Pens vs. Sharks in Stanley Cup (and life)

(717 words)

The Pens playing the San Jose Sharks for the Stanley Cup is less than idyllic for me because I’m one of those guys who gets annoyed having to pay attention to any news happening in any of the 39 world time zones that aren’t the one I’m in.

If it’s not happening in EST, I have trouble paying attention. Same goes for news about people whose names I have trouble pronouncing. 

It’ll be annoying for people watching the games with me because I’ll inevitably ask stupid questions about real sharks.

For instance, I’ve always wondered if these notorious man-eaters are uniformly voracious or if there are some sharks that are like some picky kids about cleaning their proverbial plate.

Dad shark: “Son, if you don’t eat your liver you’ll go to your room without your device privileges for the whole night.”

Son shark: “I hate liver! Isn't it enough I ate both the awful kidneys!”

I like it when best of seven series involving Pittsburgh teams are against teams within our sensible time zone against players whose names lend themselves to convenient heckling.

That’s why I was hoping we’d play the Brooklyn Nets, a EST team with players named Tad Young, Will Read, and Jarret Jack.

Of course, this would be highly unusual because the Nets are a professional basketball team and playing an NBA team in the NHL’s Stanley Cup would unprecedented.

And, oh, how the Pens would kick their asses.

NHL scouts routinely rate a team’s skating abilities. I’m sure they’d say an NBA team has very poor skating skills.

It’d be fun to watch Sidney Crosby zoom around a bunch of 6-foot-10 dudes who can barely stand up on skates. I’m confident Crosby could beat the Nets all by himself. Heck, our goalie could beat them all by himself.

Alas, we get the PTZ (Pacific Time Zone) San Jose Sharks and guys named Dainius Zubrus, Marc-Edouard Vlasic and Joonas Donskoi.

I also hate the sports league propensity to try and achieve perfect fairness in scheduling. That means games 1, 2, 5 and 7 will be played in Pittsburgh, which gets home ice advantage because of its superior record. 

Those of you who are statistically minded will note the disparity in sequencing. Games 3, 4 and 6 will succumb to the scheduling equivalent of Manifest Destiny.

It upsets environmentalists like myself because of all the squandered  jet fuel it’ll take to zoom back and forth across the continent in the event the series goes seven games (it won’t).

It’s incredible wasteful.

It’d make environmental sense to play the games in a central location, like Lebanon, Kansas, the exact geographic center of the USA.

If you think Lebanon would be a convention mecca, you’d be mistaken. Population 279, one resident told me they’re so desolate they’re 60 miles from the nearest Walmart and that they buy toilet paper by the pallet.

Of course, the biggest question of all involving San Jose’s participation in the Stanley Cup is whose idea was it to put an NHL franchise in San Jose, an inland city with the same international prestige as Fresno.

Who wants to junket to San Jose?

It’s like taking a California team and making it come to Pennsylvania to play Scranton.

There shouldn’t be professional ice hockey in towns that never see roads covered in actual ice. And I reserve the right to alter my position once Global Warming renders the whole stipulation preposterous.

So it promises to be a fun week here in Pittsburgh and San Jose, too, I’m sure.

I grew up playing hockey and have remained a huge fan. This Penguin team is very appealing, too.

Being in a city that’s on a championship run is tremendous fun. No one knows this better than Pittsburgh fans. In my lifetime, I’ve celebrated six Super Bowls, three Stanley Cups and three World Series championships.

That’s 12 in five decades, for an average of more than two every decade.

By comparison, fans in Cleveland haven’t won squat.

Yes, it’s good to be us.

This week will prove it again.

It sounds like one of those hysterically hyped Animal Planet shows, but this series will confound the the aquatic natural order: The Pens will devour the Sharks.

Livers and all.

Pens in five.

Related …

Let’s move nation’s capital to Lebanon, Kansas

Youth hockey league in hot water over icing anthem

MOvember & my magnificent mustache

Fanning vs. shark: we need a rematch!

The winter day I nearly died in Minnesota

Daylight Savings Time annoying AND deadly

It may come as a surprise to sophisticated readers, but the inspirational soundtrack for these posts is often the morning farm report.

I rise with the roosters and am on the road by 6 a.m. most mornings, my radio set to Latrobe WCNS-AM.

As the local agriculture reporter drones on about the price of soy, winter wheat and dairy futures, I drive half asleep past about a dozen chickens, four cows and a black and white goat my daughters tell me is named Oreo, famed among the school bus set for once having escaped by chewing a hole in his fence.

The farm report and the bucolic scenery seem to further soften my still-foggy mind so the first lively newspaper story I see jumpstarts my thinking so I can wax euphoric over things like mimes and Earth’s eventual occupation of Kepler 22b.

Today I’d like to issue a little farm report of my own.

The cows look relaxed, the chickens serene and Oreo fit as a fence-chewing fiddle.

And I feel like I was out drinking all night and got all of the headache and none of the fun.

It’s Day II of our great national hangover, Daylight Savings Time.

I’ve had my share of killer hangovers, but those I’ve suffered in solitary.

Turns out Daylight Savings Time is killing us all.

A University of Alabama at Birmingham news release said the Monday and Tuesday after moving the clocks ahead are associated with a 10 percent increase in the risk of heart attack.

It’s a common vanity for men and women to boast they have some time to kill.

Foolish mortals. Time’s killing you!

The exact opposite is true in October when we move the clocks back: Risk decreases by 10 percent.

It’s only logical to conclude if we move the clocks back an hour once a month we could eliminate killer heart attacks all together.

I don’t understand the need to monkey around with time so much.

I have enough trouble sleeping. I lay awake worrying about money, my fathering deficiencies, Sidney Crosby’s return from concussion symptoms, international conflicts and irrational tyrants bent on attaining the WMD that experts say will nudge the world ever-closer to nuclear doom.

And now I have to worry about artificial time manipulations increasing my risk of deadly heart attack.

Then there’s the tedious logistics of it all. My computer and phone both automatically reset, but my three watches, my Bose stereo, car radio and two battery operated clocks require pesky manual adjustments.

Changing clocks takes time. And every second spent tinkering with the hands of time is another second spent dreading the unhealthy consequences.

And, really, big picture, I fret over what DST does to the Doomsday Clock. Artificially operating since 1947, it was intended to herald the threat to humanity from nuclear catastrophe, but has since upped the gloom quotient by adding the threat from climate change.

Could a careless re-setting of the Doomsday Clock render all my cares and worries moot?

I’m too sleep deprived to calculate the possibilities.

I do know this much: I’ve never once heard my morning farm report announce there’s a strange outbreak of bovine insomnia striking the region.

And until you start seeing cows with wristwatches strapped to their left front legs, I doubt you’re going to find a cow that has trouble sleeping.

They go through life untroubled by our vanities regarding time and the pretense of our ability to control it -- right up until the kind-hearted farmer packs them off to the slaughter house.

And now I’m doomed to spend at least part of the day wondering if the Doomsday Clock has a snooze alarm. Holocaust or not, I’m still going to need my beauty sleep.

But that’s a matter to be resolved another day.

Right now I just don’t have the time.

O Canada! Still misty for mounties

I wonder if it would reduce the viewing impact of the Olympics if they ran them in weekly installments like, say, “How I Met Your Mother.”

I’d watch. I can’t get enough.

These were the best games ever that didn’t involve Tonya Harding.

Maybe it was because it was hosted by Canada, the Chicago Cubs of the international community without the bitter losing streak.

Like the Cubs, our northern neighbors are so lovable and prone to spontaneous inebriation that even opposing fans can’t help but cheer them on. In so many ways, they’re like America without all the in-your-face ‘tude. And they have such a tuneful national anthem that I rooted for them to beat Team USA in hockey for the gold just so I could hear a really great song sung with historic gusto.

It didn’t disappoint. More than 20,000 fans and every single player joyfully sang an ode to a sprawling country that’s never in a hurry to rush off to war or overachieve in any way that’s too show-offy.

If they gave gold medals for national anthems, Canada would be the international powerhouse. “O Canada!” just can’t be beat.

I’ve long argued that countries should change their national anthems every 10 years or so to reflect the national mood. Thus, here in the Clinton years our athletes could have entered the Olympic arenas to Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

And the Axis of Evil and their minions would have certainly had even more reason to tremble during the G.W. Bush years if our athletes had swaggered into the games to the martial stomp of “We Will Rock You!”

(Early contender for the Obama years: “Why Can’t We Be Friends?”)

But the Canadian national song is so pitch-perfect and pleasant it needs no anthemic alterations. The melody and lyrics are outstanding, some inaccuracies involving that part about ‘standing guard for thee’ not withstanding -- the cheap liquor I’ve bootlegged in and out of Canada over the years would have made rivals like Capone come hunting for me with tommyguns a-blazin’.

So I confess to feeling a little turncoat tingle when the Canadian anthem was played as a squad of proud Royal Canadian Mounted police unfurled the big red maple leaf.

And it was more than the music. See, I’ve always been misty for mounties.

That goes back from 1994-99 when the CBS program “Due South” ran. It starred actor Paul Gross as the dashing Constable Benton Fraser, a mountie so wholesome and good-natured he made Dudley Do Right look like one of those bigoted bunglers that let O.J. Simpson get away with murder.

He comes to Chicago to solve the murder of his father, a legendary Mountie played in ghost form by deadpan comic genius Leslie Nielson, himself a native Canadian from the Northwest Territories (who knew?).

Fraser had a wise-cracking Chicago sidekick detective and Diefenbaker, the ever-faithful half-wolf wonderdog who, while stone deaf, was capable of reading human lips and communicating what was said to the understanding Constable Fraser.

Fraser may have been the greatest straight arrow crime fighter ever conceived. He had supernatural detective abilities stemming from superior application of everyday human senses. I remember one lively episode when he was able to track down a homicidal culprit by smelling the breath of a rat to determine the particular brand of barbecued ribs it had been nibbling.

I admit to feeling kind of sheepish rooting for Team Canada over Team USA, but the game meant so much to a country and a people of such natural exuberance that I couldn’t help myself.

Plus, Canadian star and game winner Sidney Crosby plays for Pittsburgh now and I wanted him to succeed under otherwise crushing national expectations.

To me, the guy’s one of the greatest. He’s courteous, a team player, a leader and a real credit to his country and the city he now represents.

I’m not saying the guy could solve a murder from one whiff of rat’s breath, but The Kid is good.


Note: The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette cited some of my recent blog, “All Snowmen Are Abominable,” in its “Cutting Edge” column on Sunday’s forum pages. I am flattered by the mention and the nifty juxtaposition that something with Amish in the title is considered cutting edge.