The real standings, hopefully improved

These images should at least be larger and more legible - I uploaded each conference as a separate image. Blogger lets me make each individual picture a bit bigger, with better resolution, if I do that rather than upload the whole shebang as a unit.

A table would be the gold standard, however. Hm... in a series of posts mocking the league's pity points, my method could at best be described as a shootout loss - thus deserving of a pity point itself. At least I've successfully employed the concept of irony in my blogging.

Nonetheless I will still decry; heck, at least I'm trying to improve. The NHL seems more than happy about their system, and I think I see why. Say you're Commissioner Garrison Keillor Gary Bettman.  You have to interest a non-market such as Phoenix to accept a transplanted team like the Winnipeg Jets, who finished the 1993-94 season a dreadful 24-51-9.  Or, let's say you're trying to expand into new markets... but your expansion Tampa Bay Lightning were less than an exemplary example - that's 17-55-10 in '97-98 and 19-54-9 in '98-99.  Yeah, who wants in?

So, the very next year, Bettman introduces an overtime loss column.  Instead of Tampa duplicating its 19-54-9 record, it gets to say it was 19-47-9-7.  Voila!  And the brand-new Atlanta Thrashers avoid 60 losses by moving four of them to this OTL column.  Huzzah!  So what if these points wind up costing the Carolina Hurricanes (37-35-10) a playoff spot in favor of the inferior Buffalo Sabres (35-36-11, but four of the losses were in OT)?  And by 2001-02, there were no 50-loss teams in the league; or, scratch that, there were three, but only if you actually count the OTL as an L.  And the year after that, 27 of the 30 teams could say, hey, we got points in more than half our games!  Somehow only three NHL teams managed to lose 40 or more games.

The extra column drove purists crazy, but it kept the owners happy.  Nobody wants to say they were well-below .500, so the extra points were a godsend.  Then, after they blew up the 2004-2005 season, they came back with the shootout - because if points for losing was good, then points for winning after the game was over was doubleplusgood!

As a result you have the table below, where 24 out of 30 teams are .500 or better.  Everybody's above-average!

Well... not Carolina. Even their pity-point record is 5-17-5; it's almost impossible to be that bad under any circumstance. That translates into a full-year record of 15-51-15 with one game to play; even under the old rules, it's a record of futility that few teams have matched.  But under the old rules, the 'Canes would be 2-19-6.  There's just no way to sugar-coat that.  It's epically bad, a SIX WIN pace.  Even if they could scrape the seventh win in the last game, that's a full-year of 7-57-18, and only the ties would keep them from being possibly the worst team in the history of the league.  Their seven wins would break the old 1975 Washington Capitals record for the fewest in the expansion era.

The day my worldview was shattered

I was ten years old, watching Apollo 11 launch from Cape Canaveral on TV, when my dad told me that these will be the first men to set foot on the moon.

My entire worldview was shattered, because until then I thought Captian Kirk and Spock and the whole Star Trek crew were up there already.

Cut a kid a break, Star Trek was on prime time Thursday night! I remember the first episode I ever watched. It was the salt-sucking beast that looked like McCoy's ex. Probably explains why I'm still single

40 years ago today...

... was the launch of Apollo 11, the mission that took men to the surface of the moon. But that's not what I want to talk about.

40 years ago this Saturday, while our brave astronauts were hurtling through space toward the moon, Senator Edward Kennedy was also hurtling through space, launched off the Dike Bridge toward the waters of a channel on Chappaquiddick Island. While our astronaunts all made it home safely, one traveler on Ted's craft was not so fortunate.

If there were three cable networks back in 1969, he would have never survived politically.

Reefer Madness

Last night the good folks at Netflix brought me the 1936 documentary "Reefer Madness". Guys, this film has more laughs in it that most movies that try to be. The intro brushes over heroin and cocaine to warn parents of the real threat to their children, the madness of "marihuana".

The school principal is talking to this kid who was a straight A student and top tennis player until he started listening to jazz and smoking reefer. 'So Bill," asks the principal, "Have you picked up any bad habits lately?" I shouted at the screen, "You know he's smoking reefer! Ask him if he's smoking reefer!"

There are teens using reefer and then committing murder (I didn't think a stoner would be that motivated.)

The dealer doesn't sell his dope by the ounce; he buys it from the supplier premade into cigarettes. The machine used to roll the joints was very similar to a kind of machine advertised on TV for tobacco back in the 1970's (Who here remembers cigarette ads on TV?)

Also, there is a scene where the principal is on the office of the local FBI. "Marihauna is grown in every state of the union, "explain the G-man, 'There's no interstate commerce so our hands are tied." Been a long time since anyone in the federal government gave a rat's toenail about the Interstate Commerce Clause.

I am worried about my employer. He listens to a lot of jazz, and that leads to getting hooked on reefer.

OMG! I listened to Steely Dan last night. Am I next to succumb?

It's been bugging me all day...

I know that everybody and their twin has already blogged about the debate. No doubt this has already been mentioned elsewhere. But something has nagged at me ever since Joe Biden had his little scolding screed about Dick Cheney being the most dangerous Vice President ever:

While he Vice President of the US, Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.

Afterward, he went home without a moment's thought. He showed up a few days later in Washington DC to preside over the Senate, as if NOTHING HAPPENED. He spent much of the next several years unable to visit New York or New Jersey without being arrested, tried, and hanged for murder. What's more, there's evidence he may possibly have made plans to steal or outright conquer part of the Louisiana Purchase in order to be the King of something, rather than the complete social and political pariah of the United States.

And lest we forget - dude killed a guy in a duel. In fact, killed a guy who by his own account had already determined to waste his shot, in order to bring the duel to a peaceful conclusion. In later years Burr actually brought someone back to the Weehauken cliffside and showed him where Hamilton's shot had gone before Burr had fired back.

I don't care how many hunting accidents he has - Dick Cheney will never approach Aaron Burr's standard.

It's ladies night

Sorry to gang up on the Lord's Own Hockey around here, but this is pretty big news - three women (Cammie Granato, Geraldine Heaney and Angela James) will be enshrined in the International Ice Hockey Federation Hall of Fame. (Note that this is not the same outfit as the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.)

This is especially interesting since the Puck Stops Here featured a couple of conversations on this topic two months ago. After the initial to-and-fro (check the comments), PHS posted a follow-up with his reasoning.

Manon Rheaume is not one of the three women to be inducted. Of course, neither is Danielle Goyette, whom I mentioned as a good candidate, so I suppose we're all square. And there's always next years' inductions. As of right now, however, I stand by my earlier position - Rheaume was very well-known and thus a key to developing women's hockey, but actual Hall of Fame enshrinement as a player should be reserved for those pioneers that kept with it the way Granato, Heaney, and James did.

Sally Rand @ The Nukes That Brought My Daddy Home

I've seen a photo, in my mother's possession, of my father as a young sailor during WW2 with this woman.

It looks like it's from a USO show when Dad was @ Pearl Harbor in 1945.

On a related subject, I sometimes wonder if I or my siblings would be here if The USA didn't drop the nukes on Nippon. Would Dad have been part of the land invasion of the Japanese Islands in the spring of 1946?

What am I to think of the nukes that brought my Dad home to marry my Mom and beget me?

The Nightfly..

...turns 25 years old today.

Not this blog, nor the blogger, but the album.

h/t to anklebitingpundits.

I'll let the Fly take it from here.

The empty sky

Sheila hits the bullseye.

And, not to be crass, but there are two thoughts that need to just step off in regards to terrible loss: "it's time to move on" and "we have to get over it." I say this full well knowing that it these are usually my first reactions to a sudden, shocking pain, ever since I was a boy.

(At this point I ask only that you bear with me - I have an unfortunate choice between personalizing a great atrocity, or pretending that my own foibles and motives are the universal condition of mankind. To me, the less danger lies in the first course. If I must seem like a colossal egoist, I'd rather it be on appearances only, and not in truth.)

In 1986 I was rushed to the hospital with sudden acute appendicitis. While I waited I alternated tossing my cookies, folding in agony, and running a non-stop stand-up act for the staff and patients. This went on for about six or seven hours - writhe, hurl, one liner. The surgeon came, examined me, and wheeled me directly to OR. Later he told my folks that I was about 30 minutes from a burst appendix. I cracked a joke about that too.

My dad died in late 1991. No jokes this time, but no tears, either. To my shame, I admit that I've cried more about dead pets, schoolboy crushes, and the New York Islanders than I ever have about my father.

In 2001 I was working, a Tuesday then as it is this year; I heard about the first plane just before I parked. I thought that it had to be a freak accident. Then of course the second plane hit, and every television in the place was re-tuned to the various news stations. We had a number of guests in the building that day for meetings - I remember leaving my office to ask about the general hubbub, only to see the first of thousands of replays of the second Tower struck. I went back to work.

I was still grimly working as I overheard the conflicting details as they came out: who it could be (since there was clearly someone's will behind it), the planes unaccounted for, about everything else aloft being diverted to the nearest airport. The first notice I got of the first Tower's collapse was a general sigh, like a felt gust of wind, and I vividly recall a former coworker crying out into that silence, "They blew it up!" As I went around to the nearest TV I could see him ducking out of the room in anguish, his hand held over his mouth in grief and fright.

The entire building was dismissed as of noon. Up until the last moment I just kept working. I could think of nothing else to do, since sitting at my desk in shock or staring at the TV were obviously not going to help anyone.

To this moment, I still wonder if I shouldn't have just stopped for a minute, anyway. What I did then, as I was doing all my life, was "moving on."

We build these defenses for good reason; again, you all have yours, so I can only give you mine. Everyone has something different about themselves they are trying to protect. It got the job done in my case, by grounding me in something other than my panic. At 13 I couldn't endure just lying there in pain, helpless until the doctors came to decide what was wrong with me - and I didn't have a mature framework to handle suffering, either emotionally or intellectually. "Death" didn't mean anything at that point. At 19 it did, but knowing and understanding were obviously two different things, and the difference didn't come out until we got a personal visit. At 29, it was the sheer enormity of it all - while I stood alone, like the only tree in a square mile somehow standing after a tornado. Somehow, despite living my entire life within 50 miles of the World Trade Center, I knew none of the killed personally. Everything happened at a remove, and I never wanted to cross that distance. Because I would not suffer my own hurts, I could not suffer with others when they hurt. I built a cage to protect myself, and then found that I could not get out.

To not be swept away, one needs an anchor. My refusing to submit to fear or panic is useful, but refusing to feel it at all is a step too far. It makes the crisis itself an anchor, and I risk never being free of it. I can't be swept out to sea, but neither can I sail at will. It makes it hard to reach the far shore where our true home lies - where we will no longer sail but soar. Protecting myself from pain has also meant protecting myself from the best kind of joy, the startling happiness that makes one feel as if one has never drawn breath before that moment, the joy that changes everything - that sends a jolt through you akin to nearly falling from a great height. The few times I have ever allowed myself to get absolutely carried away, I have wound up landing far harder than I pleased. Naturally, people tell me that it beats the alternative - and for the record I agree with them, and have told it to myself many times - but like Tommy Lee Jones said in MIB when Will Smith told him that it was better to have loved and lost: "Try it." It is better, but it doesn't feel better.

That's why I feel like moving on is a trap. "Getting over it" doesn't feel better either. That is in fact the whole point to it - it usually means to stop feeling at all. The danger lies in not healing the wound one is so anxious to get over. Moving on tends to make such wounds permanent, disabling. It may well be that one has to drag oneself away from a fire on a broken leg in order to survive; it is much different to keep trying to walk on it after the fire's out.

There was no "stake" in 9/11 for me, and that may disqualify this entire post in some eyes. I won't deny it. Some people have actually gone through it all, and are ready to "move on." I have no desire to hold them back, just because I've held myself back in other ways. My flaws aren't anyone else's. I'm just offering what I've seen in the mirror as an example of what we put ourselves through in order to avoid going through our heartaches. A death, a sudden illness, a broken heart, a destroyed home... it makes one feel as if the world has stopped. It's awful, when one is reeling, to spend our dying strength against all that terrible, still mass. It's far easier to move on so quickly that it seems like it's turning normally again.

Don't let anyone do that to you, not even you. To honor what is lost, it is necessary to carry it somehow, to move with it, and not leave it behind to bind us to the past. Move on? I think I'm done with that. Rather time to double back and find what I've missed. It's going to take a few trips.

The resolution is adopted

I've often wondered what happened in the minds of the Founding Fathers on the morning of July 5, 1776.

Of course, from their point of view July 2 was the big day, so it's likely that they woke up thinking of the business of the day, and not posterity. Maybe a few woke up groggy, shuffling around the bedroom for a moment before it came back to them that they'd just signed on to one of the most shocking documents in human history. Maybe a few failed to sleep at all thinking of it. Others no doubt awoke with renewed purpose. If these 56 men were anything like their countrymen today, there was a good mix of regret, relief, apprehension, and firm determination.

And yet, on the outside, nothing was really different. Sun rose in the East again; birds sang, carriages began to roll past; the daily business of living colonial life began as it had the day before and would the day after. Washington had been in the field for months, obliging the British to quit Boston, and in turn preparing to quit Manhattan. More soldiers were on the way from England and elsewhere to oppose the Continental Army. In reply, the nascent country prepared to send embassy to the powers of Europe to implore their help. Five more years of war stood in their path, and after this, six years in which the former colonies nearly "lost the peace," to use today's big phrase.

When was the last time we marked Cornwallis' surrender in Yorktown or the ratifying of the US Constitution? I remember in 1987 there was a big deal about the 200th anniversary of the current American government, but that's about it.

The more I think about it, the more remarkable that seems. In America we do note those things, but as mileposts along the journey of the nation, and not as its departure. In the same way, the further mileposts of Abolition, Suffrage, and Civil Rights prove the strength of the idea that started us and still carries us. And the more I read the Declaration and Constitution, the remarkable logic of it becomes more plain. The colonists had already pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on the question. The Declaration is a sovereign statement of what the American country is - the Constitution (and the Articles of Confederation before it) were only a description of how that country's people chose to govern themselves. The big thing was the idea. Once it was shown what people were standing for and fighting for, everything changed. A militia fighting as British subjects for justice under the British King isn't the same as an army fighting for justice under their own law, separate from that king.

Had they failed, and the colonies of the Americas still belonged to the Crown, it would have been the death of that nation, but it wouldn't change the idea; the pledge made by those citizens of the brief-lived United States would still stand without a Constitution, and their sacred honor would live on.

That's why the United States of America celebrates the Declaration as its birthday, every year. May she have many more.