Let’s go Islanders!

UPDATE, 10:29 pm:

That hurts, but thanks for a great year, guys.

Especially Tavares. MVP! MVP!

And then I hit the “random” button and this comes up.

Time, indeed.

I think I need a moment here.

This last holds a particular sticking point. Obama either ignores or scoffs at any suggestion that his own lavish vacations and 1% perks are a problem. Normally, you’d notice if the guy calling you to the ramparts of the class struggle was well back of the front lines… all the way back at a luxury resort, golfing, and then issuing a denunciation of “millionaire and billionaire corporate jet owners” from the steps of his own private jumbo jet. It should be even more glaring that, unlike the big wigs, the President does all of this on the public’s nickel.

And now we have the latest, that the President-who-is-not-an-emperor nevertheless holds himself to have the authority to order the deaths of American citizens on American soil via drone strikes, without due process or even probable cause. The Constitutional prohibitions on this sort of thing are numerous and stringent. The thing that really gobsmacks me on this is the lack of reaction among the same folks who, ten years ago, saw the hobnailed boot of fascism in every step of the prior President. There was a long and protracted argument about this at the time, I recall… and the debate centered on whether the measures taken then were actual violations, and why. But now we don’t even get the courtesy of that debate, because dissent is no longer the highest (or any) form of patriotism.

How is this even possible? People are not so foolish to hold such wildly different standards based just on the letter behind the politician’s name, are they? And honestly, I don’t think they are. In fact, I don’t think  that thinking has much to do with it. The standard isn’t reasonable, in the sense that it doesn’t involve reason at all. The standard is emotional. One group is the Other, and the first group is all that stands against them and all their foul works. So the same exact action (jet-setting to lavish vacations, questioning the motives and actions of the Government) is simultaneously the most shameless of deeds and not a big deal. The standard is not Right vs. Wrong, or Lawful vs. Illegal, but US vs. THEM.

It’s no way to run things. And I don’t think that this is a controversial position. Rule of Law isn’t always popular, but most of the time, most of us from both sides of the political divide agree to it, because the alternative is disastrous. And yet, there’s that us vs. them thing that kicks in when it’s “our guy” getting dinged for acting like a komissar. There’s a list of excuses like “Your side did it first” and “It’s necessary for progress” and “But there’s a crisis.”

And some people just dispense altogether with excuses and do it because They Know Better. And that gets us to CS Lewis, and The Magician’s Nephew. The Magician in question explains to said Nephew that “Men like me who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules just as we are cut off from common pleasures. Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny.”

Digory saw through Uncle Andrew, of course. Quoting the entire exchange would not fall under Fair Use, I’m afraid, but it’s the second chapter, and much of it will sound all too familiar to the reader.

(hat tip to Laura’s sidebar at FM²)

In this case, I was just going to leave a comment at Dustbury about the dreck-infested genre of modern Christian Contemporary Music, when it got away from me. So I rounded it up and dragged it back here where it won’t dig up the neighbor’s peonies.

You see, this is one of the many small things about which I have too much thought invested. As a Catholic, my Sunday mornings are usually spent in an exercise in true mortification: worshiping my God while trying not to hate modern Catholic hymnists. Good Lord, but this stuff is largely unsingable.

Now, take the bathetic, tepid, squishy-marsmallowy of what is laughingly called “worship music” in the modern Catholic Church, turn it up to eleven, and play it on a radio station exclusively devoted to the stuff, and you have Christian Contemporary Music.

Barf.

Now, hey, if you don’t like it, don’t listen, right? And I don’t. Praising Jesus in song is great, and I probably do too little of it. I probably do too little in all areas of my life, being your typical sinner. But there’s three things at issue here, three thoughts that reveal themselves as flawed attempts at being a better man of faith, and CCM gets right to the heart of them. The first thought is that if I love Jesus, then I will do nothing but Jesus-y things all the time. The second thought is that if I praise Jesus, then the quality of my praise is of no import. The third thought is that to praise Jesus is always a positive, affirming experience.

The Third Oops (faith is always positive and affirming) is perhaps the easiest to dispense with.  Friend of the Blog fillyjonk says it best in the comments:

Another thing I like about some of the older hymns? They seem more prone to recognize that Christian life is not all rainbows and lollipops. Sometimes I wonder how many people are driven away after getting the impression that having down times or difficulties is somehow not congruent with following Christ…

Two thumbs way up. The Bible itself has some horrible things done to (and in some cases, by) believers. In fact, there are very clear warnings that “The world will hate you because of Me.” But there is also consolation, such as John 16:33: “In this world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer! I have overcome the world.”

That’s a reason to praise, but it’s also a reason to sing the blues every once in a while. The best artists recognize this. The CCM movement seems to think that there’s no dark nights of the soul, to judge from the relentless “we’re positive and uplifting yays!” messaging.

In fact, my ire with my Church’s happy-clappy 70′s songbook stems in large part from this. I mean, we make a pretty big deal of Lent and sacrifice. We get burned ashes smudged into our foreheads once a year by a guy who tells us “You are dust and to dust shalt thou return.” Fifteen minutes later we leave the building to the strains of “We Believe” or some such pablum.

Do I think we need more uplifting culture? Of course. It’s great to have the option. I also think that “uplifting” becomes dishonest when it’s the only part of the message we’re getting. We leave the impression that belonging to Christ means that we simper our way through life as if nothing was ever wrong with it, or with us. Maybe we tsk-tsk about some heartbreak, but we always end up with how blessed we are. Or else, we act absolutely no different from anyone around us, leaving the impression that our faith results in no real and lasting benefit or change in our lives. Neither of these are winning strategies. Also, neither of these things are even remotely true.

Onward to the previous point. (I swear that should have made sense.)

The Second Oops (the quality of praise is irrelevant) is perhaps where we as believers do the most damage to our own cause. The Great Commission is to make disciples of all nations. Well, how we doing with that?

There’s one thing that’s true of all Loves: they delight in finding a true expression of the Beloved. Robert Parker’s Spencer expressed it well in the book “Early Autumn,” in a scene where Spencer and Susan are watching a Celtics game. Susan wonders why the Celtics crowd cheers when a visiting player makes a fine play and scores; Spencer explains first that the player used to be a Celtic, but moreover, it was a great play, and a true fan appreciates good basketball.

Lately, believers seem to be getting this backward. We act as if appending the name “Jesus” to whatever we’re writing or singing or etc. improves the quality by default. And the hilarious thing about this is, we never do this anywhere else. Even the thought of it would be ridiculous: “I’m driving my car in Jesus’ name, you can’t give me a ticket! I’m knitting in Jesus’ name, the sleeves don’t have to have to be the same length! I’m baking in Jesus’ name, so it doesn’t matter that the cake collapsed in on itself like a chocolatey black hole!”

Or to put it in terms I used above the jump: if you don’t like it, don’t listen… and I don’t. This is music meant specifically to appeal to me as a believer and I can’t stand the stuff. So I ask again, how are we doing with that “make disciples” thing? Who is going to listen to this mewling milquetoast nonsense and say, “Sure, sign me up for a lifetime of thinking exactly like that!” Who’s going to follow Christ if they think that they’ll be forced to pretend to enjoy this pferdkaese?

One objection I can think of – indeed one that my own wife will sometimes lodge with me – is that these are people expressing their love for God as well as they can and I shouldn’t put them down. To which I have to reply, sure they are and God love them for it, but why inflict that on the rest of us? If they’re not that good at it, why are they doing it professionally? I love hockey; I’m not trying to play for the Chicago Blackhawks.  More than that, I’m not trying to say that my hockey league is more wholesome than the NHL so buy tickets to watch us and not them. Yet for some reason, the moment the name of Jesus gets involved, the concept of skill and craft goes right out the window?

I own albums by Jars of Clay and Sixpence None the Richer. I don’t own them because they are believers, but because they made great music. I own albums by tons of other folks too, and when they occasionally stray into being explicitly Christian, it is, unsurprisingly, immeasurably better than most of the simpering song-and-praise brigade.

This gets us to the top of the list, the First Oops: if I love Jesus I will do Jesus-y things all the time. And this is the tricky one, because it’s true, but not in the way that people usually make a go of it.

True tale: when I was a younger adult, I considered one of those Covenant Communities that you may have heard of… groups of believers choosing to live, work, and socialize together. Sadly, one of the things that tends to happen there is that they tend to get culty about non-essentials. It starts out with living for Jesus, and if you’re not careful, it ends up with living for not reading Car and Driver because they review cars made in countries that oppress Christians.

These folks, it should be said, are almost uniformly pleasant and unplastic, but they still had a deal about rejecting unChristian music, by which they meant anything that wasn’t explicitly written for church.

I couldn’t quite delineate my objection to it at the time, but now I can: it’s inhuman. NOBODY DOES THIS. Nobody lives their entire waking moment as if they were in church. Even the saints, who are disconcerting in their otherwordliness, still engage the world on some level. They don’t stop eating and showering and taking out the garbage, they just do all those things differently, to the glory of God. Merely being unworldly for the sake of the thing usually leads to humbuggery and sanctimony, not holiness. In the Bible, when Jesus rises from the dead, He has an actual body, which still bears the wounds He received at His death. He’s still Incarnate – He doesn’t merely set aside or outgrow His real humanity.

That’s what kept me out of that particular group. It wasn’t for me. Again, I stress that it has been a good home for some folks I’ve known, and they weren’t humbugs or fakes. I also appreciate the larger idea behind their musical guidelines, which is that if it’s an active hindrance to living for God, you ought to free yourself from it.

The “anything not for Church is unhelpful” thought, however, is itself unhelpful. The point of belief isn’t to get all of us into the Faith, but to get the Faith into all of us, into every part of us. Theologian and author Frank Sheed used the analogy of the sun: being a believer isn’t like seeing all the same things that a skeptic would, plus the sun in the sky; it’s seeing everything in the light of the sun, seeing them transformed from vague shadowy stuff to detailed, vivid landscapes and colors. Likewise, believers don’t merely have God in the picture like another thing, but God is IN all the things, is the frame and the canvas without which no things at all would exist.

I can play hockey in such a manner as to give credit to my God, without breaking out the sticks and pads in the middle of the second reading. (Maybe wait until the recessional, and cross-check the “folk choir” into the side of the pulpit. Surely that would be an act of corporal charity…) I can also give glory to God without having to listen to nothing but K-GOD on my commute.

(credit to Dustbury for linking the original article from Patheos)

Because there are many games per night to get through, each has to be strictly scheduled. Win, lose, or tie, the next game has to go off on time; run too far behind and the last game won’t finish until well after midnight and nobody will be fit to get up in the morning to go to their jobs.

This leads to our league doing things in reverse from the pros in one important fashion. NHL regular-season games that are tied after overtime go to a shootout. Playoff games just have overtime after overtime until someone finally scores. (Why the important games have real hockey endings while the regular season settles for gimmickry is beyond me.) In our league, however, we have no time to run a shootout that might take an extra ten minutes, so the regular-season games can end tied. BUT ties aren’t an option in the playoffs, so those do go to shootouts, and in the most recent one, there was a key goal scored that probably shouldn’t have counted.

The goalie poke-checked the shooter on this attempt, and got a piece of it, but the ball* kept on towards the goal line. The shooter, seeing that it was going to roll wide, shot it in himself after the poke. The ref let the goal stand despite everyone saying “Wait, what??”

* Ball because this is dek hockey (the official spelling has no C) and we’re all on foot and this is very ghetto but bear with me.

Being that sort of guy, I carry a pdf of the NHL rulebook* around on a thumb drive, and though I wasn’t reffing this one, it came in handy to look up the rule governing valid penalty shots/shootout attempts. (You can read along here.) The two keys: first, the puck (or ball) must stay in motion towards the goal line unless it’s a spin-o-rama move, in which case the move must be made in a continuous motion. Second, no goal can be scored on a rebound – if it hits the goalie, it has to carry in under it’s own momentum or else the attempt is over.

* Except for specific exceptions, we try to follow the NHL rules. I mean, a crosscheck is a crosscheck – why reinvent the wheel?

Our commish decided that “rebound” presupposes “shot” and that a poke-check is not considered a shot, therefore the goal should count because the ball didn’t deflect back the way it came, only changing direction from side-to-side. My thought was that the shooter can’t touch it again after it hits the goalie, because this isn’t continuous motion. I suspect he did so in order to have a reason not to overturn the call; but he’s stuck to it ever since.  So I wrote Kerry Fraser’s “C’mon Ref!” column at TSN to get a ruling.

Now, indirectly, I have my answer, thanks to Alex Burrows’ bizarre non-o-rama move against Jon Quick and the LA Kings. Fraser never replied to me (his column is specifically about rulings involving things seen in NHL games), but this section of a recent column of his holds the solution:

… Contact by the goalie with the puck would be deemed a save.

Remember, a legal goal cannot be scored on a rebound so unless the puck slid past the goalkeeper and into the net without further contact by the shooter this attempt would be ruled complete by the referee.

So that goal from our house league should have been waived off, and if it happens on my watch, it will be, and I will have backup. Thanks ref!

The last time we spoke, right before the battle, he made a suggestion I admit I considered absurd. “You should try keeping a journal,” he said.

“A journal?” I echoed. “Do you mean I should write a book?” I know, of course, that Moff Nur has been editing the manuscript of my master Darth Sidious the Emperor Palpatine, whose highly anticipated treatise on the subject of the subjugation of civilizations and the creation of powerful monsters promises to be a bestseller.

“No, no,” smiled Nur. “I mean like a diary.”

“Like a teenage girl?”

“Well, not entirely unlike a teenage girl, I suppose. The purpose is to help you analyze yourself by exporting your thoughts and impressions into a form you can review. Not only can it provide valuable insight as an artifact, but I find the actual process of recounting my reflections cathartic in itself. … I promise you, my friend, it helps.”

And so I have decided to make good on the Moff’s advice, now that he is dead and the confidence of the terrorists swells. I have begun this journal. I do not know how long the experiment will last, but I admit that in the absence of Nur himself I do find it calming to imagine I am speaking to his spirit as I dictate this recording.

Hello, Moff!

Alright, now I feel really stupid.

Well, lots of folks, other than teenagers and Sith Lords, keep a diary.  Some people call them “journals” so they don’t have to admit that they have a diary.  (The Punisher called his the “War Journal,” which was awkward when you consider all those “Catcher in the Rye” quotes and Good Charlotte lyrics scribbled in the margins.)  Your truly has a diary.  It’s pretty badly named – “diary” shares linguistic roots with the word “daily,” and all you Friends of the Hive know that I’m not a daily sort of writer – but diary it is.  I like to think of it as closer to to the Sith model than the Twihard, as befits a good minion.

You may suppose that a “journalist” would have a “journal” rather than a diary, but having been a journo major way back when, I know better.  A lot of these cats are really of the fawning lap-sitting variety.  Case in point:

Over the weekend, CNN anchor and reporter Tom Foreman wrote a piece for CNN’s website explaining the genesis of a tradition he has kept for the last four years. … Foreman has been writing President Obama a letter every single day of Obama’s first term. Some letters offered Obama advice, while others explained to Obama why Foreman rarely buys a lottery ticket.

You can call it fan mail, or hero worship, or love letters… whatever you like, but I’ma go ahead and call this a diary.  Some people actually have names for their diaries, even if it’s just “Dear Diary.”  (Mine just has dated entries.  Sith do NOT name their diaries.)  Mr. Foreman’s Diary is apparently named “Obama.”    And like a diary, Obama is quite unlikely to ever reply.

* No, but seriously, read this whole thing, it’s really terrific stuff.

As a word of explanation: on either side of my family, I’m the eldest of my generation.  My mother’s sister got in the next three, and then there’s a gap of eight years or more between me and my brother.  From there, the various cousins and siblings range well younger than myself.  As a result, sometimes I tend to lapse into “get off my lawn” mode with the youngsters, a situation that annoys all parties, and one I take pains to avoid when I can.

Still, I notice even when I manage to keep it to myself, and what I primarily noticed in the Czar’s Monday missive is the uncanny resemblance to many of my generation.  This meant that I wasn’t keeping it to myself this time.  The Czar kindly let me ramble, but even that was cut down.  My interest was more than abstract.  What got me where I live is the part I’m putting after the jump.

There are 15 of us, beginning with me and going down to a middle-schooler.  Technically this would make her the next generation; leaving out all the cousins who are still in compulsory schools, our family stratum is eight persons thick.

Of these eight, three or four (depending on who’s tallying) are currently leading lives similar in most respects to what the Czar described: multiple part-time jobs instead of a budding career, group living (or stuck with the parents well into adulthood), and dubious prospects.  This is not to say that they won’t make the leap – I did so relatively late in the game, and these aren’t untalented or unintelligent people.  The final horn hasn’t sounded yet.  Of course, nobody knows when that final horn will go off, will they?  And that worries me.  The rules of the game have been changed to make it ever-more-challenging to get off the bench and get into the flow of play.

One of the metaphors popular in discussing the meddlesome nature of too-large a State is that they are meant to be referees, and not to take up the player’s gear and participate in the action.  Bad enough, but now it’s almost like the sportswriters have also taken the field – not to play themselves, but to make sure than everyone else plays according to prepared roles, because to behave otherwise is to spoil the purity of their story afterward.  (After all, players only get in the way of a well-managed game.)  The incessant whistles of Life’s overbearing refs dovetail nicely with this desire to move the players around like props.  Nobody is important as an individual any more, but as a class, or as a metaphor for the lesson these busybodies mean for us to learn.

Should we be surprised that so many players give up on the game?

People lie along a continuum of behavior.  Let’s scale it from zero to a hundred.  In both the overall and in the individual pursuit, you will find a small group at the very low end, the single-digit sorts who are incorrigible.  They don’t care.  In schools, they’re the ones marking time until they can start their professional criminal careers; in jobs, they are untrainable and surly where they are even employable at all; they will cause trouble for the fun of seeing what it does to everyone else.  Likewise, the high end, 90+, are filled with people who are dauntless.  They’re the kids stuck with single-digit teachers who nevertheless become engineers or doctors or inventors, who read Aeschylus and Virgil in their own spare time; they rise from the stockroom to CEO; they take trouble on behalf of others even before those others knew they had trouble.

Most of us are in that comfortable muddle in the middle.  We even make it something of a virtue not to be a Single-digit or a Dauntless… the “I’m a good person” defense when we become aware that we really could be a whole lot better if we bothered.

We already find it easier to shed points than gain them, but for a lot of us, “I’m a good person” only gets us so far, and we start to push to make it true.  And that’s where the Refs and Writers are such a hazard.  The more barriers they put up to our increasing our score, the fewer people keep playing, and the less success they have.  The only high-end skill of the Refs and Writers: helping people shed the points.  You could almost place these people in the negatives – they have a knack, a perverse anti-talent for insisting that it’s unfair to those losing points when other, better-motivated people try to gain points of their own.

Again, pick an aspect of life, any you like: “you’ve made enough money,” or “you’ve drank enough soda,” or the recent post at Morgan’s.  That picture is astonishing to me.  I can get if some people don’t want to be merely looked at, but to be told that everyone else has to pluck out their eyes?  Hogwash.  It’s not just about people being pretty no matter what, but other people insisting that they ought not to be pretty.  And it’s self-defeating.  It really becomes the mirror of what it purports to be: it’s the people shrieking like harpies about “lookism” who reduce a woman to nothing more than her physical appearance, who refuse to take a pretty girl’s brains seriously, or who insist that a smart girl can’t be physically appealing as well.

This is already intolerable, but it really begins to frost my flakes when I see its effect on my loved ones.  I worry a lot about the seven youngsters.  One is already in crisis.  Even the others who aren’t, how are their prospects?  To use the parlance of the day, the Blue Model life isn’t sustainable.  Moreover – and this is the big secret – it isn’t meant to be.  The mindset at the negative end of the scale is that nobody must be in the black; he who dies with the least toys, wins.  All this money-grabbing and power-exertion isn’t even honest, in the sense of the grabbers wanting more for themselves.  In my letter to the Czar I said otherwise, but the whole reason this didn’t go up yesterday as I’d hoped was because I really began to think I was wrong about that.  I seriously doubt that any of the grabbers enjoy having their spoils to judge from their faces and attitudes.  If they are capable of enjoying anything, it’s the actual grab, the thrill of knowing that they can impose their will on others.  They really don’t care about winning; the thrill is in making sure the other guy loses, and knows it.

Fresh from his travels all around the European leagues

I snapped this picture at a local store, and put the poor fellow back on the shelf.  My wife came along behind, said to herself, “It’s only four bucks,” and bought it.  Then she surprised me with it the night before the lockout ended.

I call him Mottau.

Both these guys are fellow Lighthouse Hockey writers

Obviously Dom’s replying to something Keith said earlier, but for a minute I was trying to connect these two statements as a coherent conversation.  I think I even got as far as thinking that “comedians using puppets” was a reference to the NHL and its referees.

Stupid lockout.