Though it's unclear clearly vaguely
I've been tagged so I can be studied in my natural habitat by scientist d-lee, aka "Trunk Boy" aka "Puddle Boy" aka "Dave". I would take the radio tag off of my ear and be done with the whole thing, but my understanding is that the alternative is to be dissected and/or put in a cage and have Loreal eye-shadow put in my ear canal to see if it makes me crazy or prefer cigarettes to water. So I'll do it.
Five Strange Things About Me
Or rather, the first five characteristics that I can think of right now that might make someone say, "Really?!"
1. I don't like hockey.
I'm only including this because of the people who might be stopping here via Puddle Boy's blog. I don't really consider this to be strange. It's more...what's the word..."normal".
It's also not really true. I like the game of hockey a lot. When I was watching some of the playoff games this past year, I realized that it's an almost perfect game. It has the beautiful simplicity of basketball and soccer without a lot of the penalty problems that those two games have. I would probably watch it a little more often if I'd grown up with any kind of exposure to hockey whatsoever.
It's the NHL I have a problem with. They've taken a great game and wrapped it up in wretched packaging. The season is way too long, there's little respect for the history of the game, the expansion and team movement and renaming has been sloppy, immature and careless, and the playoffs are a work of spectator attrition. They beg for wider acceptance while creating a product that only a die-hard fan could love. To hell with them.
2. My jaw pops
Embarrassingly, this happens mostly when I'm kissing someone. It sounds like someone's popping corn just below my right ear. It doesn't hurt at all, which I have to tell the girls who ask, "Doesn't that hurt?" (translation: woah. That's kind of freaky). I think it may have something to do with nervousness/tension, but whatever the reason: pops.
3. I hate cars
I certainly understand the convenience of them, and I do find myself with a masochistic longing for a car again. But I think that, even besides the pollution angle (which is a very sharp angle), they dominate places, they insulate people from actually interacting with the rest of the world, and add an unnecessary level of danger to everyday life. They're a menace and a hassle. I'm rational enough to know that we can't do without them, but we've got to find better transportation solutions.
4. I'm near obsessed with not wasting anything
I'll keep ratty furniture not out of thrift but out of not wanting to let go of anything that's still usable. I'll eat myself sick to keep food from going to waste. I do think that everyone should be conscious of waste and landfills and to not treat the world as so disposable, but I'll acknowledge that I'm kind of ridiculous about it. My feelings aren't so much born of environmentalism, but just not wanting to throw out anything that still has a use.
5. I'm half liberal and half conservative
No one believes this, which I suppose I can understand. I believe in capitalism (encourages responsibility through personal gain) while also believing in Government intervention and support (cleans up the mess of corrupt capitalism and provides in the places money can't be made). I believe very strongly in principles considered conservative (sanctity of marriage [though that includes gay marriage], patriotism, importance of faith, necessity of the military) while believing equally in liberal values (personal choice, total freedom of speech and press, importance of ensuring social responsibility, importance of diversity and respect). In other words, I believe very strongly that the words and intentions of the US Constitution are absolute gospel, something that a lot of people claim but don't really believe or live (Antonin Scalia, I'm looking in your direction...and it's your job, dude). In other other words, I disagree with almost everyone.
6 comments:
I won't even engage in argument with you about the NHL's so called "lack of respect for the history of the game". With no intent to disrespect, you're in no more position to discuss the history of the NHL than I am to make sweeping statements about the history of Czech cinema.
I would like to hear you expound on how, exactly, moving and renaming of teams has been "sloppy, immature and careless". In almost every case of relocation, it was a result of financial ruin, bad arenas and an unwillingness of local governments to help out on either front. In some cases, bad owners. When a more financially stable owner comes in and/or a new city wants to build a new arena and offer tax burden relief, it makes perfect sense to relocate. It may be a game, but making the game happen is a business. It always makes fans mad, but the alternative would be a team that goes into bankruptcy and/or out of business. Same as any sport.
You're probably right, though. The Avalanche should have kept the name Nordiques when they moved from Quebec City. That makes perfect sense, just like the Los Angeles Lakers makes sense.
Sorry, but I detect a slightly antagonistic tone to your "I don't like hockey" statement. Otherwise, I'd have left it alone.
Come on, Dave. If I've learned anything over the years of electronic written communication, it's that if you're hearing antagonistic tone in something someone's written, assume it's imagined, because it almost always is. And it certainly is in this case. It was an opinion, and it may have been snarky and cranky, but it wasn't aimed at anyone.
I only put that there because the entire point is to tell five "strange" things about myself, and I was getting a bunch of visits from people coming from your hockey blog. I figured that if they thought anything was strange, it would be that.
Also, anyone can argue anything. Because you don't know the full history of Middle East politics, do you no longer have the right to have an opinion about anything going on in the Middle East? My opinions about the NHL may not be from a hockey fan, but they are from a sports fan, and just because I don't know the finer points of the last collective bargaining agreement or the Avalanche's contract with their arena doesn't mean I don't know when I'm bored because the playoffs last for two months.
The immature part is in reference to the names of some of the new team. Hurricanes, Panthers, Blue Jackets? Fine. Lightning, Sharks, Predators? What 3rd grade kickball teams did they get these names from? It has nothing to do with names that make sense (I'm not sure where you got the whole Nordiques/Lakers thing from), but rather names that instill a certain amount of pride instead of something that's a short-term move to sell merch and bring in bandwagon fans.
Again, I say this as a sports fan, someone in the mainstream that hockey is supposedly trying to attract, and this is my opinion: the NHL's past glory is long dead, and in its place is something that is intended to be nothing but Entertainment. It's the same reason that I can't stand the NBA, a point that I've made many times before. MLB and the NFL have managed to move forward, expand to more financially viable places while also keeping the storied past of the sports (often too much). The NBA and the NHL have failed in that.
Our disagreement is exactly the one that I already mentioned in the post: you are a diehard hockey fan. You love the product they create because you'll love it no matter what. That's great. I really respect that. But I'm telling you that, as someone who is a big fan of sports and sports business, there is absolutely nothing attractive to me about the NHL. I'll turn on the finals games when I think about it, but the business decisions turns me off of ever wanting to follow it at all.
Listen, I'm never going to say something around here deliberately to antagonize specific people. I might say something to try and spark debate, but I'm not going to deliberately take a dig at someone. As a matter of fact, there's been MANY times where I haven't written about a particular subject because I didn't want someone reading it to interpret it as antagonistic. I wrote what I wrote assuming you'd be able to take it as something about me, something I could write freely, which is what you'd asked for. If you're open to keeping this as a debate about hockey without taking my criticisms of the NHL personally, I'm all for it.
"I believe in capitalism (encourages responsibility through personal gain).¹"
...Sounds Reagan-esque² to me...
¹ Reid's blog, above
² Reid's blog,'The root of all evil, of strife and upheaval', May 18.
*sigh*
You're right, M. It's 100% Reagan. That's the part about Reagan that I admire. But I also feel like that was the part of him that was naive, which might explain this part:
"Government intervention and support (cleans up the mess of corrupt capitalism and provides in the places money can't be made)"
...which is absolutely the opposite of Reagnesque. See? Both sides of the coin. Like I already explained.
Holding the view that capitalism will always eventually take care of every problem is Reaganesque. Thinking that there are times when the government is forced to step in because there's a problem that needs to be solved before someone can figure out a way to make money solving it is not Reganesque. Get it?
Reid, the entire reason I went off like that wasn't because you get bored by the long playoff season. I can understand that. It's that in one breath you say "I never had much exposure to hockey" and in the very next, you say "the NHL doesn't respect the history of the game enough". If not for that sentence, and the "to hell with them" statement which cannot be viewed as anything but antagonism, I would have totally been okay with your views. Some of your reasons for not liking hockey are legitimate. The season IS too long. The playoffs ARE hard for anyone but hardcore fans to follow.
But when you say one of your reasons for not liking hockey is that "the NHL doesn't respect the history of the game", it isn't quite the same as saying "it doesn't suit my taste".
I would expect to be taken to task if I said "I don't like Czech cinema because there's never any nudity". It's a statement that someone in the know would find patently ridiculous.
Your stance on team names is well known, and is not exclusive to hockey. All major professional sports leagues have a few teams with stupid names. You can't use that as a reason to hate the entire sport.
I'm just sayin'
Well, it is true that there was antagonism towards the NHL. But unless you just took a job with them, I'm not going to take that back. I don't like them. I got kind of riled up by that paragraph, so I figured I'd end it with a zinger. But there was no antagonism with you.
The history comment is just a feeling. Looking at other examples: the NFL has kept one eye on it's (relatively short) history by doing things like keeping the Cowboys in the NFC East (which is annoying to me for personal reasons), keeping the Steelers from changing their uniforms, and doing everything they can to keep the Saints in New Orleans and the Vikings in Minnesota. And while it's annoying to almost all of us that the Yankees are almost always good, it helps out MLB enormously from a marketing standpoint to have them be good. It's also a huge marketing plus to have teams like the Red Sox and (as much as it hurts to say) White Sox win the World Series, because there's a huge sense of HISTORY behind it, which is given tons of air time by mainstream media and encouraged by MLB.
The best thing that could happen to the NHL would be a string of Stanley Cup championships by old teams that have won it a million times before. The last time I felt a sense of history around the Stanley Cup was when the Rangers won. Was it annoying that a New York team wins and only then do the media go nuts? Absolutely. But besides the two years that the Hurricanes made it to the finals, it was the only year that I really paid attention.
Maybe you know something about what the NHL has done to try and promote the history of the game, but my outside view is that the NHL is going into a completely different version, where teams like the Lightning will win because they're in rich Southern towns, and the Canadian teams will slowly go bankrupt and all move to warm-weather cities where the majority of fans (not all; any team will have its diehards) will only follow the teams when they get good and otherwise just treat it like a fun night out instead of a sport. That's the feeling I get, and that's exactly what doesn't suit my taste. So saying that the NHL doesn't do much to promote or encourage its long history is exactly the same as why it doesn't suit my taste.
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