Plenty of Nothing

Snowshoer, 1930s

Evangeline Brandt "Friday"

You Say?

I'm no different from you, I want to keep my Japanese current.  So this list of sixty 2008 neologism is must reading.  From sabupuraimu (subprime) to saibin inko (juror parkakeet) the Japanese language proves its ability to stay up to date.  (Via Languagehat.)

Traces

Cross Promotion

Nice piece of cross-promotion here.  The LCBO has loaded up on gift boxes for the holiday season, and one of them is this all-Edinburgh tandem of Deuchars IPA and Rankin's detective John Rebus.  The beer's all right, though more oaty than I'd expect from an India pale ale.  The novel is ... meh.  Maybe Rebus gets sharper in the sequels, but God he's a shitty detective in this one.  His only advantage as a cop is that he's sleeping with a coworker who knows what's going on.  The rest of the time he's drinking.    Here's the crucial moment for me, on page 194, just as Rebus has figured out the identity of the psychopath who is about to murder his daughter: "Rebus, shivering, entered a pub for the hell of it and ordered a triple whiskey."  Dude!  Catch the guy!  Douglas

Obama and Walcott

Bookninja is in a faint because President-elect Obama has been spotted with a copy of Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott's collected poems.  The last president to show any grounding in poetry was Kennedy who had Robert Frost over for his inauguration and who, like Obama, knew how to speak.  To be fair, though, the copy Obama is holding in this Reuter's photo looks fairly pristine, as if it has just been handed to him by some staffer who'd learned via the intertubes that Walcott has written this poem.

Bouquet (M. Purcell)

Behind the Trail King

Evangeline Brandt "Choosing a Major"

Senior Women's Hockey Roundup

The CWHL is back for a second season, this time without the Quebec franchise.  The Ottawa Capital Canucks have returned as the Ottawa Senators Women's Hockey Club, wearing the same regalia as the NHL Senators, after having merged with the old Ottawa Raiders' NCCP program and entered into an affiliation with the men's team.  They'll play mainly out of the Bell Sensplex in Kanata.  Judging by the roster the Ottawa franchise is still the employer of choice for ex hockey Gee Gees. 

Coincidentally, both the CWHL and Sweden's Dam Riksserien are in their second year with six clubs.  But the Swedish league is the opposite of the CWHL in that five of the six clubs (AIK, Brynäs, Leksand, Linköping and MODO) are associated with senior men's teams and only Segeltorp is not.  If the WNBA is your guide, then affiliations between men's and women's clubs would be the way to go toward a pro women's hockey league.

The WWHL is back with five clubs, but no Hayley Wickenheiser who has a goal and two assists in ten games with Eskilstuna Linden of Sweden's Division 1C.

In Switzerland, Lugano sit atop a seven team league ahead of ZSC Lions, Reinach, last year's playoff winners Langenthal, Küssnacht, Bomo Thun, and Visp.

Female hockey players suffer, or report, twice as many concussions as their male counterparts.