In which I Give Up and Look Up Sports, Again
A certain relative supernaturally conspired to make my region's sports teams win
Ahoy, supporters! I’m still on Substack, but I have been making lackluster effort to move to another platform, such as putting the freebie parts of the letters on Medium and the non-freebie parts on Patreon and Ko-fi.
This all started when I had to read a book for business school that involved looking up the MoneyBall guy. That was a fun rabbit hole in which it turns out the writer also wrote The Blind Side, and one of the guys he wrote about used to play for the Tigers, and various sources disagree about how to spell his name and whether the other guy with a similarly spelled name exists or not. That was much more interesting to argue about—or to watch other people argue about—than sports strategy or anything I’m supposed to be learning in business school. But that covered baseball. And a little football.
I also still have to ability to suddenly have song lyrics come out of nowhere, whether I want them or not.
Turn around — every now and then a business loses some value and it has to change its strategy
Turn around — Divest, selling off a subsidiary part!!!
If that’s not was divestment really is, too bad. It’s in the song.
Then there was that thing with the cup. I learned quite late that the pink cup appearing in memes and non-meme, sincere posts was a brand called Stanley.
Since I was only seeing it in text form, it took me even longer to discover that the nice little cup from which one can drink coffee in a car is pronounced /ˈstæn.li ˌkhəp/
The more familiar (to me) cup, from which hockey champions drink beer at midnight after they win it, is pronounced /ˌstæn.li ˈkhʌːp/
I put a thing on Medium about syllable stress and that was great fun.
Medium still doesn’t support superscript for letters and that makes me mad. Do I have to keep earning money for a platform that doesn’t kick off Nazis just because they’ll let me denote aspiration? Well, no. They can’t rely on my 50 cents a month for much longer.
Flashback Time!
”Dad, why does the octopus want Stanley? Who is Stanley? Why octopus?”
One carefully designed t-shirt brought it all together. I think we were at the sports clothes store owned by the guy who owned our house. It was mostly college sports, neatly divided down the middle between the school where my parents met (and also where the parents of both of my middle school bestie and high school bestie met) and the school I just barely didn’t get into once, then got into another program that’s technically the same school, but couldn’t afford to go to. My sister also got into the enemy school, and as a joke, our friend’s Dad put on gloves to open her acceptance letter, but he was still proud of her and celebrated her success. That is, the store our landlord owned was called the Spartan/Wolverine store, but since it was hockey season for the professional hockey team, the front of the store was all Red Wings stuff.
The shirt I noticed as my dad and I went to pay rent featured a cartoon octopus, probably wearing a hockey helmet and holding a hockey stick. It was also probably also wearing a Red Wings hockey shirt. The text said, “I want Stanley,” and maybe also, “Go Wings!”
That’s how I learned that the trophy for the NHL was called the Stanley Cup. I think the octopus represented that the teams had to play eight games in each round (Or I guess best in eight. They could sweep in five games, and I they have done so at least once, or fans were hoping they would, as they expressed by driving around with brooms hanging out their car windows.)
I can’t forget the octopus thing. I watched the hockey on T.V. with Dad, excited in the way my family can empathize enough to like things we don’t really understand as long as it’s important to a loved one. I haven’t thought about the Red Wings winning the Stanley Cup in about twenty-five years, but back then it was the only thing that mattered.
I was surprised that so many people kept throwing octopus onto the ice. The sports camera zoomed on a single slimy little octopus, and maybe caught a glimpse of skates zooming past it. I was astounded that someone would do that to an animal. I was surprised that it was so small.
“Where are people getting those octopuses?” I asked, fearful that these were potential pets taken from fish stores and being killed for…sport?
“grocery stores, seafood section,” said Dad. I don’t remember if that was enough, or if he needed to explain that they were dead in the store like the rainbow trout, not live in tanks like the lobsters. I was the kind of idealist child that considered the lobster tank at the store a little zoo, not much different from the cockatiels and guinea pigs on the other side of the store. I was sad when I saw some normal person getting two lobsters carefully folded into a thin cardboard box, to buy and take home to make a delicious lobster meal, like a normal person.
And they are delicious, it’s just sad to see them alive, when they don’t know about the flavorful afterlife that awaits them. I don’t think crustaceans have complex thought lives, but they must have something like surprise when they leave the tank for the box and on down the road to death. Mmm lobster. Allegedly there’s a hospital that gives a lobster dinner to everyone who has a baby there.
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