Sweet Tea, Barbecue, and Bodychecks

OK, so I got this formletter-esque spam in the mail from some outfit, asking me to join his “sports library”. I filed it in the trash, along with all the Penis Enlargement spams and Nigerian Wire Fraud scam-spams and eBay account phishing spams that I get–because it’s spam, and I loathe spam and the people who send it.

I got a second e-mail today from this outfit:

Hi,

I previously invited you to have your blog included in Spammer Site‘s sports blog library. Since I have not heard back from you, your site has not been included. The site is more fully developed and will officially be launching on Labor day (in a little less than two weeks). I am inviting you one more time to be part of the sports blog library. In order to entice you to become part of the library, I am providing the URL to show you what it looks like and how it works. Check out URL deleted because I refuse to give a spammer a link. You will see that as a member of the library, people that may be interested in reading your blog, will have a place where they can more easily find it. Be advised that although the rest of the site is operational, most images and articles are space holders at this point. I do hope you contact me and allow me to include your blog in the library.

So I go and check it out–and I see that I’m the only hockey blogger not named Mirtle, Golbez, Kukla, or Cason that hasn’t replied to the guy’s form-spam. Are you people kidding me? Do y’all know something I don’t?

I replied with the following:

$SPAMBAG,

I don’t care for impersonal formletter-spam (which is how your initial e-mail and this one have been presented to me). That’s why I didn’t respond. Thanks for the “invitation”, but I’d rather not be seen as condoning unsolicited commercial e-mail.

Have a great day,

AQ

If there’s one thing I hate more than a certain Central Conference team from Michigan, it’s UCE/UBE (i.e. spam). I could have been a lot snarkier with the guy (like, for example, telling him that the Nigerians do a better job of trying to disguise a spam as a personal e-mail than he did), but I decided to be polite.

Stop laughing. I can be very polite when I want to be.

Soanyway, he replied with this:

No problem. I will note that you’re not interested. I know that the emails are very impersonal, but unfortunately, unsolicited email is the only way I can create such a community. I respect your choice and your conviction.

$SPAMBAG

Like Hel it’s the only way. Whatever happened to dropping a line to somebody like (for example) Paul Kukla and saying “Hey Paul, I’m trying to get this site set up, can you pass the word along to bloggers that you think would be a good fit?” That’s certainly better and (dare I say it) more ethical than sending out unsolicited bulk e-mail. “Everyone else does it” is no excuse, either–and don’t tell me I’m making too much of this either, because dammit wrong is wrong…and bulk-mailing, no matter how “noble” the motivation, is W to the R to the O-N-G.

Or, as I’ve said about other things that are wrong: “It’s legal to stick a knife down your pants and lop your own nards off in public, but that doesn’t make it right.”

Just sayin’.

Since I’ve been either too busy fending off the beer-loving minors at Stop-n-Rob or flat on my back and doped up on Flexeril, I pretty much missed a lot of stuff–like, for example, Cory Stillman’s shoulder needing surgery and Frankie Kaberle’s shoulder not needing surgery (thank Eir for that). Props to d-lee and CasonBlog for keeping the Caniac end up.

Anyway. Back around the Ides of March, Eric McErlain (who has his own set of medical woes to deal with–get well soon, bubba) about the All Blacks and their pre-game ritual: the haka. One of the clips he posted was one from a New Zealand/South Africa Tri-Nations match:

Kapa O Pango

The day of Game 3 against the Habs, I started a thread on teh LGC entitled “If this doesn’t get people fired up, nothing will”–and I posted that link. The Hurricanes won that night and the next seven games afterward. Even when the streak was broken, watching the haka (and my bumping the thread) became a game-day ritual–win or lose. It got a little silly toward the end when certain posters were told that they couldn’t post in the thread anymore because the ‘Canes lost a game, and much of the thread is just me saying “bttt” (back to the top), but it was all in good fun.

What, me superstitious? Perish the thought!

The day of Game Seven, the thread (which sadly almost got lost in the Great Board Migration of 2006 along with so many other Hall of Fame threads) became a sort of bonding ritual, as fans down here watched it along with fans in Brazil and Poland and Canada and even the Middle East (Thor keep you safe, Joe and Kevin). I still can’t watch it without a shiver going down my spine, and it’ll always be known to be as The Haka That Won The Cup.

Because if something like that doesn’t fire people up, then nothing else will.

(caveat: the duplication of many posts in that LGC.com thread came as a result of a db error when migrating the board from phpBB to vBulletin. Trust me, it wasn’t intentional.)

Proof positive that Alex Ovechkin is a badass…

…for sufficiently Vanilla Ice-like values of “badass” anyway.

Mike Chen’s Hockey Blog: Five Weird Things

So Mike tagged me to post five weird things about myself. Oh, the humanity.

1. After the NY Giants beat the crap out of my beloved Washington Redskins in the 1986 NFC title game, I decided to place a wager with some people at school: If the Giants beat the Broncos in the Super Bowl, I’d get a mohawk. Elway choked, and I got a mohawk–and then I got the bright idea to try to peroxide it and go all Wendy O. Williams. The attempt failed, and my hair turned orange. I blame Tom L. for this, cos he’s a Giants fan.
2. I can count in seven languages (English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, and Finnish). I can hold at least a simple conversation in six of those seven, parse written statements in five of them, and have great fun driving my boss up the wall by switching randomly between all seven languages while counting something at work.
3. I am mildly autistic–and no, I definitely do not have to buy my underwear at K-Mart.
4. I love the cold. When something needs to be done in our lovely 28-degree cooler at Stop-n-Rob, it usually gets assigned to me. When the temperature falls to the 30s in the wintertime, the most I’ll put on is a light jacket. I’ve been known to turn on the AC during the wintertime to drop the temperature in my apartment a dozen degrees or so, which drives my husband up the wall.
5. I loathe shopping even more than I loathe all Detroit sports teams and the Dallas Cowboys, and will go to great lengths to avoid having to go to a mall or store for anything that is not computer hardware or software. The only time I make any kind of exception to this is when I’m on a roadtrip, when I’ll go buy some kind of tchotchkes as a souvenir. Otherwise I’m at home patching my jeans for the 2394724th time so I don’t have to go buy new ones.
Since I don’t think they’ve been tagged yet, I’m tagging:

James Mirtle (whenever he gets back from vacation)
Tom L.

Tom Benjamin
Pat from Black Dog Hates SkunksÂ

And Mike from Confessions of a Hockey Fanatic

Not that they’ll do it, but what the hell.

There are all kinds of fun theories that abound in the sporting world–the Curse of the Bambino, the Ewing Theory, and so on. All of them are about as scientifically sound (and intellectually defensible) as Intelligent Design and The Flat Earth theory, but they still make for fun water cooler discussion.

In that spirit I introduce to you, dear readers, a new (and equally unscientific) sports theory:

The Malik Effect–named for this man:

New York Rangers defenseman Marek Malik, aka The Serene Master of Malik-Fu.

The theory behind The Malik Effect holds that any team that beats a team with Marek Malik on it in the playoffs–early rounds or finals–will suffer later on. I shan’t bore you with a big metaphysical discussion of people who can affect the overall luck of others and the quasi-religious clownery that drives the theory–I’ll just let the facts speak for themselves.

Known examples of The Malik Effect in action:

1999: Boston Bruins defeat the Carolina Hurricanes in the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals. Bruins go on to get pwned by the Buffalo Sabres on their march to that year’s Cup Finals.

2001: New Jersey Devils defeat the Carolina Hurricanes in the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals. Devils go on to choke a 3-2 lead over the Colorado Avalanche in that year’s Stanley Cup Finals and get pwned in Game 7.

2003, 2004, 2006, 2007: Detroit Red Wings find themselves unable to advance past the Conference Finals since beating the Carolina Hurricanes in the 2002 Stanley Cup Finals.

2003: Minnesota Wild defeat the Vancouver Canucks in the Western Conference Semifinals. Wild go on to get swept in the Western Conference Finals by the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim.

2004: Calgary Flames defeat the Vancouver Canucks in the Western Conference Quarterfinals. Flames go on to the Cup Finals, only to lose to the Tampa Bay Lightning in seven games.

2005: Hame Zlin beats HC Vitkovice Steel in the Czech Extraliga playoffs after a heated seven-game series. Zlin goes on to get swept in the Finals by Pardubice.

2006: New Jersey Devils beat the New York Rangers in the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals. Devils go on to get the crap beaten out of them by the Carolina Hurricanes in the Eastern Conference Semifinals.

2007: Buffalo Sabres beat the New York Rangers in the Eastern Conference Semifinals. Sabres go on to get the crap beaten out of them by the Ottawa Senators in the Eastern Conference Finals.

2008: Pittsburgh Penguins beat the New York Rangers in the Eastern Conference Semifinals. Penguins go on to lose in six games to the Detroit Red Wings in the Stanley Cup Finals. Note that the Red Wings, as indicated above, had gone without a Cup since 2002–until this season, when they encountered a team in the Finals that was itself under the Effect’s influence. Note also that Malik didn’t even play a single game in the 2008 Playoffs.

The only two known avoidances of the Malik Effect have come in international competition: Canada in 2004′s World Cup, and Sweden in this year’s Olympic games.

As I’ve said. This is not the most scientific theory in the world. But it’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

Addendum: The Malik Effect has been confused with the Curse of the Sheik, which refers to a team’s loss of luck/mojo when The Serene Master departs (either by trade or free agency) for other environs. That is a separate theory, which I may expound upon once a larger representative sample is acquired.