The Atari World Series

 

Flin Flon Bombers Hockey Puck

While Mom recovers from pneumonia, Sean and I have been helping around her place, cleaning up and so forth. I found this Flin Flon Bombers hockey puck in the basement; until I found it, I'd forgotten we had it. I imagine Mom and Dad got it sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s. 
 

Joey the Trainer

"Ya gotta hit him from the left, ya lousy bum! Are you throwing this fight on purpose? You better be, because if this performance is really the best you can do I'll make you start sparring with my gramma! She'll teach you a thing or two, you lazy louse!" 
 

The Ref

"Okay boys, remember: I want a dirty fight. No hitting above the belt, no one goes to their corner until one of you is unconscious." 
 

Shirts vs Skins

Edmonton's current heat wave triggered a painful memory today. Back in junior high, we sometimes played team sports in gym class. I didn't (and still don't) care a whit for sports, but I would have been fine with participating had the gym teachers not divided the teams by forcing half the players to strip to the waist, a practice known as "shirts vs skins." 

I hated being on the skins team. I was very uncomfortable in my own skin, thinking myself too scrawny. I also felt incredibly vulnerable, perhaps because I'd been a victim of bullying pretty constantly at the time. (Things got better in high school.) I remember thinking it seemed incredibly unjust, that teachers could force us to take half our clothes off against our will. 

As far as I know, no one else in my class complained, nor did they seem bothered by the practice. I stopped protesting, but I hated every moment. Those classes definitely raised my already present antipathy for sports. 

I also remember a communal change room in junior high, another agonizing rite of passage. There were communal showers without any privacy dividers, too, and while I'm sure we were made to use them, I have no memory whatsoever of showering at school. I suspect I blanked those memories out somehow. Is that even a real thing? 

In retrospect, I'm rather amazed that "shirts vs skins" was ever seen as acceptable. A cursory search reveals that some schools still do this. 

I recognize that I might have been overly sensitive about this. But given how sensitive teenagers can be, I feel like exemptions should have been allowed, at the very least. 

The 2030 NHL Expansion

Sean (and many others) were quite happy about the latest Edmonton Oilers win in the current NHL Stanley Cup playoffs. During a text discussion, the Florida Panthers were misnamed the Florida Planters. I jumped on the typo, saying that Atlanta should have a team called the Georgia Planters. Sean responded with some AI-generated art, including an adorable mascot (above) and a couple of jersey designs: 

Inspired, I turned to Bing Image Generator and asked it to create some jerseys for hypothetical future teams. Sports fans, please welcome

The Saskatchewan Saskatoons! 

The Halifax Schooners!

The Tijuana Fiesta! 

And the Reykjavík Vikings! 

Normie Kwong Gets a Heritage Minute

 

I was fortunate enough to meet Norman Kwong when he took over from Lois Hole as Lieutenant Governor of Alberta, and I wrote speeches for him for a couple of years. He was a very congenial fellow, and he certainly deserves this accolade! 

The New Sport

 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2021 Day 5

Old Harry Potter
A solitary birthday 
Lunch and cake for one
 

Dugout

I painted this dugout in University of Alberta colours. My first attempt was pretty bad, just a mess, with many visible brush strokes, uneven colours, etc. But I persevered and added several more coats, all thin, and then dry-brushed different shades of yellow and green overtop of the original contrast paint layers. I think I managed to give this a more realistic feel than when I started. 
 
This dugout came with four minis, which I have yet to paint. 

Superman vs. Muhammad Ali: The Movie

Rao knows I love Richard Donner's Superman (1978), the film that cemented my love for the characters and stories that made up the world of Clark Kent and his heroic alter ego. Donner's adaptation captured almost the full gestalt of what makes the character great: his goodness, his vulnerability, the tragedy of his birth, the irony of being two-thirds of an impossible to reconcile love triangle, the weight of his self-imposed responsibilities. And Donner captured these elements in a film that avoided campiness (save perhaps when it comes to the villains) and treated the mythos with respect. 

But another great Superman story emerged in 1978: Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, a gorgeous oversized tabloid comic book crafted by two legendary figures in comics: writer Denny O'Neil and artist Neal Adams. While the concept sounds like a gimmick of questionable taste, O'Neil and Adams put the two icons, one real, one imagined, on equal footing through good storytelling and clever use of the mythologies of both men. 

The plot is really quite simple: an alien armada arrives in Earth orbit. It's the Scrubb, a renowned warrior species who've heard that Earth, too, is a planet renowned for its martial prowess. An emissary of the Scrubb demands that Muhammad Ali, who they dub Earth's greatest warrior, must fight the Scrubb champion in gladiatorial combat. Refuse, and Earth dies under a hail of nuclear missiles. 

Of course, the alien emissary finds Ali just as he's being interviewed by Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen, Clark slips away to change into Superman and argues he should be the one to fight the Scrubb champion, acknowledging that while Ali is the world's greatest human fighter, he, Superman, is superhuman...to which Ali responds if anyone's going to fight for Earth, it should be someone born on Earth. 

The alien emissary doesn't care who fights as long as someone does, so he sets up a primary bout that will take place in an arena that nullifies Superman's powers, guaranteeing a fair fight. Well, "fair" in the sense that now you have a guy that's still pretty strong but who's never needed any training to win fights going up against, well, Muhammad Ali. 

While this setup sounds like silly kid stuff, the storytelling abilities on hand really sell the idea, and the narrative gives both Ali and Superman plenty of moments to shine, with three great boxing sequences, some Mission:Impossible style covert ops, and a spectacular space battle. In the end it turns into a legitimately exciting space opera that, if filmed with care and an admittedly huge budget to capture Neal Adams' incredible visuals, could have rivalled the Star Wars films for escapist entertainment back in the day. 

Naturally you'd use the cast from Donner's Superman, and Ali would, of course, play himself. Somewhere out there in the multiverse, you can see this movie...

The Man of Le Mans

Steve McQueen has only a few lines of dialogue in Lee H. Katzin's Le Mans, and most of his screen time is spent behind the wheel of his race car. And yet, he's extremely compelling and believable as a man who must race, because for him, it's what makes life worth living. It's a message he communicates in one quiet conversation with a racing widow, and one reinforced by his eyes, his body language, and his ineffable, enigmatic charisma.

The racing sequences are spectacular, particularly the crashes, which are visceral, shocking, and put you right in the action alongside the unfortunate drivers. Great visceral thrills in a film that is at the same time somehow quiet, contemplative, and steadily placed. There are strange contradictions in this film, but it's a winner nonetheless. 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2019 Day 11

Flickering candle

Watches the silent bonspiel

Stones under the gun

Slow Death Overtime

Sean and I had a brief text conversation today about, of all things, hockey, or more specifically, the amount of points needed for a team to make the playoffs. I wondered, idly, the minimum possible number of points a team would need to get into the playoffs, assuming that many many teams had a terrible year so the threshold would be lower. I had thought that a lot of tie games might help lower the point threshold, but Sean informed me that there are never ties in NHL games now, no matter how long they have to play.

That put an exciting notion in my head: theoretically, assuming that the goalies play exceptionally well or the...puck-shooters play exceptionally poorly, a game could go on forever. You could end up with a situations where the players, after, say, two or three days of constant playing, drop from exhaustion, one by one. Ideally, the two goalies would be the last to drop, preferably at the same time, so that no victor could be counted. Would the NHL declare a tie in that case? Would they change the rules mid-play out of mercy for the players?

According to Sean, the longest game recorded went six extra periods, back in 1933. "People likely barfed," he remarks. 

All the Right Moves for All the Wrong Reasons

A film with tremendous integrity, All the Right Moves (Michael Chapman, 1983) puts skewed cultural priorities into grim perspective. It's the story of Stef (Tom Cruise), a high school senior with just enough talent to play college football, but not enough to make the major leagues. Showing uncommon wisdom for a teenager in this sort of movie, Stef plans to leverage his football talent into a scholarship so that he can pursue an engineering degree in college; it's his way out of the dead-end, decaying factory town that has already claimed the sweat and happiness of his father, brother, and ancestors down the line.

Stef's coach, Burt Nickerson, (Craig T. Nelson) wants to escape, too; if he can win one big game against a team ranked third in the state, he's almost certain to land a prestigious and financially rewarding college coaching gig. Similarly, his players have a shot at showing college scouts their value.

But the game is narrowly lost, with some of the fault going to Stef, some going to the coach, and there's blame all around. The coach manages to land a job at a California college anyway, but he slander's Stef's reputation, scaring away college recruiters. It looks like Stef is doomed to stay in town and work a factory job, just like his family before him.

Meanwhile, Stef's girlfriend Lisa (Lea Thompson) supports Stef's efforts to secure a place in college, even though she knows success means she'll lose him. As she notes, there are no scholarships for her; she's a talented saxophonist who dreams of being a musician, an impossible dream given the price. Only the football players have a chance of actually achieving the American Dream.

In the end, the coach relents and offers Stef a full scholarship at the college he's coaching at in California, and his mom, dad, brother, and girlfriend are all on hand to urge him to take the opportunity. Stef signs the contract, and we have our happy ending, one that comes in the last seconds of the film and is shot and acted so wryly that the filmmakers dare us to take it at face value.

So we shouldn't. This may be a happy ending for Stef, but the larger injustices prevail. The film explicitly states that there is no escape for Lisa and so many others, but Stef takes his shot anyway. You can hardly blame him. But maybe you can blame a culture's values for trapping so many for the sake of so few.

Quick Takes: Ali (Michael Mann, 2001)

Usually I'm unmoved by Will Smith's performances, but he was magnificent in this - so much so that I forgot I was watching Will Smith and believed I was seeing Ali. Nor am I a sports fan, but this was as much about Ali's determination to be a champion of the people (and ahead of his time he certainly was with regard to the Vietnam war) as it was his incredible feats as an athlete. Kudos to Smith and the rest of the stellar cast, along with director Michael Mann and his crew, for capturing a remarkable life with such style and power.

Muhammad Ali vs. Kal-El

Thanks to the generous gift of an Amazon gift card, I was able to purchase Amazon's well-regarded portable photo studio. I tested it for the first time today, somewhat carelessly, using my smartphone with no regard for the proper shutter speed, iso, etc. Even so, this action figure homage to Neil Leifer's "Muhammad Ali vs. Sonny Liston" turned out okay. 

Lego Advent Calendar Haiku 2018 Day 10

A hushed silence

Then BOOM! explodes the cannon

The crowd roars for blood

Superman vs Muhammad Ali

I picked up this set of action figures in Metropolis, Illinois on our road trip to see the 2017 solar eclipse. It's so cool to see an iconic story translated, after over 40 years, into three-dimensional form. 

My First NHL Game

Thanks to the generosity of my employer, I was able to enjoy (in my own particular manner) my first ever NHL hockey game. I'm not a sports fan, but I was certainly impressed by the spectacle of (taxpayer-subsidized) Rogers Place and all the high-tech tomfoolery that surrounds the hockey game itself. The scoreboard hanging over the ice is massive, with utterly spectacular resolution; I marvelled at it the whole game. Technicians can project whatever they want onto the ice, such as the team logos seen in this image. During the game I suggested to Sean that a clever coach would project additional hockey pucks onto the ice to confuse enemy players. I'd laugh and laugh!

Seeing a game live has not transformed me into a hockey fan, and as ever I feel sad that I can't share the heightened emotions of the real fans as they watch. As with my apathy toward children and pets, I seem to be lacking certain common human instincts. Instead, I find myself analyzing the non-stop assault on the senses that occurs during the game; except when the players are actually playing, music blares from all sides, animation lights up the rink and the electronic billboards circling the stands, and propaganda films play on the scoreboard. Indeed, the hidden ringmaster exhorts the crowd to "GET LOUD" at various points during the game, and the crowds dutifully agree. I was reminded yet again how easy it is to manipulate crowds with words, images and sounds. We are so easily programmed, and I'm certainly not excepting myself; I just respond to different programming languages.

Part of me realizes this is all (relatively) harmless fun, but another part of me sees in this kind of event a more refined version of the old gladiatorial arena. I guess you can call this progress, though, as no one dies and the violence is punished rather than rewarded (textually; the subtext is something else again).

I'd never willingly pay to see a hockey game, but I'm glad I had the opportunity to see one simply so that I can better understand what moves other people.