Snowman On Fire

Richard Stevens’ Diesel Sweeties is a laugh riot. I read it religiously, daily (and even on religious days, like today) and always get a good laugh. Any good artist makes you fill in the visual gaps, whether it’s leaving out every shingle or brick in a painting or forcing an appreciation for pixel aliasing when you’re wearing the red-n-black.

If you want your own hand (tablet) drawn, 8-bit pixel party shot, complete with slimming transform, anti-aging bits, and appropriate derisive expression (and the Islanders aren’t even in the vicinity of the Rock yet!), all this can be yours for a very nominal fee.

Minor operational update: looks like iPowerweb, the folks who host this site and happily take my credit card payments once a year, have fixed a few of the lingering upgrade problems. For most of February and March, snowmanonfire.com couldn’t be reached by any probes, pings, aggregators, consolidators, ad displayers, or anyone else. Kind of like pucks shot by the Devils and the net. But things “feel” better. This may be the only sign of life in Boston this April. All manner of Red Sox, Bruins and Patriots jokes implied.

If you’re wondering why the performance of the blog is only slightly worse than that of, say, Philadelphia’s third line, it’s because iPowerWeb (the folks I pay to host it) moved to a new platform that is basically miserable.

On top of that, I’ve filed two trouble tickets and haven’t heard back, so it’s likely the Snowman will go on the road again, in search of reasonable mySQL performance, Wordpress knowledge and a hosting provider that actually knows something about technology.

Of course, blogging about problems with your blog is so self-referential that I believe it’s illegal in South Dakota, but if I keep someone else from going down the money toilet with these guys it’s a win.

I travel quite a bit for my day job, and I’ve developed certain hotel preferences over time. In the course of managing my son’s hockey team, I’ve also booked large blocks of rooms for tournaments and have seen the entire range of customer service. In the past week, I’ve lived at both ends of that spectrum.

This morning I checked out of the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, FL. Sometime around 3:30am, the fire alarm tripped and woke up the entire hotel. Upon checkout, the front desk manager gave me a discount on last night’s lodging rate, as compensation for getting all of about 2 hours of sleep. I didn’t have to ask, I didn’t have to plead my case, they just took care of their customer. Guess where I’ll be staying next time I’m in the Ft. Lauderdale area? This is how you build a brand. It’s one reason why I’m loyal to Hard Rock Cafes (consistently good quality anywhere in the world), and now I’m loyal to their hotel chain as well. Not surprising when you consider that the idea of rock memorabilia at the HRC started with the London cafe hanging Eric Clapton’s guitar over his favorite bar stool as a measure of permanent hospitality.

Rewind a week to a hockey tournament in the nation’s capital, where I was hosting 15 families in a Marriott Suites hotel. In the course of three days, we had families assigned to smoking rooms (with 11- and 12-year old hockey players in them), contradicting the rooming list I had been given. The phones went unanswered more than half of the time. There was no bell service to be found, so the lobby became a collection of hockey bags and orbiting parents and siblings. Typicallty, when you land a large group at a hotel, the hotel’s sales manager sends a token “thank you” for your business - a fruit basket, some chocolate, something low-cost and high-carb to say “We value your business.” What I got was arguments from the front desk about room assignments; what I didn’t get was any contact from someone in a position of authority or sales. I’ve waited a week to hear back from the hotel, and the silence isn’t just deafening, it’s indicative of a brand problem.

What Marriott told me, implicitly, is they could care less about my business. Perhaps this is a result of Marriott franchising their hotels, instead of owning them outright; perhaps it’s merely a local management problem over a holiday weekend when the hotel was oversold. No matter the cause, the effect is the same for me: My loyalty to Marriott has gone negative.

The locomotive cheer is one of the oldest college cheers. dervied from a pre-Civil War Army cheer. It’s forever ingrained in my Princeton experience, not just from four years on campus but through countless reunions and sporting events, in which a locomotive signals a job well done, a sign of respect, and conveys a thank-you for the phrase coined by Woodrow Wilson, “Princeton in the Nation’s Service.”

Here’s a big locomotive for Michelle Kwan, who withdrew from the Olympics today. She proved that you don’t need a gold medal to be a champion. She demonstrated that you can participate in a sport you love and respect without it being the sole thing that defines you, and without the media’s insistence that you further define the sport. She was eloquent in her speech but more elegant in her deeds.

Having suffered through a torn groin I can vouch that it is excruciatingly painful. Walking hurts. Stairs are torture. I can’t imagine skating or jumping. Muscle tears are accidents, they’re emotionally painful, and they have ended more than a few hockey players’ careers. This likely ends Michelle Kwan’s Olympic career, and she’ll depart without a gold medal.

But go to your local rink early on a Sunday morning, and watch the young skaters, and ask them about their idols and heroines. You’ll hear Michelle Kwan’s name emerge as a cheer. The Olympics are about pagaentry, and human drama, and tradition. Today the human element rose above the others - but the tradition, once started, lives far longer than the memory of medals and podiums.

You read it here first, people.

Michelle Kwan might punt on the Olympics. After she arrived Torino. After she marched in the opening ceremony and got way too much TV attention (hello, NBC, how about the women’s ice hockey team?)

Here’s a suggestion for Michelle: Set an example for all of the young skaters who worship you and hang up the skates before you get hurt (physically or mentally) on national TV. You’ve won Olympic medals - is the possibility of adding a gold medal enough to tarnish your career?