Clemmensen named "all-time unsung player" of Hockey East

I have to wonder why an award like this even exists. Why not just hand out, every year, some Awards For the Best Player Who Has Not Yet Received This Award and keep doing it until everyone has one? That'll fix it.

Second, how is a guy who got as much ink as Clemmensen, all of it well-deserved, "unsung"? If an award like this is even going to exist, it should be something along the lines of the Bruins 7th player award-- the best of the guys who wasn't expected to be one of the best, or the player that beats your expectations. Nobody who has followed Hockey East since its creation doesn't know who Clemmensen is and what his accomplishments were. It's ridiculous.

He won three HEA championships and appeared in four NCAA championship semifinals.

The list of runners-up is no less silly: Joe Fallon (UVM), Cal Ingraham (ME), Fernando Pisani (PC) and Joe Sacco (BU).

Joe Sacco? Unsung? Cal Ingraham? Really? Okay, maybe you might not SEE Cal standing there without lowering your chair a notch, but you could certainly still read about him.

Next up, the Hockey East Anniversary committee will be running a ballot for the league's most memorable moment. I have two nominations for this award: the awarding of the All Time Unsung Player Award to Scott Clemmensen last week, or that time BU coach Jack Parker said it was "good for the league" the first time Merrimack College beat the Terriers.

Sony: What Is Happening Is Not Happening

Thank goodness Sony is a Japanese company, because they can at least claim that English isn't their native language when someone points out the nonsense in claims ilke the latest regarding PlayStation 3 sales.Things start out fairly innocuously:

Man's Best Friend... Again

I often wander into complex threaded discussions in places like Newsvine but feel completely overwhelmed by the number of comments that scream out for replies, but daunted by the amount of time necessary to reply individually to each one.

This story about a couple that paid $155,000 in an auction to clone their dead dog spawned a conversation that covered a wide range of topics, although a number of recurring themes arose.

"I sure can think of a lot of things I could do with a $155,000, and cloning my pet is not one of them!"

Many of the users claimed that it was bad to spend this amount of money on cloning a dead pet because the money could be better spent on other things, mostly charitable works. Some were very specific and pointed out that if one was interested in giving a home to an animal, there are many animals scheduled for euthanization that could be saved for that amount of money, or even better still, clinics that could perform spaying/neutering operations on animals to prevent the birth of unwanted animals.

Whether this is valid or not depends primarily on the context of the criticism, and in nearly all of the posts, the context was missing. One author supplied it, pointing out that nobody was advocating a law to prevent this couple from having done this, or from legally exploiting their own property (in this case, cash) for a legal purpose (in this case, cloning their pet). Rather the intent was simply to point out that a more positive and socially responsible act might have been to use the money for something else, something beneficial for a wider range of individuals than themselves and their dead pet.

While this is laudable, actually I wonder if that commenter is right: at least some of the comments I think were advocating some kind of restriction, or at best suggesting that there was something morally reprehensible about what they had done.

Not always doing the best, most right thing, does not make the thing which is done wrong or evil. These things are a continuum, not a dichotomy. As others pointed out, had this couple purchased an expensive car or other consumer item, not only would they not have been criticized, but the story would not have existed, as it would not have been notable.

One Console Platform?

BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka's advanced the possibility that someday gamers would play games on one ubiquitous console. There are "valid reasons," he says, why the market would trend that direction, with the exception of "Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo maybe having some issues with that they might want to continue their platforms."You think?This has come up before, and I'm pretty sure that it was Muzyka behind those earlier remarks also.

Blame, Reward, and Help: Crisis of Meritocracy

The comments on this Newsvine story about portions of the bailout packages going to distressed homeowners I think illustrate one of the conflicts that is at the center of America's domestic agenda, and one that has been there for quite some time.

With Friends Like These

"It is better to make friends than enemies."

This statement is presented as axiomatic in a blog post at the Agonist, seemingly in reference to the recent US attacks in Pakistan, although it never mentions it by name, except in the category tags.

Despite the seeming obviousness of this rule, the author admits that much human behavior seems to contravene it:

Capital Idea

A Killer App?

Mobile Banking - A Killer App?

Am I the only one who thinks that in the current climate, people are actually going to want to check on their accounts less, rather than more often? What's the driving motivator here-- paranoia or depression? Is it a sick fascination that will drive people to need to watch their retirement funds deplete even while they're on the go? Or will they prefer to just wait for the monthly statement to arrive, whether it comes in the postbox or the email box?

Blow: Stories In Games Are Just Hot Air

Jonathan Blow, One man creator of the oh-so-pretty Braid platformer, as amazing for its interesting gameplay as its surreal visuals, says, essentially, that videogame stories are bad and probably wouldn't get much better with better writers since trying to tell a story in a game is a bad idea.

On Newspapers

Several items of note regarding the plight of the newspaper industry have come to my attention of late. This assumes, for instance, that there is such a thing as the "newspaper industry" at this point, disparate from the multimedia conglomerates, and such a thing as a "plight" disparate from the current financial crisis.

In particular, a college friend of mine, who still works in the industry, called my attention to one of many "save the newspaper" causes that have sprung up on various social networking websites. He also pointed out a piece at the Atlantic on the subject. Much of my daily reading is in the online gaming press, and one of the more popular outlets, Kotaku, also has ex-newspaper employees there, and they have mentioned the situation that their local paper is now in (here and here). I felt a need to somehow explain my relative lack of enthusiasm for this concept.

Given my own personal history it is somewhat difficult to come to terms with these events. Since I have not ever worked as a professional journalist and have not worked in publishing of any kind, in any capacity (save several different blogs) for more than a decade, it may be that my thoughts on this subject are outdated, or irrelevant, or that I have insufficient personal investment in the related issues for my opinion to carry much weight.

Nonetheless, newspapers do hold special significance to me. Learning to drink coffee and reading a daily paper, in my case The Boston Globe, formed a rite of passage into what I then considered adulthood. A change of schools and a change of majors in my first year of college landed me in a liberal arts program and on the editorial boards of two publications, a biweekly college paper and a somehwat more irregularly published literary magazine. At the latter, I learned the rudiments of electronic page layout, and at the former I applied them, eliminating the manual typewriter and typesetting system then in use. (This was in 1991, if you can believe that-- the desktop publishing revolution that Apple wrought in the mid-1980s still had not filtered as far as my suburban college's student newspaper six years later, despite the fact that the campus was lousy with Macintosh computers, everywhere except the newspaper office. Meanwhile, thousands were spent each year on typesetting.) That pattern repeated itself in graduate school, and followed me into my first jobs, where I found that being on the technical side of things paid better and better suited my personality. I worked at a local daily for about three years but later moved into doing similar tasks for nonprofit organizations. At that daily I initiated the paper's website, and went on to either establish or modernize sites at other organizations. Perhaps if I'd had more sense (or, rather, less sense and more vision) I'd simply have dropped out of graduate school in 1994 and gone directly into web design after seeing the first versions of NCSA mosaic; instead I mocked it as being silly and slow compared to Gopher.

Pages

Subscribe to Front page feed