Ha! Did you see what I did, there? I said "Back-a-gain", which is a pithy take on "bakugon", which are overpriced, cheap, ridiculously silly collectible
dolls action figures based on an over-budgeted, badly-written, ridiculously silly television programme. Brilliant. You may or may not be able to tell that Yours Truly spent some time in a toy store today. Want to know why? Because Yours Truly is a mook.
"WHOA!" Yours Truly said at a television commercial. "What's THAT?!"
"Those are Mega Beanz, Mum. You can play them and trade them and race them and everything!"
"They look RIDICULOUSLY FUN!"
"We should get some!"
"WE TOTALLY SHOULD!!"
"That's it," His Nibs cut in at that point, "No more coffee for you. Like, ever."
Anyhow, the short version of the hockey tournament is: Team played fantastically well, but didn't rank well. The Captain got a Player of the Game Award. That City pisses me off to no end, and I have not even the slightest inkling of ever living there again. His Nibs agrees. My Da is awesome.
Labels: hockey, Saskatoon
I read this thing once, some kind of email meme, that started out: "You know you're a hockey parent when..." and one of the lines in that email was, "the parents of your child's friends think you're kidding when you tell them that your child is available for a sleepover between April and September".
Sadly, this is no joke.
My friend was asking when he could come by for a visit. And I said, "March." And he said, "Ha ha, no really." And I said, "March."
I'm not complaining. I'm just saying.
Because all of this, travelling to other towns when it's dark and cold and blowing snow and ice all over the place, going to other cities for tournaments, dragging The Nipper all over hell's half acre and back...it's all worth it to watch The Captain come bursting out of the box, steal the puck from some mini-mook, and glide and deke across the blue line, muscling his way past bigger kids to take a shot at the net. Watching him skate makes me smile all over.
Labels: hockey
I don't want to jinx anything, but...
The Captain's hockey team is in the finals for the season. They're playing on Friday for the minor hockey league equivalent of the 'pennant'.
SCREW YOU, STANLEY CUP!
THIS is entertainment
Labels: hockey, kids
You may have heard this before: that skating is kind of like a controlled fall. There's some very long and involved explanation for this that
Discovery Jones could give you about the science behind the controlled fall that is your basic skating cadence. Something-something point of rotation, something-something kinetic energy, something-something acceleration, gravity something-something. Anyway, it's pretty interesting and next time Discovery is at one of your house parties, you should ask him about it.
If you're not inclined to believe this, you should come watch one of The Captain's hockey games. There is a young lad on his team whose skating style would convince you. He's a very good player, and it's wonderful to watch him skate; he puts his head down and just goes. But it's always kind of amazing that he stays on his feet. It's as if this kid and gravity met each other once at a beach party, where there was an unfortunate incident with sand and ice cream sandwiches, and now their relationship can be described as tenuous as best and adversarial the rest of the time.
In fact, if you're a science guy, you should watch hockey. There're all kinds of interesting things going on, from reduced coefficients of friction depending on how fast you skate and how sharp your blades are, to fluid dynamics (when you skate, or even when the puck travels across the ice, there is a thin layer of water doing carazzzy things down there), to particle motion, and light/wave motion (particularly with the angles of incidence and angles of refraction and the way sound waves act in different parts of the arena). On top of that, you have aerodynamics, thermodynamics, um, and aromadynamics.
Add to that the whole field of the psychology of comptetition and sport, and you could spend the whole day just geeking out at the rink.
Or, you could just sit in the stands with some very cool people and holler random encouragements at the amazing kids on the ice who make the NHL look like the entertainment equivalent of judge shows (to anyone but me).
Labels: hockey, science
