Who to blame next year when the Blackhawks don't repeat?

**For full disclosure, I am a die-hard Detroit Red Wings fan, but I can readily admit that I prefer the Blackhawks to be a strong team rather than the weak shell of a team that they were for the past decade.**

I was talking with my dentist this morning (who is Canadian and, obviously, a hockey fan) about the Hawks' chances of repeating next year. Training camp hasn't even started and I can single out the two people primarily responsible for the Hawks' inevitable playoff exit next year.

Brian Campbell and Cristobal Huet.

Some may say that Dale Tallon, the Hawks GM who signed both players deserves some of blame, and that may be true. But folks have to remember that after the campaigns throughout most of the 00's the only way players would come to Chicago was by being overpaid. Tallon did what he had to do, and in many respects it paid off. The Hawks won the Cup, but local opinions about an embryonic dynasty are premature. The problem with Campbell and Huet is just how egregiously overpaid they are.

Campbell was the cream of the defensive crop in the free agent class on 2008. His cap number is over $7M and he's signed through the 2015-2016 season. Clearly, the cap his is one problem, another is the way that  his contract is structured. He's going to make $7,142,875 every year of his contract, virtually making him impossible to move. Campbell has only played in 75 or more games in four seasons out during his professional career, and for an offensive defenseman has only eclipsed 50 points once (in 2008-2009 he was 7g, 45a, 52pts). His career statistics are not that impressive so someone making so much money. He's been a decent player, but he's not worth what he's being paid. Campbell is the Blackhawk's albatross. Is it too soon to make comparisons to Alexei Yashin's deal with the Islanders here? To his credit, Campbell is a solid player, perhaps in the $4-5.5M range, but no where near $7+. If you're not in the Norris mix annually you don't deserve Nick Lidstrom or Scott Niedermayer money.

While Campbell's signing illustrates throwing money at a player's potential, the Huet signing demonstrates poor scouting and delusions of rehabilitation. Seriously. Huet won more than 30 games once, during the 07-08 season and that was with two different teams. He won 26 for the Hawks this past season, but eventually lost his starting role down the stretch and played all of 20 minutes in the playoffs. Two things about Huet: 1.) He's streaky. He always has been and always will be. He wins games in bunches but seems to lack the mental fortitude to push past obstacles when he's not getting the bounces. This also makes him impossible to trade because no one wants to take on a $5.6M cap hit for a back-up goalie; 2.) As a result of #1, it's clear that Huet is not a bone-fide starting goalie. Huet's cap hit is over $5.5M and he's making $5,625,000 for the next two years. (To put this in perspective, Martin Brodeur, arguably the best goalie in the history of the game makes $5.2M/year.) Fortunately, his contract length is not as bad as Campbell's, but that just means that the Hawks will lose more players in the short-term that they could otherwise lock-up at reasonable salaries before they earned huge pay days. Given Heut's past, he's best suited for a tandem goalie system, much like what the Hawks did this year, which is probably why he won 26 games. However, in a tandem goalie system a team should be spending $5-6M on both goalies, not just one. Huet's poor play has all but eliminated the possibility of keeping Antii Niemi, who actually has some upside potential, very difficult. It should be interesting to see what the outcome of Niemi's arbitration is.

Only time will tell if the speed with which the Hawks' won the Cup after new management took over will be a blessing or a curse. Certainly, hockey is back on the map in Chicago, but the vast majority of those people are band wagon fans. The question is will they stick around when the Hawks aren't winning with the same regularity that they did during the 2009-2010 season?

This is what happens when you marry a history nerd

Everyone has their idiosyncrasies. Some of us, perhaps, have more than others and they can range from the minute to the all out weird. Myself, I may be borderline OCD in a couple of respects (my music library, for example), and just plain determined on several other fronts. To the latter, I can add the convergence of historical ideas to present a scenario that drives my wife batty at times.


We already have a dog. He's a rescue and somewhere down the line before we got him he must have undergone some sort of traumatic experience because he's about as jumpy as a dog can be. He's settled down in the past couple of years, but he's still pretty high energy, something that is made worse by the fact that we live in a small apartment. Given these pre-conditions, we are quite a ways away from getting a second dog, but when the time comes I'm dead set on what type of dog I want. A vizsla (pron. Vee-shlah).

Sambuca, our current pet, is afraid of the camera.

My quest for a Vizsla.


Now you may be asking yourself, what's the big deal about a vizsla? Well, for starters, they are just really cool looking dog's. They're really intelligent and very trainable. While they are a high energy breed, they're also very good at just lazing around. The fact that they don't shed much is a bonus too. Usually, that's enough for someone to want a dog, right? Ok, here comes the geeky historian justification as to why this is the perfect dog.

How could anyone saw no to this face?

The vizsla is a hungarian hunting dog. In 1904, Arthur Griffith, an Irish politician, wrote a treatise called The Resurrection of Hungary. This served as a model for the first Sinn Fein political platform, something that would change in later years, but nevertheless, Griffith drew the connection between Ireland and Hungary, using Hungary as a model for political change. So I can justify to myself having an historically hungarian dog for this reason (not that one has to justify why they want a dog, but just let me have my idiosyncrasies).



To show how much I've thought this out, I've already picked out a name for my future dog. It has to be a male dog for the name to work, and again this harkens back to Irish history. The vizsla is a red dog, and looks like a hound (if you ask me, I don't know if there is an actual hound family, and if there is, if the vizsla is a member, but it looks the part to me). In Irish mythology the hero of Ulster (Cu Chulainn) is known as the hound of Ulster. The symbol for Ulster is a red hand. Combine those two things and what do you get? A red hound. Good enough for me. So obviously the dog's name has to be Cu Chulainn.

A good looking dog if I ever saw one.

Of course I tell all of this to my wife, and I get all geeked up while she can't do much but shake her head.

The most amusing animal is...

We'll call this guy Doug.

The platypus of course. Not only is the word itself fun to say, these little guys are so weird looking one can't help but laugh. It's as though they were created from the spare parts bin.

To reinforce the fact that I'm a total nerd, one thing that I enjoy about the platypus is the fact that the word ends in an "s" which allows me to bastardize its plural form as "platypi," which I find equally as humorous as the animal itself. What are some other words that end in "s" and sound funnier when pluralized with an "i" at the end? Thoughts?

Rethinking "Common" Sense

Recently I read "Freakonomics" and one of the things that struck me while reading it was the authors' point that conventional wisdom is neither conventional nor wise. I think that similar re-evaluation of common sense is in order. I am increasingly aware in recent years that having any "sense," that is an understanding of considerate behavior and respect for others, among other things, is by no means common. Perhaps this is exacerbated in an urban environment where there are large numbers of people and very few structures in place to enforce or at the very least ensure awareness of "common sense."

A few examples:

1. My earlier blog post about my neighbors dog.

2. On the subject of dogs, our direct next-door neighbor currently has her sister staying with her, who in turn brought her dog. Instead of taking the dog outside to relieve itself, the sister just opens the door to the SHARED terrace and lets the dog do it's business. Now this wouldn't be a huge issue if she immediately picked up after the dog, but in the month or so she's been staying there we've only seen her do so once, and it was just after we had already picked up a week or more worth of dog droppings (which we have done at least 4-5 times). Now this is a SHARED terrace. Not only is it disgusting to have dog crap festering out there, it smells, and it's unhealthy. We take extra care to make sure that our dog, when he's out there, stays away from the soiled area. My wife even asked the sister to pick up after the dog, but this request has gone unheeded (today I picked up 2-4lbs of dog crap from the past couple of weeks). Having a bit of sense would incline one to ensure that their shared terrace was not covered with dog crap or stink like crazy in the hot, humid Chicago summer heat, but remember, sense is by no means common.

3. Public Transportation. Don't get me wrong, public transportation is great. It's affordable, (relatively) reliable, and it's (a bit) more eco-friendly. However, I've noticed that with both trains and busses people cannot figure out how to board and de-board. With trains people wait at the doors and rush on right when they open. A bit of sense would help people realize that if you step back for 10 seconds and let the people de-boarding off the train first, then you can get on much easier and likely find a place to sit or stand with relative ease. On busses the same principle applies, but is much worse. There are two doors, a smart person enters through the front and exits via the rear door. Now if one is elderly or needs help on or off, I can understand exiting through the front door where help is available. But for the rest of the able-bodied population this just prolongs the bus ride for everyone else. On many occasions I've seen people sitting in the very back of the bus, walk all the way to the front to get off, pushing past people boarding, only to walk back down the street past the rear door they chose not to use. How does this make any sense at all? Just as obnoxious is when people have been waiting for a bus for any period of time, get up to the pay box (usually with a queue behind them and an already packed bus), and spend the next 3 minutes fishing around for their fare. How difficult is it to have your fare ready when you board, especially when you've been doing nothing but waiting for the bus to show up for the past 5-10 minutes?

4. Airport security. People know this is a painful and cumbersome procedure already, but a collective lack of sense just makes it worse. Fortunately some airports have different lanes for families, experienced travelers, and folks in between. Usually the experienced line is quick and efficient (people with some sense), and the other lines are a total crap shoot. It's amazing that the new TSA rules have been in effect for almost 10 years and people still seem shocked that they can't bring large liquid containers through security or that they need to take out their laptop for the x-ray machine.


My favorite exchange from the film "Men In Black" was between Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones where the latter explains that a person is intelligent, but that people are basically idiots. Perhaps I'm just becoming an old curmudgeon and noticing these things more often, but it seems to me that even this truism needs revision to state that SOME, but not all people are intelligent (i.e., have some 'sense'). I'm hoping that moving out of the city will mean that there are less folks around with the me-first attitude and more people with a hint of 'sense', common or not.

Libraries, Books, & Digitization

I'm a big proponent of digitization. I can totally get behind Google Books. One of the most useful aspects of digitization is that it makes books, and other text-based media, fully searchable. So in that light this story about Stanford University is quite interesting. Digital books also eliminates the need to place a hold on a book, or recall it because more than one person can download and use a digital book at the same time. Likewise, interlibrary loans would become much faster, easier, and cheaper.

Saving space is certainly a big deal for the library and I can understand the desire to create more space for essential services. However, relying solely on digitized books does not bode well for all disciplines. Especially in the humanities, where so much is reliant on books, there really is something to be said for walking the stacks. Every scholar has had a serendipitous moment and found a useful book they had no idea existed simply by perusing what was located near the book they were looking for in the first place. This is somewhat similar to actually holding a physical copy of the newspaper and perusing the news instead of just searching for the one story you know is there.

Digital books are more difficult to take notes with - jotting a quick note in the margin gives way to a series of clicks that can be cumbersome for some people.

As someone is not a very fast reader to begin with, this story also perked up my eyebrows and made me think that total digitization is not desirable, at least not yet. I noticed that it took much longer to read digital books before I saw this news item, so I can't say that it surprised me.

The question remains, how do we decide what balance to strike between digital and physical books, and what books should be kept in physical form in addition to having digital copies (because let's face it, ALL books can be digitized)?

On a related note, I am all for the complete digitization of archival records. Doing so would make primary research much faster and cheaper, and would greatly extend the life of documents because they would be handled much less.

To DVR or not to DVR...

How did people watch television before the invention of DVR? Granted I've never owned a Tivo, the Uber-DVR, but I would like to. We've always had the standard DVR that one gets from the cable company. The benefits of DVR are well known - you can watch your favorite shows whenever you want and not restrict yourself to the scheduled and the ability to fast-forward through commercials - are two of the main advantages in my opinion. However, DVR does have its limitations.

I'm not a HUGE TV guy, but I certainly don't mind it. My preference is to watch sports. My wife likes all kinds of shows, including many mind-numbing reality shows. With so many channels and so many shows on, especially sporting events, scheduling conflicts are inevitable. Our DVR can record two programs simultaneously. Supposedly the AT&T box can do four; four would be good at our house. It's bad enough when you have to decided between two of three weekly programs, but the situation gets exponentially worse when you factor in sports, which do not necessarily follow the same predictable schedule. (Weekly programs can become an even bigger issue when networks change the day and time of a given show.)

This begs the question - which program should get preference - the weekly program that's bound to be re-run or available online soon after airing, or the one-time sporting event? Certainly, the way that question is phrased shows my bias. But two people with differing opinions on television viewing inevitably leads to missing programs.

For most people, two shows at once is plenty, and for the most part, it's enough for us. Sports is the inconstant factor. So what can we glean from all of this pontificating? Multiple television programs, live sporting events, two people, and one TV/DVR combo is not enough. The solution? TWO TVS!