Fish Fear Me

Hockey History

A new era in collegiate hockey will begin today at 4:00 pm as the #1 Gopher men's hockey team takes on the Wisconsin Badgers in the first ever Big Ten hockey game. Previously both teams were part of the WCHA and they are joined by previous CCHA members Michigan, Michigan State and Ohio State along with the formerly independent Penn State team. At this point the Big Ten will not have a women's ice hockey conference, probably due to lack of teams. #1 Minnesota, Wisconsin and Ohio State will remain in the WCHA and Penn State will remain in the CHA.

Lots of people are unhappy with this change as the WCHA has a long and storied history with Minnesota that can be traced back to 1951 and the old Midwest Collegiate Hockey League. For my part, the change makes me a little sad too, but life goes on. What I'm most skeptical about is a conference with only six teams, one of which(Penn State) just started their hockey program last year.

The Gophers at least managed to fill out their non-conference play this year with some top teams, I'm not sure about the rest. If they and the rest of the Big Ten teams can do that in the future then they will be fine. In fact, their schedules might have more room to play high-caliber teams than before. Time will tell.

Next Week: The Real Deal

I hope you had a good Thanksgiving. My brother put on a spread for a small group of us that had a turkey and all the usual fixings. It was delicious, as always.

The topping to a nice day was watching Justin Tucker rack up 19 points for my fantasy football team. With 12 points from Mathew Stafford and 12 more from Reggie Bush that makes it a 43 point lead for me going into this weekend. I can't get too cocky because my opponent only had the Steelers Defense/Special teams going yesterday, so he has 7 more players(including Adrian Peterson) yet to go this week to my 5. Nonetheless, it's a very good start.

Before last week's win I had lost three in a row, so the best I can do is the #3 seed in the playoffs. My opponent this week gets that seed if he beats me and I would slip to #4. I'm still very happy to be 8-4 at this stage and in the upper bracket of the playoffs. It has been a good FFL year no matter what happens after this point.

Around here you can kind of get a feeling for how harsh the winter is going to be by how the jetstream acts in November. When it stays north of Minnesota and bottles up all of that cold Arctic air there's a good shot at having a milder or at least shorter winter. When it doesn't though, it's often like a dam breaking and we can count on wave after wave of Arctic air masses coming down from Canada. We've already had a couple of cold blasts this month, so I'm not at all surprised to read this:

Light snow streaks in Monday & Tuesday, but the main event comes Wednesday into Friday as a series of sloppy southern storms track across the Plains. Wednesday into Thursday temperatures may be just warm enough aloft for a wintry mix in the Twin Cities (mostly snow north and west). A second storm pushing northeast may drop all snow by Friday into early Saturday, with cold air firmly in place. It's still too early for any more details, other than to say that snow lovers may finally get their wish the latter half of next week.

Here's a gasp-worthy number: the ECMWF (European) model prints out a low of -17F in the metro a week from tomorrow. Remember, the coldest jabs of winter are usually preceded by significant snows.

Numbing cold lingers into the second week of December with a temperature rebound by mid-month.

That's just one model, but any way you look at it it's going to get cold. All of that will certainly slide east of here, though I don't know how far south it will get. The real deal arrives next week. We've been warned.

About That Iran Deal

 Did you see the news?

Six world powers reached an interim agreement late Saturday night with Iran on its disputed nuclear program after four days of talks in Geneva.

In the six-month interim deal, Iran agreed to limit nuclear activities in return for relief of up to $7 billion in sanctions that have hurt its economy.

As always though, with the Obama administration you can take nothing at face value:

The final details of a nuclear agreement signed over the weekend between Iran and Western nations will not actually go into effect until further negotiations take place at a later date, according to a senior administration official and sources on Capitol Hill.

Even as Iran and the P5+1 announced late Saturday night that they had reached a six-month interim deal that curbs Iran’s nuclear program while giving Tehran the ability to continue some uranium enrichment activities, it is now clear that the six-month freeze will not go into effect until the P5+1 negotiators and Iran agree to a final plan to implement the interim agreement.

So what we actually have is an agreement to try to negotiate the implementation of an interim agreement that will maybe, or maybe not, lead to a comprehensive agreement ending Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Perhaps that diplomatic vaporware will turn out to amount to something in the future, but I'm afraid that Team "Ready, Fire, Aim" has once again squandered America's leverage in another stupid and futile political gesture aimed mostly for domestic consumption. Having announced Saturday night that the so-called agreement "...achieves a great deal," there is now intense pressure on Obama to see the negotiations move forward. A collapse at this point would be extremely embarrassing at a time when he can't politically afford more blunders. Iran will use that on Obama if they need it, you can count on that.

On the other hand, Obama/Kerry's tactical blunder doesn't matter at all if this is just the final stalling tactic in a long series. If the Iranians are really only several months from enriching enough uranium to make half a dozen bombs or so, as some analysts insist, then the sole purpose of the talks is to paralyze any military options by Israel and the United States until the weapons are complete. The mad mullahs aren't going to give up the Shiite/Persian A-Bomb after all that effort and money when they are so close. 

Can Israel be forestalled from attacking Iran? That depends on how much support it gets from the US and the Gulf states that feel threatened by Iran, and I don't know the answer there. 

If Israel doesn't attack and Iran gets the bomb you can bet that Russia and China, and probably India, will say "Oh well, it didn't work " and that will be the end of economic sanctions. You can also bet that in short order maybe a dozen of Pakistan's 120 nuclear warheads will find their way to Saudi Arabia and an era of three-way Mutually Assured Destruction deterrence will begin in the Middle East. Assuming that certain parties can be deterred. 

Meanwhile, the Sunni-Shiite proxy war in Syria rages on.

Weather Drama

It appears that a sizable storm now coming out of Texas and Oklahoma has a pretty good chance of disrupting travel plans for the holiday week. Mom and my sister are going out to visit the New York branch of the family, but they aren't leaving until Thanksgiving Day and the forecast for New York is cold but sunny. Hopefully the mess will be mostly cleaned up by then. If you are going out of town this week here's to good luck and safe travels.

I know it's not fair to laugh at people who aren't as well prepared for wintry weather as we are in Minnesota and I try to avoid it, but I saw the following and I couldn't help but snicker a little:

"Dallas prepared for the storm by declaring "Ice Force Level 1," code for sending 30 sanding trucks to trouble shoot hazardous road conditions."

Seriously? "Ice Force Level 1"?(cue the dramatic music)

Wasn't that a Chuck Norris movie? Or maybe it was a Jean-Claude Van Damme flick. Hey, it sounds like it should be a movie.

"Ice Force Level 1: Escape From Minnesota"

Or maybe it could be a Kris Humphries vehicle to movie stardom: "Ice Force Level 1: Escape From Kardashia". 

I better quit before I get in trouble. 

Update

Two of the five kids pulled from that pond yesterday morning have died. The other three remain in serious condition. Many questions remain unanswered:

The cause of the accident had yet to be determined late Thursday. Despite the mist, the roads were relatively dry and free of ice, authorities said. At that hour, traffic is relatively light.

That ramp is about a mile from my house and I tend to avoid it because of a short merge onto northbound Hwy. 100, not because there is anything wrong or unsafe about the ramp itself. The State Patrol is saying that alcohol was not a factor and there is no evidence that she deliberately drove the car into the pond. If that's true it would seem to leave mechanical failure, some sort of distraction, or she fell asleep as possible causes since apparently no other vehicles were involved. 

The details of the rescue still don't seem to add up. The Pioneer Press is reporting:

Authorities soon arrived, and several went into the water for the children. But it wasn't until the tow truck began pulling the car out that the rescuers reached the children.

...

The first child was removed from the car at 6:35 a.m., and the last one about 6:55 a.m., some 45 minutes after the car sank at 6:10 a.m.

It appears that some police or fire personnel quickly made heroic attempts to get to the children but were unsuccessful. I would like to know what happened over the next 20 minutes, not to criticize the fire department, but to learn what capability they lacked that kept those kids in the water for so long after they arrived. 

It also seems strange to me that once the car was out of the water enough to get the first child out it would take 20 more minutes to get the last one out. There's probably a good explanation, but I would like to hear it.

One last thing to note, the State Patrol has confirmed “according to our records [Guerrido] did not have a valid license.” That makes the following statement from her attorney(Rick Petry) to be, at best, flat-out false:

Petry wants no one “to think that this poor mother has done anything wrong,” he said. “From what I know, I don’t think she did anything wrong. She tried to do everything right.”

If you are driving without a valid license, you're wrong. Period. I understand that compassion is the priority right now, but accountability is going to have to enter the picture as well. She should not have been driving without a license, regardless of whether that was or was not a factor in the accident. Let's not start by whitewashing things.

From Bad To Worse

I drove past the scene of an accident this morning on the way to work. I could see that a car was secured by a rope about halfway up the embankment from an on-ramp to a rainwater holding pond and there were a very large number of emergency vehicles on scene, so it looked pretty bad. I didn't know the half of it:

A St. Louis Park spokesman said the 5 children rescued from a submerged car off Highway 100 Thursday morning were found unresponsive.

The car carrying a mother and 5 children went off the road and crashed into the pond at about 6:15 a.m. after taking the Highway 100 North ramp from Highway 7 westbound.

All five children are listed as having "serious injuries." Given how the article says "...the first child was pulled out of the car after 25 minutes, the last after 45 minutes..." I'm somewhat surprised they are alive at all. Amplatz is part of the University of Minnesota system and it and the Hennepin County Medical Center are topnotch hospitals, so the kids are getting the best of care.

The details are still being pulled together by the State Patrol so I'll reserve judgment, but a few things seem a little questionable at this point. Were the kids properly secured in the car? Five young kids are a lot to legally seat in a Grand Am I would think. How was it she was able to get out, but not one of the kids made it out of the car? If she's from Brooklyn Center that means she was headed toward home, roughly six miles up the highway she was taking. If she was heading toward home at that hour, where had she been? Did she fall asleep?

For my city's fire department, I have to ask how it could take from 25 to 45 minutes to rescue all of those kids. Station #1 is just under 1 mile from the scene and station #2 under 3 miles. I find it hard to believe that the first rescuers weren't on-scene within five minutes, so what happened between the time they arrived and the first child being rescued? Why did it take twenty more minutes before the last child was out of the water? Granted, 9' of cold water makes for very bad and dangerous conditions, but did it really have to take that long?

We'll see what kind of answers are forthcoming. In the meantime, I'm sure the families of those kids would appreciate any thoughts and prayers.

150 Years Ago Today: The Gettysburg Address

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863

There are five versions of the Gettysburg Address, each with slight differences to the text. The version above is the Bliss copy, but you can read all five and the story of their origin at the link. 

150 years later, "...that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion" still endures. In fact, that cause lives on even more broadly today, not just in theory, but in practice, especially for women and minorities. And along the way we have become a better nation.

Tuesday Odds And Ends

My thoughts and prayers(and a little money) go out to the people of the Philippines who were hit by Typhoon Yolanda. The donation page at the Salvation Army for this specific disaster can be found here if you are able to help. As is usually the case when Mother Nature wreaks havoc on somewhat isolated areas, it's the slow-motion effects after the initial blow that threaten to kill the most people. Lack of clean water, shelter, medical supplies, and great difficulty getting the logistics chain up and running. It's going to be a terribly hard and heart-breaking couple of weeks there.

Like every natural disaster these days, much of the incompetent and hysterical news media gets the story wrong and the climate change vultures swoop in to use the dead as props in their propaganda campaign. You have probably read that Typhoon Yolanda is one of the most powerful and deadly storms ever. Sadly, it's not even close. For some Truth to News Media^tm, check out this post at Watts Up With That. For some additional historical perspective, check out this one there also. None of that matters to the victims of Yolanda right now, of course, but it is important for the rest of us to push back against the nitwits, charlatans, and outright liars who are trying to con people into believing that something unprecedented just happened because of climate change.

The leaves have finally come down here in the Twin Cities. They stayed on the trees as late into November as I've ever seen. I ran a ton of leaves through the leaf vac over the weekend, so I have lots of compost material in both bins for the spring and plenty of shredded leaves bagged up to mix in with the lawn clippings next year. Even though we're well below freezing today, the forecast maybe has enough of a warm up for the composting process to work for a couple of weeks before winter finally shuts it down until spring.

The GOCE satellite indeed fell to Earth Sunday night. It looks like it broke up over the Falklands. Pic at the link. Just an FYI on those satellite tracker websites that appear to be doing real time tracking. After the European Space Agency announced that GOCE had probably disintegrated those websites showed it still going strong, which was kind of confusing. It turns out that the websites get periodic updates of tracking information that they then feed into a software program that predicts the actions of the object between updates. When the tracking info stopped for GOCE the ESA declared it dead, but the software programs kept going, presenting viewers with false information. Those websites are probably pretty cool for finding or tracking stable satellites, but viewer beware when it comes to events like what just happened with GOCE.

I reserve the right to change my mind based on further information, but as of today I think this whole business about Jonathan Martin being bullied by his Miami Dolphin teammates is a steaming load of you know what. Jonathan Martin is a pansy for running away from whatever problems he had in the locker room and now a bunch of other pansies in the media and punditland have glommed onto the issue so they can get their self-righteous on and stir the pot some more. Martin should have worked it out with his fellow offensive linemen, and if not them, the O-line coach. And if not him, Martin should have gone to the player captains and/or up the coaching staff chain of command. Instead he ran away like a little girl. Check that, I didn't actually mean to insult little girls. 

Great Moments in "Lowered NFL Expectations"

Vikings head coach Leslie Frasier on what he was thinking when the Vikings defense finally forced the Washington Redskins to punt late in the 3rd quarter last night:

“I was going, ‘Hurrah, hurrah,’ ” he said, arms raised above his head. “We got another one and another one. We’re going to do this the second half of the season. We’ll make people punt.”

Heads Up This Weekend

Little bits of the sky will be falling sometime this weekend into Monday:

A European satellite that ran out of fuel will start falling in the next few days, and fragments of the disintegrating 2,000-pound spacecraft are expected to strike the Earth's surface.

Nobody knows where or when the fragments will hit, but the European Space Agency has said the parts are likely to fall into the ocean or unpopulated areas. Potential spots will be narrowed down closer to re-entry, ESA said on its website.

See the map below from the European Space Agency for real time positioning. Odds are the debris will fall harmlessly into an ocean somewhere, but you never know. Have a good weekend.  :)