Law Goalie

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.

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.

If by "more poetic" the assignment intends you to nominate the poem with "more obvious and numerous poetic devices," you'd really just have to catalogue what they're using, respectively, and let it come down on one side or the other. My guess would be Teasdale's, in that case. If on the other hand you're being asked to arbitrate the poetic superiority of one over the other, it would be more of an opinion piece. Personally, I'd find it much easier to argue for Frost than for Teasdale, if only because the conceit of 'Barter' is a wee bit tried and trite -- and, frankly, entirely vacant of the rather obvious fact that the idea of purchasing love and life owes more to prostitution and slavery than poetry; put 'Barter' in a ribald mouth, and the whole thing becomes outrageously funny. Falstaff would have had a field day with it. Frost, by comparison, aspires to less and perhaps achieves more. You can mock it -- imagine the speaker of Housman's 'Terence' having a go at it in the same voice as his, "The cow, the old cow, she is dead / It sleeps well the horned head / We poor lads, 'tis our turn now / To hear such tunes as killed the cow." -- but it's always preferable to be a simpleton than a buffoon, or whatever the feminine form of a buffoon might be (a Buffy?) And, happily, this reply isn't too off-topic for a Vent - I loathe Teasdale and disapprove of Frost for reasons of sheer intellectual perversion.

Loved seeing the Marlies on CBC - they really should do more of that. I'm sure it was as much fun for the players as it was for us.

Backstopped the UofT law boys to their first championship in six years. Means nothing, feels goooooooooood...

Not sure about the holder - I was in the back playing with some Brian's Focus gear. I just seemed to recall that the RBK cowlings were somewhat annoying to get settled right. I suspect you're right that he just didn't use enough passes. He did both sets of blades in the time it took another shop just to do the first pair I tried it on. I may take them back to give him another crack. When I skated on them today, it really did feel like the flat wasn't fully in; the edges were there, but I didn't have that silky glide that FBV gave me before. Does that fit with what you suspect may have happened with too few passes to establish the flat?

Holy, I will say that doing goalie skates on the current FBV setup is a little trickier, apparently. I took my skates to an otherwise competent sharpener yesterday who had not yet done FBV on a pair of goalie skates, and he really struggled with them at first. Granted, one set of blades still had a 1/2" ROH on it, but the first skate he did was fishscaled, and the lateral edge was basically gone. When he re-did the blade, it was fine, and he said he felt he'd got the hang of it, but I was a bit surprised that a sharpener that experienced had to struggle to make it happen. Granted, am I also using the RBK Customlite cowlings, which are something of a bitch to work with, but they do have the full-width steel rather than the thinner 'Thrust Blades' from the 9K. Just a word of warning. It might be worth waiting until Blackstone comes out with their goalie-specific shapes and has a little more time to iron things out. I'm already hooked, so I'll just have to live with it. :) Sidenote: is it actually trickier to put an FBV cut on blades that were previously ROH that to work from a new blade?

A small admission of contrition - ahaha.

Bucky, your goalie will hate you for an hour for that one tip, and love you forever if you follow through on that promise. :D I actually make a point of praising my D more for "letting me see the shot" (which includes boxing guys out as much as staying the hell out of the way) than for blocking shots. The problem is that there are three ways that throwing your stick in the lane can go wrong, and only one way it can go right. If you do deflect the shot away from the net, great - that's the one good outcome; the problem is that your goalie probably has no idea where the puck is after you tip it, and could be completely off-angle if it gets thrown back on net quickly (the first bad). The other options are, of course, tipping the puck on net (disastrous), but almost as bad is the chance that if you throw your stick in and *don't* make contact with the puck, you may actually screen the puck from your goalie - partially or entirely - at the most crucial moment of the shooter's release. More to the point, the efficient difference between those outcomes is so small that the defender basically has zero control over it. There was some very good research done on this in Calgary, the conclusion of which was that if an elite goalie's visual attachment to the puck is disrupted in the final half-second (roughly) before the shot, the goalie's save percentage will drop from about .900 to around .750 - which is more or less the difference between an effective goalie and a dangerously poor one at any given level. Personally, all but three of the goals I've allowed since the new year could be put down to this problem, or similar problems of D playing off the stick-blade instead of the body, and screening me with their legs. In that same period, it's probably about a 2:1 ratio of blocked shots to goals created, which sounds pretty good until you compare it to a save percentage of .900 - and much worse when looking at the roughly 1:2 ratio of blocked shots to dangerous scoring chances created. /rant Let it not be said I'm thoughtlessly critical. I completely understand the stick-in-the-release impulse - the D want to be involved, they want to *do something* to help out. It just happens that this is the least helpful thing you could possibly be doing as a defender, short of banking the puck in off my leg, two-handing me across the side of the head, or throwing a guy on top of me as I'm freezing the puck to blow out my knee ligaments. It would actually be more helpful to stop dead in your tracks and take a giant dump on the ice, right then and there, than to throw your stick in front of the release; at least the steaming turd would discourage the trailer from hunting rebounds.

Sorry mate - wasn't running down your goalie sight-unseen, just being a bit aphoristic about guys throwing their sticks in the shooting lane; it was a paraphrase of something a goalie coach once said to me in a moment of frustration.

If the blade of your stick has a better in-game save percentage than your goalie, it's time to find a new goalie.

De Beg Yin!

One of my own defensemen created three goals against me tonight, single-handedly, and was a pylon on six other scoring chances: one goal, one primary assist, and seven times he got used as a screen. I don't mind unskilled hockey players, and ordinarily, this shift just runs off my back, but the sheer idiocy of what he did has made me angrier than I've been since someone hit me in the ear during warm-up while I was taking another shot. Nothing a couple of large Islay Mists won't fix, I'm in a cat-punting mood.

If Leighton hasn't earned a little trust by now - from his team and the Flyers' faithful - what the hell else does he have to do?