I’ve been around the blogosphere for a while now, and I’ve noticed that the ol’ media empire here is starting to look a little dated. There’s a definite “pro” look these days, propagated by the templates available in the popular online blogging services. Some of the hallmarks of the pro look seem useful, like limited width so the eye can comfortably scan text. There’s also a feeling that all the parts are fit together into a nice, integrated, whole.

It made me think about what I would like this blog to look like. In the end, it still won’t have that pro look. The thing I most want to do will not work in Internet Explorer 6, and maybe not even 7. What I most want is an end to rectangles. The ampersand breaking out of its box in the header (unless you are using Crappy Browser 6) has had people asking me “how did you do that”? Making the top of the what’s new box not line up with the top of the sidebar was another somewhat tricky little bit of coding, just to break the lines.

What I’d really like to do is build on the “mad scientist” theme. I’ve got some thoughts on how to do that, but as usual my ambitions far outmatch my abilities. We’ll see, though. I might be able to pull off “slick, high-tech mad scientist”.

I’m curious what you guys like or don’t about the current design. Certainly the most important aspect is readability. That’s what it’s here for, after all.

This isn’t quite what I was shooting for, but is does have visual appeal (and rounded bits).

Sweet!

Thanks!

Originally, my subtitle for this episode was “…friggin Finns!”, but you really can’t blame them for doing too well. It’s what they were trying to do.

A few days ago I wrote that it looked like a contest between Russia and Canada. Those who read the comments around here might have picked up that the Finns weaseled their way past the US team in a shootout. Not shocking that the Finns beat the United Statesians, but a shootout? In a single-elimination tournament? That’s just plain nuts. That’s just TV stations wanting to make sure the game doesn’t run too long.

Shootout? pf. It’s not hockey.

So the Finns moved on to face the Russians. It was a good game. I think the Russians were taking the win for granted, but it went 1-1 into overtime. The Moscow crowd was going completely nuts.

Then the Finns scored, and the game was over.

Imagine a balloon filled with gasoline fumes popping without a sound. Whoosh, and that’s all there is. In the aftermath Russian players were staggered, unable to hold themselves on top of their skates.

I was in the wrong city last night. On the TV there were astonishingly beautiful women weeping because their hockey team had lost. A woman weeping over hockey is the second sexiest thing I have ever seen. I fell in love with one woman right there and then, so shattered was she. If you want to review the footage, track that girl down and tell her there’s some dissolute American writer who wants to marry her, go right ahead. But – she was weeping alone! Were the Russian men so caught up in the horror that they were unable to offer comfort, or are beautiful women weeping over hockey so commonplace they merit no consolation? What the hell is wrong with you guys over there? She’s hot! She loves hockey! She’s sad!

It’s probably delusional to think that were I on the scene that I would do any better, but any place where pretty girls weep over hockey is a place I want to be.

So, the Finns won, to set up today’s games. The Russians demolished the Swedes (don’t be fooled by the 3-1 score, it wasn’t that close and the Russians weren’t trying) for third place, and looked bored doing it. The home crowd was quiet. They had not recovered from the night before. The championship game’s not over, but the Canadians are having a pretty easy time with the Finns. How much better it would be, how much more fun, if the Russians were playing and the crowd was in full voice. Canada probably is the best team this year, but I’d give Russia the edge in this place. It would have been a classic. Except the Russians dropped the ball.

The Finns, however, aren’t buying any of that. I’d be praising them as scrappy (but really they’re not), and having good team chemistry (which they do without question), and being everything I like in an underdog, except they ruined my final. On top of that, at least while I write this, the Canadians are skating easy. I’ll forgive the Finns all the other stuff if they make a game of it here in the finals.

Watching the Finns play, I think I can see how they do well against the big teams. They’re pretty good, but I think the Swiss would have their number. Just a chemistry thing.

But man, you should have seen the Russians.

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“The World’s a Stage, and we are merely players,” Shakespeare said (or something like that).

What if that’s true? What if we’re just some big puppet show God’s putting on for the kids in his neighborhood? So if those kids can see all six billion of us running around like ants in a rainstorm, are any of them watching you? Most of us would just be extras, milling around in the background, maybe not even on the same continent as the interesting people.

When we die, what happens next would probably depend on whether we had a fan club or not.

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I was composing sprots-journalism like thoughts throughout this game. The theme was the contrast between the Czech team and the Slovak team, both overmatched, but the games they played were very diffferent.

At least, that’s what I was going to say when the Slovaks led the Swedes 2-1. Although the boys in yellow and blue were on the attack most of the time, the red, white, and blue weren’t rolling over. Scrappy, tough counterpunchers, you could be having a tea party at their end of the ice only to turn around and discover that they’re sitting in your living room, reprogramming your remote control.

Not long after that, Sweden was up 4-2 and I was mentally erasing all that I had thought. The dominant team had arived.

Then it was 4-3 and the Slovaks were looking pretty tough. They’d figured out the Swedish forechecking and their swift strike had drawn blood. The Swedish goaltender faced relatively few shots, but could never rest — when the Slovaks took a shot it was often out of nowhere and consistently dangerous. There was a face-off at mid ice; the Slovaks surged and two seconds later had a scoring chance.

I love watching games with teams like that. There is never a moment that doesn’t hold the potential for something breaking out.

Then Sweden scored again, and it seemed that all was lost. I revised my story again.

While Slovakia never had the lead again, they were never beaten. When the jerks scored to go up 6-3 my brother wrote to me: ‘Not a good day for the slavs’. I had barely tapped out ‘Not unless you count the russians’ when the slovaks went bing-bang-boom and made the game interesting again.

The final goal, the swede’s seventh, was an empty-netter. The only thing that would make hockey better would be a tradition where the winning team just drops the puck behind the net rather than ringing up the meaningless empty-net goal. That would be classy.

I’m sorry the Slovaks didn’t win. They had the fire in their bellies, the hustle, the grit, the je ne sais quois of a championship team. In the end the Swedes were better, however. Now I think it’s between the Russians and the Canadians. The Russians looked awfully good today, and the tournament is in Moscow this year.

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Some of you may have noticed a mention in the “What’s New” box up there that I’ve been having a wee bit of trouble with the blog. The executive summary is this: it broke. iBlog, the software that maintains all the episodes, generates all the interconnected pages and whatnot, took a powder. I tinkered around with it for a while with no success, and I held little hope of getting any meaningful help as the company that makes it is waist-deep in releasing a major upgrade to the program. The sensible thing, therefore, was to move this monster to the new software, so that any further problems I had would be things the developer really wants to hear about.

iBlog 2 is really much better than its predecessor, but there are still some rough edges. Three categories didn’t make the transition successfully, so I had a pile of episodes to cut and paste into the new version by hand. One feature of the new version is much more direct handling of fonts and stuff; unfortunately all those episodes were made with the assumption that there wasn’t any of that stuff, so it all had to be stripped back out.

Anyway, things are getting back to normal here, whatever that is. Let me know if you spot anything strange or if yo miss something that used to be there but isn’t anymore.

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A few events have converged to lead to this episode of little consequence; first, I just had the pleasure of logging a few thousand miles of top-down driving fun, third (chronologically), my sister just wrote an article in her blog about the singular pleasure of the experience, and second, I was recently ribbed for coming to a gentle stop at a yellow light while driving in Southern California.

In her blog Carol Anne mentioned that one feels more connected to the world when the top is down. This is undeniable, but it has effects on the driver that go far past what you might expect. Convertible drivers, by virtue (I believe) of their less-insulated state, are more courteous drivers. That’s not just the random assertion of a convertible driver, it’s based on Science. That’s right, there’s been a study. I can’t link to it, but I heard about it from the Actual Scientist. I think I did, anyway; my recollection is vague, but I’m pretty sure Click and Clack actually spoke to the individual involved. That’s NPR right there. Unassailable.

In any case, the Actual Scientific Study (a Master’s thesis, as I recall), involved driving around, stopping at traffic lights, and then not moving for ten agonizing seconds after the light turned green. The conclusion: drivers of convertibles were far less likely to honk their horns during those ten seconds. Someone got a Master’s degree for that.

There are lots of rude things that people do in cars that they would never do anywhere else. If everyone had no top on their cars, the roads would be much more civil. Heck, you might even have a nice conversation at the next traffic light. They’re good places to hang out.

Sweet!

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It’s that odd in-between time, the quiet time before sleep comes. The day is finished, done, written, but the next has not begun. And here I am, astride that gap yet contained within it, neither here nor there. It is a time when today does not exist, only yesterday and tomorrow. Yesterday was a good day, although not according to plan.

Yesterday was not perfect. The world is not perfect; it is a flawed orb which cannot even manage a circle in its orbit around the sun. Plato thought that because we are able to imagine perfection, that ideal must exist somewhere. I don’t think so. Not for yesterday, at any rate. The ideal was too full of contradictions, multiple wishes that were inherently incompatible.

I wish I’d had more time with Rose. She remains my favorite bartender in the whole damn world, and I wanted to tell her of the time I was in a little place, nine time zones away, and the bartender broke a glass. “Rose!” called out my brother. They have never met, but I had told him that I think of Rose whenever I hear glass break. I did find a moment to tell Rose she rocked — I’d never, ever, fail to do that — but it was a quick hand signal over other people’s heads. Plato would have me remove all those people, and replace the hand gesture with something more familiar, a more substantial expression of a relationship that has only on fleeting occasions overcome the wood and copper bar between us.

Needless to say, if Plato gave me license to create that ideal, Rose would be less than pleased. All those people are her livelihood, and her friends. Her happy greeting when she sees me is genuine, just as it is with dozens of other regulars. Those people at the bar were her friends, and making them disappear would not make her happy. Hell, they’re my friends, too, some of them.

And then there’s Amy and Gene and Tom. Less time with Rose meant more time with them. What are you going to do about that, Mr. Plato? Moving toward one part of the ideal takes me farther from another. Yesterday was not perfect, nor was it even remotely possible for it to be so. I just wish I could have talked to Rose a bit more.

Sweet!

Thanks!

There are many things that go into making a good sport. Different people respond to different aspects of competition and games. People who like situations that build slowly, punctuated by a significant event that breaks everything open, like baseball. People who like a game of intricate set pieces executed at great speed with great violence like American football. People who like to watch groups of dysfunctional thugs with one chief thug to each side score against each other at will enjoy the NBA.

I was watching a game tonight, and it was down to the last two minutes. It was a close game, the home team down by one. The clock kept ticking. The team that was behind began taking chances, desperate moves, score-at-all-costs moves. The clock, it kept on ticking. The losing team pulled out all the stops, giving up defense to just score one point to send the contest into overtime.

The clock kept ticking, until the game was over.

In an age when the last two minutes of a basketball game can easily take fifteen minutes, you have to appreciate hockey. Unless there is television butting in, the last two minutes don’t take substantially longer than any other two-minute period. If the game is close you can feel every second tick off as your team desperately scrambles. Just a little more time, you think as your heartbeat measures out your team’s life. Hang on just a little longer, you think if it’s your team facing the onslaught. But, as in life, the clock keeps ticking.

Baseball has no clock, and, except for periods of multiple pitcher changes, doesn’t change pace all that much. So that’s cool. It starts slow, so there’s not much use in stalling. Soccer could probably benefit from letting the fans know if the clock is running or not, because fake injuries can slow down the game to intolerable — when you’re ahead, hit the turf. At least some of the time you spend rolling around in apparent agony will be run off the official game time. Football slows down, increasing the intervals between plays until each execution constitutes a commercial break. In defense of football, however, when the losing team has the ball and is out of time outs, the game hits the fastest pace of the day, and that might be the most intense minutes in any sport. (Although spiking the ball to stop the clock should not be sanctioned.)

In football, however, there is a period before the final dash that is as slow as basketball, when teams are using their timeouts and “managing the clock”. On a coach’s report card Monday morning, clock management will be rated. Football is an incredibly complicated game, modern when you think of it, a team of specialists, and so now it wouldn’t surprise me if there is a “clock coach”, a guy on the sidelines constantly going through scenarios and whispering clock advice into the coach’s ear. That can be fun to watch. “What are you thinking!” you shout at the TV when your idea of clock management differs from that on the field.

I have no defense for the interminable last seconds of a basketball game.

In the end, though, if there’s a clock in the game I want it to be the enemy. It will not be managed, it will not negotiate. It ticks, it ticks, it keeps on ticking, until the final whistle blows. Advertisers will just have to deal with it.

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Sweet!

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