how is this better than "a chink in his armor"?

One suspects there will be minimal outcry over this. But it's still annoying.

Curry Spices Up Bollywood Night for Warriors

Haw haw haw, see, Curry—Bollywood—Indians love curry, which is a spicy food, probably the national dish of India, which is where Bollywood is, and also Curry is the name of the best player on the Warriors, so it writes itself!

Except it doesn't write itself. Somebody wrote it. (Presumably not "Ryan Leong", since that's the usual dodge used by reporters when some internet jerk gets upset about a headline.) Somebody wrote this cheap pun because they thought it was funny, and, sure, okay, it works on whatever level it works on, and I guess we should be happy the Warriors are doing some minimal kind of cultural outreach with a Bollywood night. But would they have run an essentializing and at least borderline offensive pun with any of their other cultural outreach nights?

"David Lee Fries Glen Rice on Asian-American 'Sorry for the Internment Camps Thing' Night"

"Jarrett Jack Racks Up Steals on African-American 'Free Basketball Tickets Might Stop this Crime Wave' Night"

"Andris Biedrins Makes a Lot of Cabbage on 'Eastern Europeans Like Borcht, Right?' Night"

"Jolly Swagman Andrew Bogut Slaps Shrimpy, Barbie-Like Team Around on 'Waltzing Matilda and Fried Wallaby Night'"

Sure, all these jokes are bad, real Borcht-belt level stuff, and most of them even require explanatory links; this is because the jokes I made rely on slightly more obscure cultural references and connections than Bollywood/Indians/Curry/curry. But the connections are there, and, in my fake examples, would obviously preclude their publication. So why are these precluded when "Curry Spices Up Bollywood Night" isn't?

—Collision, humorless dink

Ryan Lambert Sucks

(Non-optional soundtrack to this post.)

Here is an edited version of three grafs from Ryan Lambert's latest column. (I include unedited originals below.) I've used strikethrough to eliminate the weasel words, pointless asides, or things irrelevant to my main point.

Scott Howson, for all the talk about how hard he tried and how his firing was more about going in a "different direction" than his personal job performance, was simply not a good NHL general manager. That much was obvious to anyone who saw how pathetically bungled the Rick Nash saga was, or his draft record, or most of his other trades, and the vast majority of his free agent signings.

But you have to give Howson this: He just set his successor up for an hilariously successful future.

Howson's drafting and trading over the last few years has accumulated a decent number of prospects that range from "good" to "very good," though to be fair maybe only one can be considered "great." They're mainly defensemen, like Ryan Murray (the benefit of picking second, one supposes), David Savard and Tim Erixon, as well as goaltender Oskar Dansk. No overwhelming prospects, but a good group nonetheless. Grabbing guys like Cam Atkinson hasn't hurt either. But overall there's a reason Hockey Prospectus and Hockey's Future have the Blue Jackets in the bottom half of the league when it comes to prospects.

So, what we have here is an argument that runs:

1. Scott Howson was not a good NHL general manager
2. His draft record was bad
3. His successor is in a good position to succeed
4. Because there are a decent number [Ed. note: whatever the hell that means] of good/very good prospects, and one great one
5. But their prospects are bottom-half of the league

The contradiction is clear: Lambert is simultaneously saying that Howson was bad at drafting (1., 2., 5.) and good at drafting (3., 4.). How could a patently self-contradictory claim get made and published? I mean, I'm not misrepresenting him or his arguments in any way: all I did was try to shave away the cruft and reveal the argument he was making.

My theory is this: it would be easier for Lambert to understand what he himself was saying—and for his editors, if he had any—if he'd cut down on the weasel words and pointless semi-conversational asides.

(Earlier this week, his lede was this, again with the weasel words eliminated:

On Monday night, the Flames went down pretty quietly in a home game against the Minnesota Wild that pretty much all observers agreed was in every way a dreadful, unwatchable hockey game.

That description fairly accurately covers most Flames games this season,

That's 42 words, 6 of which are pointless qualifiers that only blunt whatever statement he's trying to make. Fairly accurately. Most. Pretty pretty much.

Maybe he gets paid by the word, so 14% filler is working well to line his pockets thickly with hockey-blog-troll stacks of cash. Maybe he doesn't read his own results, and what we're reading are first drafts. Maybe he thinks he trolls effectively enough without removing all the equivocations—the etiology doesn't matter, though, because it's clear that his obfuscations are legitimately getting in the way of his ability to communicate, as they so, so brutally did in his little Howson riff.

It doesn't really matter. I don't read Lambert much: even when his point isn't buried under fearful hedges, that point is rarely more interesting than "X sucks and Teemu Selanne is great and I saw a lacrosse goal on YouTube" or, very occasionally, "Y should get more credit and Teemu Selanne is great and I saw a lacrosse goal on YouTube". Even if it has a Simpsons quote at the bottom, I can skip a column that doesn't do any more work than that. But if the dude is going to get big-boy real estate on the only hockey blog that matters, I'd like to see him do better work.

—Collision, who loves Titus Andronicus as much as Lambert does

Scott Howson, for all the talk about how hard he tried and how his firing was more about going in a "different direction" than his personal job performance, was simply not a good NHL general manager. That much was obvious to anyone who saw how pathetically bungled the Rick Nash saga was, or his draft record, or most of his other trades, and the vast majority of his free agent signings.

But you have to give Howson this: He just set his successor up for an hilariously successful future.

Howson's drafting and trading over the last few years has accumulated a decent number of prospects that range from "good" to "very good," though to be fair maybe only one can be considered "great." They're mainly defensemen, like Ryan Murray (the benefit of picking second, one supposes), David Savard and Tim Erixon, as well as goaltender Oskar Dansk. No overwhelming prospects, but a good group nonetheless. Grabbing guys like Cam Atkinson hasn't hurt either. But overall there's a reason Hockey Prospectus and Hockey's Future have the Blue Jackets in the bottom half of the league when it comes to prospects.

Is Semin on the Rocks in Carolina?

Alexander Semin made a splash this summer by following a couple mediocre years of decline with a risky one-year deal for $7 million. Clearly, he's banking on his ability to have a resurgence that would tantalize some GM into splurging on him. This takes real spunk. Not every player could convince his agent to swallow a deal like this, but Carolina Hurricanes head honcho Jim Rutherford didn't want to let such a potent opportunity slip through his fingers, and, unusually for the notoriously tight-fisted decision-maker, he didn't dicker, he didn't try to soften the deal or harden his terms, he just took it on the chin, and paid Semin a load of money.

However, to this point in the season, Semin has scored only a single goal. So far, some Hurricanes fans have felt that this $7 million they sprayed on Semin was shot, wasted. Some have even spat that he may be choking. It's probably best to ignore the anxious ejaculations of these fans—they're drips, and their protestations are certainly at this point premature. If you only look at numbers that are, so to speak, raw, "dog" is what you'll conclude—but this would be a mistake.

While it's true that he hasn't finished like most people had hoped, to call him a bust would be nuts: Semin's been on the ice more than half the time when the Hurricanes have scored 5-on-5. Cooler heads insist that while most of his production has come in spurts, it's reasonable to expect that he'll find his stroke as he gains familiarity and comfort with his new linemates.

He may not have been wielding the hot stick, but he's been all over the ice, including mounting a surprising defensive performance, and the production expected to come off of his stick has spilled over into his teammates' numbers. If the coaching staff can spread him over multiple lines, that should help keep opposing squads from swallowing him up defensively. Eventually, this should allow him to get off better shots, in the face of lesser competition. The 'Canes shouldn't be rigid and insist that the only place for Semin is in the top sextet: using him in a three-way arrangement, to fill whatever holes the lineup may spring, will best allow him to make his mark (though he does need linemates who can keep him from getting rubbed off the puck or splattered on the boards). The chemistry looks good for this to go down, too: nobody on the team or associated with it appears to be mouthing off or smearing Semin; no dirty laundry, no embarrassing leaks. It's clear that misusing Semin would stain a coach's reputation, especially in a media environment where, eventually, everything comes out.

If he comes on late in the season, this soft start will be forgotten. As long as the team doesn't droop all the way out of the playoff picture, the thrust of Semin's acquisition should stick with you: just by being around, Semin has made everyone around him better. (Staal's typically flaccid early-season productivity has been notably inflated.) So whether or not you immediately notice him on the ice, the presence of Semin simply can't be ignored.

—Collision, dick, joking

technical, difficult: Chris Collision's NFL Picks Column

As 2012 collapses into crumbs, it seems important to recap what was a frankly bumpy series of NFL-gambling columns for The Classical. I thought the idea was sound—a smart, engaged writer takes on the country's most popular sport from the inherently compelling vantage point of wagering on uncontrollable outcomes—but from the feedback I've gotten from readers, to say nothing of the site's editors, and given the minimal traffic the columns generated, it would appear that something prevented my work from generating the reception I expected. It hasn't been as much as fun as I had thought. I'm not sure I would do it again. But I am, alpha and omega, a professional: So here you go.

First, and I suppose most glaringly: No. I didn't as such watch very much football this year. I don't like the sport all that well, and I interact with it primarily as a background for heavy drinking and occasional stabs at cooking or adult-on-adult non-sexual socialization. So, yes: all of my picks were either complete fabrications or copy/pastes from writers who filed before I did, culminating in a real embarrassment for me when I failed to catch that I'd taken my inspiration from a fantasy football advice column, instead of another picks column. Very much a low point for me on a personal and a professional level. More personally chagrinning that week was the my-penis twitpic I mistakenly posted publicly instead of as a direct message to one of my followers—who, as it later turned out, was a member of my next-ex-wife's legal team anyway. More I am not currently at liberty to divulge except EFF OFF, CAROL, AND TAKE YOUR SHYSTERS WITH YOU. That week also proved a bad time to mount a lengthy defense of Chris "don't treat my semen like it's battery acid Jones' cri de pénis entitled "Ladies: You're Not As Good As You Think". I began to acquire a reputation for misogyny that it has proved difficult to shed.

Two other professional setbacks bear mention. First, yes, it was Week 3 before I stopped referring to the Houston Oilers, who have, apparently, been the Tennessee Titans (!?) for around two decades now. To be fair, I think this is in part a failure of editorial oversight on the part of The Classical itself, but, in the end, I am the one who typed "Houston Oilers" and so I will naturally accept up to half of the blame. Second, I did completely fail to mention football of any kind in Week 4's column, which instead ran some 3,500 words long on the topic of my not altogether successful attempts to organize a birthday party for my middle child, now-three-year-old Ieszikcha. Kourtney's insistent obstructions and general ill-will toward the father of one of her children "helped" me generate my longest column, submitted well in advance of deadline, but, again, the thoroughgoing absence of football earned some notice.

Also notable was the frank hostility attracted by some of my recurring segments. "In the Doghouse at Radio Shack" baffled those it did not alienate with week after week devoted my attempts to attain customer service and technical support for my .mp3 player, cell phone telephone, netbook computer, wireless router, soldering iron, radio-controlled monster truck, and batter charger (Weeks 3-4, 1-6, 11-present, 5 & 8, 13-present, 1, 10, & 1, respectively.) In my defense: (a) as noted, I hardly represent a football expert—or even an enthusiast—and a 750-word weekly quota is a yoke few writers comfortably wear, so a familiar topic was needed if I was to continue filing copy, and: (b) the real subject of a column should, by all evidence, be the mechanisms by which it is produced, and the people involved with those mechanisms. Thus my not infrequent through much reprehended disquisitions on Radio Shack's extended warranties, customer service, and staff attractiveness levels. They played a real role in columns I wrote, and it would be no more fair or accurate to leave them out than it would be to exclude the contributions of [reference TBD maybe special teams coach??] to a football team's success. Or failure.

Another recurring segment that displeased a vocal portion of The Classical's Comment Kadre of Kommunity Konnisseurs (TCCKKK) was my even-numbered-weeks strategy of previewing each game with a lyric from the Screaming Trees album Last Words. Readers argued that a phoned-in last-gasp album torpedoed by a record label and only released a decade after a second-tier band had broken up was not something meriting continual reference—particularly in Week 4, when my .mp3 player was on the fritz and I did an admittedly mediocre job of quoting the lyrics from memory. To this criticism I can only respond: It is not the measure of art's quality that it is popular, or even well-regarded. If I wanted to make easy references, I would use decades-old hit movies like Rocky IV, A Few Good Men, The Shawshank Redemption, and Almost Famous, until you suspected that 88% percent of my cultural consumption consisted of TNT's New Classics lineup. If I wanted brilliant lyrics that cut to the core of the human condition, I would tap Counting Crows. Instead, I use the art(ifacts) that mean the most to me in my inscrutable experience. And if that means readers have to choke on hard psychedelic pop a generation past its sell-by date, then so be it. (Now Playing: Ned's Atomic Dustbin.)

Perhaps nothing got as much pushback, though, as my picks foil. While Simmons had his wife, the Daily Fix had a flipped coin, and Deadspin had an unfunny Nazi (haw haw haw) joke, I had a weekly YouTube clip of "this week's raep scene from a Hollywood movie". My attempt at satire was cruelly rebuffed—and wildly misinterpreted. What I had intended as a savage denunciation of a cheap tactic intended to gin up an emotional response from a numb audience was somehow twisted, and I was repeatedly accused of grim, unseemly wallowing in the worst kind of pornography, simply for curating numerous clips of sexual violence in the context of a football gambling column. It was not gratuitous bad-boyism, nor an indication that my sexual desires are predicated on brutalization; it was satire. It certainly was not a cynical miscalculation, based on the inescapable presence of Nazi, stripper, lingerie, porn, etc., content from other sites. I think it safe to call myself The Accused and the editors at The Classical have informed me that my NFL picks column will be surplus to requirements going forward, so I will be Leaving Las Vegas, if you will. Or, in the words of Mark Lanegan, from the unjustly neglected Screaming Trees album Last Words, [quote TBD, if that fat jerkoff Sandra at Radio Shack ever gives me an .mp3 player with a working SD card slot]. Last words, indeed. Thanks to The Classical for running so many of these columns, and thanks to all who wrote or commented or took out a pointless restraining order, Carol or gave me a place to crash. See you all on the sidelines.

—Collision, road dog for the forseeable

Picks (home team in CAPS, pick in bold, line in italics iff I predict the home team will cover regardless of my pick to win):

Baltimore Steamrollers vs. Chicago Chinooks (-4.5)
Cincinnati Sinisters at Detroit Dynamites (+11)
Cleveland T-Rexes at Green Bay Barrage (+.5)
Pittsburgh Poisons vs. Minnesota Yetis (-18)

Buffalo Bullhorns at Dallas Harriers (+3)
Miami Fangs at Los Angeles Supercocks (-8)
New England Gunners vs. Philadelphia Vengeance (-45)
New York Hardknockers vs. Washington Volcanics (PICK)

Denver Spearheads vs. Houston Heatwaves (+2)
Kansas City Clashers at Indianapolis Narwhals (-10,000)
Oakland Leviathans vs. Jacksonville Immortals (+4)
San Diego Supernovas at Tennessee Tarbenders (-.5)

Phoenix Horntoads vs. Tampa Bay Warheads (-3.5)
St. Louis Cannons at Carolina Carnage (-5)
San Francisco Zephyrs vs. New Orleans Zombies (+5)
Seattle Cavaliers at Atlanta Crossfires (+6)

Fuck You I Quit Part Two of Three

Hey, NHL: somebody else can advertise your shit.

The awesome towel that Pierre Idiot Trudeau gave me? The Sakic shirsey I retired when they retired Sakic's number?

The hat that made somebody stop me in downtown Oakland two winters ago and say "The Avs, hunh? Man, you must be a real diehard.". The Forsberg shirsey that was in line for the Sakic treatment.

The Sakic inaction figure.

The little keychain my boss gave me when I worked at the the Lutz.

The patch that's been on my bike bag for the past couple years & started I don't know how many conversations.

All goes in a box.

Fuck You I Quit: Part One of Two

We start with words from two of my favorite poets.

"Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,"
—John Berryman, Dream Song 14

"Life is short and should be painful as well."
—Megulon 5

Given this view of life—which I take to be more or less indisputable, pace the existence of sex, mescal, and HEAVY TUNES—, we need, and we have¹, sports to divert us. They are, as Shoals recently wrote, "bits and pieces of life reassembled in a heightened, refined form...[to] make [a] life seem bigger and more unpredictable". Or, some days, bits and pieces of life cobbled together clumsily to make life feel worth living at all.

Except right now, you may have noticed, there's decidedly less sports around to make life seem bigger, heightier, and more unpredictable, what with there being no NHL hockey to watch. Why is there no NHL hockey to watch? Well, it's a money thing.

The sides look like so:

• NHL vs. NHLPA (National Hockey League Players Association)
• Gary Bettman, Commisioner of NHL vs. Donald Fehr, Executive Director of the NHLPA
• NHL team owners vs. NHL team players
• NHL Board of Governors vs. NHLPA player reps

The argument sounds pretty familiar.

Essentially, like all unions in 2012, the NHLPA has already lost the battle over money. Now they're fighting to keep their access to coffee and the occasional set of steak knives. "Fighting" in a rather restricted sense, that is, since there has been the princely quantity of "six meaningful days of negotiation in five months" and today was announced some more bad news: they're still far apart, and the NHLPA has decreed that the insta-rejected proposal they made this morning, well..."It's about as good as we can do."

Oh, wait: one more piece of bad news:

There are currently no plans for NHL and NHLPA to meet again.

— Chris Johnston (@reporterchris) November 21, 2012

And, per Larry Brooks, the NHL Board of Governors won't be meeting again until 5dec2012. One suspects that no progress will be made before that date.

So, I would like to say this to the NHL, the team owners, the Board of Governors, Gary Bettman, the NHLPA, Donald Fehr, and everybody else who refused to negotiate until the last Collective Bargaining Agreement had expired, and who, apparently, aren't really bothering to negotiate² now:

A very special, deep, thorough fuck you to the lot of you.

Great job, guys. Way to:

• put in very nearly a full half a day today, making—if we round up—an entire 7th day of negotiation in the 60-somethingth day of an entirely predictable lockout
• quickly determine that you don't give a flying fuck through a rolling donut about resolving anything
• and then decide to break without making plans to reconvene for more negotiations

Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?

—Collision, NHL fan 1996-2012

¹ Or maybe vice versa.

² You could look up "good faith" if you wanted. Next to its definition, there would not be a picture of the relevant parties in this dispute.

San Francisco Bulls

As a quick bit of direct action against the increasing/infinite alienation perpetrated upon NHL fans by the current-and-getting-currenter lockout, I rounded up a sizeable posse to go to the first-ever San Francisco Bulls game—an experience very nicely previewed and evoked by Grantland's Katie Baker.

There were many, many firsts, and before I ran out of steam, I made it my mission to document them. My unedited notes appear below. If you want an actually comprehensive recap, I suggest you hit up Fear the Fin.

It started with some tasty pyro!

Period 1
3.05: 1st PP
3.06: 1st fan yells "shoot it"
7.10 1st PK
10.44, 1st GA
16.01, 1st GF
Somewhere in there: first fight.

Period 2
4.25...penalty shot

Second Intermission
out of beer—the Cow Palace has been sold out of beer in the second intermission of the first game
Rawhide stood kind of too close to me for kind of a long, long time

Period 3
dude behind me bellows, apropos of nothing, "SUNDAY PUNCH!"

The team's mostly been beat up a lot since that first close loss. The night I saw showed a disciplined team without a great deal of talent: an expansion team, for sure. The Cow Palace is a problematic building, too: it's absolutely huge, and that means that a crowd of 8,000 can seem kind of sparse. A number of the other teams in the ECHL have buildings with capacities of perhaps 5,000, and in there, a lively or livelyish crowd of 3,000 might make a real difference in a game. But, what the hell: it was a great night out, I bought a decent-looking hat, and I look forward to getting out to more games this year.

--Collision, sometimes having a little trouble filling the time