We're counting down the best goals of the 2023.24 season 🚨 pic.twitter.com/aFui6dMVSu
— Pittsburgh Penguins (@penguins) April 22, 2024
Quark Soup by David Appell
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
🐧 Top Five Goals
Price of Gas is not High
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
This is Why Hockey is the Best Sport
But tonight, their definite last game of the season, they played Jeff Carter, a big 6'4" center known as "Big Jeff Carter" who once starred for the Los Angeles Kings. He's now 39, and was widely expected to resign at the end of this season.
And he did so tonight. All the players fromm the NY Islanders, who played the Penguins tonight and are moving ahead to the playoffs, lined up and shook his hand and patted him on the shoulder or neck and had something to say to him:
The utmost respect 🫡 pic.twitter.com/IheDZhkxJW
— Pittsburgh Penguins (@penguins) April 18, 2024
I have never seen another sport where this happens. Not baseball, not football, not basketball. Maybe it's happened. I haven't closely followed these sports (never basketbal, but I did try to follow the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team as a kid and the Pittsburgh Steelers at a teen into my early 20s), but I never this kind of sendoff for any player in those sports.
I've only been watching hockey seriously since spring 2018. I had a brief spell in New Hampshire in spring 2005 when the Boston Bruins wre in the playoffs and I watced intently for the first time. But since spring 2018 I have been watching closely. And, yes, the players play hard, but it really does seem that in the end that they are all in one faternity.
I wish I played but I never had the chance. But it's been great watching the genius of Sydney Crosby of the #Penguins, a star since he was 7-years old (seriously--that was the first time he appeared on "Hockey Night in Canada," a kind of weekly bible of the sport.
In any case, Crosby still does great things at age 36, and plays an amazing game up-and-down the ice. Someday he'll go out too, but not next year. This summr he'll be skating hard near his hometown of Cole Harbor, Canada. Jeff Carter will be going back to Los Angles, rich, floating in the glow of a career well done. Very many new players will be trying to get into the NHL, so they too can revel in its traditions and history. I like that, in a world that is now always changing too fast.
Hip Eclipse Clip
I've seen a couple zoomed-in pictures of solar flares during last week's eclipse, but this is the best I've seen so far:
100x zoom on the solar eclipse
byu/ArchontheWings ininterestingasfuck
Tuesday, April 16, 2024
The Last 30 Years If....
Top left and clockwise: Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton and dBarack Obama |
Sunday, April 14, 2024
Said Doc....
"It has always seemed strange to me,” said Doc. “The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”
-- John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
Saturday, April 13, 2024
Spike in Tube Ties and Vasectomies
In the US. From "Changes in Permanent Contraception Procedures Among Young Adults Following the Dobbs Decision," JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), April 12, 2024:
Thursday, April 11, 2024
Recordbreaking Atmospheric & Ocean Heat is Unexplained
From the NY Times:
Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS has an article in a recent issue of Nature about how scientists can't explain the recordbreaking temperatures seen in the last nine months (or so), and about why that's a problem. I don't think it's paywalled. He wrote that he doesn't think it's a decrease in aerosols (which cool the planet), as James Hansen has been speculating in recent months. Gavin writes:
Much of the world’s climate is driven by intricate, long-distance links — known as teleconnections — fuelled by sea and atmospheric currents. If their behaviour is in flux or markedly diverging from previous observations, we need to know about such changes in real time. We need answers for why 2023 turned out to be the warmest year in possibly the past 100,000 years. And we need them quickly.
I don't understand how teleconnections could cause an increase in global heat. Regional, sure. But the entire planet? How does that work?
Monday, April 08, 2024
The Solar Eclipse From Here #eclipse2024
We were slated to get a peak solar eclipse of 22.4% blockage. Instead we got this:
The nice thing about the 2017 total eclipse here in Oregon was that it happened in August, and in summer here pretty much every day has perfectly blue skies.
Hope the weather is better elsewhere in the path of totality (and outside it, too).
Sunday, April 07, 2024
Player's Respect for Injured Referee
There was a scary but touching moment in yesterday's Pittsburgh Penguins vs Tampa Bay Lightning hockey game. A referee and a Tamba Bay player collided head-on and blind, and both went down on the ice. The player, Haydn Fleury, stayed down for a while but got up and with assistance skated to the locker room entrance, holding a bloody towel. But the referee, Steve Kozari, stayed down and needed to be taken off on a backboard and stretcher.
The moment was also touching, because as he was being wheeled off the ice, the arena was silent and all players from both benches came onto the ice to look on and give him their respect. I've never seen such a thing in any sport, but I don't know a lot about hockey culture so perhaps this is a standard response. The only thing I can compare it to is lacrosse, where all the players on the field take a knee when a player from either side is down. At first I thought this let them take a rest, but my nephew, an all-conference defenseman, told me they do it out of respect.
Wednesday, April 03, 2024
Countries That Have Uncoupled CO2 Emissions and Economic Growth
Monday, March 18, 2024
Things Are Listening
I just asked Siri (my iPhone) "when was Memorial Day in 1996?"
She gave one of these "here are some options, check it out" useless responses so I quickly typed into Google on my PC's browser "Memorial Day" and before I got any farther the first autofill it gave me was "1996."
Is that a coincidence? Of all the years before now it went to 1996? I don't think "Memorial Day 1996" could have been in my browser's history. But I've been writing about some things that went on around then so maybe it was. If not, it seems weird and uncanny and I don't like it, even if I know it was all done without any human intervention and no actual human behind the curtain cares what I was searching for.