Law Goalie

I feel your pain, mate. Ankles are terrible. Just RICE it and apply your analgesic of choice - maybe a half dozen G&T's? 0% coverage, 100% out of my pocket - yet another reason I was so pleased with them. Gee, don't give me any real NSAIDs or anything. I half expected to get referred to a lunar massage guru because the epicycle of Io was out of harmony with my Fluffernutter field variance.

How did you periodize leading up to the camp? My vent: nurse practitioners who prescribe placebos. Like I'm not going to go look it up on Pubmed as soon as I leave, you clots.

Sweet jerseys - used to watch your fellow Hibs in Edinburgh. :)

Despite being fatter than a whale omelette, I'm finally playing fairly well again: 1-2 GA per hour against respectable competition. Consistency isn't there (I'm still tanking the odd game if I don't get enough sleep, or eat well enough, or spend too much time thinking about Andrew Bloody Marvell), but it's getting better. Now, if I can just slough off this lard apron, I'll be laughing...

That's what I figured. I know they said 110 was impossible on player blades. Anyone tried 100/1 other than Tim Thomas and a couple of jimmy's experimental guys?

Possibly a dumb question, but has anyone tried 105/75?-- or is that only physically possible with wider goalie blades?

The GRE is a joke, and the only company with more questionable testing methods than ETS is the CSA.

Jesus wept... I will be so much happier when Michel gets my new mask done; he's got one or two ever so slightly more important boys to deal with first, but that shot and the MSH HHOF shooting gallery dispelled any buyer's remorse that lingered after I mailed the cheque.

Was one of them an orange liquid in a highball glass?

A delightful variety of all over the place. Couple of current junior players, all the way to guys who just picked the game up in the last couple of years. Every once in a while someone would bust out a coast-to-coaster, but for the most part, it was more about making plays and having fun than just filling the net; more interest in showing off gear and gonzo personalities than showing people up. Nice atmosphere.

Yep, those are in, Reebok-parlance, 'Turco-breaks' - which is really just shorthand for 'breaks in the vertical roll above and below the knee'. You may note, however, that with the way I have them strapped those breaks mean nothing: I put the two knee-straps through the top-calf buckle, and the top two calf-straps through the mid-calf buckle, leaving everything from the knee up totally free. At one point, I also sliced through the right pad's toe-ties, requiring some emergency surgery involving chikinpotpie and myself throwing our legs on top of the boards, and Dr. pmurphy17 using chikin's skate blade to slice off the rest. Amazingly, the pad continued to behave as normal. That stick (the Ballistik .52 Cal. on which I'm doing a long-term review) is far and away - and I mean by a country mile - the best and most durable one-piece composite goalie stick I have ever used, seen, or heard of. And it's damn sexy too!- especially once I got the blue Tackimac grip on there. Totally head and shoulders above the rest of the field.

Few of me from the MSH Summer Jam; demo pads and gloves courtesy of Tim Schultz at Reebok; pics courtesy of the gracious jds and fasmiele. What's kind of cool is that they're all mid-action shots - there isn't one of a set pre-shot stance, everything's sort of mid-movement.

All I can say is -- well-earned. Whether nature or nurture, fuck it: you earned it.

Finally, FINALLY got to a good tune-up skate at CIA in Mississauga tonight.

I'm on a course of single-malt antibiotics.

Sinus infection. Ugh.

That's not quite what bystander apathy means; it's a sociological principle, not an ethical one. If it's you alone bearing witness to a threatening confrontation between two (or more) people, the decision to intervene is a private one. You calculate the risks, weigh the pros and cons, etc. Bystander apathy applies to larger groups which bear witness to the violence (in whatever form) done by one or more persons to another or others. Even when the group bearing witness is overwhelmingly superior in numbers, resources, etc., and would, as you say, in the aftermath, almost universally profess a strong, highly motivated desire to have intervened in the moment of confrontation, they do not. The theory is that they do not intervene because no single one of them is willing to be the first one to step forward. As soon as one person raises a hand - or even their voice - against the violence, nearly everyone else joins in almost instantly. The really sad thing is that the principle is observable even in situations where the violence has already happened, and the injured party is simply in need of medical aid. People have bled to death in crowded streets. That's part of the reason why (until liability became a bigger issue than ethical conduct) governments used to love have people trained in first aid, basic military skills, etc. Trained reactions are the single best way to overcome bystander apathy; that's largely why, in good first aid training, one of the more important lessons is crowd control. As soon as you step in, you'll have ten or fifteen other wannabe heroes lunging foreward as well, and most of them don't know what the hell to do; best thing is to send them off to do things like call an ambulance, get water, get a cloth, etc.

Bystander apathy sucks. One day buddy will try that in the wrong place, and someone will teach him that shitting teeth ain't fun.

Ugh. Horrible case of metallogeusia from contaminated pine nuts: hideous bitter metallic taste in your mouth that lasts for two bloody weeks, and only intensifies when you eat or drink, and the more flavourful the food or drink, the worse the sensation. Goddamn you, Pacific Rim.

Get some massage (even self-applied) going on your vastus lateralis - you'd be amazed how often that can vanish in minutes.

Paraphrase: reading is just like lifting weights. All the same basic rules of adaptation apply. Don't read too much in one sitting. Don't try to read too much at once. Don't read too much of any one thing, the same way you wouldn't just do preacher curls for two hours. Take breaks, because it's in the rests that your brain will actually adapt to having read, and better prepare itself to read again. I forgot you were doing Greek as well. Sophocles wrote three Theban plays based on the histories: he wrote Antigone first, then Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus; historically, however, the events of Oedipus Rex come first, then of O. at Colonus, then of Antigone. Gilbert Murray (among others) has some interesting things to say about that decision, largely with respect to how the character of Creon changes. As for the 'doing what the grader wants' angle, it applies everywhere. If you want your building proposal to be approved by the city, you need to make it palatable. It's just a question of how skillful your rhetoric is: fulfill one or two expectations, skirt another, violate another.

^^ Can't argue with that. Distance education - even of the most informal, tutorial sort - is always an unqualified disaster.

Sounds like you're more or less on the right track. Always aim to please the person grading your papers - a lesson I learned far later than I should have. That will be true from here to eternity. You will find a moment of clarity with your textual comprehension: you'll plug away at it, and when you've sufficiently adapted your brain to the task at hand, the neural pathways will align and the scales will drop from your eyes. Like anything else, it's just a matter of willful adaptation. Which Oedipus play, and whose translation, if you don't mind my asking? Colonus often gets left out, obscuring Oedipus' thematic importance to Antigone, which was written first but comes later in the Theban chronology. Hopefully you won't be addled by inconsiderate clots in the library again. If you really do need to pad out the paper, getting into discussions of secondary critical sources can fill up volumes unfathomable to man or monk; both of those poems will have had just sub-biblical levels of commentary. If your school has subscriptions to online journals (eg. through Scholars' Portal), you can absolutely rake that stuff in. Incidentally, cocksuckers at the U just about cost me $18K today with a clerical error.

Ow, goddamnit, that stings - right in the alma mater!

That's a rather extraordinary position -- are Horace's Sermones less poetic than the Carmina simply because they have a rhetorical method and a point to make? Coleridge and Wordsworth, to name but two, would have a bone to pick about sentiments lessening poetic art (in their critical theory as well as in practice). Throw it forward a little, and I've heard it convincingly argued that it was two satirists - Pope and Swift - who wrote the best pure, technical poetry and prose respectively in the language, no matter what their aims were. It's an interesting assignment, especially in re: the dominant contemporary poetic devices (some great critical literature in there), as well the present maturity of the poet's art. I underestimated its scope from your original post. You'd need to have good command of both poetic catalogues for that. Moose, I couldn't agree more -- especially about the teaching of Blake. Most of the time I hear him taught, it's like Northrop Frye never wrote a fucking word, and M.H. Abrams was just whistling dixie out of his ass.