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Sorry everyone, we were static for a long time in blog parlance but we’re back – explanation is boring, to do with Old Fart’s incompetency in Internet matters, but we finally got around to getting going. We were nagged by three other curmudgeons and they now have their own blogs: Business and Finance, Office Etiquette, and Etiquetter Period.

A number of letters were sent to us over the past year or so which we did not read but we’re going to go look for them in cyberspace and maybe we’ll find them.

Christmas Eve is coming up and curmudgeons should be reflecting on Le Rochefoucauld’s observation:  ”I am least alone when I am by myself”.  We wish all you curmudgeons a solitary Christmas Eve.

Now a few words about ice hockey:

The puck

The origin of the word puck is not well known. People used to play the game with a ball as is done in field hockey but on ice it bounced around like the elusive elf of that name, so they called it the puck. Then someone – someone whose name is lost to history –  had the bright idea of slicing the sides off! and hockey as we know it was born. (The first pucks were easier to raise having a curve at the edges).

The trap

I heard a sports announcer recently speculating on the origin of the unpopular strategy of  ’the trap”. Well, folks it was originated by the Ottawa Senators around 1930 and was known as ‘kitty-bar- the-door” after the children’s game. The Senators won a couple of Stanley Cups with it but it was so boring people stayed away and the team lost money. Tommy Gorman, the owner, sold the club to an American city. The strategy bored everyone there too, and the club went broke.  Gorman got the name back and entered the club in the old Quebec Senior Hockey League.

Concussions

There is a lot of talk lately about concussions in the National Hockey League. If you click on the Boxscore on the Scores page on the NHL site after a game, you will see a stat for Hits. The league credits players with hits as if they were assists or something. If the NHL changed this stat from Hits to Attempts To Cause A Concussion we might have a clearer idea of why there are so many concussions. In a Toronto paper recently (December 2011) a former Leaf player, Stankowski, I think his name is, declared he never watches NHL games. It’s not hockey as we used to play it in the forties, he said. In the old days, a body check was an option. You could force a pass, poke check, or knock the fellow off the puck. Then you played the puck. All you wanted to do is get him off it so you could take it from him. This cult of hits leads inevitably to concussions.

As for boarding: the boards were ten inch by twelve foot wooden planks, one inch thick. They were mounted on little posts and with gaps, the total height of the boards was twenty-four inches or two feet approximately. Above that loomed snow banks – we kids shoveled the rinks, which were located at the schools, ourselves. Boarding would consist of knocking an opponent over the boards into the snow bank. He – or sometimes she – would emerge covered with snow and thoroughly humiliated. A fight might ensue. Delay of Game took place when a raised puck disappeared into the snowbank. Sometimes they were not found until spring and another had to be found.

There were no helmets. We had shinpads attached to kneecaps, like today’s, and elbow pads. That’s all. The lucky kids had hockey gloves and hockey pants. Poor kids could afford to play hockey then;  today ice hockey is a middle class sport. I was looking at a photograph of  Hall of Famer, Frank Nighbor, the other day.  He played in the twenties. No helmet (because there were no helmets there were fewer concussions – look at the sport of rugby). But I did notice that his gloves had ribs reaching half way to his elbows. Last year in the NHL West finals I saw Joe Thornton chopping repeatedly with his stick at Kesler’s wrists, which were exposed when his arms were extended between his sleeves and gloves as he carried the puck.  There is a chink in today’s armour and trust old Joe to find it.

But today’s game in the NHL , the CFL, and the NFL,  is for sissies: in the old days you went out with what equipment you had and you took your licks. Nowadays, professionals go out in full armour and the whistle hardly stops blowing as the highly paid referees/nannys try to protect these grown men from hurting themselves in the sandbox spectacles of commerce.

The January thaw: remember that? Us kids huddled in a dark gymnasium as somebody tried to teach us basketball while our eyes were looking out the basement window in sorrow at our old soggy rink, where ice had turned to slush and the world was grey.. without hockey the world was a dark and dismal place.

Speaking of the weather, we have now an appalling example of government selling out to a scoundrel: The Weather Channel. Have you counted the minutes devoted to selling crap? An American entrepreneur approached the cable companies, who were providing weather information free on a government channel, gathered world wide at the expense of tax paying citizens, and said, hey, you are giving the weather forecasts away for free, you fools,  I will pay you cable companies, money in your pockets, to run my channel, The Weather Channel. Of course, he got all the info for free from government, and pockets millions for advertising stuff no one needs. No doubt he make enormous donations to the political parties and gets tax credits. We do not live in a democracy, let’s face it. Plato called it something else, an oligarchy.