Snowman On Fire

The hockey off-season brings a surfeit of warm-weather activities: golf, baseball, rollerblading, and my favorite, reading. I don’t find it at all incongrous to read hockey books when it’s 90 degrees and humid. To help share the warmth, I collected my list of favorite hockey books in a sidebar page, and I’ll get around to updating it in the next few weeks.

Just finished Jack Falla’s Home Ice and Saved. I think you have to read them in that order; Home Ice is about the joys of owning a backyard rink and is a collection of his essays and stories, all true. Saved is a work of fiction, but like all good fiction, a little bit of the author makes a celebrity cameo appearance. It’s especially appropriate for this playoff season, but I won’t spoil the ending.

Several years ago, the NHL decided to make a push for “non traditional media” coverage, given that it was barely registering fifth in a four-sport nation (NFL, MLB, NBA and the NHL being the “top four”, although NASCAR generates more of an audience in the top four spots). Since then, the use of video and the YouTube deal, encouragement of bloggers and even a zero-cost blogging infrastructure and fan page system on nhl.com have helped move this idea along. The basis for the non-print, non-television coverage push was that NHL fans tend to be more technologically literate, more affluent, and more inclined to consume multiple media sources than other fans. Which is another way of saying that if you can afford tickets at the Rock or the Garden, you probably own a computer and high speed internet connection.

During this rather tortuous season, I found myself reading Tom Guilitti’s Fire & Ice nearly every day, more for his insights into practices, post-game reports and press conferences that made me feel like I was there. Tom is the Pat St. John (in his WNEW-FM prime) of the sports blogging world — when he’s on, you feel like you’re talking hockey with your best friend, even though you’re talking to a screen and nobody is listening (sounds like a Linkin Park song, sorry).

I also began regular consumption of John Fischer’s In Lou We Trust blog, and John was kind enough to send props the Snowman’s way. Unlike the real sports journalism world, bloggers tend to nod to each other except when we’re stealing content and themes. John writes like the guy who sits down low on the glass and cheers as much for good defensive plays as flashy goals. Rounding out my four corners of Devils dailies were the five-man 2-Man Advantage show and the iconoclastic, self-deprecating, and vocabulary-creating duo at Interchangeable Parts. Along with my morning dose of comics, these became my sports pages, editorial columns, and entertainment.

Now if only Lou & Jeff would figure out that there are quite a few readers and writers out here who are willing to make up for what constitutes marketing in the Mulberry Street Gang by promoting the team, the arena and the entire league. Why not have a “Blog with the Devils skate”, or a regular, weekly e-mail Q&A between bloggers and players (and management, if they actually use the web)? Invite the bloggers in for a virtual press conference, held with a webcam, a conference call line and some links off of the team website.

Looking through the statistics for this blog — which are minimal and very short-term, as I don’t pay for anything other than hosting space — most of the traffic comes from searches, and some of that from image searches. Pictures I’ve taken at practice, or at the Rock, show up in Google image search and result in traffic to the site. This is the new marketing — it’s not about reaching the people who already know where to find the Devils web site, nhl.com or can navigate the side roads around Newark’s Broad Street — it’s about finding the folks who were looking for something else and happened upon something Devilishly interesting. There are so many low-cost, high-return activities in which we — bloggers, aspiring writers, or just general Devils hangers-on — would participate. Just open the door to the bench, guys.

I’m going to ruminate more about this season, think about my wish list for new blood to be squeezed from this Rock, comment on the playoffs, the state of hockey, the post-season antics of my own NJ Ice Dragons HNA team, and whatever joy I can find in the Mets, Yankees and Olympics this summer. After all, I want to see how the Kathryn Bertine story ends.

I’ve been trying to squeeze the most out of the latest version of WordPress while simultaneously moving, converting, converging and editing down old content. I’ve taken down the old homepage of agrosnowman.com and replaced it with a pointer to the blog; anything of interest there now shows up as a page on the right-hand nav bar here.

In an attempt to get more readership, and after that, more sponsorship, I also signed up as a Project Wonderful ad destination. If you scroll to the bottom of the page you’ll see three ad boxes that are up for bid; anyone who wants to sponsor the site can do so at the “market rate” determined by a continuous auction for those three spots. It’s one of the features I like in R. Stevens’ Diesel Sweeties comic web site, so I followed suit and put a similar footer here. Now all I need are sponsors: the going market rate to run a footer ad here is whatever epsilon charge about absolute zero is at PW — probably a dime a day (you could feed a starving child, or support a well-fed Devils fan).

Next steps: bringing over the entire hockey book list as a page, editing the theme a bit more to make it more red&black friendly, adding some custom graphics, and of course loading the last 60 or so entries that got lost in the shuffle.

I’ll admit to a bit of off-hours entertainment this week that didn’t involve Devils games: I started reading Questionable Content, an aboslutely brilliant web comic, and was so intrigued by the few panels that I saw that I went back to square one (post one, if you must) and began reading the whole strip.

This is the beauty of web comics — unlike something in your local newspaper, you don’t enter storylines without context. You can absorb the crispy goodness of someone else’s warped mind and see the whole thing evolve. I’ve been digesting about 150 strips a day, with a goal to get caught up to early 2008 before I head off to China next week. This is definitely a strong-R rated strip, and there are references that I’d have to explain to more than a few of my friends. But after spending reasonable amounts of time in the 413 area code, and working at a college radio station for a few years, I can say with certainty that QC captures the mash-up of both. Perfectly.

When you’re reading something, and one of the characters reminds you of a good friend in every way, then the illustrator and writer have connected with you such that art imitates life. It makes for a good story, even if your own life doesn’t have the same number of parental warning labels affixed.

Things in snowman-land are slow, and I’ve already opened a trouble ticket with the powers that be (or more correctly, the iPower that hosts this site). Looks like some database performance issues since they moved my web site to a new hosting farm. I’m learning plenty about mySQL, the database that holds all of the content, which provides a nice crossover between work and play: my employer, Sun Microsystems, is in the process of closing an acquisition for mySQL AB. Time to get smart both ways.

I’ve been thinking the same thing for the past 7 hours. It’s bad. Very bad. Like “cross the beams” bad. I attempted to upgrade the version of WordPress I’m using, but since I’m not using a nicely hosted Wordpress environment, I did it myself. Mistake. The good news is that I made a backup of the entire blog database before starting. The bad news is that I proceeded to destroy just about everything, including the URLs, permalinks and cross-references that I’ve built up for the past three years.

Bottom line: I’m going to have to piece the old blog back together, bit by bit, likely going to take a few days to get all of the old posts back, and it’s going to be weeks until Google starts finding things again.

But the Devils won, 6-1, in a night when the blue line lit the red line four times. I can tweak PHP and SQL code with a smile on my face now.

Writing takes practice, just like hockey, baseball, or public speaking. And like hockey, baseball, and public speaking, I’m way out of shape. First blog post since the beginning of December, nearly six weeks without putting keyboard and brain together, and it gets progressively harder to crank out coherent (let alone amusing) thoughts on anything.

One of my favorite books about writing is Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird,” named for direction given by her late father to Lamott’s brother, who had proscrastinated in writing a report on “birds” until the last minute, and then panicked. His advice: Just take it bird by bird, and you’ll get through it. Great advice from a great writer.

So the Snowman is back, slightly more rotund in shape for lack of exercise, round in sound for lack of writing, and stacked three high with ideas that haven’t quite made the cut. I’m going through them, bird by bird.

Today was a big day — I ended up on Cory Doctorow’s blog, had my interview with that very same Canadian writer posted publicly on the ACM website and finally can claim to be associated with someone from Canada who is not hockey-related.

I love books. I buy many more than I read, and lately I’ve been buying out of print or gently used editions from amazon.com to add to my collection. Typically the used tomes fill in from days when spending $15 on a book would have put a serious dent in my spending money. Now that I can dabble in books and have somewhere to put them other than a cardboard mover’s box, I’m able to build up small libraries in obtuse topics such as Lake Placid, New York, hold’em poker, cryptography, and 70s art rock group Yes.

Without any further introduction, here’s my current top ten favorite hockey books:

What’s missing? A book about Jeff Halpern . Something focused on hockey diversity, featuring Scott Gomez and Jarome Iginla, perhaps. The hagiography of Saint Patrik (Elias), with a whole chapter on how he can consume dumplings and kolachi and still be pure muscle.

Got an email from Kathryn Bertine, former ice skater, ice show skater, and very funny writer, about her deal with ESPN to pen a column chronicaling her quest to compete in the Beijing Olympics. She’s published one more sports book than me, used to skate at the rink in Colorado that used to bear my company’s logo, and she answers her own email. Good buying signs for her work: the column is a great read.