…Malloy added, Connecticut is not close to landing an NHL franchise. “I don’t lie awake at night wondering how that’s going to happen,” Malloy said. “Because, it’s not going to happen in the short run.”
I attended a game over Christmas break and the crowd was a decent size, but the team is averaging less than 4,500 fans a game. Hartford needs a new arena, but the NHL isn’t going to be part of it.
Someone alert Don Quixote! Crawford in an interview with the Canadian paper The Intelligencer:
“Toronto could handle another NHL team — probably two more,” said Crawford. “But there are three NHL teams within 90 minutes of Hartford, plus basketball, football and baseball. Winnipeg proved they were a viable market with quite a few sellouts for their AHL team.
“Here, it would be a tough call. The AHL team (the Connecticut Whale) is averaging about 4,000 and their tickets are 10 bucks. For the NHL to come back, you’d need 15,000 people playing 80 to 100 bucks.
The kicker? Crawford manages rinks in the area and helped organize last year’s outdoor Whalers Hockey Fest. Something tells me Crawford’s off the Christmas card list this year.
1970 marked the 350th anniversary of the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock and like usual the residents of Plymouth, Massachusetts were planning the annual Pilgrim’s Progress festival. The festival included a parade and feast, complete with residents in period clothes. The whole affair was a celebration of American progress. Empire, if you will.
Frank James, a Wampanoag Indian, decided to change the agenda for that year’s Thanksgiving. James and other Indians, including the Narragansets and Passamaquoddies, planned to demonstrate in a “dignified and responsible manner” about the repression and poverty endured by American Indians.[1]
Yet the protest wasn’t going to attract much attention without some theatrics. To help bring more attention to the protest, James invited the American Indian Movement (AIM)–a Minneapolis-based Native rights group that had protested on Mt. Rushmore the same year–to join the protest. By the time the protest started at the foot of Massasoit’s statue, over 200 Indians had assembled. James decried the pilgrims that “stole our corn,” and added, “all that love and brotherhood stuff between Indians and white settlers is a lie!”[2] Russell Means, a charismatic leader of AIM, implored the white men to listen
Listen. Listen to us, white men. Plymouth Rock is red. Red with our blood. The white man came here for religious freedom and he has denied it to us. Today you will see the Indian reclaim the Mayflower in a symbolic gesture to reclaim our rights in this country.[3]
Sure enough the group retook the replica Mayflower II moored in the harbor. Once on the ship the group lowered the flag of St. George and symbolically raised an upside down American flag. In a “new kind of Boston Tea Party,” only with real Indians, the group dumped pilgrim mannequins into the harbor.[4] After being cleared off the ship by local police officers, the group crashed the feast, overturning tables full of food, and dumped sand on Plymouth Rock. The protests concluded that night with another group sneaking back into the area and painting the Rock red.
One little boy, while watching the Pilgrim procession during the festivities that day, turned to his mother and asked, “Where did all the Indians go?” “They’re not part of this,” the mother replied.[5]
Celebrate Thanksgiving and count your blessings, but remember the cost at which your blessing came.
We tossed the cakes to them and I fed them like chickens with small pieces of cake and like chickens they ate it. Mr. Stevens kept guard with a whip with which he pretended to whip a small boy. We made them open their mouths and tossed cake into it. For a ‘Coup de Grace’ we threw a lot of them in a place and a writhing heap of human beings. We drove on very soon in the moonlight, It was beautiful.…We made the crowds that we gave cake to give three cheers for the U.S.A. before we gave them cake….
Theodore Roosevelt, Diaries of Boyhood and Youth
The “fun” occurred during a trip to Italy in December of 1869.
Howard Baldwin, not satisfied with an average of 4,700 per home game this year, is back chasing rainbows and attempting to implant delusions of grander and sugar plum fairies into the minds of Connecticut hockey fans. Want a new arena complex and the NHL by 2017? Howard will do it! If you believe that I still haven’t been unable to unload my ocean front property in Arizona. Call me, it’s heavily reduced.
So what are the issues this time? The biggest is the price tag: []$105 million in public dollars](https://twitter.com/VTConfidential/status/136437450703765504). I’m a hockey fan but even I won’t endorse spending money on a new stadium given the record of publicly-financed stadiums. Next? Baldwin wants the NHL to return in six years. Winnipeg opened the MTS Centre in 2004 and saw the NHL return this year–a seven year time span. Howard wants the NHL back in six years and we only have nice pictures of what the new XL Center will look like. With fifteen years of failed attempts at a new arena, do you really think we’ll do it in six?
While watching the final installment of Ken Burns’s “Prohibition” documentary I noticed a picture that was notable solely because I watch too many old reruns of “Cheers”:
“Saturday Night in a Saloon,” Russell Lee, Craigville, Minnesota, 1937 (LOC)
And as it appeared in “Cheers”:
Still from the opening credits of “Cheers,” Season 7 (Youtube)
Thanks to the fine folks at Shorpy, who highlighted the photograph last year.
Interesting article on Turnitin.com, a website professors and universities use to (hopefully) catch students passing off plagiarized work. Unfortunately the service has a variety of issues, the biggest of which is that it offers a (paid) service for students that tells them the parts of their papers that will get flagged should it get run through turnitin.com by their professor.
Front page New York Times* article from yesterday on the fact that Tulsa’s BOK Tower is basically a smaller version of the Twin Towers. It should be noted that the tower will become the second tallest building in Oklahoma upon the completion of the Devon Tower in Oklahoma City.
I’ve long gotten over bickering about factual errors in historical movies, yet Public Enemies just got on my nerves. The IMDB issues page should shed some light if you’ve never seen the movie. Oddly it wasn’t that the movie has Pretty Boy Floyd die before Dillinger (the movie uses Melvin Purvis shooting Floyd as basis for him leading the hunt for Dillinger), rather it was that the Yankees played the Cubs in July during one point in the film.
Late in the film Johnny Depp’s Dillinger wanders through a police station examining evidence while a baseball game can be heard in the background. It’s the Cubs beating the Yanks 3–2 with the announcer talking about the Babe’s bad leg. The Yankees were actually playing in Chicago that day, and Babe Ruth certainly had a bum leg. But given that Interleague wasn’t invented for another 63 years, the Yanks were at Comiskey not Wrigley. They also played a doubleheader, blowing out the Sox both games.
Of course Dillinger was a Cubs fan.