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The Origins of NHL Trophies, Part V!

And to think we said we'd never make a sequel... Anyway, since we last blogged on this topic, there's been a change in the awards, so there's a new entry in the list! That, and we forgot one.

First, to the change. Sadly, this season we bid "adieu" to the Lester B. Pearson Award, about which we blogged here, and which has been retired and replaced. You may recall that this was the award handed out, on behalf of the NHL Players' Association, to the player voted "most outstanding" by his peers. Now, we are generally against the replacing of the NHL awards, and we're against this one. Nonetheless, we can have no objections to the man chosen to be honoured by the replacement award, especially given that it's handed out by the NHLPA.

The Ted Lindsay Award: Ted Lindsay (pictured above bothering Jacques Plante) was a hell of a hockey player. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he made up one third of the "Production Line" in Detroit, alongside Gordie Howe and Sid Abel. How good was the line? Well, in the 49-50 season, Howe finished third in the NHL in scoring... behind Lindsay and Abel.

Despite his on-ice prowess, however, Lindsay is better-known for something he did away from the rink. In the mid-50s, he and Doug Harvey of the Canadiens launched an attempt to form first an association, and then a union, for NHL players. Lindsay's career suffered for it; the Norris family, who owned the Red Wings, ended up trading him to the then-moribund Chicago Black Hawks. However, the players duly got their union, and the men who today pull down millions to play the game, and actually have some say in where they play it, can thank Ted Lindsay for that.

The Ted Lindsay Award will be given, as the Pearson Award was, to the league's most outstanding player, as voted upon by the membership of Ted Lindsay's NHLPA.

The Roger Crozier Saving Grace Award: This is the one we forgot. The Roger Crozier Saving Grace Award is awarded by MBNA America (a bank, in case you didn't know) to the goalie who records the best save percentage over the course of the season.

Roger Crozier was a capable goalie for the Red Wings for most of the 1960s, when he twice led the league in shutouts. In 1970, he moved to the expansion Buffalo Sabres, and became their first ever starting goalie. Crozier played the rest of his career in Buffalo, apart from a very short (3 game) stint with the Capitals, and retired in 1977. After his retirement, he went to work for MBNA America, and the award that bears his name was donated by his employers after Crozier's death in 1996.

No Oiler has ever won the Roger Crozier Saving Grace Award.

I should point out here that there are a couple of other NHL awards; however, they're not named for figures from hockey's distant past, and I don't see much point in discussing them at any length. They are the NHL Lifetime Achievement Award (Current Holder: Jean Beliveau) and the ScotiaBank Fan Fave Award (Current Holder: Roberto Luongo).

Well Done, Mr. Speaker

The federal government breached parliamentary privilege with its refusal to produce uncensored documents related to the treatment of Afghan detainees and must provide the material to MPs within two weeks, Speaker Peter Milliken has ruled.

In case you were wondering at all, that was an important and historic statement by the Speaker. To sum it up (the full transcript is here, Mr. Milliken ruled that Charles I Stephen Harper and his cabinet cannot refuse to do the bidding of Parliament, period, full stop. The notion that Parliament, not the executive branch, runs the show goes back a fair ways, probably at least to the above-alluded-to English Civil War, and it is really no exaggeration to say that, had the Speaker ruled differently, the Canadian political system would have been dramatically altered at a stroke. So, it was a big day for the country, and again, a hearty "well done" to Mr. Milliken.

Anyway, long day at work, so I'll wimp out at this point and let you go and read Dr. Dawg's excellent and detailed analysis of the situation!

Hooray, Manitoba!

Question: What do Cree, Dakota, Dene, Inuktitut, Michif, Ojibway and Oji-Cree have in common? Well, apart from, obviously, being Native American languages, they're about to be given official status in the province of Manitoba. Apparently, they will be recognized as Aboriginal Languages of Manitoba, and efforts will be made to preserve their use.

This is a very good and encouraging thing. Indigenous languages have become notoriously fragile things (the tsunami of 2005 irretrievably eradicated five languages in the Bay of Bengal alone), and any official intervention to forestall the loss of them is more than welcome.

So here's to Manitoba, and may we see the same sort of project undertaken in other provinces soon! Oh, and the comments section for the story linked in the first paragraph is every bit, and I mean 100%, as non-ignorant as you thought it would be.

UPDATE: The Calgary Herald story seems to have gone away. I've replaced it with something form the Winnipeg Sun.

Well There's Your Problem...

First off, this is only funny because Sébastian Buemi wasn't hurt. Anyway, this is what the catastrophic failure, at 180 mph, of an F1 car's suspension looks like from the driver's point of view:

New Fashion Statement?

Saw a nice gentleman pottering around in the bookstore today wearing a blue boiler suit, which isn't terribly unusual since there's a lot of construction going on around campus, plus the building services people do drop by from time to time. What was unusual was that this particular character had accessorized his boiler suit with about eight cowboy hats, which he was wearing stacked up on his head. Well, one must have one's own look, I suppose...

Well Thank Goodness That's Over...

The Oilers' 09-10 season summed up in one thrilling image

And thus endeth The Season In Which Everything That Could Go Wrong Did. Embarassing off-season shenanigans? Check. First game lost to big rivals thanks to comedy goaltanding moment? Check. Big-shooting defenseman injured early? Check. Most skilled player injured early? Check. Starting goalie injured early? Check. Just about everybody else injured? Or sick? Or both? Check. Big-shooting defenceman injured again? Check. Starting goalie injured and in jail? Check. Big shooting defenceman in hospital with life-threatening condition? Check. Promising new acquisition injured within about 0.000003 milliseconds of joining the team? Check. And so it went - trust me, we're barely scratching the surface of the awfulness here.

We'll get around to handing out Scalies a bit later, along with some less ranty discussion of what needs to be done. In the meantime, here's a sneak preview of two things that were NOT at fault for what happened to the Oil this season: A) The coaching. B) Dustin Penner. More, as I said, on that later.

In the meantime, at least we Oilers fans can relax a bit, knowing that, at least for the next few weeks, all eyes will be on the playoffs, and that we are relatively free from the danger of facepalm moments. Or not.

UPDATE! Oilers to big-shooting defenceman: "STFU." Quinn to big-shooting defenceman: "GTFO." And that last is actually just about verbatim.

R.I.P. The Man Who Helped Create British Punk

Well, we've lost Malcolm McLaren, and at the young age of 64. I think it is safe to say that, for a guy who founded a band simply as a means of drumming up publicity for his clothing store and then had that band manage to hang around long enough to record exactly one studio album, he had a fairly thunderous impact on popular music.

And here is that band:

Hey, Whatever It Takes, Right?

The Oilers are pondering some lineup adjustments...

Gaaah! Kill It With Fire!

So there you are, innocently suveying the ocean floor using one of those nifty remote-controlled unmanned submarines. At the end of the long day, quittin' time rolls around, and you reel the machine back in. And then you discover that it has acquired a passenger, and the passenger is one of these:

Photo: Gwynzer. Click to embiggen.

I mean look at that thing! It's three times the size of Nefertiti! And its feet - that monstrosity could seriously injure you by stabbing you with its feet!! Think about that for a sec - its legs, of which it has far too many, end in seriously sharp points!! And it's wearing armour!! What the hell, Earth's Oceans, what the hell?!

Ahem.

Anyway, it's a fairly common critter, a species of giant isopod which scurries about the ocean floor, feeding on large dead things and slow live ones. Its scientific name is Bathynomus Giganteus.

For the record, I think it's about the niftiest thing I've seen all day. And I am so making a D&D monster out of it.

Yay! Inventory All Done!

Many a book, pen, and doodad with the University crest on it has been counted in the last couple of days, I can tell you... And it went very smoothly, all-in all. Anyway, more on that later.

In the meantime, some inventory-done celebratory music is in order! Here's "Devil's Dance Floor" by Flogging Molly, with penguins dancing to it. That should about do the trick.

It's Spelled C-O-P-Y-R-I-G-H-T

This actually happened a couple of months ago, during the height of the textbook rush. I had spotted a customer who seemed in need of some assistance, so I sauntered up to him, and the resulting dialogue went like this:

Me: Can I help you with anything?

Him: Yeah, is this the textbook for [course number]?

Me: It is.

Him: Ok, how much is it?

Me: It's $98.50.

[Long pause]

Him: Ok. Um, so is there a photocopier in the bookstore that I can use for awhile?

The funny thing was, he was dead serious. He could not understand why I would not let him simply photocopy his textbook rather than buy it.

A Brief Message to the IOC:

For Pete's sake, settle down.

Two people who probably deserve to enjoy a quiet beer and a cigar.

Although we must admit that attempting to boost the zamboni may have been over the line...

A Spot of Bother on Italian TV

In the videoclip below, you will see Beppe Bigazzi, a fairly well-known Italian chef and specialist in regional delicacies. You will see him get himself in trouble by discussing, with far too much approbation and enthusiasm, a dish apparently native to the Tuscan region of Valdarno, just east of Florence. A dish that is, I would further note, illegal-with-a-capital-I in Italy.

The best part of the video, for me, is the understandably horrified reaction of his co-host, Elisa Isoardi, who finally ends up seeking mortified shelter behind the salad greens. Here's the clip, and I've provided a translation below it:

Bigazzi: Tomorrow is Fat Thursday...

Isoardi: True

Bigazzi: ...which in Valdarno is called "Berlingaccio," because there's a [indecipherable] Berlingaccio. Furthermore, there's a proverb for Berlingaccio: "He who has no fat kills the cat." Because we're in February...

Isoardi: Excuse me...

Bigazzi: ..."Cat February," and one of the great dishes of Valdarno was braised cat.

Isoardi: Braised Otello - no! (Otello is Isoardi's cat - Trans.)

Bigazzi: (sarcastic) Because people don't eat rabbit, they don't eat chicken...

Isoardi: (also sarcastic) No! Let's eat cats, since there are so many of them!

Bigazzi: ...they don't eat pigeon, et cetera? A cat, kept for three days in the running water of a [indecipherable] stream, comes out with its meat white. I assure you - I've eaten it many times - I assure you that it's a delicacy. So now there are going to be letters and things... yes, letters from lovers of nature! Why don't they defend rabbits? For these animals they're racists! Ok, it's not important...

Isoardi: Let's talk about vegetables.

Bigazzi: Why should we talk about vegetables?

The response to Bigazzi's little expedition into cat recipes has been, shall we say, noisy and enraged, and rightly so. The eating of cats, of course, is not an unknown phenomenon, even in the West, where it's generally considered taboo. There's an interesting article on the practise here. However, in most places where cats are kept as pets, they are eaten only as a last resort, when instability or other factors have caused severe food shortages.

A cat- and dog- butcher in Paris during the Prussian siege of the city, 1870-71.

The Valdarnese proverb quoted by Bigazzi, "he who has no fat kills the cat," in fact speaks directly to this motive. Cats are to be eaten only by someone who is desperately starving. And it is worth pointing out at this point that the Valdarno has suffered periods of extreme privation during its history - during the upheavals of the Renaissance before the Florentines took over the area, for example, and more recently during Fascism and the Second World War. I would hazard that the use of cats for food in the area grew out of one of these periods.

There is also the question that Bigazzi hints at towards the end of the clip: why don't the people who are outraged at the thought of cat-eating get similarly worked up over the consumption of, for example, rabbits? It's a good question, but one with a simple answer: it is because cats are considered pets. This means, among other things, that we tend to view them individually rather than collectively, which is a good and humane impulse. As an example of such a view, take Isoardi's response to the first mention of braised cat. The mental image that obviously comes to her right away is that of the cooking and eating of a specific, individual, animal, and it's no wonder that she responds with horror.

Now, it is true that some animals, such as rabbits, ducks and chickens, do sometimes straddle the line between pets and livestock. However, I would be willing to wager that the people who do keep such animals as pets either do not eat them at all- either the pets themselves or other members of the species, or have a certain amount of difficulty with doing so. I am reminded here of one of James Herriot's anecdotes, about a pig-farmer of his acquaintance. This farmer was apparently a fairly typical example of the hardbitten, taciturn, Yorkshire dalesman. However, when it came time each year to slaughter the pigs, his wife had to do all the work, while he sat in the farmhouse kitchen and cried.

Anyway, Bigazzi's been suspended by the network, not to mention shouted at by a number of public figures, including the Undersecretary of Health. He's also now claiming that he was sort of joking: "Mind you, I wasn’t joking all that much. In the 1930s and 1940s, when I was a boy, people certainly did eat cat in the countryside around Arezzo." And so we come back to the idea of cat-eating as a symptom of very hard times - as mentioned above, that was not a happy era for Tuscany.

(A minor note about the Times article linked to here: I don't know where they got the "in-show" quotes that they attribute to Bigazzi, but he doesn't utter them in the clip that I've given you here)

To close, I would issue a reminder that Italy does have a specific law against the eating of cats (dogs, too). I think there's similar legislation in Canada, but if there isn't, there should be.

UPDATE: Chorus, in the comments, gives us a heads-up that Bigazzi has now in fact been fired. And indirectly reminds me to link to these people!

Time Wasting Ahoy!

First of all, if you ever want to have a productive day at work again, you probably shouldn't read any further. We here at De Koboldorum Rebus will accept no liability, etc. etc.

So, anyway, Sporcle. If you have not yet encountered Sporcle, it is a site given over to a very large number of user-created quizzes, on just about any subject imaginable. The best bit is that, once you have finished the quiz, you can take a pick at which answers were most commonly missed, and how your quiz score fits in with the rest of the world.

Sporcle, we are proud to announce, has now been infiltrated by kobolds. Yes, you can take, for example, your new-found expertise in the esoterica of NHL awards over to Sporcle and put it to use! And there are other res koboldorum to be found as well, not to mention a couple coming up the pipe...

At Long Last! Part IV of the Trophy Series

Newsy Lalonde in the uniform of the Renfrew Creamery Kings

Apologies for the long delay, and general lack of blogging! Well, when we last delved into the dark world of NHL trophies, we finished up the major individual awards. So that leaves us with only a small collection of oddities: retired trophies, non-NHL trophies, and the like. Let us begin!

Sources this time around are, as usual, NHL.com, Hockey Reference, and Wikipedia.

The O'Brien Cup: The O'Brien Cup was the championship trophy of the National Hockey Association, the NHL's immediate predecessor as an eastern Canadian professional league. It thus became the NHL's first championship mug, before being replaced by the Prince of Wales Trophy. The O'Brien Cup subsequently saw a number of different incarnations, including bizarrely, as the trophy awarded to the Stanley Cup final losers.

The O'Brien Cup is named for John Ambrose O'Brien, son of Senator Michael O'Brien, who was one of the founders of the town of Renfrew, and who actually donated the trophy. The younger O'Brien helped create the NHA, and owned several of its teams, including the awesomely named Renfrew Creamery Kings as pictured above (sadly, and despite O'Brien's best monetary efforts, the Creamery Kings never won the cup named after him). His most famous and lasting contribution to hockey was made in 1909, when, having noticed that there was no hockey team in Montreal specifically designed to capture the loyalty of the French-Canadian population, he and the owner of the Montreal Wanderers created the Canadiens.

The Lester Patrick Trophy: I've included this one in the "oddities" section because it's not really an NHL trophy, for all that it was donated by the New York Rangers. It's awarded to four people or groups annually to honour contributions to hockey in the United States, and is the only trophy of all of those discussed here to ever have been won by women; the U.S. women's Olympic team won it in 1998, and Cammi Granato won it individually in 2006.

Lester Patrick was a member of one of ice hockey's great family dynasties. The Patrick clan in fact boasts four members of the Hall of Fame, and name has appeared on a number of different trophies, divisions, &c. Lester Patrick had a distinguished playing career in the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, which he and his brother Frank had founded, during the first quarter of the twentieth century (I should point at this juncture, however, that Lester Patrick also spent a season with the Renfrew Creamery Kings). His association with American hockey came after his playing days were done, when he became coach of the New York Rangers and led them to the Stanley Cup in 1928 and 1933. Famously, when his goalie Lorne Chabot went down injured against the Montreal Maroons during the '28 finals, the 43-year-old Patrick put himself in net for the rest of the game, which the Rangers duly won in overtime.

The Mark Messier Leadership Award: This somewhat self-explanatory trophy only entered service in 2006, and was awarded monthly for the first season of its existance. It is named, of course, after the former Oiler, Ranger, and Canuck star, the only man to have captained two teams to the Stanley Cup. In addition to having been donated by and named after Mark Messier, it has its recipients selected by Mark Messier. So far, none of those winners have been Oilers.

The Bud Light Plus-Minus Award: Formerly known as the Bud Ice Plus-Minus Award. Also formerly known as the Alka Seltzer Plus Award. Yeesh. Anyway, this one is awarded annually to the player who accumulates the best plus-minus over the course of the season. It has been named after bad beer and tummyache pills and at least one other corporate phenomenon.

Two Oilers have actually won the +/- award. You probably guessed that one of them was Wayne Gretzky, but if you figured out that the other one was Charlie Huddy, then good for you! And, just to bring us full circle, I wouldn't have a big problem if this one got renamed.