Here’s a pair of great Bauer hockey commercials from back in the day:
We all have something
A clean sheet
Does anyone have higher-quality copies? While we’re at it, does anyone have a copy of the NFL “Feel the Power” commercial that used Ani DiFranco’s “32 flavors” and featured various running backs? I can’t find it anywhere.
My new Trek bike came with not one, not two, but three warning stickers. They difficult to read, state only the obvious, help no one, and leave an annoying, gooey mess when you remove them.
I wonder if bikes in other countries have to be covered with crap like this.
handy list of roller and ice hockey and skating rinks in the bay area.
Michael Lewis, chaser-down of those who make good use of limited resources, found Mike Leach at Texas Tech:
Four years ago, Hodges was a high-school senior with just one other offer to be a college quarterback, from the University of Wyoming. Now, two-thirds of the way through the 2005 N.C.A.A. football season, and with a throwing arm so dead that he required a cortisone shot to move it, Hodges was the nation’s leader in yards passed, total offense and touchdowns. Three weeks earlier, against a competent Kansas State defense, he threw for 643 yards and, had Coach Leach not pulled him in the fourth quarter, might well have broken the N.C.A.A. record for passing yards in a single game (716).
A lot of the players in the locker room had similar stories of rejection and redemption. In this part of the country, the University of Texas and Oklahoma University are the old-money football schools, with Texas A.&M. right behind. Those schools fish first in the local-talent pool. Tonight there would be very few players on the field for Texas A.&M. - for Oklahoma or Texas there wouldn’t be a single player - to whom Texas Tech would not have offered a football scholarship. Conversely, the Texas Tech locker room was filled with players rejected by the old-money schools. And yet - look around! Hodges led all of college football in passing. The team’s tailback, Taurean Henderson, had broken the N.C.A.A. career record for most passes caught by a running back. The top four receivers on the team were the four leading pass receivers in Texas Tech’s league, the formidable Big 12.
For the past two years, I’ve been playing hockey at Ice Oasis. It’s a nice enough rink, but their web site is terrible. While they’ve since ditched the neon colours, the schedule page is pretty awful:
My ice oasis schedule fixes all of those problems, and gives you even more. Features include:
The site caches data from their site and converts it, much like Google makes PDFs and Word files available in HTML. It’s pretty gentle, not hitting the real site more than once a day.
canadiens.com fuels speculation:
“There will certainly be a discussion with the Penguins organization about whether they are prepared to entertain any offers for the top pick,” said the GM. “With a pick as high as No. 5 we are definitely in the ballpark of teams that would be [capable of moving up in the draft], and we will explore that possibility if it does in fact exist.”
Salon reports on the NBA pension fight:
For years, about 85 elderly ex-players have been fighting to get NBA pensions. The response from the league and the union: Drop dead. Half of them have.
Michael Lewis, who wrote Moneyball, has a nice piece in the New York Times illustrating the principles behind his book:
He finished his career at Notre Dame with the third-most hits in N.C.A.A. history, the second-highest batting average and the most stolen bases ever at Notre Dame, and he led his team, in 2002, to its first College World Series appearance in 45 years. Notre Dame’s baseball coach, Paul Mainieri, called him the finest defensive center fielder and the ”winningest” position player he’d encountered in his 20 years as a college coach. Still, as Stanley entered the market for professional baseball players, his value appeared to collapse. Baseball scouts looked at him and saw a body unlike any in the big leagues. Scouts from two major-league teams told Stanley that, if he was lucky, he might be selected in the 15th round of the ‘02 draft, which is to say he’d be handed a thousand bucks, a plane ticket and a recommendation letter that told everyone in baseball not to pay him any mind. A scout from one big-league team told Coach Mainieri that his team couldn’t draft his star center fielder at all, for fear of embarrassment.
But in June 2002, the Oakland A’s shocked a lot of people, including Stanley, and took him as their second-round pick — the 67th of 1,482 players drafted that year.
…
and succeeded well enough to be promoted, in 2003, to the Double-A team in Midland, Tex., where he made the all-star team. Heading into spring training in 2004, Steve Stanley was named the starting center fielder in Triple-A Sacramento, one rung below the major leagues. ”That almost never happens,” Keith Lieppman, who runs the Oakland farm system, says. ”That we get a guy who starts in high A, goes straight to Double-A and then to Triple-A without a pause. You just don’t see it.”