101 NHL Games in Person

Back in April of 2016 I made the fateful decision to go to a Dallas Stars playoff game. The Stars were coming off their best regular season in a decade and I had a friend that I roomed with in pony conventions that wouldn't stop talking about them. I finally decided that I should go to a game just to see what the fuss was all about. I had been to a Kansas City Blades of the defunct International Hockey League back in the mid-90s, but I didn't really know what was going on then, and it had been 20 years since then. So I went to Game 2 of the Stars' first-round series against the Minnesota Wild. It was exciting and I had fun but still didn't really know what was going on. My friend had season tickets with two seats and he would invite me to come along, but I never had time since I lived two hours away. I didn't go to another Stars game until 2018 when I just happened to be in DFW for a Rangers game. I still didn't really have an idea of what was going on, but I became caught up in the atmosphere. So when my friend invited me to games I would accept.

I was still very new to hockey. I tried watching the sport on TV in the past, but it was never able to capture my attention. I realized that I was able to follow the action better in person, especially since our seats were in the upper deck where you can have a view of the entire ice. The more games I went to, the more I gained the ability to follow along with the action. I learned about some of the rules such as offsides and icing. I was better able to appreciate the fluidity of the game. And the more I knew the more I can appreciate watching the game on TV, and the more eager I'd be to watch the game in person. And so when I went to Michigan for a job interview I decided I wanted to go to a Red Wings game in Detroit. 

Pretty soon it got to the point where when my friend was giving up one of his season tickets, I picked it up officially making me a Stars season ticket holder. It led to me flying out to California just so I can watch the Sharks play. When I finally completed my journey to watch a game at every active MLB stadium, I decided that yes, I did want to take on the challenge of going to every NHL arena. I've been keeping track of every NHL game I've been to very much like how I do with MLB games. And on Tuesday February 13 I went to a Nashville Predators game in Bridgestone Arena. When I entered it into my spreadsheet I realized that it was the 100th NHL game I've been to! The milestone just caught me off guard! I had already made a plan to go to a St. Louis Blues game in Enterprise Center just two days later, so I didn't really have time to make this post, where I take a look at some of the statistics from the 101 games I've been to.

Adrián Beltré: His Life and Career

Back in 2018 I wrote a series of six posts on this blog to commemorate the six-month and the one-year anniversary of one of the greatest baseball moments I have ever seen: Adrián Beltré's 3,000th hit, very much what I did with Randy Johnson's 300th win back in 2009. One of these posts was about the life and career of Adrián Beltré. I put in a lot of effort in researching the piece and wound up with a 13,000-word behemoth of an article, and it only covered him up to the 2017 season. I went back over it years later and was impressed by my work, but since I don't have an editor I noticed a lot of typos and grammatical errors and even worse some factual errors. I was thinking about fixing some of those errors and reposting the piece, but then I got lazy and decided hey, why not do it for a really big day, such as after Adrián Beltré gets voted into the Hall of Fame.

Well, it's finally happened. Adrián Beltré appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot for the 2024 election, and has been voted in by an overwhelming 95.1% margin. (Well, by the time I'm writing this intro it's still a few days before the announcement, but he's been named on 175 out of 177 public ballots. He's going to have to fall to about half of the remaining votes in order to miss out on election.) Which means it's time to pull out and present to you the Life and Career of Adrián Beltré!

AMPS 2023 - Winners

It's January 15, Martin Luther King Jr Day in the United States this year. However, in my fictional country of L World, it is the night of the first of three major film awards: the Awards for Motion Picture Services (AMPS). Over the past few weeks I've made two different posts each with a poll, the first one asking people to vote for the final Best Picture nominee, and the second asking people to vote for the Best Picture winner. For some reason the Best Picture nominee poll received a lot more votes than the Best Picture winner poll, and there was a tie going into yesterday. But the tie has been broken, so we can reveal the winner of Best Picture as well as the other 14 categories in AMPS, very much like how I did for 2020 and 2022 as well as the winners from 2000-2019. 

Anyways, we start from the technical categories and will work our way to the acting categories before the final reveal of the Best Picture winner y'all voted for!

AMPS 2023 Best Picture Nominees

So back on Christmas Eve I had posted my annual vote for the final Best Picture nominee for the Awards for Motion Picture Services (AMPS), the first of my fictional film awards that I had been running for well over 25 years. If you go back to the post you'll notice that the poll is done, because I had closed it around the New Year's, although I've been putting on making this post because I'm lazy and all. I was blown away by the level of involvement. We had 17 votes, the most that I've ever had in one of these polls (of course it helps that I kept spamming the link in various Discord communities.) 

It was a really close race, with one movie picking up the votes early on but another one came storming back. In the end only one vote separated the top two movies, but which one came out on top? You'll find out when I reveal the other four films that were pre-selected to make up the final Best Picture lineup for AMPS 2023! And as a bonus for getting this post out late, for the first time since 2020 I will let you the "viewers" have final say in the winner! Yes, at the end of this post there will be another poll where you can vote for who you feel should walk away with the coveted Best Picture prize! 

And in case you are interested, here are all of the previous Best Picture nominees lineup
2022 2021 2020 2019 2017 2016 2015 2013 2012 2011 2008

Also the disclaimer

YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THESE MOVIES
THESE ARE MVIES THAT I MADE UP
NOBODY HAS SEEN THEM BECAUSE THEY DON'T EXIST
EXCEPT IN MY OWN IMAGINATION
BUT DON'T LET THAT STOP YOU FROM VOTING FOR ONE OF THEM

AMPS 2023 Best Picture Nominees Vote

It's finally the Holiday season, and for most people it means giving gifts and spending time with family and all sorts of wholesome commercialism. For me, it means continuing a tradition that I have been carrying on for most than a quarter of a century: where I collect the fake movies that I had come up with over the year and handing out fake awards, starting with the Awards for Motion Picture Services (AMPS). AMPS is the earliest of three different fake film awards that I have and the least formal, which means that I have some fun with it in that I allow for some audience participation. Since 2008 I have been picking out three titles for people to vote on to see which can join four other movies to complete the Best Picture lineup. So after the break I will be presenting this year's three titles along with a short summary (because I never have the actual creativity to turn these storylines into a workable script) and a SurveyMonkey poll where you can vote on the winner. 

In case my explanation is confusing, here are the previous finalist vote. It used to be on Facebook but then Facebook shut down the Notes, after which it migrated over to this blog.
2008 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022

Also here is another important disclaimer

YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THESE MOVIES
THESE ARE MOVIES THAT I MADE UP
NOBODY HAS SEEN THEM BECAUSE THEY DON'T EXIST
EXCEPT IN MY OWN IMAGINATION
DON'T LET THAT STOP YOU FROM VOTING FOR ONE OF THEM

Randy Johnson's 300th Win Day - 2023

Another year has come and gone, and we find ourselves arriving at June 4 of the year 2023. It is the 14th anniversary of Randy Johnson's 300th career win; the holiday I've been celebrating ever year on this date. Well, I personally spent the day hanging out at a My Little Pony convention in Chicago. It was great fun, but now I'm writing this in the O'Hare airport watching as my red eye flight out of Chicago get delayed already over ten hours out. Hooray! 

Meanwhile I still have the losing pitchers of Randy Johnson memorized, as I keep refreshing my memory by reciting the wins every time I harvest fruits in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. (I have 620 fruits to harvest, which is enough to go through each of Randy's wins twice through. I recite the final score the first time around then the date the second time around, while naming the losing pitcher every time.) My journey to get the autographs of the losing pitchers on their cards have definitely slowed, as private signings rarely include these losing pitchers and my autograph by mail attempts have hit dead ends. I did manage to get the autograph of Ricky Bones (win number 117 on July 18, 1997) in person at a Nationals vs. Mets game. I have also passed the halfway mark as I now have 164 signatures, although the last half is going to be so much harder. 

Ke Huy Quan's The Big Eunuch and The Little Carpenter: A Review

So the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once opened this past year to great critical and box office success, receiving rave reviews for its story, its visual design, and more importantly the acting performances. Of note Ke Huy Quan received plenty of praise for his multi-layered role as Waymond Wang, the beleaguered husband of Michelle Yeoh's Evelyn. It was a long road back for Quan, who was once upon a time a child star noted in films like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and The Goonies (1985). He disappeared from film for well over 20 years in the mid-90s, transitioning more towards work behind the camera, serving as stunt coordinator and later assistant director. He gave several interviews about his circuitous back to acting, many of which referred to a 1993 Taiwan costume drama with the amusing title of The Big Eunuch and the Little Carpenter.

Now, my parents are from Taiwan, and throughout most of my childhood in the 1990s we received satellite television, and one of the staples of our television viewing are the TV dramas, self-contained series that can extend anywhere from 20 episodes all the way to over 60. I'd certainly remember a show with the title The Big Eunuch and the Little Carpenter, but I had no memory of it, and as it turns out neither did my parents. Perhaps it never did air in the United States. I decided to do a search on Google, and found some bare-bones information with its Chinese title 大太監與小木匠. More significantly, the series was uploaded in its entirety by the Taiwan TeleVision (TTV) official channel, along with several of their great television drama, such as my childhood favorite Heroic Youth. (英雄少年)

 I pulled up the first episode, and it became evident pretty quickly why the series never made it to the United States. The show opens to a bunch of naked boys crowding a square. Yes, I suppose the boys were all eunuchs and since all eunuchs are by definition castrated they would have no external genitalia. Yet it's still a bunch of naked boys crowding a square. And because this is the first shot of the opening credits, every single episode opens with a shot of a bunch of naked boys crowding a square. And people thought the title was provocative. Yet this aired every weeknight at 8pm on TTV for 40 days from November 1993 to January 1994.

Nevertheless, I decided to watch the rest of the first episode. It's a fairly standard fare where it introduces the characters and the setting, but nothing really stood out for me. I watched about two more episodes and didn't really care for it so I shelved the show for a time. However, as Quan began capturing one critics awards after another, his chances of Oscar glory rose. (And in fact he did wind up with not only an Oscar nomination but also the Oscar victory). And since I can't think of any other Oscar nominated actor who had starred in a Taiwan television drama, I decided to give the rest of the show a chance. And now that I've finished all 40 episodes, I've decided to write perhaps the first English review of The Big Eunuch and the Little Carpenter.