Reasons We Love Hockey Part 13

The 13th in our 118-part series.

Devils Score-O

We have praised Continental Airlines Arena in this space before for its utter lack of extraneous entertainment options; there are no bells and whistles, no ice girls, no exploding jumbotrons — it’s just hockey. With one notable exception: Score-O. During the First Intermissions a prize car would emerge from the zamboni gate, the red carpet would be rolled out, three to four lucky fans would get trotted out to center ice, and the CAA ice dudes would hang a plexiglass shield with over one of the goals. The shield had a little hole cut out in its center at ice level, and the three or four lucky fans would each get two attempts to shoot the puck from center ice through the hole. If a fan actually got the puck through the hole, the prize was not the car. The prize was a chance to come back and do it all again at the end of the season in the hopes of winning the car. It was every bit as lame as it sounds. And yet, it was irresistible. People who had, reflexively, gotten up to replenish their snacks at the period’s end would stand frozen in place in the aisles to watch the hypnotic scene unfold. Boos would rain down on every fan’s shot for anyone over the age of 10. Anyone younger than that was cheered heartily. And if a fan — any fan — was able to score, the building would go up. There were more than a few nights where Score-O drew a heartier response than anything that happened during the actual game.

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Reasons We Love Hockey Part 12

The twelfth in our 118-part series.

Blockbuster Trades

In the absence of any of the promised blockbuster moves this weekend, today’s reason celebrates those huge deals that keep you buzzing for days. The Devils don’t often make blockbuster deals. Instead, Lou makes a minor move in the summer and then tantalizes us by calling a press conference to say, “I think the fans will be very pleasantly surprised with this acquisition.” Then a day later we find out the team picked up Pascal Rheaume. Now, turns out we were pleasantly surprised with how Rheaume played, but come on. Pascal Rheaume? Other teams get Joe Thornton or Roberto Luongo or Ryan Smyth and we get Rheume?

But there was one trade that let us revel in the glory that is a giant deal: Jason Arnott and Randy McKay for Joe Nieuwendyk and Jamie Langenbrunner. That season saw us working in the same office (can you believe an employer was stupid enough to agree to have the two of us working in the same cubicle sea?) which was about 5 minutes from our house. Schnookie had gone home for the day, while Pookie was still stuck at work, risking disciplinary action by constantly refreshing ESPN’s Tradetracker. When the news came in she panickedly thought, “I need someone to talk to about this!” And as if on cue, there was Schnookie, frantic from her drive back to the office. That’s how great that trade was. Schnookie willingly came back to work just to say to Pookie, “Can you believe someone was stupid enough to take both Arnott and McKay and give us live bodies in return?!?”

What’s more fun than spending the first few days after the trade in a tizzy over the potential effects the move could have on the team, when it’s all still relatively an unknown? And then what’s more fun than spending the rest of the season assessing who got the better end of the bargain? And then what’s more fun than using that ol’ 20/20 hindsight to know that Randy McKay’s giddy-up quit giddying-up almost instantaneously upon arrival in Dallas, while Langenbrunner has become the epitome of True Devil, being a major contributor to the 2003 Cup? Really, just in general, blockbuster deals — what’s not to love?

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Reasons You Love Hockey Part 1

We are delighted to present today our first installment (or should we say, your first installment) of “Reasons You Love Hockey”! You may recall that we sent out a request — issued a challenge, if you will — for you, Gentle Reader, to tell the world why you love hockey. If you’d like to see your own reason on the big IPB stage, just email it to us at interchangeablepartsblog [at] gmail [dot] com. We will be posting the reasons, unabridged and in their full, original format, in the order they are received. And the first reason we received came from…

kms2! kms2 is one of our HLOG sisters, and the keeper of two totally kick-ass blogs, Purple Crushed Velvet (for all things Kings) and kms2′s inner monologue (for all things, just in general). So let’s give it up for her, and soak up her Reason She Loves Hockey:

I love hockey because it is one of, if not the, fastest sports, which makes watching it so incredibly exciting. I played soccer for 10+ years but hated watching it because the field was so damn big and the players looked like ants that were playing keep away rather than actually trying to score. Football has too many stops. Baseball is just way too slow. I only have to move my eyes while watching tennis and my eyesight isn’t good enough to watch golf. And I don’t enjoy watching boxing because I can only stand watching two guys fight for a couple minutes before I start crying because I realize I’m hurting too. Basically, I love watching hockey and I love that the majority of the hockey players aren’t complete assholes, like other sports players who go to strip clubs, make it rain, and shoot people. Hooray, Hockey!

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IPB Puzzles

Earlier this week there was a request put in for us to share a glimpse of the endless joy that is solving the Saturday NYT crossword puzzle at stately IPB Manor. So it was with great anticipation that we settled in for a blogably delicious puzzle tonight. As is the tradition, we sat down in front of the TV, each with our own xeroxed copy of the puzzle, armed with dinner (spaghetti with a pink sauce made with our first basil harvest of our garden’s summer) and a huge-assed glass of wine. While we normally solve either with hockey on in the background, or with IPB’s Official Favorite Move, “Master & Commander”, tonight we opted to go with “Intermission”. But as it turned out, no manner of scrumptious dinner or entertaining background noise could make up for one thing — today’s puzzle sucked.

First off, the majority of it went down without a fight. We had all finished nearly half the damn thing before there was any need for clue-sharing. The SE corner of it gave as much fight as a particularly stiff Tuesday, and the NE corner wasn’t much harder. 18-across flummoxed Pookie and Boomer (“Barn door features”), but when Schnookie spotted them with the further clue “It’s, uh, like… farm hardware” (Answer: Hasps), it was lights out. Without any further sharing, we all rolled relatively unimpeded into the NE corner. (Boomer needed a hand with 15-across, “It’s pictured in Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night Over The Rhone’”, and Schnookie spotted her the clue “Big Bear”. [The answer: Ursa Major.] Pookie and Boomer also needed some prodding to get 17-across, “Vaudeville bigwig”, and Schnookie’s relatively inarticulate cues of “It’s, uhhh… a phrase… Like, uh… a, uh…” somehow managed to help them both get “Top Banana”.) Again, they call this a Saturday? The only stumbling block there was 8-down, but we all were content to get all the across clues and take whatever the word they spelled was without complaint. And the word they spelled? “Rondure”. Um, that is so not a word. But whatever.

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SPECTRE Saturday

From Week 2 by Schnookie:

From the Diary of Jason Arnott

Wednesday, October 20

Dear Diary,

Today the boys and I were at home to play the Predators. I was feeling a lot better after my gardening accident, and was getting over the thing with the blimp in Phoenix (the training staff thought I’d be out for a bunch of time, but I’ve been through worse. Like that whole bleeding nearly to death thing when I was chopping wood with my hunting knife. Remember that, Diary? Good times…), so I was really excited to finally get to play some hockey! I mean, how can I become the dominant 50-point centre I used to be if I’m not playing regularly? I need to turn my health problems around ninety degrees if I want to help my team. So anyway, I was totally fired up to play the Predators, because I think they might be in our division, but I’m not entirely sure because, seriously, who can keep the divisions straight? But then the strangest thing happened, and I swear, Diary, I don’t think things like this happen to anybody else but me! I was putting on my skates before morning practice, and had my laces all wrapped around my fingers so I could tie my skates on tight, and wouldn’t you know it but the laces got pulled too tight, and the tips of two of my fingers came off. It didn’t hurt, and really, they weren’t bleeding too much, so I just wadded some toilet paper on the stumps (if you can even call fingers missing their tips “stumps”) and went out for practice. I’ve heard someone say once that hindsight is 20/20, and they were probably right, although sometimes I think it might be more like 20/15, but that’s not the point. What I mean to say, Diary, is that maybe I should have considered using band-aids on the wounds, or at least mentioned something to the trainers so they could have taped the toilet paper into place. But I didn’t, and at some point during practice, the toilet paper came off the fresh wounds. As you know, the insides of my gloves are pretty skanky, and sure enough, I got an infection in both fingers. A bad one. It moved pretty quickly, and by game time I was in the hospital with my arm swollen up like, well, a blimp. The doctors say they found the problem in time and were able to fix it up or something all medical like that, and I shouldn’t miss too much action – maybe like, a couple of weeks, but it totally sucked that I couldn’t play. We won the game, 4-2, thanks to the greatest goaltender of all time, Marty Turco, who skated at forward tonight because he’s sooooo good at stick-handling, and who didn’t score any goals, but he could have if he was Mike Modano. That’s how good Turco is.

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Squees All-Around!

We are so honored that this month, Margee has chosen us as Featured Fangirls of the Month. Squee! You can read our insightful answers to her hard-hitting questionnaire about the state of squee in the NHL at her imcomparable blog, SportSquee:

Featured Fangirl of the Month: June.

In other programming news, we have a pretty exciting weekend lined up here at IPB Manor. Tomorrow and Sunday we will continue with our 118-part series “Reasons We Love Hockey”, while also rolling out two new off-season features:

Saturday: A look into the solving of a Saturday NYT crossword puzzle at IPB Manor.
Sunday: The first in our we-don’t-know-how-many part series “Reasons YOU Love Hockey”.

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Reasons We Love Hockey Part 11

The 11th in our 118-part series.

The French Rococo Stylings Of Andy Greene

The very first time we laid eyes on Andy Greene he was sitting sort of vapidly at the Devils bench staring off into space and we both immediately shrieked, “He looks just like the bubble guy!” Now, because we share one brain between the two of us, we actually both knew what we were talking about, but the long and short of it is that there was something about the way Greene was sitting, and about the way his facial features fit together, that brought to mind Chardin’s “Bubble Blower”. For several games, every time he made a play or we saw a shot of him on the bench, we would giggle and shout, “bubblebubblebubble!” Then we went to link an image of that painting to a post we were writing about Greener, and we noticed something distressing:

He doesn’t look anything like Chardin’s bubble blower at all.

But surely our brains couldn’t be so in sync about something that wrong. There had to be a nugget of truth to this association somewhere. And that nugget had to be contained in Rococo painting somewhere, it just had to! We wracked our brains to find the connection, and even scouted the man out in person while riding in an elevator with him in Buffalo. After many hours of soul-searching and reflections on our years spend studying Art History, we narrowed the choices down to two possibilities:

Fragonard

Boucher

And while the debate has settled somewhat uncomfortably at stately IPB Manor that he has a Boucher maiden’s face, there is something about the turn of the swinger’s delicate foot in the Fragonard that just makes us want to whisper a flirtatious little “bubblebubblebubble”.

The only conclusion is that Andy Greene is, in fact, a bubble-blowing Bouchenard.

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