Saturday, January 22, 2011
The Great One at 50: Share your stories
Wayne Gretzky set up in the place that would become known as his "office," behind the net. (Allsport)January 26, 2011. Wayne Gretzky turns 50. Seems hard to believe.His achievements and records are endless and would take up too much space to list, but here is a sampling:
- Most goals in a season - 92
- Most assists in a season - 163
- Most points in a season - 215
- Most goals - 894
- Most assists - 1,963
- Most points - 2,857
- Fastest ever to score 50 goals - 39 games
By today's standards he was small. He was slightly built, six feet tall but only 160 pounds. He wasn't particularly fast, and he seldom threw a check.
Yet when he was on the ice the game was his.
His teammates learned to expect a perfect pass at the most suprising moments. Opposition goalies learned to never, ever relax when No. 99 was on the ice. He was uncanny
The point here is not to relive his very public success, but to explore some personal memories.
We'll kick it off here with stories from some of the Hockey Night in Canada commentators who played with him, against him, or just watched him work. We've included a story from someone who watched him play as a young superstar with the Brantford Nadrofsky Steelers.
We're looking here for your connections to The Great One. Read our offerings and then tell us your stories.
Friday, January 21, 2011
The Social Network
Facebook, The Social Network Site as of January 2011 has 600,000,000 million members. This movie illustrates how it grew from an experimental attempt to establish a network on the campus of Harvard University. It begins with an extended dialogue between Mark and his girlfriend worthy of David Mamet in its adroit complexity establishing his self-absorption, moral turpitude, and nerdiness. His exploits gain wider attention when his budding experiment crashes the Harvard Network. As the project expands to campuses across America and then the public at large and worldwide what started as a dorm room experiment becomes a multi-billion dollar enterprise and the people who were in at the basement level start making claims.
Two lawsuits ensue first involving the well-heeled jocks in a Harvard Fraternity who had first asked Zuckerberg to write code for a network they proposed. In contrast to Mark these were six-foot-five-inch athletes who intimidate by virtue of their size and their connections. The second was his friend who put up the cash that got him started. What value should be placed on capital investment versus intellectual property and what loyalty is placed on friendship. That an online network based on ‘friendship’ should be founded on the betrayal of real-life friends is ironic indeed.
Justin Timberlake appears as the charismatic Sean Parker founder of Napster whose prima donna appearances serve to influence certain of Zuckerberg’s key decisions. The two make an interesting contrast. The movie takes the form of an extended voir-dire with the parties sitting around a boardroom table while flashbacks serve to illustrate the points being made by legal counsel. To show the estrangement between the former friends the director uses the stage device of having Edwardo and Mark seated facing away from one another. In a revealing moment opposing counsel asks the bored looking Mark, ‘Do I have your attention? and he replies, ‘My oath requires that I answer honestly that you have only a tiny part of it’. When Wardo makes it out to California to see what his money is doing and finds a drug party in progress in the livingroom he approaches Mark and is told ‘he’s wired in’; he picks up the laptop and smashes it to the ground saying, ‘Now do I have your attention?’
Mark’s interest seems to be in software development and online social experiment; Wardo whose cash initially supplied the start-up capital is interested in the venture as a business that should supply a return on that capital and show a profit. Both are right but whereas Mark managed to ride the juggernaut the venture became to a $25-billion-dollar enterprise Wardo got left behind. Since the parties settled out of court and signed non-disclosure agreements we may never know how they settled. The question I’m left with is, ‘Do I really want to contribute to this enterprise?’
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/profile.php?id=100000595269777
Thursday, January 06, 2011
ER
At time of writing I am watching seasons 3 and 4 of this show’s 15 year run. It survived that long because it enjoyed consistently good writing, directing and acting along with realistic portrayals, cutting edge medicine, and expert advisors.
I am not qualified to comment on the accuracy of the medical procedures on view or the language used to describe them. What is made amply clear is why no doctor should treat a family member and that doctor’s make lousy patients. Having a doctor around when a family member is being treated is a nightmare.
The hierarchical structure of a hospital becomes amply clear each profession jealously protecting its turf. In an era when superbugs are becoming resistant to treatment by any antibiotic the importance of lowly cleaning staff is coming to the fore. One staff member who does not wash between patients or after eating or using the bathroom can do irreparable harm. Don’t know that I’ll ever understand the differences between attending physicians, residents, interns, physicians assistants, and plain old doctors. What I have caught is the competition between various fields of medicine in particular that between surgeons and medical doctors though at times I’d have difficulty were I a patient discerning the subtle differences between treating a condition by operating or the use of drugs with all their attendant side-effects. For an outsider there’s a bewildering protocol surrounding what procedures a nurse can do vs a doctor and what privileges such as the writing of scripts though inside the hospital nurses dispense medicines on a doctor’s orders. What is very apparent is the importance of nurses and the degree to which doctors treat them dismissively. What can one say for example is the difference between a nurse who has seen a procedure performed daily for 25 years and an intern about to perform it for the first time and needs coaching by that nurse.
I’ll never understand the wisdom of having doctors in training attempt to work long sleep-deprived shifts and even double shifts. If we recognize the importance of a long-haul trucker keeping a log that documents the amount of sleep that is mandatory he get why is it not important that someone making life or death decisions do the same. Nepotism it would seem is not frowned upon though having two family members in the same department must lead to short-staffing if a family emergency ensues. As in good police procedurals one of the strengths of this show was the fact that these doctors and nurses had lives outside their work hours, they were three-dimensional characters.
Mark Greene’s visit to his family home in California returns him to the room he grew up in, or at least the furniture that was moved from base to base as his navy father got transferred from assignment to assignment. Given a life lived at sea and a taciturn nature his father is not an active presence in his life. It therefore comes as a shock to him that his father gave up a chance at promotion to admiral for his sake and kept that fact secret all those years. Doug Ross by contrast is forced to pick up the pieces after his dilettante roving gambler father dies in a car accident taking with him a girl friend without a name and the family man Mexican American driver of the other car.
Supernatural 5
Here we have a show that was scheduled for a five-year run in which the story arc played out at the end of this season but was actually renewed for at least one additional season. We’ll see what the writer’s come up with to keep it fresh, mind you given the boneyard of failed shows it’s a pleasant problem to have.
The show continues to take advantage of the assets it has had from the beginning, two tall, well-built hunks who just happen to like one another on and off-set; a fast car; a large dose of the supernatural; and a revolving coterie of love-interests. The fact that the younger brother towers over his sibling and that in the credits his name appears first alphabetically has not had much press but one wanders, just ask the Smothers Brothers.
How the pair can continue to set speed records going cross-country without amassing incredible speeding tickets remains a mystery as does how they manage to get away with impersonating FBI Agents, and other public officials. Whereas their normal attire could best be described as grunge they seem to clean up real good. They would seem to be good old boys who talk tough and are not adverse to indulging in fisticuffs, hard drinking, or fast women. Their obsession with the occult seems somewhat out of character.
Sunday, January 02, 2011
Numb3rs 6
