Snowman On Fire

Why is it all of the players I secretly desire to see in red and black end up in orange, black and red? Last year David Hale flamed out on Lou, and now the Kings trade Mike Cammalleri to Calgary at the draft to get picks. This is a smart move for both clubs, as Cammalleri with thrive with someone (like Iginla) to feed him the puck; he was shot-starved in SoCal the past few years. And as much as he’s Canadian and wanted to be back north of the border, I wanted to see Cammalleri in a Devils sweater: In New Jersey, Cammalleri would have been the Jewish ice hockey equivalent of Bobby Thompson (let that sink in): a hard-working, everyman kind of guy that the locals (those of us who sample Hobby’s Deli upstairs at the Rock) look up to in every way.

As for the Devils not cashing in on the Olli rolly-coaster, I believe there’s no call due on the non-action. The Devils need speedy blueliners more than another 31-year old forward who finished the year at -19. I’m just hoping that come July 4th weekend I’m not wondering why all of the quality free agents ended up somewhere strange. And no, Newark’s not strange.

A family trip to Cincinnati was punctuated with a trip to see Reds game.  Their relatively new stadium is a wonderful place to see a baseball game on a spring afternoon. On the plus side: parking was easy an hour before the first pitch. Entrance was eased by plenty of security and ticket scanners. Large-bore kielbasa at the food concession with outboard, individually wrapped packages of kraut. To top it off, we never missed more than a single at-bat of play for food, drink or bathroom excursions. Everything flowed together (Ohio stories require river references) to make it an outstanding game day experience.

One of my less-secret goals in life is to visit every Major League Baseball stadium, to sample their food and comment on the sight lines and respect their new or old histories by refusing to use corporate names when referring to a field of play. Our Reds seats (acquired through Stubhub a week before the game) left us in the second row of the left field bleacher balcony, with a view fit for the day. “Great” and “American” are perfect compound adjectives for baseball, but I’ll refrain from adding them to the stadium moniker to invoke an insurance company by name. Deep down, it’s still an echo of Riverfront Stadium, home to the Red Machine of the 1970s to me, which is what set the stage for the afternoon’s game. Like visitingPNC Park last year, there was a childhood memory waiting for me inside the gates.

I can trace my childhood love of baseball to October 11, 1972; a month to the day from attaining double digits in age and three years precisely before my Bar Mitzvah. As I sat on the floor with my twin friends Scott and Glenn, watching our favorite Pittsburgh Pirates play the Big Red Machine in the National League Championship Series, Game 5, bottom of the ninth, tie score, George Foster on 3rd base with Bucs reliever Bob Moose on the mound. Moose threw a wild pitch, Foster scored to win the game for Cincinnati and I saw my friends’ mother cry. It is one of the most amazingly trivial pieces of knowledge I carry around, yet for 80% of my life it’s been one I can recall as the moment at which I correlated sports with something I felt, not just something I watched or a champion for whom I cheered. It was easy to get caught up in the Miracle Mets of 1969 or Joe Namath and his Jets; it was hard to watch WIllie Stargell, my childhood hero and number-sake, lose one that literally slipped away.

Stepping into the Reds’ ballpark, I wondered if visiting an echo of an event 36 years prior might somehow bring closure. It would be the equivalent of forgiving the girl in your 5th grade class that tortured you over a ridiculously colorful pair of pants, without admitting that you’re secretly happy her life turned into the equivalent of the Reds in the last decade and a half. Like an old Masters’ canvas, though, the answer comes not from recoloring the past but from applying fresh paint over the old to create something of recent memory.

Enter Ken Griffey Jr. On the east coast we have little incentive to follow him, although his pursuit of 600 career home runs has made the occasional breakfast time SportsCenter appearance. Center field in the Reds’ park has a home run counter, tantalizingly set at 598 dings when we arrived. In Griffey’s first at-bat, he deposited a 3-1 pitch into the right field bleachers, igniting fire works in the stands and above the running total. Each inning, each play, became a game of front-running to determine a sequence of hits and base running to bring Junior to the plate, giving us a chance to be first-hand witnesses to history. For a game in which my main interest was sampling the hot sausages, the baseball mattered more.

For anyone who doubts there is redemption through baseball; that family memories can be intertwined with a sport in which the names of players, teams and stadiums change literally with the seasons, I offer this: leaving Cincinnati this morning, my son found his game ticket in his pocket and said “Have to keep that one, #599″. No matter where the paper stub ends up, he’ll keep that one.

Writing is much like a sport: if you don’t exercise and practice regularly, you start to flail and eventually struggle to find even a few worthy ideas. My work blog has suffered from lack of attention for the past two months as travel, business management and lack of attention conspire to make it harder to get going again.

I’m determined to stay as fresh as possible, though, and think it’s high time to tackle one or more of the four writing projects that sit in various states of disarray around my laptop, desk, three notebooks and a sheaf of printed pages and scribbled notes. I’ve thought of an adaptation of Bruce Springsteen’s Jungleland, interpreted thirty-odd years later using only social media. That’s a zygote of an idea that’s unlikely to gestate any more. I have the oft-thought-of, infrequently-contributed to hockey book, now idling at about 60 pages and in desperate need of some motivation. Some of the best writing advice I’ve received has come from Cory Doctorow, who tries to write a bit each day, typically 300-500 words. That doesn’t sound like much until you attempt it every day as a job. Five hundred good words are quite different from, say, a dozen emails of fifty imprecisely chosen words.

My idea for a sci-fi short story inverts an axiom of space opera sci-fi in which quantum mechanics can be used to send information faster than the speed of light. What if the no communication theorem that makes this idea the stuff of fiction wasn’t true, and in fact, you could instantaneously transmit information between two entangled quantum bits? But what if the entanglement depended upon normal randomness and observer independence, and you were able to effectively confused the transmssion by changing the observer’s state? OK, this has nothing to do with hockey or baseball or golf, but it’s a project that gets random brain activity when nothing else is going on.

Most likely candidate to get some attention, and soon, is a short story that I’ve outlined and sketched in to about 10% completion. It started when pondering why hockey players (like most athletes) have innumerable superstitions, and what would happen if general managers and coaches played by the same rules. At the time the idea hit me (around Christmas) I was hoping the Devils would shake things up a bit, and this was one of those random thoughts that floated in over the mental transom. So in the interest of setting goals and sticking to something of schedule in the interests of rebuilding my writing chops, I think I’l work on Like Heaven But Colder, a short story in six parts. If I can write one part every week to ten days, that takes us into free agency and the formal off-season when there should be real hockey content available for comment.

The story will be available under a Creative Commons license with only some rights reserved, so if you want to take it and turn it into a comic, a set of drawings, a derviative work of fiction, or anything else you want to share with puck heads on a non-commercial basis, go for it. I guess I have to write something before you can actually go for anything, so the puck is back in my end.

Whenever we teach “teamwork” to our kids or employees, we always imply that it’s intra-team work. And when we teach players to establish goals, far too often we imply winning or awards, rather than simple objectives that demonstrate improvement in any aspect of the game. This video segment from ESPN shows what happens when team work means looking beyond your uniform crest, and a goal is something that hasn’t yet been achieved, but is a swing, a stroke, a shot, an attempt away, separated only by practice and attitude.Scrap every bit of youth sportsmanship training there is, and just have the young sports in your home, as well as any sports parents you know, watch this clip. Even better that the batter literally carried by other team mates wears #8: Somewhere in heaven, Willie Stargell is proud of everyone involved.

One of my co-workers refers to anything that involves confusion, lack of leadership, conflicting goals, and mild amounts of directionless meandering as a “goat rodeo.” That’s the best metaphor for the New York Yankees right now. A-Rod and Posada are hurt (hey, A-Rod, for $275 million dollars, try staying in shape in the off-season); the Yankees can’t buy a hit with runners in scoring position, and Bobby Abreau looks like he phones it in from right field about one in every four plays. In tonight’s Subway Series game Abreau’s throw on a sacrifice fly had a better shot of reaching Joe Girardi (in the dugout) than Molina (fillling in for the one-armed Posada).

The Yankees are in last place. And not just one of those artifacts of scheduling, short-term respite at the bottom of the statistical ladder; they’ve earned this one. With a new manager, key injuries and a pitching rotation that hasn’t improved one iota over last year, I’m inclined to see what happens, making it all the more amusing to see the front office goat herder himself (that would be Hank Steinbrenner) stage mini-outrages in public. If Steinbrenner really wants to improve the Yankees, he can stop with the histrionics and start by finding someone who can pitch, followed by someone who can hit when there’s another pinstriped uniform in view on second or third base. And maybe provide some much-needed leadership on the team in the process.

Got this incredibly slick stick from Meredith Gran, author of the Octopus Pie online comic. She asked readers to send her hand-written notes so she could see others’ scribbles; what we got back was a personalized note backing mass-produced iconography. “Team Asthma” is how my wife has referred to my hockey endeavors over the years, interspersed with “Inhaler League.” All terms of endearment of course. I doubt the American Pediatric Society or the NHL are going to call me for public service appearances when probable Cup-bound heavy breather Gary Roberts fills the role nicely. If you’re wondering what the intersection of Brooklyn based comics, aging NHL stars and even older left wings looks like, it has roots in this four-month old comic that cemented me as an OP fan.

Patrik Elias had a goal and an assist for the Czech Republic as it became the first team to beat Switzerland in the World Championships. It’s amazing how productive Elias can be when you move him back to wing, and pair him up with a center who feeds him the puck like warm kolac.

Meanwhile, Team USA lost its captain and big center Jeff Halpern. Halpern banged up his right knee, and is back in DC for surgery to repair a ruptered ACL. It’s repeat knee rebuilding for Halpern, something he last had done six pre-cap summers ago as a Cap player.

The IIHF ranking system probably has some algorithmic basis that could only be explained in an xkcd comic and a 2nd year graduate text in topology. And the rules for deciding team and country affiliations are very loose; it’s possible for Scott Gomez to skate for Mexico and quite reasonable for me — or Halpern — to be eligible for the Israeli national team. Don’t laugh about the Israeli team, now ranked ahead of Iceland but behind powerhouse Estonia; they’ve been moving up slowly. Given their one rink in Metulla and lack of booster clubs, they’re probably 3 Olympics and half a dozen Russian olim away from Olympic contention. But what a team they could assemble under IIHF rules: Halpern, Mathieu Schneider, Mike Cammalleri, up-coming Preds goalie Dov Grumet-Morris (former standout at Hah-vahd) and the first-ever Israeli drafted into the NHL, former Devils prospect Max Birbraer.

Today I experienced the delight ususally reserved for watching Duke basketball lose to North Carolina. The Rangers were out-gunned, out-hit and out-hustled for all but about 3 minutes of today’s Game 5, and they got bounced by the Penguins. It’s becoming increasingly easy to cheer for the Penguins, as they generate excitement rather than controversy. Who wants to hear about Jagr’s future in the NHL, Gomez’s monster contract that took the Rangers no further than he took the Devils, Sean Avery’s spleen venting, or listen to the Rangers whine about penalties? Another trade deadline deal - the one that brought Hossa from Atlanta to Pittsburgh - looks briliant, as Hossa gets the game and series-winning goal. Shades of Patrik Elias with that one. The Monday morning question is just how much the New York media will pick this series apart, looking to lay blame in which the guy supposedly in his career twilight (Jagr) outshone the recent imports (Gomez and Drury) when it counted.

I’m cheering for the Penguins in the Battle of Pennsylvania, and they could take either Dallas or Detroit.

I check the logs on this blog every few days just to get a sense of what kind of topics generate traffic, and how people find my blog amidst the millions of voices on the net. I’ve discovered some interesting and perhaps perturbing truths:

Google AdSense is really self-referential. Before rebuilding this site, I had an ad click-through rate of small fraction of a percent, but I defniitely had click-throughs. And those clicks shaped the types of ads that appeared under each entry: some NJ Devils related things, ticket broker ads, occasionally pointers to eBay auctions. Once I rebuilt the site, I’ve been getting somewhat moronic ads based on the “snowman” keyword and the “on fire” modifier, including fire equipment, Frosty the snowman related electronic kitsch, and other things that register somewhat above oral surgery in terms of interest to the average snowman reader (all two dozen of you). I’m not asking anyone to click, because (a) that violates Google Adense’s terms of service (it’s a blatant form of click fraud) and (b) I do not want more stupid ads like these littering the site, and clicking on them only makes Google think that “they’re working”. I’ll point this out to my Google friends; if you are displaying 400 ads a month and not getting any click throughs, maybe it’s time to change the sort algorithm?

In response to a promotion from the hosting company that keeps the snowman chill, I signed up for a Google Adwords account. This is the flip side of AdSense — Adsense displays the ads; AdWords lets you pick keywords and phrases to which to attach your ads. My one-liner advertising the Snowman On Fire blog has been shown about 50 times this week, without a single click — so I haven’t paid for any of those displays, but at the same time, the net effect has been exactly what I paid for. Just for chuckles, I sponsor some of the popular mis-spellings that would take people to a Devils related blog, like “Patrick Elias”, and I get more displays there than on the normalized keywords. But the opacity of the process bothers me: Google decides what each click is worth, and one good click might exhaust my whopping advertising budget (best described as “a Hamilton per month”). With a small budget, I’m precluded from ever displaying in a high-click value market, like someone searching for “Stanley Cup,” because any click would exceed my ability to pay for it. But this seems to point at the converse of my click-through problem in AdSense — why not let market forces determine the value of clicks, so that the overall value of click-throughs increases, rather than assigning some known only to the Googleplex value that makes the market slightly more murky that NHL caponomics?

As much as I’m aggravated by Google AdSense, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Project Wonderful. PW is the ad engine that powers most of the online comics I frequent, helping the authors pay for, well, electricity and beer, I think. I put a footer with three buttons at the bottom of the page, and it turns out that my few page views a day are generating a steady stream of revenue. Not much - a few cents a day, but more than I’m seeing from displaying irrelevant and irreverant Google ads in the same context. The big difference is that PW charges by the day, and sets a market price for display ads using a public auction. You can make your own decisions about the value of having an ad show up for particular content, because you see the style, shape and sequence of the content. There’s full transparency, and that makes the advertising process both wonderful and a self-directed fulfillment.

And for the cosmic coincidence of the day: I love seeing readers arrive here through some tortuous, circuitous path. Earlier this week, someone searched for the phrase “I will praise him the rest of my days,” a phrase usually reserved in our household for Marty Brodeur or Patrik Elias. However, there was a typo in the search, and the phrase “I will parise him the rest of my days” landed the searcher at the snowman’s feet. I only see actual page loads, so I know that the person who went in search of praise found a praised Parise here — something made the person click, and for that action, I’m happy for the rest of the day.

I finally did something I swore I would do weeks ago: I finished putting up all of the posts that were eaten or lost when I upgraded my blog site, and then decided that I was going to tackle the problem of cached links to the old site. When I first started using WordPress, I used the numerical indices for blogs, so links to entries had the form
http://agrosnowman.com/snowman/?p=34.
Not at all indicative of the content or potential puns included in the title. Upon re-install, I chose the compacted title as a permalink for each entry, which seemed like a good idea at 1:00 AM on a Saturday night when my wife was annoyed that I was typing rather than doing something more, well, productive.

After spending a few hours looking at PHP books, searching a bit, and some trial and error, I actually wrote a piece of code for the first time in about five years, and more miraculously, it works! If you go to one of the “old” entries via a cached link from any search engine, the little code snipped I put up will map that “p=##” mess into a proper blog title, and then redirect you. Writing code has never been my strong suit, and I still find it somewhat surprising that my prose writing has far outpaced my code writing when 25 years ago I couldn’t conceive of that ordering under any circumstances.

In any order, approach, or way, I’m pronouncing the Snowman back to full strength, with all previous content once again available, and in theory I shouldn’t drop anyone on the cold hard floor of the Internet. Now if only the Yankees’ bullpen could manage the same.