Hi, I'm Conan. Nice to meet you.

She's lovely, absolutely lovely. Amazing voice, long black hair. Her name's Bonnie. As in, my iPod. Yes, I just named my iPod Bonnie. Deal with it. I'll be dealing with her and I'm quite happy with her, thank you very much.

Score one for my broken stick/shaft collection!

I grabbed a broken Nike Bauer Vapor 40 stick today walking out of the locker room. And by "stick" I mean the end bit of the shaft with the blade was hanging off the rest of the shaft. Shame too, as it was a good stick, had the blade not been hanging on. Maybe I can send it in to SRS and get it back, cause it's a nice stick. Oh well, now I have two shafts in my broken stick collection.

Why don't we do this in hockey?

You know, after watching the World Cup and seeing how opposing players trade jerseys at the end of their games and watching the ESPN Jozy Altidore jersey exchange commercial, why don't we do that in hockey? I mean, it'd be cool to do and it'd be a great way to get jerseys as well. Yeah yeah, I know that hockey jerseys generally are more expensive to produce/buy, but it'd be a neat thing to do. I'd do it, just throwing that out there.

Locker room fact finding

As I was in the locker room today at Kettler (Kettler as in Kettler Capitals Iceplex, practice facility of the Caps) pulling off my gear, I ran into a guy goes to Mary Washington. He said that he wanted to go to the administration/student activities office to form a team, and that he was planning on getting a team established. It was pretty cool meeting another guy from UMW who wanted to get a team going-hopefully it'll happen when I'm there!

NHL Free Agency begins. Cue the madness of it all.

Today marks the start of the NHL's madness free agency period. Nothing too big happened in terms of signings, but I'm gonna share my thoughts really quickly about who signed where.

-Volchenkov, Tallinder, and Hedberg to the Devils. I like these signings, as Volchenkov can help block shots (huge understatement there; he's one of the premier shot blockers in the NHL), Tallinder is a solid defenseman, and you can't go wrong with Johan "the Moose" Hedberg (love that nickname), cause he's pretty solid and can be a solid goalie. Great signings so far.
- The Blackhawk's fire sale is continuing, with Andrew Ladd going to the Thrashers, and keeping up the Chicago-Atlanta connection of late, for defenseman Ivan Vishnevskiy. Seriously, it seems like half the team has been traded; Sopel, Byfuglien, Eager, Versteeg, and now Ladd are all gone. Then again, they're stockpiling prospects like crazy. And I mean crazy as in, it's criminal how many prospects they now have in the system. Oh and Burish signed with Dallas. I swear, half their Stanley Cup-winning team is gone.
- An ex-Devil, Paul Martin, has signed with the Penguins. While I hate to see him go to Pittsburgh, at least he gets more recognition.
- Dan Hamhuis to the Canucks? Well, at least Luongo won't get shelled cause of a solid defense, conceptually of course. Same goes for Michalek, cause I actually liked him; it's gonna test that with him also going to Pittsburgh.
- I'm digging Phoenix's move, resigning Morris and signing Ray Whitney
- WTF Glen Sather. You sign Boogaard for 4 years? You sign a player who fights and that's it. You've lost it, completely freaking lost it.

Baseball Fun

Admittedly, I've been wiped out for the last hour or two, so I didn't post this sooner. Why am I wiped out? Cause I was playing baseball with some friends and some colleagues from my dad's office, that's why. You know it was fun when you're dead tired, which, when I think about it, is the case for a lot of things. Anyways, we played at Washington-Lee's field in Arlington, and boy it was a blast. The entire infield is a sandlot, so it felt like something out of the movie The Sandlot. For the first half, all 11 of us rotated between hitting and fielding, which surprisingly was a lot more fun that you'd expect; I also got the rust out of fielding and hitting, so that was a blast. After a while, we played a slightly abridged version of the real rules to baseball, and it was young guys versus the "old" guys. It was Jim, Dave, Evan, Tony, and I against the rest, with one pitcher pitching the whole time. Since both sides didn't have enough players to cover all the positions, anything hit to the right of 2nd base was an automatic out. The pitcher also was the 1st baseman, so if you weren't quite there to first base and the pitcher had the ball, you were out. Moving on, we had a pretty intense game, which ended up being tied 4-4 after how many innings. Both sides were hitting the ball pretty well, just that we had a series of misfortune, aka "the fielder caught the ball". I had one time where the bases were loaded...and I fly out to end the inning. It happened another time, just that I was on base; karma sucks big time. However, I redeemed myself by driving in the game tying run, so that was cool. Towards the end, my knees were sore from running the bases (didn't get much of a chance to do that, cause we never got to do much) and from being the catcher. Whew, I'm still sore from that. Anyways, it was a blast. A bit tiring and I'm slightly sore in my calves from bending as the catcher, but it was a blast! Hopefully in the future we can get a real game going, cause it's so much fun playing!

Anatomy of a Rant

Some of you gentle folk might be wondering, what's the secret to a good rant? Well you know what? I have the secret to a good rant. Without further ado, here is the whole key to a good rant.

You can start out in one of two ways: guns blazing, take no prisoners, or the subtle way. It's kinda like "do I want to take his head off or just rip him a new hole?" Either way, you'll achieve your goal. Personally, I prefer the subtle way, as it's far more fun to mess with somebody's head. But that's just me.

Case 1: The guns blazing method.
What we have here is where you're obviously telling people, you're somebody who is not to be messed with; if they look at you funny, you let them have it. To give them that impression, it's kind of like the first day in jail-you have to kick somebody's ass to let the rest of the bunch know that you mean business. The guns blazing method of a rant is like that, you set the tone early on. From the onset, you should say something like "this would be fun/good/exciting/whatever it is you're talking about, had there not been the problem of it totally sucking", something along that lines; I'll let you figure your own way of conveying that. From here, you just pour it on. Basically, you just heap on the abuse after initially establishing what the main gripe is (note, if it's a true guns blazing rant, there should be several "main" gripes). However, you don't want to overdo your ranting at once, cause it's more effective if you give it some optimism...and then brutally bring it down. What I'd say is something like, "It wasn't all bad, as his acting/performance/whatever you're talking about was the saving grace. Unfortunately, it's as effective as wearing a faulty life jacket when you can't swim, your arms are broken, and you're bleeding with sharks all around you-you're dead anyways." That really just sums up the guns blazing method, as it's pretty straightforward to do in a rant.

Case 2: The subtle way

Some people might want to rip the head off a certain person/group/subject in rants, but the subtle rants are often more efficient. For me, it starts off with a seemingly neutral review/critique, then I infuse it with my biting commentary. Really, it comes to just pouring it on in the rant, but it has to happen later on. Start off by maybe saying, for example, "Going into the movie, I was warned that you'd want to kill yourself by the movie's end. Well, that wasn't true. By the end of it, I wanted to not only kill myself, but the director who made it." By doing this, you express outrage but not so blatantly. From that example, you set yourself up perfectly to continue to rant about something. If I had to give a mentality to the subtle rant, you have to express outrage about something and why your designated subject matter is bad, and you have to have the mentality of quietly plotting revenge. Oh and the last thing that makes the subtle rant subtle is the use of language; the successful use of bigger words lends more to the effect.

Finally, have fun with your rants, as they're supposed to be therapeutic (there's some twisted irony for you there). If you want to see one of my examples, check out my rant on Disney on my Facebook.