Yeah, yeah. So I took a hiatus. To make a long, sordid story short I canceled my hosting account with my previous hosting provider because I kept getting my account suspended. When I did it I had every intention of just saying “screw it” and waving my private parts at all this blogging business. I got fed up with answering the same “why do I get this error with the spelling checker” questions daily. Keeping track of the latest phentermine spammers got boring. And I’m still nobody’s designer.

But, I’m back. Lots of stuff going on in the life — Julia’s growing, my father’s health sucks, my health has sucked but is getting better — and, frankly, this thing can be cathartic. So, I signed up for some more hosting and we’ll see how it goes. Cut me some slack while I try to get back in gear, m’kay?

I cut my fingernails this morning. (Yes, I resurfaced from obscurity to blog about my hygiene habits, how delightful!) As I was doing it I suddenly realized that my hygiene technique for this particular task — rounding those fingernails and squaring off those pesky toenails — were entirely implanted in my brain by a television show on some Saturday morning when I was young. I can’t remember what it looked like, but I’ll never forget my impression. There was this oaf — this was an animated show — that didn’t take care of his nails. So these people convinced them that he needed to cut his fingernails. So they espoused the virtues of smoothly rounded fingernails and he dug it and he kinda got all excited about it and noted that, by gum, his toenails needed a trimmin’ too.

“Round off those toenails!” he exclaimed exuberantly.

And the fascist nail trimmers looked at him aghast, like he’d farted and jerked off at the same time. In church.

“Oh no, we have to cut your toenails straight!”

I’ll never forget because my immediate reaction — and, to think of it, my reaction even 30 years later — is “man, what a picky group of broads.” You’ve convinced the poor sucker that rounding off his fingernails is The Way. You’ve gotten him all hopped up about it then leave him to make that incorrect leap of joy that it’s The Way for all nails. They set him up! They were just waiting for him to say it so they could gleefully deride him! On television!

Of course, my fingernails are rounded and my toenails are straight. I don’t want those bitches harassing me.

NHL hockey is finally back. I refuse to even think about the arbitration period and the lockout. It’s over. Let’s just get out there and play some hockey.

Tonight was the preseason home opener for the Hurricanes against the hated Crapitals, and what a glorious start to a season. To be honest, I haven’t been this excited about hockey since that 2002 Cup run. And what I saw tonight makes me downright giddy. 6 to 0. 6 goals. Yes, by the Hurricanes. I was spellbound. They trounced Washington. I know it was preseason and I’m sure the Washington people will make excuses about Kolzig not being in net and a bunch of younger players on the ice… that’s dandy. We had our backup goalie in. Yes, the one that just shut you out. And we had a lot of younger players in. A couple of veterans like Hedican, Wesley, newcomer Corey Stillman and Brind’Amour shared the ice with players that have never been on the ice in the RBC Center like Gove, Richmond, and rookie Andrew Ladd.

And the Hurricanes just embarrassed them. The Capitals took a lot of penalties in this newer, more skating-oriented NHL where interference, hooking and holding are strongly enforced (see this video for a detailed look at the new enforcement of rules). The Hurricanes had a power play unit tonight the likes of which have never been seen in this town, at least for the home team, with four different players scoring power play goals. They cycled, they stick-handled, and they passed with an efficiency and crispness that was impressive to watch. Four power play goals. That’s not even counting the exceptional individual effort leading to a short-handed goal by Justin Williams. Invigorating.

This isn’t your grandpappy’s NHL

Color me a proponent of the new rules. I like all of them, but the one that I think will make the biggest difference in play this year is the removal of the two-line pass rule. First game of the preseason and I can already see how much it’s opened up the offense. On the breakout the Hurricanes generally played an aggressive game, with the defensemen bringing the puck up, the center in the defensive zone or around the defensive blue line, and the wingers on the offensive blue line. Often, the wingers would cross up on breakup, causing the defense to react and opening up opportunities for different passing lanes. I felt the Hurricanes had a great strategy for taking advantage of this rule change every time, whereas Washington, for the most part, still looked tentative.

I, not being a “purist,” think the shootouts during regular season games is a Good Thing. I never personally liked ties. It was underwhelming. Sure, there were occasions where the Hurricanes would eek out a tie and I rejoiced at the automatic point against particularly tough opponents, but to my mind a shootout with a guaranteed winner each night is more exciting, will keep more butts in seats, and will provide a good sense of closure. Interestingly — and I don’t know if this is a league-wide mandate or something the ‘Canes came up with, but I’d assume the former — all preseason games will end with a shootout regardless of outcome.

The rest of the rules — goalie pad size, the trapezoidal zone behind the goalie, larger offensive zones, tag-up offsides, harsher icing consequences — all add up to in incremental improvement. Overall I couldn’t be happier

New Sensation

Maybe Rutherford really is a genius. His relatively young team did quite the thrashing last night. I couldn’t help but be impressed. From Cam Ward who was simply awe inspiring in net from his seemingly perfect positioning to his amazing reaction time on both glove hand and butterfly — he had one close-in wrister save that was an absolute bullet to the 5-hole but he closed it up quicker than you could blink — to Mike Zigomanis whose excellent awareness and tenacity was really on display, there were a lot of players out there with serious potential.

And they meshed together well. We had an offense! We had an incredibly tenacious defense that rarely let the Capitals set up even on power plays. Our forechecks, backchecks and breakouts were fluid and spontaneous. Our powerplay was brutally effective, rarely letting Washington clear the zone and more often than not producing goals. I can’t say enough about Ward as goalie last night, playing very intelligently, calmly, and proficiently.

This is a new look for the Hurricanes, and a look I think people will get excited about. Big kudos to both Rutherford and Laviolette for putting things together in such a way.

Let’s get it on

I’m really, really looking forward to this season. Maybe it’s the force hiatus of the lockout that’s clouding my judgement, but I’m positively giddy.

I work for a living. I generally get home at anywhere between 5:30 and 7:00. Then I eat, spend time with the girl before she goes to bed, rinse and repeat. Then I have to fit in my hobbies so my time is limited. So why oh why do network television executives have to give the OK to shows that I apparently wish to watch?

Thankfully we have that luscious high definition DVR so I don’t have to be a hostage to their show timing. I really don’t know how television-watching people survive without these modern technical miracles. Hell, I don’t know how we allowed ourselves to survive it before the DVR days. (Note: I realize that television watching is hardly a divinely mandated right and that people are suffering the world over and couching anything having to do with such germane a task as watching a television show in the terms of “survival” is complete hyperbole and I’ll burn in Hell for my blatant disregard for… etc, etc. If you’re thin-skinned and sensitive enough to have had those feelings while reading this, I urge you to seek out the hundreds of thousands of other blogs out there that might suit your needs and temperament rather than leaving a comment to that effect here that’s certain to merely provoke disdain. Thanks!) That said, here are the things that are in the list and their projected longevity in that list.

Lost

Oh, we likey-likey Lost. Once again we timed it pretty well. We didn’t hop on-board last season, but I noticed that they were showing repeats during the summer. I scheduled it to record the pilot and that was it, we were hooked. Personally I haven’t seen as compelling of a pilot episode ever. Just awesome. So, we started catching the repeat episodes and really enjoying it and really hating ABC and cursing them soundly as they started skipping episodes to make time due to the start of new season. Luckily, the box set came out on DVD so we hurriedly popped them on the Netflix queue and just got done with all of them this weekend… just in time for the start of the season tomorrow. Huzzah!

Alias

This country is no longer on the Most Favored Nation list. They’ve kinda gotten silly. Okay, they’ve been silly from the beginning. I remember writing about some of the sillier things that chomp my ass about the show, but I’m still willing to give it a shot. Precisely how they’re going to accomplish this with a pregnant star is beyond me at this point.

Surface

Caught it last night and enjoyed what I could see of it as the local feed had big problems that caused us to miss about 10-15 minutes of it. Looks like an interesting premise and what we’ve seen of the “monster” is suitably frightening.

My deep dark secret is that I’m mortally afraid of open water. Deathly. This probably stemmed from an episode in my youth whereby myself and two of my friends got trapped out on a power piling in the middle of the bay near the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, FL. We swam out to it and started climbing up the inclined, tarred telephone poles that made up the lower section. I still had my legs dangling in the water when my friend that was still in the water started screaming and thrashing. He started to go under when I finally got hold of him, dragged him up in front of me and pushed him up the pole. About this time I noticed pain on my legs and hurriedly pushed him as I shimmied further up. My friend was bleeding and had welts all over him, and my leg had a bloody welt as well. It was then we noticed that, not unlike the scene in Finding Nemo, we had worked our way into a swarm of Portuguese Men-Of-War, floating malevolently all around the piling. My friend got hit essentially over his entire body and was in shock. I just got it in the legs but it hurt like a hairy mother. We were screaming at my friends’ mother who was on-shore to help us and she finally realized that something was amiss and found a boat to come pick us up. The injured friend spent a couple of days in the hospital and now I’m permanently afraid of open water.

So, add that particular color to the show and my first glimpse of the big, ugly monster was rather creepy.

Invasion

It’s scheduled to record. Hopefully won’t suck. You can tell Lost was a big hit given the number of supernatural-thriller dramas coming out as opposed to the onslaught of crime dramas in years previous.

My Name Is Earl

I’d hump Jason Lee, he’s a funny guy. Gotta give him a shot at overcoming Scrubs as funniest show on TV. Scrubs will always be on the list.

Anyone have any other recommendations?

• DHL must have the “sorting facility” from hell because my new Vonage router has been “transiting” it for roughly 8 hours. I’m picturing my little package zooming down miles of Oompah Loompah-strewn conveyor belts which loop madly through a byzantine complex of weirdness. More likely is it’s sitting in a heap of other crap, of course. I like Oompah Loompahs though.
• Julia is big into “bobos” and crying and announcing that she’s crying now. Everything that could possibly happen to an object is a “bobo.” Julia falls and scrapes her knee? “Bobo.” Mom has paint on her arm? Yup, “bobo.” The wall in the stairwell has a tiny flaw? Yessir, “bobo.” She’s 28 months old now and seems to be popping out more molars which means she says “no” a lot and typically cries at anything. She’ll then start leveling off the crying and announce in a heartrending voice “Julia cry.” This is valuable info we couldn’t have gleaned anywhere else.
• Because I’m all about the baby, I have to marvel at her ability to occupy herself for literally hours sorting things. Her current favorite is crayons. She’ll sit in her highchair for a literal hour playing with her crayons. And this isn’t drawing, this is emptying out the box and carefully putting them back in the box. All of them with tips up, of course. I’ll sit next to her and we’ll talk about the colors of the crayons and we’ll occasionally draw for a bit on drawing books but for the most part she just wants to sort. Of course, Over-Protective Parent Brain kicks in and starts whispering “great, she’s well along the path of OCD… nice work, ass” but then I read BabyCenter and everything is fluffy again.
• NHL2K6 is wonderfully glorious and partially flawed. I think it’s better than 2K5 but it’s not a knock out of the park. Some delightful new features and controls, some iffy AI decisions and some lingering bugs leave me once again saying “almost but not quite perfect.” If only I had the time and talent to write my own.