Snowman On Fire

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.