Sunday, February 25, 2007
Statistics Sundays - Disarming Edition
But, aye, it is true: I couldn't give a rat's a$$ anymore!
Some quick facts about hockey now (just to fill up our quota -and mandate here- of statistics!)
The all-together ooky term "HOCKEY" comes from the French (something else to blame them for!) - the word "HOCQUET" (not to be confused with "hoquet" which is French for hiccups...! Nor is it to be confused with HOCHET - which is a mere BABY RATTLE! *LOL* Finally, the damn confusing French also have the verb "HOCHER" - which is the verb of use when one wants to signify that someone is shaking his head in disbelief! As everyone was doing during that hockey confrontation between Senators and Sabres last Thursday?
Talk about trite Thursday thunder! But I digress!)
"Hocquet" though used to describe a SHEPHERD'S CROOK (must have been, also, a crooked shepherd too - not my kind of Shepherd!)
That mere unlikeliest of origins explains a whole lot of things...
1) Why I ever took a liking to that silly sport...!
2) Why the "Flying Frenchmen" were to dominate for a while said silly sport
(Sometimes, for no apparent reason, God Himself sides with the French... His Ways Are Impenetrable! Mysterious! And it is not for us to question the logic of it all...!
The French sure had not God on their side though up in Waterloo or when those guys in feldgrau bypassed the MAGINOT LINE of defense that they had and went right through the Ardennes...! But that is another story or two...
Although an imaginary line of defense; guys in gray - sounds like a boring hockey game to me! Ottawa-Buffalo, again? *ROTFLMBO*)
3) How it is that many violent hockey players can be saintly boys as well as their usual "strictly-business" selves...
(As it is wootsy-cutesily represented by the
Minnesota Fighting Saint above! ;)
And exemplified more concretely by the likes of Cam Neely, Normand Léveillé and Gord Kluzak - to name but three!)
4) It all explains why grown men can act as such spoiled brats on ice (and in the stands, at the bargaining table and in the locker room) as well...
5) And it also explains howcome the disbelief is ever-present;
for, indeed, how can these guys make so many millions by simply lacing up skates and chasing a damned puck made of rubber, as if it was the most important thing in the universe?!?
(And, as usual with the sillier, brutish men among maledom, they mistreat what they've got despite valueing it so much - they slap the puck around like crazy and violently toss it into the net any chance they get...!!! But we may be straying from the subject now, with such parallelisms...?)
Hockey today is a game of statistics too - but less so than football or basketball - and much less so than the REAL FOOTBALL (soccer) and baseball...
Still, in all of these sports, numbers will be brought up to either increase or decrease a player's salary (depending on whose side of the bargaining table you may be, evidently!)
Hockey has become less and less interesting to me as the years have gone by - and the refinement has increased, in luminousland! ;)
It has become a sport for BIG BUSINESS anyway
And its fanbase is definitely the lowest common denominator - the riff-raff!
There is also a French word for that: RACAILLE!
French course is FINI - I mean, Statistics Sundays will adjourn now! ;)
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