February 28, 2009

What happened to shoes?

Filed under: Personal — Adam @ 6:35 pm

I finally found a good pair of shoes today. I hadn’t been looking long or much, but after trying to find some Monday I was about ready to just wear work boots all the time. I like simple shoes, and I was looking for what I guess would be termed “sneakers” that weren’t solid white or black. I have black dress shoes and black boots, I don’t need another pair of black shoes because I’m not a goth or hot topic employee. There’s a limit. I don’t want solid white because they’re shoes, which go on my feet, and they tend to get dirty and sometimes it just won’t come off and white becomes grey.

So I was looking for a simple pair of grey or even brown sneaker-like shoes that didn’t cost more than $50. That’s my limit. I refuse to pay more than $50 for something to cover my feet. I only allow that much because I expect them to last a year or three (my current shoes are pushing three) before falling apart. They’re feet. All shoes have to do is keep them dry, keep them warm, keep them cool on asphalt, and keep sharp things out of them. It’s not a complicated equation. “Keep my feet at a decent temperature and keep shit off of them.”

I half expected most of the shoes I looked at to come with an optional spoiler and fart pipe. Some of them had the equivalent of racing stripes. Many of them had yellow! (Because yellow makes things go faster.) Some of them were silvery. Things that are not made of metal should not be colored to look like metal. It’s too weird. Some of them were bright blue with yellow, which is just insane. Some of them had bright orange, or other offensive colors. Is it a shoe or a warning that there is road work ahead?

They go on my feet. My feet are not fancy or flashy. They’re hunks of skin and bone designed to hold body weight and help me maneuver through life. There’s nothing special about them. They’re feet. I expected some of the Nike and Reebok (spelling unsure; I don’t care, but it passes the spell check on Firefox) to have spinning chrome rims as an optional buy. What, I can’t have a sub-woofer put in?

A lot of them looked like they were more than 50% plastic. Let’s consider how bad an idea it is to wrap your feet in plastic for a moment. Also, it’s ugly. For some reason, people pay $60, $70, $80 for some seriously ugly shoes. I wouldn’t pay a tenth of that for most of these shoes. Why would you buy such atrocious looking things?

At least the trend of pump-up shoes and lights seems to be going away. (For those who don’t remember, they used to make shoes you could “pump up” with air by squeezing part of the tongue. I have no idea what the purpose of this was, and I owned a pair when I was about eight or nine.) At least, I think the trend of lights on shoes went away — I didn’t see any L.A. Gear shoes so I can’t be sure.

I finally settled on an ugly, but mostly grey pair of Nike shoes that were on sale for $39.99, plus tax. That’s not a bad deal; my current pair are Nike shoes. Like my old pair, the new pair has no gigantic neon swoosh on them. No hot pink, not warning sign orange, no painful blue. They don’t call attention to my feet in any way… which is the idea.

Because they’re just feet.

February 14, 2009

Eat it, Patafie.

Filed under: Sports — Adam @ 11:24 am

Last night’s game was amazing. Despite Patafie’s best efforts, we pulled through and won in a shoot out.

Now, on paper, they did have more penalties than we did this game. But watching the game, Patafie missed a lot of blatant penalties on their part, including goaltender interference on their second goal. He also called off one of our goals and said it was kicked in when it bounced off of a skate — which isn’t the same as being kicked. I saw no kicking motion, and considering his failure to call some of the most blatant tripping and hooking I’ve ever seen, and Thursday’s insane tripping call when our player didn’t even touch Charlotte’s, I’m trusting my eyes more than the worst referee in the ECHL.

I don’t often like to blame the referee, but every time he’s the referee, I have a problem with the officiating. Without fail. Every game I’ve been to with Patafie ends up with me actually fussing about it. It’s pretty much the only way I’ll get annoyed enough to write about it.

It isn’t like we don’t lose often enough to our own problems — often, the team doesn’t play a full three periods. For a while, we’d play great until the halfway point of the second period and then just be dead for the rest of the game. That’s not a way to win in hockey. That has nothing to do with the referee. But in the last few weeks, our team has come together and play a lot more cohesively.

We do still have problems — our power play percentage is awful. Just outright horrific, honestly. We spend too much time passing the puck back and forth and giving the other team a chance to pick it off and clear it down the ice. Worse, sometimes they get shots on goal during our power plays. In fact, against Cincinnati, we ended up having power plays where they got more shots on goal than we did. That’s a major problem — we scored more shorthanded against Charlotte than on the power play.

Playoff chances are so-so. The division is decided by win percentage as opposed to points, so we could be in fourth in points, but not in fourth in win percent — actually, we are in fourth in points but not win percent now. This is because August folded mid-season. Even if we do, it looks to me like Florida or South Carolina will carry our division, and one of those two teams or Cincinnati will carry the conference. In the National Conference, it looks like it’ll be either Las Vegas or Ontario from the Pacific Division, and Victoria or Alaska from the West Division.

I think that Las Vegas and Ontario will both enter playoffs with something to prove. Ontario was formerly the Texas Wildcatters, a playoff favorite in our division, and Las Vegas lost in the Kelly Cup Finals. I also think an Ontario vs. Florida final would be interesting. While Ontario was Texas, Florida got a good number of their best players.

If we do make it — and I really hope we do — I like our chances a lot more than our record indicates. We’ve proven we can take on statistically better teams, and we’ll have had more time to come together. We’re still sort of fighting with the fact we’re an “expansion” team. The two years off for Katrina really hurt our lineup, and most of these guys haven’t played together before. We have a lot of players that are good at beating goalies, a great goalie, and some pretty good defense, we just have problems — passing and power plays being the major two.

February 13, 2009

Hockey must be a hard game to play,

Filed under: Sports — Adam @ 11:25 am

Especially when the referee, Steve Patafie, has a hard on for the home team. Last night’s officiating was a joke. Their guy dives, we get tripping? They blatantly tripped us up so much toward the end that he finally started calling it, but honestly — I saw at least six times where they deliberately tripped our guys up, far more obviously tripping than a few of the tripping/hooking calls he called against us (like when a Charlotte player grabbed our guy’s stick with his hand and held on to it and our guy got hooking!), and he just didn’t call it. I, along with the rest of the fans, was pissed.

This isn’t the first time Patafie has pissed me off — of the ECHL referees, he’s one of two names I can always remember and always grumble about when they announce the referees. I’m not sure if he just likes to piss fans off, or if he has something against the Sea Wolves in particular, but his officiating sucks.

As to the game, well, the penalties drug us down pretty hard. I think it would have been a clean, in-regulation win on our part were it not for the bullshit calls. But we were down 3-0 halfway through the second when Jason Tejchma picked up a loose puck and skated down the ice to score our first goal of the game — shorthanded, because of the above mentioned bullshit hooking call.

Then in the fourth, down 4-1 with less than ten to go, we rallied and tied it. But thirty seconds into overtime, Charlotte profited from some pretty unlucky bounces as we attempted to clear it and sunk the puck into the net.

Of their five total goals, two of them were power play goals. Of our four, only one was a power play — and one was short handed. To me, that says that in a more fair game with better officiating, we would have beat them. Not that we’ll ever know, as I’m fairly certain Patafie is the referee tonight as well.

February 9, 2009

Just for the record;

Filed under: Politics — Adam @ 9:12 pm

Currently, short of a Republican filibuster, the Democrats have enough votes to pass almost anything.

In two years, I’ll be reminding everyone how these have changed:

Single
# 10% on income between $0 and $8,350
# 15% on the income between $8,350 and $33,950; plus $835
# 25% on the income between $33,950 and $82,250; plus $4,675
# 28% on the income between $82,250 and $171,550; plus $16,750
# 33% on the income between $171,550 and $372,950; plus $41,754
# 35% on the income over $372,950; plus $108,216

Married
# 10% on the income between $0 and $16,700
# 15% on the income between $16,700 and $67,900; plus $1,670
# 25% on the income between $67,900 and $137,050; plus $9,350
# 28% on the income between $137,050 and $208,850; plus $26,637.50
# 33% on the income between $208,850 and $372,950; plus $46,741.50
# 35% on the income over $372,950; plus $100,894.50

The lower bits, at least, ought to change a ton.

February 7, 2009

Pink in the Rink

Filed under: Sports — Adam @ 10:16 pm

Tonight was the second annual “Pink in the Rink” for the Mississippi Sea Wolves. For those unaware, this is a night where the players of a given team wear pink jerseys as opposed to their normal color, as part of an attempt to raise money for various breast cancer related charities. The jerseys are auctioned off post-game for a sizable sum (for the ECHL anyway).

Last night, we played the same team — 2007-2008 Kelly Cup champion Cincinnati Cyclones. They beat us pretty bad, 6-2. Tonight was a much closer game, and the Sea Wolves came out on top — 3-2. As the final whistle sounded, a massive brawl started, too. This was fueled by a sense on both sides that the other team was taking liberties — and I agree with our guys about them taking liberties with our goalie. As I yelled once, when the goalie has his hand on the puck and the whistle has been blown, you stop trying to hit it out of his grip. There may or may not have been a profanity attached to this particular observation.

Possibly the funniest moment for me came when we were skating around their goal and passing the puck, and in annoyance I yelled “Yeah, you can skate pretty, but SHOOT THE PUCK” and almost immediately, we shot and scored. I think I have a new lucky phrase.

Also, the Bendy One was wearing the pink replica jersey I bought her tonight, and I have to say, she looked good. So I bought her a pink Sea Wolves cap to go with it.

Tomorrow will be the tie break between the two teams for this three game series. If I recall correctly, we’re about even when it comes to third game tie breaks. So we’ll see.