seattle Mariners – This one almost didn’t make it to this category because while Seattle, as a major port, certainly can claim local association with mariners, I’m not sure what sailors have to bring to baseball. Except I’ve seen the Deadliest Catch so I know that sailors are tough sons of guns and generally fearless which are pretty good traits for a baseball player. A close call but I’ll give it to them, as long as they agree to stop calling themselves the “M’s” which is just sad.
  • Arizona Diamondbacks – Another good locally-specific name with plenty of dangerous and ferocious connotations that work well as a team name.
  • Colorado Rockies – I debated this one for a long time because while certainly the Rocky Mountains are regionally applicable for a team based in Colorado, naming your team after a mountain range is sort of a cop-out. Still, the Rockies (the mountains) are majestic, imposing, unforgiving, and typically symbols of steadfastness. So in a kind of pseudo symbolic way it works.
  • San Francisco Giants – The name Giants suggest size, strength and intimidation, which works fine for a baseball (or any other sport, for the most part) team name. Not locally specific, but that’s good since the team is a transplant from New York.
Marginal or Questionable Names
  • New York Yankees – Similar to the Vancouver Canucks, naming a team based off of a nickname for a country’s people is somewhat dicey. I suppose it could be argued that the name is regional since Yankee often refers to a northeastern citizen of the United States and New York is certainly in that region and it could also be argued that it is a patriotic name which invokes images of the best qualities of the American spirit. Those arguments would be weak, but you could make them.
  • Kansas City Royals – I guess suggesting nobility can be inspiring for a sports team, but royalty really has little to do with athletic prowess and has absolutely nothing to do with Kansas City. Except that the name actually came from the American Royal Livestock Show held in Kansas City every year since 1899, according to Wikipedia. Naming a team after a livestock show is kind of dubious but it is locally specific so it sits right on the fence between really lame and just mostly lame. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt for now.
  • Minnesota Twins – Locally specific is fine, such as with the Twins who are named after the Twin Cities (St. Paul and Minneapolis) but Twins aren’t any better at baseball than anyone else so the end result, while well intentioned, is less than stellar.
  • Chicago Cubs – Why cubs? Like my dad says, naming a team after a younger version of an animal that would be a much better team name (in this case the Bears, which works fine for the football team so why not the baseball team?) is pretty silly. Still, animal names and alliterations are better than some of the junk in the next section so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt here, a little.
  • Houston Astros – The team based out of Houston was originally called the Colt 45s, which being an intimidating firearm is a pretty decent name. Then NASA set up shop in Houston and in 1965 the team was renamed to honor that (probably due to the popularity of the space program at the time). The problem is that “Astro” isn’t really a noun, it’s more of an adjective unless you’re talking about the dog on The Jetsons, which I don’t think we should. At least the spirit of the team name which evokes concepts of speed, progress, intelligence and so on is in the right place, but the end result is only so-so.
  • Milwaukee Brewers – Certainly locally-specific since Milwaukee is home to numerous beer breweries, I’m not convinced that (unlike the Steelers or Packers from football) a brewer suggests any quality that would be useful to a baseball player. Patience maybe? I dunno, although it may be salvaged somewhat due to the common correlation between baseball and beer, at least from a fan’s perspective.
  • Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim – Never mind the stupid city madness in the team name, Angels is questionable because it’s hard to imagine how an Angel would suggest anything terrestrial which might be an asset to a baseball team. But Angels refers to the English translation of “Los Angeles” (City of the Angels) which makes it locally appropriate (if not factually appropriate) and I suppose—at least if you believe some cut rate Disney movie—a team of Angels would be pretty tough to beat. It still seems kind of iffy to me though.
Actively Ridiculous or Stupid Names
  • Boston Red Sox – What does a colored sock have to do with anything? That’s like calling the Rangers the Blue Hats. Wow, a team named after a portion of their uniform. How… idiotic. That they also spelled “socks” wrong counts against them and that it is a shortened version of the double-whammy stupid and awkward “Red Stockings” just makes it worse.
  • New York Mets – The name is short for the official name which is “New York Metropolitan Baseball Club, Inc.” The official name is patently lame and uninspired and the shortened version is therefore nonsensical.
  • Philadelphia Phillies – The team was named as an homage to their home city which is passively stupid since everyone knows that the city names are almost always included when referring to a sports team. This is necessary to remove any ambiguity with other sports teams. If I say “The Giants sure suck this year” I could be referring to at least two major sports teams and probably a host of collegiate and amatuer-level teams. If I say, “The San Francisco Giants sure suck this year,” which almost everybody would say in most cases, my meaning is clear. Therefore the homage angle is not well thought out and since there is, to my knowledge, no such actual thing as a “Philly” (note that a female horse who has not yet reached sexual maturity is a Filly and in no way a fitting baseball team name unless your team is populated with young girls who have a strong interest in My Little Pony), that means the name fails on all levels.
  • Washington Nationals – Stupid for the same reason as “Yankees” except even more so because no one that I’ve ever heard refers to an actual person as a “National” unless they preface it with a foreign country (such as “Chinese National”) and a team full of “Washington Nationals” when Washington isn’t a country strikes fear in the heart of… no one, really.
  • Chicago White Sox – Moronic for the exact same reasons as the Red Sox, all the way down to the unnecessary misspelling.
  • Cleveland Indians – The name itself is a little uncomfortable to begin with. Unlike “Braves,” Indians is not only not really the preferred term any longer but an Indian in an of itself shouldn’t necessarily confer any of the attributes a baseball team strives for. Then you throw in the team logo which is a miserable caricature of a Native American somewhat akin to the old cartoons and their exaggerated portrayals of African Americans (which would be absolutely unacceptable in modern times, by the way) and it starts to get really uncomfortable. Then you find out that Cleveland’s team name was originally the Spiders (not altogether a bad name for a baseball team) but they were the first to sign a Native American player in Louis Francis Sockalexis so racist fans began referring to the team—disparagingly—as the Indians. After Sockalexis left the league and eventually passed away, the team name was officially changed as an “homage” which, considering that the name was meant to be insulting in the first place, is questionable at best. At this point, it’s almost as bad as the NFL’s Redskins.
  • Cincinnati Reds – The actual name was originally the Cincinnati Red Stockings which automatically moves it down here based on the previous rants regarding the Red and White Sox. Items of clothing don’t make good sports team names, period. But when the Reds joined the National League, they dropped the Stockings and were just the Reds, which is also stupid since colors aren’t better names than clothing items. That Reds is also a derogatory term for communists, it just gets worse. Also? The Reds’ logo is among the worst ever, probably stemming from the fact that their name was ludicrous to begin with.
  • Oakland Athletics – The common nickname, “The A’s” is pretty dumb but not nearly as dumb as “Athletics” which generally doesn’t even refer to a person (who ever said, “That guy is an athletic!”) because it’s an adjective. Team names that are adjectives are inherently stupid and even though Athleticism is good from a baseball standpoint, there has to be something that possesses that trait for it to work.
  • Los Angeles Dodgers – Originally the team was the Brooklyn Dodgers and were originally known as the Trolley Dodgers which Wikipedia says was “a reference to Brooklyn pedestrians who “dodged” the trollies that ran over the maze of streetcar lines that criss-crossed Brooklyn.” So locally specific but still pretty dumb for a baseball team, but made completely worthless when the team moved to LA where they don’t have trolleys and are just known as the Dodgers which suggest that they typically dodge stuff. Since in baseball dodging anything except a wild pitch will usually result in an out or an error, it’s a dumb name for a dumb team. And yes, I did find glee in putting them here because I am a Giants fan.
  • San Diego Padres – Perhaps locally specific for the number of Spanish missionaries who historically populated the area, this takes the Anaheim Angels concept to a whole new level of ridiculousness and is in no way a fitting baseball team name.

I think the end result is that baseball has a lot more really bad names than football.

Moron-a-Thon

A couple of weeks ago I was getting frustrated with my TiVo constantly being out of available space. I have a fairly low capacity 40-hour Series 2 which, when combined with the horribly poor reception I receive from the non-boxed cable signal that requires me to record pretty much everything on one of the highest quality settings (thus taking up more space), often leads to issues where things don’t get recorded not due to scheduling conflicts but lack of available disk space.

After a particularly frustrating couple of days earlier this month during which I had this happen to me several times, I went through and fiddled with my Season Passes to try and help the problem. One of my solutions was that I trimmed the “Keep at Most” option of several high-profile SPs (shows I watch pretty much right after they air or at least no more than a day later) down to “1.” My thought process was, “I’ll always watch and clear these shows out, so why keep them around?”

Well, here’s why: Nik and I both watch Lost. But Lost comes on at 9:00 PT and I never start watching a one-hour show any earlier than twenty minutes after it has begun airing. The reason is that after twenty minutes you can usually skip through all the commercials because you’ve built a sufficient buffer and by the end of the show you’ve only just caught up to the live broadcast. But 9:20 is pretty close to when Nik heads off to bed. Being a more night-owl type (or just being more content to zombie-walk through my day) I don’t mind staying up until after ten or even after eleven. But Lost night is kind of tricky because I work in an office full of Lost fans. If I don’t watch the show the night it airs the inconsiderate TiVo-less hacks that work there will spoil the whole episode with their water cooler chatter before I even have a chance to watch it.

So this season we’ve been splitting the views up; I watch the show Wednesday night and then sometime during the next week Nik sits down to catch up and I re-watch it with her (because Lost usually is good for at least two viewings).

Well, last week the episode (“Further Instructions”) was pretty weak. When I griped about it, Nik faltered on wanting to watch it and in the end never got around to firing it up (actually, getting her to watch any sort of TV, including rented DVDs, has been something of a chore lately since she’s clearly addicted to playing Ticket to Ride online). But I forgot that I had changed all my Season Passes so I didn’t think to delete the previous episode before this week’s began. When I snapped on the set around 9:30 to start watching, I was confused that Lost wasn’t being picked up. It took me a few minutes to piece together what had happened and by the time I did I ended up with only the last twenty minutes of the show recorded.

I was pretty annoyed but I figured that it wasn’t a huge deal because abc.com makes a big to-do out of offering episodes of their shows online. Yeah, that may be theoretically true but the actual execution of those online episodes leaves something to be desired. I tried four different times with three different browsers on two computers to try and watch the whole show on ABC’s website. I only ever got the first fifteen minutes in before it would restart from the beginning or just stop playing and refuse to ever start again. After copious frustration I ended up settling for those first fifteen minutes and then the last twenty I had caught on TiVo and tried my best to piece together what happened in between.

Nik and I decided we would download the episode from iTunes Music Store later this week to watch the whole thing together but I don’t know that I can properly describe the level of frustration I was feeling yesterday.

And that was before I watched the Sharks game.

I Hope He Got a Big Bribe

I’ll give the Nashville Predators one thing: Their forecheck was phenomenal last night and the Sharks didn’t seem to puzzle out what was being done to them all night, even when they were pressing in the Nashville zone. It was clear from the sidelines that the Preds struggled in their own zone and knew it so they were going to do everything they could to keep it out of their zone as much as possible. Checking the boxscore, you might think that plan simply worked.

But you would be overlooking the one other part to the Predators’ plan which was obviously to grease the officials’ pockets with fat wads of cash to ensure that the Sharks lost, no matter how unfair it was.

I’m sure I’ll be accused of seeing the game through teal-colored glasses but I challenge anyone to watch the full game and not feel like the Sharks were the victims of bad call after bad call as well as having blatant, dangerous plays made against them in full view of some ref and there was no whistle to be heard. I think even Nashville fans should worry about the officiating in that game because if the Preds think they can play that way and get away with it every night, eventually they are going to jack someone up badly and have one of their players end up suspended or fined or put on a five minute major penalty.

I’ll go ahead and ignore the first boarding call that was blatantly overlooked late in the first period. Whatever. The guy wasn’t hurt and as much as I griped about it at the time, I would find out soon enough that it could get much, much worse. Third period comes and Toskala is whacked by several late coming after-the-whistle Predators. A minor melee ensues in which offsetting minors give the teams some 4-on-4 time. Questionable maybe but one could shrug it off. Then a few minutes later Toskala moves behind the net to play a puck and is promptly boarded by a forechecking Nashville player.

Was he really boarded? You better believe it. His face was to the wall, he was playing the puck and the Predators player hit him square in the numbers and tossed him in the boards. It wasn’t incidental contact, it wasn’t the result of some defender pushing him awkwardly: He flat-out checked the goalie and did so in a very dangerous way with the referee standing no more than five feet away.

No. Call.

Actually, there was a call on the Sharks defender following up on the play who put his stick down on the Predators player and got called for cross-checking. Cross checking. I’ve seen superstar goalies get goaltender interference calls for accidentally tripping them up behind the net by spraying ice on their pads, but Toskala gets full on checked in the back toward the boards where he could have easily been injured in full view of the ref and there’s a call on the Sharks? Absolutely unbelievable. And what makes it really suspect is that this happened right at the end of the game with the Sharks down by one and pretty much in full press on Nashville and threatening to score.

Maybe I’ve been watching too many online conspiracy theory videos lately, but I’m just saying that seemed like the worst possible call at the worst possible time.

But my suspicions would amount to nothing if the Sharks had been ahead or tied at the time. And the fact is, they were, only the scoreboard didn’t reflect it because the referee straight up stole a goal from the Sharks. It went down like this: The Sharks rush Tomas Vokoun who stacks the pad and goes down. A Sharks forward crashes into him and the puck rebounds clear and is stuffed home by the trailing Sharks player. The goal light goes on, the Sharks start to celebrate… and then the ref skates up with speed flinging his arms wildly in the “no goal” motion. No goal? What play was that guy watching? Even if he lost sight of the puck, he was in a bad location to see it and certainly shouldn’t have whistled it down that quickly.

So they checked the tape. Clearly a goal. Then they decided the call must have been that the whistle blew before the second Sharks player actually buried it in the net. So they play it real-time with on-ice audio. And the puck sails into the net a full three seconds before any whistle is heard, even from the bribed mistaken referee.

At this point the Sharks fall prey to my biggest pet peeve in all of sports: The non-reviewable call.

Okay so let’s assume for a moment that you aren’t one of those technophobes who think that instant replay doesn’t belong in sports. What is the rationale for including instant replay review in a sporting contest? To get the call right. I mean, why else? The assumption there is that the officials are fallible humans who don’t always have the benefit of watching plays from various angles and in anything slower than real-time (which in a game like hockey is pretty fast). So you offer them an “out” by allowing calls to be corrected based on video evidence.

Now I understand that certain plays or calls don’t work from a review standpoint. For example, if a player fumbles a ball in football but the play is called dead by an official which stops the progression of both teams, it’s hard to fix that because the teams should have had the opportunity to try and recover the ball and make a play with it. Overturning a call on a play whose result can’t be re-created simply won’t work.

But in this case we’re talking about a goal. A goal. This is a binary play: Either it was a legitimate goal, or it was not. A referee can’t say “I meant to blow the whistle earlier” any more than a player can say, “I didn’t mean to sock that guy in the head during his breakaway.” Intention doesn’t matter. In this case the on-ice call was no goal but so what? We reviewed the play and the no-goal call was flat incorrect. But it’s not like something happened that couldn’t be re-created. It’s easy, you called it no goal but you were wrong because the video replay shows that it was a goal so you overturn the on-ice call to “goal” and give the Sharks the point they deserve and swallow your pride.

Although I’m sure it’s easier to stand your ground with all the money in your pockets weighing you down.

A Slew of Screeds

Today’s agenda will be dealing with Heroes, T-Shirts, San Jose Sharks, San Francisco and TiVo. Also if you visit GameSpot or subscribe to the RSS feed, my video game-specific blog has a post regarding the New Super Mario Bros. game for DS. You may have noticed that I put an RSS feed thing over in the right column for the GameSpot blog (titled “A Gamer Darkly” for no real particular reason) which may not be all that useful but does at least provide an updated link to the latest posts made over there.

The Hero Lies In You

Someone on the TiVo web forum mentioned in the discussion of last night’s episode of Heroes that so far the Heroes aren’t really acting very… heroic. This is a fair criticism for a show called “Heroes” but I think one of the themes the show is very effectively dealing with is that just because someone is born extraordinary doesn’t mean they’re born with an understanding of how to cope with that. Many of the characters on the show are either in denial about their abilities or not convinced that they aren’t just plain crazy rather than remarkable.

Another complaint I’ve heard a lot was regarding Hiro’s ability to communicate with Nathan in the diner in this week’s “Hiros” episode. I’m not quite sure I understand that gripe since in a previous episode (in which Hiro travelled to the future) he was able to more or less communicate with everyone until the conversation got so specific and law-enforcement related (which is almost a subset of English in itself) that Hiro realized he may not be fully comprehending what was being said and wanted his English-fluent friend to talk to the officials to make sure he didn’t get himself into more hot water than he was already in.

It’s not unreasonable for a Japanese guy to understand basic English (probably at about a third or fourth grade level speaking-wise) and he seems to have a decent grasp for reading it (based on his familiarity with American comic books and television) so his ability to have a fairly simple conversation about a topic he is familiar with in English terms makes total sense to me. As a few people pointed out also, there’s no better way to crash-course language than through immersion and he’s certainly been immersed in English-speaking environments for several days now. I didn’t find it at all unusual for him to speak to Nathan.

Some people have wondered what is so special about Claire that she warrants the “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World” mantra. My personal theory is that Peter is the key to stopping the bomb, but he needs the powers of the others in order to do so and specifically, he needs Claire’s ability to regenerate to keep him alive long enough to pull off his world-saving gambit. But that’s just speculation.

One interesting question that I haven’t been able to determine from the information presented so far is whether Isaac’s future-reading powers are triggered or in any way related to his heroin use or if that is simply a mechanism he’s instituted for himself to cope with the ability. I would guess based on the fact that Peter can use the power when in his presence without any drugs (and Isaac wasn’t high at the time either) that the heroin-power connection is all in Isaac’s mind.

Here’s something else that’s interesting: Most supernatural comic book characters (i.e., those that aren’t just heroic humans like Batman) have a hefty amount of combat-readiness to their powers. Consider that Spider-Man has exceptional strength and agility (certainly an asset in a fight); Storm can control the weather such that she can send bolts of lightning at foes; Cyclops is practically all combat with his laser-eyes and so on. But most of the characters in Heroes actually don’t have a lot of combat ability: Isaac’s future-seeing (at least in its current incarnation) wouldn’t help much in a fight; Matt’s mind-reading is certainly useful but not really combat-ready; Peter’s power absorption isn’t intrinsically combat-ready unless he was fighting someone who’s powers were combat-oriented; even Nathan’s flight ability is helpful but aside from the apparent speed he has, he hasn’t shown any hint of being capable of handling more pain or taking more punishment than anyone else which means that while he could speed-fly fist-first into a foe, he would probably hurt himself as much as whomever he was fighting. In fact, only Niki (whose powers are still vague at best but who may be super-strong based on the fact that she probably weighs about 110 lbs. and she cut a guy in half), Hiro and Claire are likely to be of any real use in a fight and even then, Claire would survive the fight for a long time, but her ability to win such a combat (except by attrition) is questionable.

Shirts Shaped Like Tees

So I ordered some shirts off of Threadless.com yesterday because they were having a sweet sale where most of the shirts were only $10. The site is pretty cool in that it allows people to upload T-shirt designs which get voted on by the site users and the most popular designs actually get made and put up for sale.

I have a strong dislike for clothing that turns me into a walking billboard which is why most of the clothes I wear are either plain or feature something I like such as a band. I guess band shirts make you into a walking ad for that particular group, but somehow that works for me since it’s something I actually endorse versus wearing a Nike shirt or something that very obviously came from Wal-Mart or whatever.

In this case many of the designs are clever but avoid being at all ad-like, which means I don’t feel quite as boring as wearing one of my (literally) six plain black shirts but I don’t have to worry about my soul.

Plus, $10 each. How can you go wrong?

Powerhouse?

I was reading an article on ESPN.com about the Red Wings’ fall to mediocrity and in the article columnist Damien Cox uses the adjective “powerhouse” to describe the Sharks.

That was kind of nice to read.

Of course the Sharks are obviously not invincible. While I’m certainly happy with the start to the season 7-2-0, and it is definitely a plus that three of those seven wins have been shutouts in the Sharks favor, those two losses were kind of ugly. One was the really bizarre game versus the Edmonton Oilers in which there were two natural hat tricks (one by Cheechoo to put the Sharks up 4-1 and then one by Ryan Smyth which ended up putting the Oilers ahead). That game could be written off just because of the strangeness of it all but the 4-1 loss to the Minnesota Wild was pretty sad considering the Sharks out shot the Wild 32 to 18 and the Wild beat Nabokov four times while Manny Fernandez only missed one of the barrage.

I certainly understand that the Sharks can’t be expected to win every game and I don’t mind giving up the occasional 6-4 insanity game or even a 3-2 nailbiter that goes down to the last five minutes of the third period. But I certainly don’t want to the see the Sharks out there in a futile effort through two periods and only score once just to keep themselves off the shutout. The tough thing about the Sharks being a “powerhouse” is that it’s hard not to watch them play and expect them to win pretty much every game.

The big test comes tonight when the Sharks play in Detroit, a road venue they have practically never emerged from victorious during the regular season. They handled the Red Wings soundly the other night in San Jose but if they can show the same poise and ability in Detroit, that will be quite a statement to Sharks fans.

One other thing I was thinking about which stemmed from my recent visit to the Tank for the Dallas game is that the HP Pavillion needs to do a bit of upgrading. For one thing they need those arena-spanning HD screens between decks. They installed them at AT&T park in San Francisco and I noticed that several of the road games the Sharks have played have been in stadiums with those wraparound screens. They look nice because for one the quality is phenomenal which means you can put player photos and stuff on there and they actually look like someone you might recognize (versus the aging JumboTron technology which still looks like staring at a newspaper print way too closely to my eyes) but also because they wrap around the whole stadium you can get some nice graphical effects going with bright, vibrant colors that really help with the atmosphere. Plus, I thought the Sharks were supposed to be this very technology-friendly team and they have these embarrassingly antique Lite Brite-looking signs. So lame.

Fog City

Nik and I spent some time in San Francisco this weekend, belatedly celebrating our seventh wedding anniversary. We would have celebrated closer to the actual date but I was afflicted with my hades-spawned flu which was not very romantic, to say the least.

Anyway we mostly just hung out and wandered around the touristy areas like Pier 39, which we’ve both done about a thousand times before but the point wasn’t what we were doing but who we were doing it with. Eventually we wandered down the waterfront so we could eat at Joe’s Crab Shack which is a sort of tacky little place that has some really tasty food and, of course, copious options for crab lovers.

I recently was able to turn Nikki on to the joy of crab and she’s been near-insatiable ever since. I think her 1 lb. fresh dungeness crab order may have cured her for the time being but she certainly seemed to enjoy her meal. We stayed there for quite a while, talking and eating and watching the Bushman across the street.

If you’ve never been to San Francisco you probably aren’t familiar with the extraordinary number of street performers that crowd the touristy locations around the city. Street performers are a kind of unique beast in that they are simultaneously fascinating and yet annoying. Some of them are actually remarkably talented: Musicians, performance artists, etc. But at the same time they are only a slight step above your average panhandler which there are far too many of in SF anyway.

Still, all that is forgiven in the case of the Bushman.

The Bushman is a street performer whose schtick is pure genius in its cleverness. Basically he gathers up a bunch of random tree branches; medium-sized ones, obviously never anything that requires a large amount of effort to obtain. He gathers two fistfuls of these branches and squats on a little stool or empty bucket, clutching the branches in front of him so he is basically hidden from one side of the sidewalk. He does this right on a regular sidewalk so to careful observers he basically sticks out like a sore thumb. But most people aren’t that observant so if they’re coming toward the “bush” they will probably dismiss it as nothing spectacular and continue on their way.

When they get close, Bushman drops the branches just a bit a scares the heck out of the passerby.

The good thing is that he doesn’t go out of his way for the huge scare. That would probably be a little mean. And part of the joke is that once you’ve been burned, you realize how silly it was to not notice a random bush in the middle of the sidewalk.

The best part (and where Bushman makes his money) is being in on the joke as an observer. Bushman is pretty good about understanding when to try his scare (too often and people would see it happen up ahead and be prepared, too infrequent and the constantly gathered crowd would get bored and drift away). A few folks with good senses of humor will tip Bushman after falling for his trap, amusingly it is often the boyfriend or husband of the startled woman (girls react far more entertainingly than most guys) who drops some cash for the laugh. But mostly the Bushman hits up the crowds of laughing onlookers for tips.

Sitting up in Joe’s Crab Shack (right across from Bushman’s favorite haunt), you can observe his prowess without being prone to his requests for donations. It’s a good time. And the crab ain’t bad, either.

TiVo is Hurting Itself

Much has been made of the demise of TiVo. Granted, they have and will continue to have a hard time competing with cable-company and satellite TV company offerings, despite the constant complaints about those knock-off interfaces and feature sets being sub-par. Users will put up with a lot of crud for the sake of convenience.

But there are things that TiVo could do to help itself, and it seems to me that they aren’t doing them.

For one thing, they move slow. I would expect the behemoth cable companies to be playing catch-up to TiVo, but I haven’t seen that to be the case. How long did it take TiVo to get a unit out that could record HD? And when it did come out, they priced it at an insane $800 MSRP. Whew.

And don’t even get me started on Mac support for the TiVo2Go software/feature. After “working hard” on the issue for like two years, we get this back in January and then nothing for nine months. Look, it takes less time to fabricate a human being than it’s taken to even see a beta of this product. Come on.

What really frustrates me is the simple things. TiVo’s features should be fairly easily updatable and yet there are so few service upgrades getting pushed out to users it’s kind of criminal. Take a look at this list of requested enhancements. Most of those are very reasonable requests, especially stuff like complete boolean capabilities for Wish Lists. I can’t tell you how badly I want to have my “49ERS” season pass not pick up junk like “49ers Preview Show” and “49ers Total Access” and “49ers Playbook.” I want the game, not the rest of the junk. But 49ers games show up on a title search as the generic “NFL Football” so I can’t just get a Season Pass to that or I’d get the stupid Jets vs. Dolphins games and stuff, probably at the expense of Niners games or at the very least at the expense of something else I’d rather watch. If I could say “Title = ‘NFL Football’ AND Description CONTAINS (‘San Francisco’ OR ’49ERS’)” I would be golden.

This has been a problem since the Series1 TiVos, so what’s the holdup? In the meantime I end up juggling my Season Pass list constantly, trying to find a happy medium. For example, I want Sharks games almost all the time. But sometimes it depends on when the game starts and what else is playing. I can put it below something like Lost or Heroes and know that the Sharks game will always be pre-empted for those shows, but what frustrates me is that if the Sharks game starts at 5:30 and a show I don’t want to miss will start at 8:00, I’d rather have the first two and a half hours of the game and then switch over to the show. I thought that was what the clipping feature was supposed to do but unless I’m doing something wrong it doesn’t work like that.

At the time it hardly matters, I’d rather have my TiVo than not and I don’t really qualify (what with our freakish cable situation) for any other options. But eventually we’ll move out of this apartment and when Comcast comes knocking on my door offering me a $9.99 additional fee for dual-tuner DVR functionality with a higher capacity than I have now my loyalty to TiVo is going to be tested because I just don’t feel like TiVo is working hard enough to keep me loyal.

So what do you say, TiVo? How ’bout you step it up and keep a once-happy customer?

Want to Catch You Awake

A few thoughts:

  • I mentioned yesterday that NBC would be re-airing all the non-Pilot episodes of Heroes in case you missed them. That’s happening Sunday, October 22 or this coming Sunday evening at 8/7c.
  • I’ve had a chance to play with the iPod adapter interface for the new head unit on Nikki’s car stereo. I have to say, this is the way to listen to an iPod in a car. It sure beats the heck out of the clunky cassette adapter interfaces and FM transmitters. Very much the way to go as far as that kind of thing is concerned.
  • This is sweet as those LightScribe devices are something I’ve been interested in for a while now. Nik and I have been burning a lot of CDs lately since I’m much more comfortable having a CD folder crammed full of 100 burned disc copies than I am having 100 of my $15 CDs sitting around in a car and it’s nice to be able to make minor adjustments to certain discs (leaving off songs you don’t care for, etc).
  • Of course with the Sirius radio and iPod connection, CDs seem a bit less useful than they may have been previously. The one instance where they are useful is with specific mixes because both Nikki’s Nano and even my 20GB iPod are too small to hold our entire collection so we have to update via playlist which prohibits having multiple playlists on the iPod itself (which is not a limitation when your iTunes Library is smaller than the capacity of the iPod). I haven’t really paid close attention to the latest iPod models but it looks like I could get an 80GB model for about what I paid for my 20GB 4G. Unfortunately as is fairly common with Apple their options aren’t really ideal for what I’m looking for. 80GB is excessive, but 30GB is a bit too small (my Library is running around 26GB at the moment) and the price differential between the two is kind of baffling. $249 for the 30GB and $349 for the 80GB? Especially when the 8GB Nano is also $249? Huh? In my mind the pricing would be $79/1GB Shuffle; $99/2GB Nano; $149/4GB Nano; $199/8GB Nano; $249/30GB; $299/50GB (what I would consider, if it existed); $349/80GB. That leaves the bottom and top end models at exactly the same price and doesn’t have any crossover from one model or price point to the next. It does make the jump from Nano to regular iPod pretty hefty in terms of price-per-gig but at least it makes more sense than offering 8GB and 30GB for the exact same price. Good grief.
  • While I was sick I watched a lot of ESPN because it is a heck of a lot more interesting in the middle of the day than any other channel. What drives me nuts about ESPN is their obvious sports bias: This is ostensibly a channel devoted to 24/7 coverage of the world of sports and yet they run about seven and a half hours of repeats per day, of which the breakdown by sport is something like 75% NFL, 15% MLB, 5% NBA, 3% NASCAR, 2% Golf and the remaining 1% being split equally among the NHL and any other sport they can come up with which happens to have a “newsworthy” highlight that particular day, including horse racing, ping pong, professional bowling, poker and that Scottish sport where they throw the telephone pole straight up in the air in an attempt to… uh, not get conked on the head by it when it inevitably lands and tips directly back toward the tosser as though he were some sort of cartoon lumberjack. I fully understand that part of the problem is the American sports audience who would rather watch NFL press conferences than see potentially exciting Soccer highlights or definitely exciting hockey recaps but to a certain extent I wonder exactly how much analysis people are really clamoring for at the expense of decent sports news. Especially when they seem to struggle as Sunday fades and it gets to be Wednesday, Thursday, etc to come up with new stuff to talk about. Football teams only play once per week so there’s really only so much to say. At some point the news itself starts to create stories just to have something to talk about (“T.O. brushes his teeth left handed and Parcells tells him he’s jeopardizing the team’s unity!”) which is something that simply wouldn’t stand in any other type of journalism. I just wonder if it would really be so bad for ESPN to go ahead and do nothing but highlights and cover all kinds of sports from all over the world. I certainly wouldn’t mind being kept aprised of the English Soccer leagues (or, heaven forbid, the MLS) and amateur gymnastics or track and field events in non-Olympic years. It sure beats listening to John Clayton babble about how important Shaun Alexander is to the Seahawks for the sixth day in a row.
  • They decided to install a new application to manage all of Support at work. This is both a blessing and a curse: The old application had some very specific quirks that made it something of a pain to work with and it was also based off of old versions of our products so it was kind of embarassing for us to be so far behind our own customers in a lot of cases (especially since we spend so much of our time trying to get people to upgrade). Also the server that was central to our day-to-day work was very much showing its age and had started to become a serious liability for us. So the new application addressed a lot of those problems, which is a good thing. But the old application had been around long enough for several user-created interfaces to pop up that were designed by Support people which meant they did what we wanted/needed them to do. Now those interfaces have to be re-done to accomodate the new systems and most of them haven’t been updated yet. As a result my return to work has alternated from mild to severe pain as I’m forced to work with clunky, IT-designed interfaces that don’t work they way they should and in a lot of ways severely hamper my ability to do my job. Of course being out for almost two weeks means I’m behind as it is and this certainly isn’t helping me get caught up.
  • My dad posted a bunch of old movies for me to check out that I added to my Netflix queue this morning. If anyone else has any suggestions, I’m all ears.

Shut Out

The Sharks game last night was a lot of fun; the seats were row nine of the upper deck just above and behind what ended up being the home ice goal. The great thing about the Shark Tank is that there really are no bad seats in the whole place and we had a nice view of the far side of the ice as well as some really great visuals of the near goal.

Of course the enjoyment of the game was helped by a 2-0 Sharks victory in which Nabokov looked as solid as I’ve seen him play in about three years. This was Nabby of old and near the end of the game the crowd was in a fever pitch chanting “Nab-by! Nab-by!” to spur him on to complete the shutout. He had some help from some solid defensive play including some nice physical work by HB‘s favorite whipping boy, Kyle McLaren.

I was also impressed to see the same play that Cheechoo and Bell scored on in the season opener work again for the Sharks second goal, it’s good to see that even when Cheech isn’t really finding the net that well he can still help out with some setups. It’s kind of surprising where all the points are coming from this year: The Sharks have one of the highest Goals For totals in the whole Western Conference (I think they’re actually tied for first with—of all people—Chicago) but Joe Thornton hasn’t scored one, Patrick Marleau has been pretty quiet on the scoring front and aside from that one freaky game where he nailed a natural Hat Trick, even Cheechoo hasn’t had any goals. Instead they’re coming from guys like Mihalek and… the defense.

Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t complaining. The Sharks are going to need contributions from everyone this year if they expect to be legitimate Cup contenders, and it’s nice to see that they aren’t having to rely on their top two lines to do all the offensive work. I just hope they keep it up; one thing that has stunted some good Sharks teams in the past has been the fact that whenever their top scorers go on the schnide for a while there has usually been no one around to pick up the slack. It looks like that might not be so much of a problem this year.

The one thing that has me a bit worried is this whole goaltender controversy. The problem as far as I’m concerned is that right now they’re both playing well and feeding off of each other to compete for the top spot. But the danger is that if it goes on too long they might both come to the conclusion that there is no top spot to attain and they’ll sort of give up trying as hard and figure, “We’re splitting the duty so I only really need to work half as hard.” Then you end up with two mediocre/underperforming goaltenders that you can’t deal anywhere. So the ideal would be to trade one of them as soon as possible.

So which one? That’s really tough in my mind because some people (I’m not saying me, I’m just saying some people) might argue that the last time this situation came up, the Sharks made the wrong move by sticking with Nabokov and dealing Kiprusoff. So do you fear making that same choice again and stick with Toskala even though you just signed Nabby to a pretty big contract extention last year or do you stick with your only Rookie of the Year and popular hometown netminder? How much weight do you apply to performance last year? Granted, Nabby was hurt and playing through injury a lot last year but it was really Toskala that got them as far as they did in the playoffs. What about performance this year? So far Toskala is unbeaten but Nabokov has two shutouts and his one loss was in a really wild, flukey kind of game.

My personal opinion is hard to sort out because I think I desperately want Nabokov to be the guy, but I worry because he’s had a lot of chances to be that guy and he’s dropped the ball more than he’s stepped up. I’ve never really been sold on Toskala’s panicky playing style and I can’t shake the feeling that he only plays as good as he does when he has something to prove. I worry that with Nabokov out of the picture as the number one guy, Toskala would flounder lacking the proper motivation. The Sharks have a great goalie system and the third stringer/future backup Nolan Schaefer looked really solid in very minimal play last year but I think if you held a gun to my head I would say I’d rather have him backing Nabby than Vesa.

Truthfully, I kind of want to keep them both but I understand that generally speaking that’s pretty pointless in the long run. So the real question becomes: What can we get for whomever we get rid of? I’m thinking if Raycroft sucks in Toronto (which he probably will), what about Bryan McCabe? He’s older but wouldn’t have to play as much in San Jose as he does in Toronto since the rest of the team is so young. Of course I would absolutely love to steal Dion Phaneuf from the Flames but I doubt they’d have a need for Toskala unless Kiprusoff got very badly hurt and I’m sure they’re fine with Jamie McLennan as a backup (not that Toskala would be too hip on going from one second-string spot to another, he’s going to want a #1 job). Plus I’m not sure I’d be too thrilled with handing one of our goaltenders off to a division rival again which is why I’m looking to the East.

Ideally Denis in Tampa Bay won’t work out and the Lightning will start shopping for someone to help save their fanbase and be willing to deal playoff-hero-turned-last-season-goat St. Louis whom I think is struggling less with his play and more with his club and would fit in nicely on the Sharks roster. Still, I think St. Louis probably still has too much name recognition in Tampa to be a realistic option (and I’m sure no one is going to repeat the debacle of the Thornton trade by giving up a franchise player to San Jose) but Fedotenko is pretty good and might be a nice replacement for Steve Bernier whom I like but I feel like should be playing more with Smith and Grier on a grinder line than the talented second line as a finesse guy. In any case the Sharks problem really isn’t offense but defense and Tampa Bay is pretty light in that category. My ideal trade would be to the Flyers who are struggling with a goalie controversy of their own, only theirs is between two mediocre players in Esche and Niittymaki. In return for Toskala we’d get Joni Pitkanen and Jeff Carter.

Land of the Living

Whew.

It’s good to be back. Typically when I’m sick I spend a lot of time doing the kinds of things I like to do even when I’m not sick like playing video games and reading, that sort of thing. Then when I end up feeling well enough to go back to work, I kind of miss the free time to do whatever, you know?

Not this time. I had possibly the worst sick week (plus) ever this time around and it was nothing even close to fun. In fact I felt so bad the whole time that it was actually a pain to watch TV or movies, although that’s pretty much all I did. Even with the TiVo and Nikki constantly making runs to Hollywood Video to pick up movies for me to watch (eventually she just rented a whole season of 24 for me to watch which shut me up for a good four days) I was still scraping the bottom of the entertainment barrel quite a bit. I guess that’s what happens when you’re at home sick for 10 days straight, but it left me with a new appreciation for the time I have to do other, more interesting things.

As a matter of fact I got a new perspective and appreciation for pretty much everything in my life while I was sick. Being too miserable to sleep or eat or do much of anything for that long leaves a lot of time for thought and I kind of started realizing how much of my life I spend being grumpy about really pointless things. I came to a lot of other conclusions about some of the unfortunate choices I’ve been making lately mostly in terms of my attitude toward things that are either not worth the bother or indifferent attitudes toward things that actually do matter and hopefully I’ll try to be better about that. I suppose the only positive thing that came from being sick is that I got (hopefully) an improved perspective on my life. Something about absence making the heart grow fonder would probably be aproppriate here, if not tiresomely clichéd.

Anyway, I don’t have a lot of time or anything since I’m still trying to play catch up from all that time I missed out on, but I did have a few things I wanted to say today before I forget:

  • One of the many movies I watched last week was Double Indemnity, an old 1944 black and white noir picture starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson. It’s really quite good (although I liked The Big Sleep better) as many of the old pictures I’ve been watching have been. Unfortunately, I’m starting to run out of ideas for old movies to watch. I fully confess that this is due to ignorance and not a lack of quality material to check out; the next couple I have coming from Netflix are From Here to Eternity, All About Eve, The Guns of Navarone, Suspicion, M, Touch of Evil and The 39 Steps. Anyone know some others I should check out?
  • I watched season four of 24 like I mentioned above and it was much better than the season that stopped me from following it every year (the piteous season three), but the show still drives me insane. Mainly what makes me nuts is two things: One is why everything has to revolve around LA. I mean, I know the show is set there but c’mon: There should be enough time to make the travel realistic (how anyone gets all over LA in less than 20 minutes is beyond even the most forgiving critic) by spreading the love a little bit to different CTU branches and making things more plausibly spread out. Related to this quibble is why everything is handled by CTU. Aren’t there any other governmental agencies that can do some of this stuff like, say, the military? It makes no sense, especially when they spend twenty minutes of each episode griping about how “stretched thin” they all are. Well, delegate, people! Problem solved. My other beef is that they’re constantly sending like three people to go pick up these potentially well-armed suspects and then they act all surprised when only the main character survives the assault and they have to be rescued by someone else. I’m thinking if I need to bring in a suspect for questioning because they are the only person in the world who might be able to reveal the location of the bomb/terrorist leader/plane/kidnap victim/whatever, I’m sending in a freaking army to get them. I think the CTU people kind of cause more of their own problems than they seem to realize.
  • One show that I don’t have a lot of complaints with right now is Heroes. Man, I love that show. Last night’s episode was superb, yet again. The only thing that really bugs me about the show right now are the naysayers. Yes, it is very much like the X-Men. So what? The X-Men are cool, and this gives us a chance to see an X-Men-like story with new characters (so we aren’t bored with the origin stuff if we’ve read the comics already) and a re-imagined take on the whole superheroes concept. I think it’s working very well and the pacing seems to be just about perfect: I’m always left wanting more but they aren’t killing me slowly with the glacial pace of the plot like Lost. One of the great Lost debates is the Characters-vs-Story discussion where some people say they are more interested in the character development and therefore don’t mind the so-slow pace of the Island Mysteries aspect but others (like me) think the characters should really be there to move the story along so the development of the characters becomes almost meaningless since it takes over the whole show leaving the plot to flounder. With Heroes they got it all right by developing the characters at a nice clip but letting those developments also push the plot forward. Very well done and I was quite pleased to hear that the show got picked up for the rest of the season. If you haven’t already started watching this show, I can’t recommend it enough and I’ve heard they plan to run a brief marathon of the last three episodes (not including the Pilot) sometime in the next week so if you haven’t seen it yet, keep an eye out for that to help you catch up.
  • So the final consensus on the new Decemberists album is that it may surpass Picaresque in terms of total quality and has quickly shot to near the top of my all-time favorite albums list. Love it. On the other hand, the new Evanescence album, The Open Door is bland and uninspired and quite a disappointment. Nik also picked up AFI’s Decemberunderground album from iTunes on the strength of a couple of singles she heard on the radio. It’s not too bad, really although I need to give it a few more listens. AFI is kind of a more intense Green Day but they have some catchy riffs and some nice melodies going on, so I think it could get some decent playtime.
  • I had a bit of a chance to listen to some of Sirius satellite radio driving around to doctor’s appointments and stuff in Nik’s car while I was sick. It’s a pretty cool thing and the lack of commercials on the music channels is really, really nice. There’s a lot of selection available as well which means it usually isn’t hard at all to find some station playing something you like. My only complaint so far probably has more to do with the head unit than Sirius itself, but I’m having a really hard time finding the non-music channels. There is supposed to be a way to choose a channel via category but I can’t seem to make it work the way the manual describes which means a lot of the NPR, comedy and sports stations are ostensibly there but not accessible. This is going to become a problem pretty quickly when I want to start listening to Sharks games on the way home from work and can’t even get to the stations.
  • Speaking of the Sharks, I got better just in time since Nikki bought me a three-pack of Sharks tickets for our anniversary and the first game is tonight versus the Dallas Stars. I’m heading out after work to pick HB from work and then heading on to the tank so hopefully my body will cooperate and I’ll be able to enjoy myself. I’m kind of counting on excitement to push me through some of the weariness I still feel, but it should be a really good time.

High Hopes

Watching the San Jose Sharks beat the St. Louis Blues was weird because as this is the beginning of a new season, lots of stuff has changed in the Sharks organization. Fortunately, most of the change is good. Unfortunately, despite picking up the win, the Sharks managed to falter enough to allow St. Louis to force an overtime win which means they picked up a point as well as the Sharks.

A few notes about the game:

  • Watching hockey in HD is really, really nice. It’s noticeably easier to follow the puck on the ice and while Whippy Whipperson and the rest of the camera crew at FSN Bay Area still move the cameras too much (versus changing angles on the play), the blur effect when a fast pass opens a breakaway is lessened by the improved camera equipment which helps catch up with the play faster. It’s still not as good as actually being at the game, but it’s a lot closer than the usual squint-and-shrug activity required by regular TV.
  • Marty McBorely is terrible. I miss Drew Remenda already. Sample “commentary” from last night after the Sharks took a second penalty twenty seconds after the first:

    Yeah, you really don’t want to go down 5-on-3 in this situation.

    Wow. Is that a fact? I’m going out on a limb here, McBorely, and saying that you never want to go down 5-on-3. If this is the kind of “insight” we’re going to get, I’m about to start muting the TV feed and listening to the radio while I watch the games.

  • I was pretty impressed with the play of Mike Grier and Mark Bell. Of course Bell scored on a pretty, pretty play by Cheechoo (in a relatively rare assist role) but the point is, he actually buried it. If that was still Ekman over there, 50-50 chance that he sails it right over the empty net.
  • What’s up with the new kid, Marc-Edouard Vlasic? He looked positively terrified out there. I mean, he played okay but that guy looks like he’s about 11 years old. Still, you gotta respect the kid for trying. His official nickname for the season (as dubbed by Gin): Pickle.
  • I was quite unhappy with Toskala’s play all night. I felt like the game really should have been a 4-2 regulation win for the Sharks. The only time he really looked sharp was late in the second period when they were down two men and the D had been out there for approximately nine minutes without a line change and couldn’t clear the zone. But especially that second goal: You don’t let that in. Not if you want to be starting goalie for my team.
  • How crazy was Cheechoo punching a hole in the boards with his skate? Like McBorely pointed out, it’s always scary to see a guy go hard feet-first into the boards (brings memories of Marco Sturm a few seasons back) but if he’s just going to kick out the boards (in practically a perfect circle!?)… well… what? And what really killed me was that it took them like twenty minutes to fix it. For all the work they did I was expecting something that looked like it had never been broken at all. Instead they screwed a piece of plywood into the back of the boards. Look, I’m no carpenter or handyman or anything, but what was the holdup there?
  • Speaking of holdups, that was about the longest game ever. Right after the broken boards incident they paused for a good ten minutes to review (and ultimately make the wrong call) a Sharks goal. You know one thing that I like from the NFL that I wish pro hockey would implement is that when a call is challenged or goes to booth review in the NHL the ref gets on the loudspeaker and explains what it is that was challenged and what they’re going to review. Then when it is done being reviewed, the ref gets back out there and explains why the call was made the way it was. That, I think, can do a lot to put a fan’s mind at ease because from where I sat the puck was clearly across the goal line (myabe they didn’t have HD?) and the live audio feed indicated that it was so well before the whistle blew (which blew way early, too, by the by). The only thing was that the puck wasn’t completely visible before the whistle blew, and the goalie’s leg moved to reveal the puck location just after the whistle so even though you could tell that the puck didn’t move at all before or after the goalie’s leg got out of the way, I could at least buy an explanation that there was insufficient evidence to overturn the call on the ice. Although, the call on the ice was for a review which I think is a major cop-out. In my opinion, if the ref can’t tell on the ice which way to make the call and wants to go to the booth for review without an official on-ice call, then there should be no need for undeniable proof one way or the other since nothing stands to be overturned. In that case it should just be whatever it looks like happened. If that was the case they would have given the Sharks the goal, I’m pretty sure. But as it was they retroactively decided the call was “no goal” so the evidence had to be incontrovertible.
  • The 2006 Sharks Team Preview on Yahoo! notes that McLaren is an overrated defenseman because he doesn’t have much offensive power. I concede that his offensive skills are mediocre at best (that’s why we got Carle) but his defensive skills are among the best on the team, maybe second to Scott Hannan. What drives me nuts about McLaren is that during the playoffs the guy is such a difference maker because he absolutely punishes anyone who steps near him with the puck. But during the regular season (and it started already last night) he acts like a little puppy who wants to lick everyone’s faces instead of throwing some checks around. It’s annoying (but don’t even get HB started about it).