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While I’m not the biggest NHL fan, there is news worthy of note. Former Stampede and U of M Gopher star Thomas Vanek received the largest number of write-in votes for this year’s NHL All-Star team. Vanek, who holds the Stampede records for most goals and most points in a season and in a career, is a forward with the Buffalo Sabres, which currently has the best win-loss record in the NHL. Vanek is third in the league in plus/minus ratings.
I’m not familiar enough with the NHL to know why Vanek didn’t appear on the online ballot but I was one of nearly 155,000 to cast a write-in vote for him. I’m also not knowledgeable enough to tell whether Vanek is likely to actually make the All-Star roster. I know fans elect the starters and the rest of the teams are selected by the league’s general managers. I speculate the fact three of Vanek’s teammates constitute half the Eastern Conference’s starting lineup may work against him. But, like I said, I am truly oblivious when it comes to the NHL (of course, others would say that is not the only subject.)
The news about Vanek also provides an opportunity to mention something I noticed recently on the web site of the USHL, the league in which the Stampede plays. For those who don’t know, the USHL is a junior development league where the players are essentially trying to attract the attention of NCAA Division I scouts and coaches. The league has been fairly successful in that regard and while no one can guarantee those attending college on a Division I sports scholarship will get the most of their education, the USHL seems cognizant of the importance of education.
In a recent release, it pointed out that even among elite junior hockey players, only 684 of those born in North America in any particular year are likely to play NCAA hockey or in the Canadian Hockey League. And even of those 684 elite players, only 35 will make the NHL. The Stampede are doing well with two alumni — Vanek and Chad LaRose of the Carolina Hurricanes — in the NHL and probably more than a dozen at some level of minor league hockey. (Although Vanek was born in Austria and, thus, would not be considered amongs the North American statistics.) Still, as the USHL says, the odds against achieving the professional level are “why players should put education first when making their hockey decisions.”
It’s nice to know a junior league is at least making some effort to stress that a young athlete’s future likely will not always be athletics.
[Hockey] is a fast body-contact game played by men with clubs in their hands and knives laced to their feet.
Paul Gallico, Farewell to Sport
A public thank you to the wonderful hosts for the small “blogger banquet” I attended Wednesday night. I got to meet a couple bloggers I did not know personally and the wide-ranging conversation and laughter were only rivalled in quality by the excellent food.
I thought this an appropriate way to express my thanks and relay to those there how much I enjoyed it. Those who were invited but could not attend missed a delightful evening and I certainly look forward to another in the future.
[I am] firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles,–but much more so, when he laughs, it adds something to this Fragment of Life.
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
I wanted to mention a couple of neat space-related links I stumbled across over the last couple days.
One site features the sounds of space while another part of the site has recordings from various space missions. (Via Amy on the Web.). I’ve heard a CD of space sounds before but am not sure if it is the one offered for sale by this site. In my opinion, though, the sounds are better in smaller doses than listening to an entire CD. As I recall, most of these are picked up via radio telescopes or similar instruments on space craft. The U of Iowa also has a site that not only has sounds collected by the instruments the school has had on various spacecraft, but also provides links to other sources.
Moving from one of the senses to another, the WaPo has a gallery of shots from the National Air and Space Museum’s Earth from Space exhibition. (Via SF Signal). The museum has a companion web site that includes an online exhibition.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.
Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
Some items that caught my attention as I continue to procrastinate on at least two book reviews I’ve been planning to write for probably two weeks now:
- Oh no. Dog obesity is on the rise. (I particularly love the headline for the second item.)
- Richard Powers, whose book The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for fiction, has an essay in this weekend’s NYT Book Review about how he uses speech recognition software to “write” his books. He discussed this on NPR’s Fresh Air a couple weeks ago and while I wasn’t as impressed with The Echo Maker as some critics, he has some interesting and potentially valid arguments using such software.
- While working on the post about The Big Read, I came across the South Dakota Humanities Council’s link to the South Dakota Literary Map. The front of the map locates 55 authors and one or two titles of significant works near the region they wrote about. The back of the map contains biographical data and a partial annotated listing of titles for more than 150 authors. I don’t recall having ever seen one but may have to seek one out.
- I’m not sure how this South Dakota author keeps doing all he does. Former Sen. George McGovern is 84 and is now going to write a biography of Abraham Lincoln. By the way, if you have not seen the documentary on McGovern’s presidential campaign, One Bright Shining Moment, it is well worth watching.
- The finalists for the 2006 Philip K. Dick Award have been announced. Given the limited amount SF I read last year and the fact the award is for SF “published in paperback original form” in the US, I haven’t read any of the finalists, although I’ve almost picked up Chris Moriarity’s book a couple times. The winner will be announced on April 6 at a major SF convention in Seattle. (Via Big Dumb Object.)
- Speaking of Philip K. Dick, a fan site has placed online a 1986 comic by R. Crumb (yes, that R. Crumb), called The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick. For those unfamiliar with Dick, he experienced what he claimed was a series of religious visions in early 1974. The comic is a “graphic interpretation” of that experience, which many considered symptoms of schizophrenia. It is certain, however, that they dramatically affected and in fact became essential to his writing until his death in 1982. (Via Science Fiction Observer.)
If we started prosecuting people for sin, we’d all be in jail.
George McGovern, Larry King Live, Aug. 12, 1998
Evidently I’m not alone in lambasting the Argus for something it printed on the front of its local “news” section more than a week ago. Former U.S. Sen. Jim Abourezk has an op-ed column today pointing out what he perceives as additional inaccuracies in the newspaper’s blog entry on why the Iraq War was justified. But Abourezk doesn’t limit himself to the falsehood documented in my recent blog entry.
Like I did, Abourezk points out that the claim that Saddam kicked out the weapons inspectors in 1998 — the first reason the Argus gave for justifying the war in Iraq — is simply false. He also points out how three other statements in the blog entry (and I do not recall which, if any, showed up in the dead wood edition) were wrong or even outright false. I didn’t examine his additional points simply because the one I addressed was beyond dispute. After all, as I pointed out, the falsity of the canard about the weapons inspectors being kicked out in 1998 was established before the Iraq War even began. Nor does it take much of a fact-checking effort to find that out.
Abourezk also asks the Argus to publish a correction. But to my knowledge, there never has been a correction published in the paper, despite the fact the most demonstrably false statement appeared there. The errors in the piece have been brought to the attention of the writer and the editorial staff at least twice. So why is it evidently exempt from the paper’s statement of “newsroom ethics,” which say it will “correct errors promptly,” regardless of whether they appear in news items or editorials?
Is it that the misstatements first appeared in the blog and thereby somehow immunized from the paper’s ethical standards? Is it simply reluctance to admit a misstatement? Or is it that the so-called “liberal media” doesn’t want to acknowledge that it doesn’t fact check and simply continues to blithely pass along and endorse lies used to start the Iraq War?
In the end, the answer doesn’t really matter because we only have two choices: quit subscribing or accept whatever the Argus doles out. Unlike TV or radio, you can’t just turn the channel. But each week, I move closer and closer to the first option.
UPDATE: The Argus ran the following correction in its Jan. 19 edition: “In 1998, the United Nations removed its weapons inspectors from Iraq in advance of U.S.-led airstrikes and after Iraq stopped cooperating with inspections. This information was incorrect in an excerpt from a Voices blog entry in the Dec. 30 newspaper.”
Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation, must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free, but facts are sacred.
C.P. Scott, editorial, Manchester Guardian, May 5, 1921
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