Here’s a recent sample of search terms that bring people to my humble blog. I should note that for quite some time, MoreHockeyLesswar.org has been in the top 10 Google results for Cholle recipe. I get quite a few hits from India. I hope they like my recipe! A precursor to this blog, WackyMonkey.org , was the number one result for “weird monkey sex” for a really long time.

I’ve got to say, it always amazes me some of the things people will type into a search engine. I mean, Jesus H. Christ, what kind of meat head types “is it true that black people do not play hockey because of weak knees” into Google, and what the hell do they expect the computer to say back?

“I’m sorry Dave. You’re a fucking idiot, so I won’t be able to answer your questions today.” That’s what I’d say if I were their computer.

Anyway, what brings you here? Here’s my personal invitation for you to de-lurk and say hello. For your amusement, here are some searches over the last few days (and yes, people, I know I’m perpetuating this nonsense by reprinting these terms and further seeding the Google index):

• history of helmet use in u s. professional hockey?
• everett silvertips tickets wanted ads
• squatting laws in mexico guadalajara
• locker fights.com
• rough boys hockey fights
• you know ogie oglethorpe
• is it true that black people do not play hockey because of weak knees
• guy pulls worm out
• increasing junior a hockey game attendance
• www.morehockeylesswar.org
• pie hockey
• bong hits jesus song
• viktor sjodin movie
• marijuana penalties guadalajara mexico
• hockey is dying
• silvertips mascot portland
• i want to drive a zamboni
• ogie oglethorpe jersey
• feminist quotes
• cat fights.com
• how to make cholle
• children hockey accidents
• i want to drive the zamboni
• cholle cook
• more hockey less war
• silvertips
• dropping leaflets methods
• funny hockey expressions
• the rules the woman is always right
• bring back emotion in hockey
• network54 hockey forum
• easy garbonzo bean recipe
• more is less
• cum shot
• disney on ice half price
• swift hockey socks

Hi everybody. There’s a new meme in town, called Friday Fiction. The idea is that every week you write something, then leave a comment or trackback ping at the hub. It’s modeled on the Thursday Thirteen meme, but with a focus on fiction. I’m not a professional writer, nor do I play one on the Internet. It’s just for fun, and just to encourage me and you to keep the creative juices flowing. If you don’t have a blog, but wish to participate, leave a comment to that effect, and I’ll get in touch with you about submitting your work to the hub.

I don’t know how to start a meme, so this may be a slow starter. Have fun!

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.

Damn, not sure how that happened, but I forgot to renew the registration for morehockeylesswar.org. It expired yesterday. My registrar was kind enough to let me renew anyway, so we’re back in business until 2012, when I’ll probably forget to renew again….

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?”

We have officially migrated to the new server with its new server software, and we are officially ironing out kinks. I expect there to be a few. By and large, it seems to have gone pretty smoothly though. I’m not especially pleased with my new look, so I’ll be tweaking that as we go.

I’ll be re-introducing the shop soon. I need to do some housekeeping on the merch (some of it has been less than satisfactory, so I may be discontinuing some designs and adding new). Please remember, if you’ve bought stuff, it comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. Don’t hesitate to use it if the stuff isn’t up to snuff!

More on the morrow.

For a new, improved More Hockey, Less War blog. Same bat channel, same bat time.

But with a new, improved Web server, new, improved blogging software, and a new, improved design.

Two years ago, I set up the current Web server to host family photos and my wife’s blog (because I didn’t like Google/Blogger’s privacy policy). This server is a 1997 Dell with a 200MHz Pentium MMX processer and a whopping 32 MB of RAM. It’s performed admirably for two years, and would still be fine except, well, Wacky Mommy’s gone and gotten popular. Her blog’s getting 50,000 hits a month, transferring a half a gigabyte of data to her legions of fans. She’s averaging 500 unique visits a day, and when you add to that my relatively puny readership, this little dinosaur of a Web server is starting to creak under the load. We’ve had a couple of outages in the past month when I’ve had to hard reboot the poor thing.

Meanwhile, back on the desktop, our home-built workstation has been getting creaky, too. We’ve been running a 700 MHz Athlon with 256 MB of RAM for several years now, and with the commodity pricing on new machines being what it is, it’s time to move up. So I bought a new dual core, 64 bit box with 1 GB of RAM and a new 19″ flat panel monitor for the desktop, and rebuilt the old desktop with Open SuSE 10.2 (Linux) to use as a new Web server.

The current server is running a very stripped down installation of Debian Linux, which has served us well. But I wasn’t able to run X because the machine was such a dog. With the “new” Web server, I installed the full monty, including the very fancy KDE desktop manager, OpenOffice (a free Microsoft Office clone), and everything else you can imagine you’d need in a home computer (not to mention all the server stuff I really need). Since the new desktop came with a monitor, my Web server now has a monitor, too! What a concept.

Anyway, since the new Web server has more horsepower, I decided to step up to using WordPress for blogging software, which uses MySQL for a database. I am currently running Pivot, which uses flat text files for storage. This does not scale very well, but it was very adequate before our blogs became popular. Well, since Wacky Mommy’s became popular. It would still be fine if she were a loser blogger like me. So anyway, what’s all of this mean to you, dear reader?

First, everything should be faster, particularly when viewing single entries or comments, or leaving comments. Second, I’m redesigning the blog for (hopefully) better usability. WordPress behaves more like most people expect blogs to behave. (Pivot’s a little funky in many ways.) But really, that’s it. All of my existing entries, and all comments will be transfered to the new blog, and the URL to the front page will remain the same. Some URLs to individual entries (permalinks) may be broken, though. Sorry about that.

The big switch is scheduled for this Sunday. I probably won’t post again until after the new server is up and serving.

Next step: more bandwidth. Stay tuned for that.

Wacky Mommy reminded me that I forgot the best (non-hockey) part of the evening last night, the part in which the “Chevy Prize Blimp” got hijacked. They’ve got this radio controlled blimp that flies around the arena during intermissions, dropping coupons for free margarine (I’m not shitting you), free kids’ tickets, and free fast food hamburgers. The freakin’ crowd goes nuts, especially the kids, and I’m always expecting kids to go pitching over a railing as they chase the damn thing around the arena bowl. The announcer says “Make some noise, he’ll come your way; make a lot of noise, he’ll drop some prizes!” So children and adults alike are looking up at this thing, waving their arms and screaming wildly. I can understand the kids not understanding that the man who’s driving the thing is in plain sight behind them, up in the rafters, but I’ve never understood how the adults can be so daft. Do they really think he can discern their relative position to the blimp and pull the trigger so a piece of paper can flutter down from 100 feet above them, right into their greedy fingers? Do they really not understand that they’re making asses of themselves for a margarine coupon?

Anyway, the pilot’s lack of visibility was demonstrated last night, when the blimp got wedged at the top of the arena bowl and was mobbed by a crowd that included quite a few adults. I didn’t see how exactly it happened, but it looked like the pilot’s view was blocked by the center-hung scoreboard. There must have been 25 people in a tight clutch around the blimp, which strained futilely against their grasp. Finally, it broke free and bobbed away like a big puppy, but its payload had been completely stripped. The mob continued to fight over the booty for a few minutes. Holy blimp shit, Batman, what a freakin’ hillarious scene! And this was right at the beginning of its flight, so the buzz was pretty much killed for the blimp chasers in other parts of the arena. Which is not a bad thing for those of us who prefer to not have children climbing over us, chasing visions of free oleo. Actually, in the first intermission, a voucher for a free kid’s ticket landed in the empty seat next to me, and as I reached for it to hand it to the kids behind us, the little urchin almost tore it out of my hand. Neither he nor his parents said “thank you.” If you’re reading this, You’re welcome, ya little shit.

This, by the way, was the same kid who, with his sibling, was clacking little hand clappers in my ear throughout the first and second periods. And it was one of these kids who had an “accident”, causing the whole family to have to leave the game early. Some time in the third period, Wacky Mommy (who has a lousy sense of smell except when it comes to pee and shit) looked back at the soggy mess of half-eaten pretzels and paper waste they left and said “Phew, somebody had an accident!” The couple sitting beside me had had their own accident, having spilled a cocktail, so it was a pretty nasty soup around us in the old Coliseum. Some time during the third, an arena employee came with her haz mat kit and did a quick once over on the pee-pee puddle, and the lady next to me begged a couple super-absorbent rags to clean up her own mess. No wonder I was in a fightin’ mood by the time the fight cards finally came up. “Get out there and stick ’em! Fuck ’em! Christ! Pop ’em!” I shouted, now that the kids were gone.

God, I love hockey.

…she told me so. But when you decide at the last minute to skip trying to get rush tickets to see a play and instead go see your last-place Portland Winter Hawks take on the league leading Everett Silver Tips, there’s a good chance things are going to get out of hand. Especially when these teams see a lot of each other (Portland managed to beat Everett in Everett last night, 3-1).

Portland played with Everett for two periods, helped out by an extended 5 on 3 power play that yielded a tying goal. But then things started to fall apart in the third. When Everett scored their fifth and final goal at 11:30 of the third, making it 5 to 2, I started looking for Portland tough guy Frazer McLaren to pick a dance partner. But it was 16-year-old Tayler Jordan who got things started at 16:27 with Everett’s Brenan Sonne. This one looked like a draw to me. Then off the ice with them! As soon as the puck was dropped again, 5’11”, 185 lb. Matt Sokol squared off with Everett’s Kyle Beach. Beach is 6′ 3″ and pretty much had his way with Sokol, virtually undressing him in the process. To the showers, boys! Then we had to watch a whole minute and a half of hockey before we got a couple of big guys going at it with 6’6″, 216 lb. Max Gordichuk getting some good licks in on 6’4″, 224 lb. Moises Gutierrez.

With a minute 50 left to go, the crowd was yelling for big Frazer McLaren to get into it, but he spent the balance of the game on the bench.

And Wacky Mommy turns to me and says, “How can you like this sport, with all this fighting?” Somehow she forgot that we were going to go to a play, but she was the one who said, nah, let’s go see the Winter Hawks instead. Seriously, I’m not making this up. And you know, Wacky Mommy always says you can just screw so much and drink so much.

Anyway, it got me to thinking. John, AKA Peatycap, AKA Sig from hockey-fights.com and hockeyfansunite.com has a point about a lack of emotion in the NHL. I exchanged some e-mail with a friend in Minneapolis who recently caught a Wild game, and also commented on the lack of aggression. The hockey-fights.com guys blame the new rules enforcement, which we’re also getting in the WHL this year, but they seem to overlook several years of emotionless clutch-and-grab trap hockey that preceded the lockout. They (correctly) target Gary Bettmann as an incompetent assclown of a manager and marketer, and they also are correct that the rules enforcement has gone too far (though I think we disagree on the degree). But I don’t think that’s what’s killed the emotion in the NHL (especially with an eye on how boring the clutch-and-grab and trap game had become).

The real issue is far deeper than zero-tolerance. I saw more emotion on the ice tonight than I’ve seen in ten games in the NHL this season, and a couple of obstruction penalties going both ways didn’t do anything to quell it. These kids are playing their asses off, because they don’t know if they’re going to make it to the next level or not. Intense intra-division rivalries are the norm in Major Junior hockey, even when it’s a league leading Everett, with 69 points, taking it to Portland, with a lowly 30 points. Maybe the pros just make too damn much money to give a shit night after night, and maybe the fact that they’ve “arrived” makes them complacent. I guess that’s why I’m a junior hockey fan, and I’ve never been too excited about the idea of the NHL in Portland.

I understand why Peatycap’s bitter. He’s a Capitols fan, fer Christ’s sake. Shit, now that Jack Abramoff’s buddies can’t take Congress out to the sky box, the team’s probably going to have to pull up stakes and move to a real hockey town. Just don’t come to Portland, okay? (I hear Las Vegas is looking for a team….)