Law Goalie

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?

Nor do I. My concern was that this thread is strictly for descriptive discussion of one sharpening technology, and, in my experience, getting into a comparative discussion in the same space results in both being derailed. To be honest, I figured that because you'd raised the issue, you might have some info on BFD. I haven't so much as seen a shop with BFD here in Toronto; most Blademaster/Max Edge places are sticking with ROH, and everyone else is going FBV in a hurry. Then again, we are a very peculiar market.

Perhaps you should consult the title of the thread. It may resolve your confusion. Would you care to start a new thread which lays a rational groundwork for such a discussion?

Interesting... I wish I still had my set of Thrust blades to try it on; idiot sharpener ruined them.

What did omega have his done at?

This is from a while back, but it's really been bugging me. Cornell turned down my wife for her DMA in Composition - which in and of itself isn't surprising, since they weren't an ideal fit for a number of reasons, only take one or two people a year, and typically only wunderkindern with hundreds of scores and scores more performances at Carnegie Hall - but their reason for doing so defies, well, reason. After asking around, she found out that she was considered 'too academic.' That was not a description of the style of her music (which is anything but propeller-headed 12-tone abstraction), but of her resume. Apparently Cornell doesn't like its doctoral composers to have radical things like teaching experience, significant research, and peer-reviewed publications. She might still have turned them down, in the end - Toronto offered her a lot more money - but it just struck me as an absolutely idiotic reason to reject someone. She spent more on that one application in time and money - including the fee, a pile of printed scores, and the stupid GRE testing - and all for nought. It also sucks a little for me because I'd rather hit it off with a professor of theirs who is something of a star in the firmament of satiric scholarship. Oh well.

Those are lovely skates. Toe-cap's still too narrow. :P

Didn't get to see the game: who was Caputi paying with, and how'd he fit in?

Like I said, I think the world of Leights, but this is an incredible amount of pressure to put on him. Here's hoping he rises to the occasion as well as he has throughout the season.

I think this may be one of the weird schisms within Hawk hockey/Monkeysports. Goaliemonkey has absolutely no problem shipping USPS; Hockeymonkey seemingly won't, much the way they won't add items from goaliemonkey.com to a hockeymonkey.com order, even if you call in to place the order and the items are ten feet apart. :(

Etymology is the study of the structure and meaning of words - not what they've come to mean through misprision and misuse (connotation), but where they came from, how they're put together, and what they literally mean (denotation). In practise, it's about 10% English grammar, 10% common sense, and 80% foreign vocabulary (it is, after all, our fault for having such a spatchcocked language). For example, "etymology" is composed of the Greek etymos (truth) and logos (word) - so 'the study of the truth of words.' It has, over time, come to connote 'the study of the history of words', since "truth" is a word that is as close to banned as a word can get in academia - it died around the same time PhD's in philology went the way of the dinosaurs and Lily's Latin Grammar. In practise, etymology is about the diligent use of good resources and a strong memory. Very good dictionaries (OED) always contain more or less complete etymologies; poor ones will just list what language the word came from, or nothing at all. Truly complete etymologies can be enormous, essay-length studies; it's a wonderful but truly pedantic field. There are some words in our language that seem to have sprung from everywhere and nowhere. Your course sounds unusually well structured. I can only hope that, apart from F451, it's been a good experience. I have a whole potted state-of-the-language rant which will one day appear in The Venting Spot, but for here and now, I'll confine myself to saying good work and good luck in that course.

If I had my way, the first half of every freshman undergraduate course would be nothing but grammar, etymology, and rhetoric. I'm a prick, I know. I will not, however, defend Fahrenheit 451, which is an execrable piece of fabulation; like Rusty noted, it's not even the best of its sub-sub-species of that particular genre. It tends to get chosen because it's short and critical summaries are readily available, along with a film. It's the kind of book you don't have to read. Congrats, Chadd - I know it'll feel like relief, but that's something in which to feel genuine pride. Getting a celebratory room at a first-class Marriott for 75% off doesn't hurt either. :D

Call Scott Battram. :D

Enthusiasm got the better of me. :(