Living in Portland, Ore., outdoor ice skating is a novelty concept. When I first moved here in 1989, they had a rink set up in Pioneer Courthouse Square, completely enclosed in a large tent. That was the last year they did that. I remember taking a few turns around the tiny little rink that first winter here, then pretty much hanging up the blades until just a few years ago.

I learned to skate outside, on the pond at City Park in Iowa City, as well as on Lake MacBride and the Coralville Reservoir. Also on the flooded and frozen parking lot at Mercer Park, where my dad broke his leg ice skating. We had no indoor rink in Iowa City, though the city council used to talk about building one from time to time.

I never skated on an indoor rink until my Mom started working for Parks and Rec in Littleton, Co., and we’d go to South Suburban Ice Arena occasionally, where some famous figure skaters trained and my cousin played powder-puff hockey.

I remember the last time I skated at City Park. I was a young adult; it must have been the winter of ’86-’87. I showed up at the pond pretty much at the exact moment one of my coworkers coincidentally showed up. The city had a big old stop sign with the words “thin ice” printed beneath “stop”, cut in half with hinges so it could be folded up when the ice was safe. My friend and I looked at the sign, and looked at the ice. It had been cold, and it was hard to imagine there would be a problem. He went ahead and folded the sign, and we laced up our skates. He was a far better skater than I, and we casually stroked around the pond. It wasn’t long before a cop showed up and accused us of folding up the sign and sent us on our way. (Having discovered our mutual love of ice, we later took a road trip up to Minnesota to see the North Stars play at the venerable old Met Center in Bloomington.)

Though I remember every winter hearing of snowmobiles or 4x4s crashing through the ice on Coralville Reservoir or Lake MacBride, I never heard of skaters going through the ice. Since I’ve been away from it for so long, outdoor skating has a romantic allure to it. The crisp, fresh air, hot cocoa in the warming hut, and strange little things like large goldfish (carp) frozen near the surface of the ice. I’ve conveniently forgotten about the horrible, pitted, chipped ice surface (which will trash your blades as quick as walking on concrete), the bone chilling cold, and the massive pressure cracks that grab you by the ankles and send you sprawling.

Then today, I read this. Wacky Mommy always says, no way is she going to skate on a pond. Now I know I’ll never convince her it’s safe. And now that Iowa City has an indoor rink (well, Coralville, anyway), there’s no need to trash your blades on the pond at City Park if we move back to Iowa City.

But I still have my memories.

From Salon’s Video Dog, a friggin’ hilarious video staring former Winter Hawk Nicholas Vachon:

Slap Shot fans are loving this one. In a perhaps sub-conscious nod to Ned Braden’s on-ice strip tease, USC goalie Mickey Meyer dropped trou and mooned the officials during a tournament game against BYU in Utah Saturday morning. This being Utah, he not only got ejected from the game, he was given a ticket for “lewdness” by a cop who was working security for the game.

The whole story is hilarious. The fans evidently loved it, the USC coach and announcers can’t stop laughing about it, and there’s such great humor in the reaction of the locals. “We don’t treat this as a funny incident,” Eccles Ice Center rink manager Floyd Naegle told the Associated Press. “We’re a family-oriented business.”

But the punch line is the name of the substitute goaltender: Matt Buttweiler.

I’m looking for video or audio of this. Post links if you got ’em!

I finally got off my booty and got the merchandise sorted out and put back online. I’ve reorganized it so that each design has its own Cafe Press shop, and you can choose from many styles for any given design.

I’ve been checking out the quality of stuff, and I’ve pulled one of my designs that printed poorly. If you buy anything, and it doesn’t look like you expect from the photos, be sure to return it for a refund. Cafe Press has a full satisfaction guarantee. If nothing gets returned, I will never know if a design isn’t working, or if there’s any problem with the process.

Proceeds help pay for bandwidth to keep this site (and others) online. Thanks for your support!

Greetings fellow peace lovin’ hockey fans! Here’s the place you can support the cause and take the message to the streets. All designs available on a variety of long- and short-sleeve t-shirts, sweatshirts, bags, hats, women’s and men’s, children, etc. from CafePress.com. Click on any of the pictures below to see the full selection of colors and styles for each design.

Buy with confidence; all merchandise comes with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee!

The first t-shirt design (and still my favorite).

A tribute to the WWI Canadian 148th Overseas Batallion.

Left Coast Hockey, celebrating hockey in British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. Cities of the WHL Western Conference over a red star on the back.

Why can’t we settle our differences at the rink instead? WWI soldier dreaming of the rink.

To my surprise, one of my most popular designs — now available in dark colors.

Stickers and magnets

Home Town Hero Paul Gaustad is out for the season with a cut tendon. I’m actually surprised this kind of injury doesn’t happen more often, and we should all be grateful it doesn’t. Speedy recovery, Paul!

Sport’s Illustrated writer Allan Muir grades Gary Bettman today, and it ain’t pretty. Though he doesn’t give him an overall rating, he gives him thumbs up and thumbs down in 14 areas. The thumbs down are dominant.

Bettman is pretty much the George W. Bush of hockey these days. Muir gives Bettman poor marks on expansion, realignment, playoff format, two lockouts, new corporate revenue streams putting the squeeze on average fans, the US TV deal, the lack of a player transfer agreement with Russia, the schedule change that means some teams will only be seen every three seasons in a given market, and the “ownership farces” in Chicago and Long Island.

Not much to disagree with there. In all of these areas, Bettman has been an unmitigated disaster for the league and the game.

But Muir does give him props in four areas. First relocation. He notes that “Quebec City, Hartford and Winnipeg may have had tradition, but they didn’t have the population, corporate support or arenas to compete on a major league level.” Well, if the league didn’t have such a crappy TV deal, and hadn’t made itself so dependent on corporate revenue (two issues Muir decries), Quebec, Hartford and Winnipeg could still be viable markets. Muir contradicts himself here.

Bettman also gets Muir’s approval for allowing Olympic participation. Okay, fine. I think men’s Olympic hockey is a joke, but he’s correct that it’s an important showcase for the game.

Next comes the one that’s going to have the Hockey Fans Unite boys all up in arms. Muir approves of the new rules. Other than his praise for the shootout (which I dislike for the very reason he cites) and the new uniforms, I agree with him. “Add in the virtual elimination of clutch-and-grab hockey (what took so long?), the removal of the red line/two-line pass, the return of delayed offside…and it’s clear that Bettman has overseen a positive evolution in the sports,” writes Muir.

As I’ve hammered on before, talent dilution, relocation, realignment, and scheduling are responsible for watering down the game. The new rules and enforcement standards (though they could use some tweaking) have been a good thing for the game.

Finally, Muir gives Bettman a provisional thumbs up for the salary cap (even though he gave him thumbs down for the lockout that forced it). I’m still pretty conflicted on this issue. If it helps small market teams stay in the game, I’m all for it. But as Muir points out, the cap is edging close to the pre-lockout average.

Fight fans will note that Muir does not mention that there is less fighting in the game today, and they’re always quick to jump on Bettman about that. But this is beyond Bettman. The game is constantly evolving. Today’s players are the most skilled, strongest, fastest, best conditioned players who have ever played the game. Part of the reason there is less fighting is that teams can’t afford to blow roster spots on enforcers and still compete. This is a sad fact for fight fans, and they’ll continue to try to blame Bettman, even after he’s gone.

I think we as fans can all agree Bettman has been very, very bad for the game of hockey. The sooner he is gone, the better.

Typical NBA punch. In hockey, your own team would beat you up for that.

— Two-time NBA MVP and proud Canadian Steve Nash describes his thoughts on Carmelo Anthony’s punch-and-run in the Knicks-Nuggets melee.

Here’s a funny take by Ivan Carter and Michael Lee.

Odds and ends, odds and ends
Lost time is not found again

— Bob Dylan, “Odds and Ends”

It’s been a tumultuous few weeks here at Wacky Blog Central, so let me just lay into it.

1. I migrated all our blogs to a new server over the weekend, and other than a few glitches, things have gone swimmingly.
2. One glitch was that I made the mistake of using SuSE’s yast2 to configure apache, and it totally f’ed up my virtual host set-up. This caused all of Wacky Mommy’s traffic to be routed to this blog for a day. I fixed it by doing it the good old fashioned way: editing httpd.conf, and all its subordinate *.conf files with vim. I mean, seriously, yast2 totally f’ed up the virtual host configuration.
3. Another glitch was that I didn’t set up the aliases for www, which meant if you put “www.” on the front of our blog URLs, you wouldn’t find us. (Why anybody — and by this I mean Web site owners — still uses www is beyond me. It made sense in the old days, when www.somedomain.com meant “a computer named ‘www’ on the domain ‘somedomain.com'”. These days, though, I would guess 99.9% of Web sites are virtual domains, so the www is just plain spurious. Subdomains can still make sense, for instance if you have a software package site, you can have mysoftware.com, docs.mysoftware.com, downloads.mysoftware.com, etc. But www is just silly. Of course it’s the World Wide Web. Why waste those keystrokes?)
4. Another unrelated but stupid pilot error glitch was that I let this domain expire yesterday. Oh, man, I can’t believe I did that. I renewed and everything seems to be back in order. It is if you’re reading this, anyway.
5. The dog had a massive “accident” in our home last night. Shudder. Thank god for the the following:
   1. Carpet shampooers
   2. Bi-O-Kleen Bac-Out
   3. A strong intestinal constitution (me, not the dog)
6. The new TV device for the new computer doesn’t work as well as the old ATI All-in-Wonder. I’m not sure if it’s the USB interface (probably) or the hardware mp2 encoder, but there’s this horrid delay when watching from an external source (like a VCR). And the DVR software pretty much sucks. It’s cool to have a remote control, but damn, when you’re watching a recorded show, and you fast forward, it’s virtually impossible to stop and play again without it jumping to the beginning. Why the hell isn’t there a commercial skip feature? Basically, they haven’t made the effort to make this a fully-featured DVR.
7. Did I mention the dog crapped all over the house?
8. Yeah. It’s fucking horrible.
9. On a brighter note, the sun’s been shining in Portland for several days. Cold, clear and crisp.
10. We had “family art night” at school last night, which I was expecting to be an evening of sitting at grade-school cafeteria tables with the kids as they pasted things together. Instead, we were treated to a concert by Trashcan Joe. No glue, no markers, no glitter, no whining about not being able to make it look like the teacher’s example. Nice.
11. Due to a snow storm two weeks ago, and a fever last week, I went nearly two and a half weeks without playing hockey. I finally get out on the ice yesterday and was pleased that I haven’t totally lost my cardio.
12. I still haven’t cleaned up all the boxes from the new computer and misc. peripherals.
13. We’ve got a Web server (this one!) in our bedroom. It’ll be there until I decommission the old server, which means migrating the mail server to the new Web server and a couple other virtual domains and…. and…. Oy. Maybe running our own blog farm isn’t such a great idea.

Busy busy busy.

The Winter Hawks held their annual Skills Challenge today at the Memorial Coliseum. We took the kids to see the light-hearted intra-squad competitions, including the hardest shot, most accurate shot, fastest lap, and the finale, a 10 minute, non-stop three-on-three game.

New York Rangers property (and former Winter Hawk star) Brandon Dubinsky was in town for a visit, and graced the crowd with a little on-ice interview with Scooter during a break.

No sooner did they get to talking, than Dubi was sucker punched with a cream pie from behind.

He was a good sport…

And even shared some with Scooter.

Aw, it barely even got on him!

Later, somebody handed a mike to Kurtis Mucha, asking him if he wanted to give Dubi any grief. He took the mike and asked, “Does that jacket come in men’s?”