Details: Sunday, October 5, 101 Park Avenue, New York, 4th Floor.

I’m proud to announce that my employer, Sun Microsystems, will be hosting the event (we’re donating use of the space), and I’m looking forward to seeing some fellow sports bloggers there. Tickets are $30, and include lunch (the “no eatin’ no meetin’” rule is firmly enforced when I’m involved). There are great speakers covering video blogs, security, and WordPress innards, and we’re working on a final speaker from — the NHL itself.

Now only if we can get *ookies there we’ll have Pookie & Schnookie to meet for cookies (sorry, couldn’t resist).

I’m thinking seriously about going, and would be willing to organize a team of “C” or “D” level skaters to compete representing the United States of Beer League and Mezuzot. And if the hockey slap shooting isn’t so great, there’s a wonderful school for security guard training fairly close by where you can rent an Uzi by the clip for target practice.

I’ve also been looking for the “story” of these games. For years, I’ve tried to balance the horrors of the 1972 Munich Games, which left a deep impression on this 10-year old kid, with the 1984 Los Angeles Games, ones I watched as I packed my things to move, at last, out of my childhood home into my first “real” apartment. Mary Lou Retton proved that in a world of infinite possibilities, sometimes the impossible happens. Summer events since then: doping in track, a USA basketball team that seems to play only when it feels like it, with no sense of playing for something more valuable than a contractual bonus, and baseball’s denouement as an Olympic sport.

The Olympics has also intersected my job as Sun is providing online infrastructure for the 2008 Beijing Games. I’ll be tracking the more obscure events online, both to follow the sports where the unknown athletes (and countries) compete and also to make sure the online experience remains one of which Sun and NBC will be proud.

Bottom line: I’m looking for a hero or heroine. I want to cheer for our gymnasts, watch Michael Phelps prove that the Chinese fixation with the number eight is well-placed (it works for this snowman), and hope that the USA basketball team demonstrates that professional athletes can have an affiliation with a power higher than money: national pride. My personal hope that figure skater turned triathlete turned cyclist Kathryn Bertine would compete at these games ended when Bertine failed to qualify as a cyclist, a two-year training and travel odyssey that she documented wonderfully for ESPN’s E-ticket. Read all 13 parts; it’s a novella-length story with all of the Greek drama you can digest. And of course I’ll follow the Israeli delegation, competing in gymnastics, sailing, judo, and the steeplechase, among other events, because hearing “Hatikva” played at the medal ceremony pushes 1972 further away.

Why all of the fuss over the Olympics? Why would anyone want to train for years, travel halfway around the world, and compete under duress with a billion Internet viewers watching? It’s not like there are endorsement deals for medalists in sailing - Americans want their heroes to play sports that are accessible and recognized, the precursors for commercialization. But that hits the distinction between a professional athlete and an Olympic athlete (with all due respect to hockey players, who are among the few who carry both roles with respect): Olympians are trying to prove they are the best, in the world, at what they do, and do so carrying their country’s shield and colors, not those of their team, college, or corporate sponsor. Everyone has had that longing, at one time or another, to be the undisputed best, whether in sailing, judo, basketball, selling Internet infrastructure, or writing short stories. When it comes down to matters of our own mental and physical facilities, we all dream.

Despite not making it to Beijing, Kathryn Bertine conveyed the moral of her mental and physical voyage quite simply: “Above all else, we owe it to ourselves to show up for our own dreams.” And the Olympics remind us to take that advice to heart, every one of the other 1,420 days between staggered torch lightings.

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.

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.

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.

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.