I'm sorry I haven't posted the last few days. I went off into the woods to do some camping and figured I'd post some interesting stories from the road. Instead I had no cell coverage. C'est la vie.
That said, camping is fun. This is a confirmed fact. If you don't think so you have either:
a) Been raised improperly by parents who were raised improperly, or
b) Been attacked by a bear.
I guess there are other shades of gray in there, but I think my definitions hit 90% of the cases so I'm going to stick with them as stated. For instance, this trip was plenty o' fun even with "the fishing incident".
So here's the story: Erika and I decided we wanted to go out onto the little lake that's near the campground. We decided to go fishing, since Erika loves fish about as much as anyone can love something that doesn't blink*. I rowed us around the lake for a while, but eventually Erika insisted that it was my turn to fish.
In all fairness, I haven't cast a fishing rod since I was about 9 years old. My memory of the process consists of: Push this button and line comes out, spin this reel and line comes in. So given that I had seen Erika playing out line behind the boat for us to troll, we had this conversation:
PAUL: Where's the button to release the line?
ERIKA: Just pull on the line and it will come out.
This worked fine and dandy until I got a nibble that stole my bait and I reeled in. I decided I would cast this time.
Now folks, this is where the disagreement kicks in. I was of the belief that our previous conversation meant these newfangled lines didn't have releases like the technology I used in the mid-80's. Erika counters with the fact that she never said there wasn't a release and I didn't clarify before casting (apparently you just pull it out when trolling, if you use the release it effs everything up. I know! I didn't know that either!)**. One thing we can both agree on though: When you don't trigger the release on you reel and you cast as hard as you possibly can to make absolutely sure you out-throw your wife, you're going to destroy any hope of your fishing line staying in one piece. You'll also end up with a large splash very far from your boat that pretty much puts an end to the fishing. On the plus side, we were able to salvage the floater that was, you guessed it, floating 25 feet from the boat.
Apparently I still have some things to learn about fishing. Camping though? Camping's awesome.
*Actually, we were going to go out in a pedal boat but Erika got excited and came back with a rowboat and fishing gear. This happens from time to time.
**Erika insists that she is only responsible for 10% of the blame. I argue it's more like 100% her, 0% me, so a fair comprimise would be 55% her and 45% me. I think I can find it in my heart to accept that.
Monday, June 20, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Non-Fan Idiots
Riot now many people are learning a valuable lesson about the modern world. That lesson is: You can throw away a lifetime of potential in a moment of hooliganism. Looking forward to seeing you on the news tomorrow, along with your name and address! You truly are the modern world's fool.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
An Open Letter to Jackie MacMullan
Today I posted in the comment section of an ESPN article. Yes, I wallowed into that fray. But this article was so biased, so ugly, and so unprofessional that it hit me at a level beyond being a Vancouverite: It hit me as a writer.
Jackie MacMullan herself is a longtime sportswriter, and any woman writing in sports today had the privilege of walking through a door she kicked open. To see something like this made me sad, and I responded. It also ruined my day, but that's the Canuck fan talking.
Read Ms. MacMullan's article here. My response that I put in the comments section is printed in full below. For the record I could find no email address for her, otherwise I'd have written her directly.
I'm not necessarily proud of what I wrote. It's certainly not my best work. But sometimes we lash out, and as an angry fan who doesn't understand why an article directing such vitriol at Luongo is printed yet nothing is written of Boston's fans chanting "Flopper" while a Canuck is helped off the ice with broken vertebrae; well, something has to give.
Her article here.
My response below:
Ms MacMullan,
This is a crass and immature article from a professional journalist. You knew as you wrote it that you had to take the low road, relying on comments by Luongo taken only in part or out of context. In addition, your characterization of him as "turning his nose up at Thomas" is also out of sorts, given that he did, indeed, compliment Thomas earlier in the series.
I sincerely hope that while you wrote this you felt on some level that it was a mistake. That the "letter to Luongo" style was a gimmick, that the misappropriation of comments was unprofessional, and that the fact you would never speak to the man himself this way is evidence of you crossing a line.
After hearing you on the BS Report I can only say I am disappointed this is the first article of yours I've read. I hope that you regret that to be the case as well.
Sincerely,
Paul Parsons
Jackie MacMullan herself is a longtime sportswriter, and any woman writing in sports today had the privilege of walking through a door she kicked open. To see something like this made me sad, and I responded. It also ruined my day, but that's the Canuck fan talking.
Read Ms. MacMullan's article here. My response that I put in the comments section is printed in full below. For the record I could find no email address for her, otherwise I'd have written her directly.
I'm not necessarily proud of what I wrote. It's certainly not my best work. But sometimes we lash out, and as an angry fan who doesn't understand why an article directing such vitriol at Luongo is printed yet nothing is written of Boston's fans chanting "Flopper" while a Canuck is helped off the ice with broken vertebrae; well, something has to give.
Her article here.
My response below:
Ms MacMullan,
This is a crass and immature article from a professional journalist. You knew as you wrote it that you had to take the low road, relying on comments by Luongo taken only in part or out of context. In addition, your characterization of him as "turning his nose up at Thomas" is also out of sorts, given that he did, indeed, compliment Thomas earlier in the series.
I sincerely hope that while you wrote this you felt on some level that it was a mistake. That the "letter to Luongo" style was a gimmick, that the misappropriation of comments was unprofessional, and that the fact you would never speak to the man himself this way is evidence of you crossing a line.
After hearing you on the BS Report I can only say I am disappointed this is the first article of yours I've read. I hope that you regret that to be the case as well.
Sincerely,
Paul Parsons
Ugh.
I don’t know how I’m going to be able to sleep tonight. It was hard enough on Sunday night, now we’re going into a Game 7?
This is exactly like the night before Christmas, only if your parents were too poor to buy gifts for both you and your brother. And they won’t tell you which one is getting gifts. And he lives on the other side of the country. And you hate him.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
GO CANUCKS GO!
My post today consists of one thing: LET’S BRING HOME THE CUP!
See you tomorrow Vancouver.
See you tomorrow Vancouver.
The 5 Major Sins of Sports Reporting
I am a person who reads and watches fair bit of sports coverage, and for obvious reasons I have been doing much more so lately. Here's my conclusion: the vast majority of sports journalists and broadcasters are catastrophically lazy. What else can explain the complete inability they exhibit to actually cover the sport, and not the peripheral activities that they, more more less, create? This drives me bonkers, because they ostensibly have one of the best jobs in the world (in terms of "how many people would trade places with you"), but have become so complacent that they no longer feel the need to actually put in effort on more than an occasional basis. Here's some news for you guys: If I only worked hard every 4th or 5th time I submitted something my ass would get fired. Welcome to the real world.
So without further ado, here are the 5 major sins of sports journalism:
1) Judging the content of the game based on the outcome
This is the lovely habit of analysing a game in hindsight, denigrating the losing team even though the game may have turned on a single play. In Game 1, Burrows' goal gave Vancouver a collective fangasm, followed by coverage that suggested the result was preordained. Boston scores and the coverage is reversed.
PAUL'S TAKE: "It's so much easier to talk about how smart I am when I can talk about my opinions after they come true"
2) Players Stepping Up vs. Players Making Mistakes
"Player X needs to make something happen out there"
"They never would have scored if Player Y doesn't do Action Z right there"
PAUL'S TAKE: How can a player force something to happen on the ice if every good thing must accompany a mistake by the other team? Are you saying that good players need to me more psychic? Is that what sports psychologists do... telekenesis?
3) The he-said-she-said bull that sports journalists love to foster at post game press conferences.
Hey kids, here's a word of advice: Get your quotes and then write your story. Not the other way around. Too many of these guys spend the game cramming back buffet fare while the game is on, then process that into the steaming turd they call an article during the third period. All that's left is to sprinkle it with some quotes you've garnered through leading questions and you're done. But you know what? A pile of turd with sprinkles on it is still a pile of turd!
PAUL'S TAKE: I don't care about your deadlines. Have some self-respect.
4) Covering the periphery instead of the game
Obviously the best example of this at the moment is the Burrows bite from Game 1*. Yeah, not good for the game. Obviously I'm a homer, but I still don't like to see it. Still, it doesn't need 24-hour news coverage right? Why don't you just watch the game and then talk about that? Maybe some insightful commentary to help me out like this article here? (sorry, requires an ESPN Insider membership. If you don't have that you have to eat turd)
PAUL'S TAKE: "Watching game tape in order to come up with something interesting is hard. Instead I'll write an article I can pound out in 40 minutes and call it a night. And by the way, I'm dead inside. Seriously... I wanted to write plays, but that doesn't pay very well. So instead I write about a throwaway comment from a goalie and hope that I can goad someone else into keeping this train going to prevent me from doing any real work."
5) Talking about stats instead of the sport
Guess what, the internet's been invented. So you don't need to put up a graphic every time someone's on the screen about how many points they've scored since whenever compared to how many they scored before that. If I can look the info up for myself you shouldn't be able to count it as journalism. You want to do something for me? Show me what that player is doing differently now versus then so that I can watch for it during the game and enjoy the experience on a deeper level.
PAUL'S TAKE: You know why people don't do this? Because there's nothing different. Sports have streaks in them, it just happens. Pucks hit posts, balls rim and out, and footballs go off fingertips. But everyone always has to say something even if there's nothing to say. Seriously: I think they shut the oxygen off in the booth whenever the colour guy isn't talking. It's the only explanation for why he's always desperate to jam in some inane comment no matter how little it makes sense. Come to think of it, that would explain why so many colour men sound like they have brain damage...
I have little hope that things are going to get better during this Stanley Cup playoffs, but I will at least mention that the Puck Daddy bloggers on Yahoo! are doing a better job than most, although they do fall into the above traps from time to time (they also didn't seem to know JFA about the Western Conference at the start of the playoffs, but have clearly been watching the games since then).
One more comment I'd throw out there is that Bill Simmons is trying to fix a lot of the problems I mention above with www.grantland.com, so if you share my frustrations you should maybe check that out too.
*A note on the Burrows thing: For those of you who think Burrows should have been suspended, I counter with: What about this hit, or this one, or even this one which isn't from the playoffs but is exceptionally reprehensible (you will never convince me it wasn't intentional). None of those hits received suspensions, so unless you would rather have someone traveling at 20km/hr ram your head unprotected into the boards than someone nibble on your finger through thick leather, well, give your head a shake. You're caring about the wrong problems. And no, I wasn't ok with the Rome hit on Horton, but that got (ridiculously) the longest suspension in the history of the Stanley Cup Final so it wasn't included.
So without further ado, here are the 5 major sins of sports journalism:
1) Judging the content of the game based on the outcome
This is the lovely habit of analysing a game in hindsight, denigrating the losing team even though the game may have turned on a single play. In Game 1, Burrows' goal gave Vancouver a collective fangasm, followed by coverage that suggested the result was preordained. Boston scores and the coverage is reversed.
PAUL'S TAKE: "It's so much easier to talk about how smart I am when I can talk about my opinions after they come true"
2) Players Stepping Up vs. Players Making Mistakes
"Player X needs to make something happen out there"
"They never would have scored if Player Y doesn't do Action Z right there"
PAUL'S TAKE: How can a player force something to happen on the ice if every good thing must accompany a mistake by the other team? Are you saying that good players need to me more psychic? Is that what sports psychologists do... telekenesis?
3) The he-said-she-said bull that sports journalists love to foster at post game press conferences.
Hey kids, here's a word of advice: Get your quotes and then write your story. Not the other way around. Too many of these guys spend the game cramming back buffet fare while the game is on, then process that into the steaming turd they call an article during the third period. All that's left is to sprinkle it with some quotes you've garnered through leading questions and you're done. But you know what? A pile of turd with sprinkles on it is still a pile of turd!
PAUL'S TAKE: I don't care about your deadlines. Have some self-respect.
4) Covering the periphery instead of the game
Obviously the best example of this at the moment is the Burrows bite from Game 1*. Yeah, not good for the game. Obviously I'm a homer, but I still don't like to see it. Still, it doesn't need 24-hour news coverage right? Why don't you just watch the game and then talk about that? Maybe some insightful commentary to help me out like this article here? (sorry, requires an ESPN Insider membership. If you don't have that you have to eat turd)
PAUL'S TAKE: "Watching game tape in order to come up with something interesting is hard. Instead I'll write an article I can pound out in 40 minutes and call it a night. And by the way, I'm dead inside. Seriously... I wanted to write plays, but that doesn't pay very well. So instead I write about a throwaway comment from a goalie and hope that I can goad someone else into keeping this train going to prevent me from doing any real work."
5) Talking about stats instead of the sport
Guess what, the internet's been invented. So you don't need to put up a graphic every time someone's on the screen about how many points they've scored since whenever compared to how many they scored before that. If I can look the info up for myself you shouldn't be able to count it as journalism. You want to do something for me? Show me what that player is doing differently now versus then so that I can watch for it during the game and enjoy the experience on a deeper level.
PAUL'S TAKE: You know why people don't do this? Because there's nothing different. Sports have streaks in them, it just happens. Pucks hit posts, balls rim and out, and footballs go off fingertips. But everyone always has to say something even if there's nothing to say. Seriously: I think they shut the oxygen off in the booth whenever the colour guy isn't talking. It's the only explanation for why he's always desperate to jam in some inane comment no matter how little it makes sense. Come to think of it, that would explain why so many colour men sound like they have brain damage...
I have little hope that things are going to get better during this Stanley Cup playoffs, but I will at least mention that the Puck Daddy bloggers on Yahoo! are doing a better job than most, although they do fall into the above traps from time to time (they also didn't seem to know JFA about the Western Conference at the start of the playoffs, but have clearly been watching the games since then).
One more comment I'd throw out there is that Bill Simmons is trying to fix a lot of the problems I mention above with www.grantland.com, so if you share my frustrations you should maybe check that out too.
*A note on the Burrows thing: For those of you who think Burrows should have been suspended, I counter with: What about this hit, or this one, or even this one which isn't from the playoffs but is exceptionally reprehensible (you will never convince me it wasn't intentional). None of those hits received suspensions, so unless you would rather have someone traveling at 20km/hr ram your head unprotected into the boards than someone nibble on your finger through thick leather, well, give your head a shake. You're caring about the wrong problems. And no, I wasn't ok with the Rome hit on Horton, but that got (ridiculously) the longest suspension in the history of the Stanley Cup Final so it wasn't included.
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