Three Days In Amsterdam

Amsterdam is the perfect European city for Americans. Almost everyone speaks English, and making it even better than London, the accents are more exotic. We arrived at Amsterdam’s Schipohl Airport early on a gray Friday morning, dragging our luggage to the light rail line that would take us from the airport to the city’s Centraal Station. We had agreed to try and do our unaccompanied, seven-day, two-city, Amsterdam and Paris trip without resorting to taxicabs.

The initial confrontation with the complexities of public transit in a strange city is almost always a painful process. It usually takes me several hit and miss encounters with ticket kiosks, exact fare rules, or pressing buttons to open subway doors. While we did manage the light-rail connection into the city. Finding our hotel, just blocks from the station, proved a minor ordeal with the inadequate, schematic tourist maps we were carrying. Jet-lagged, confused and over-packed, we wandered around trying to figure out where we were until a busy woman setting up a produce market stand grudgingly pointed us in the right direction.

The hotel, modern and crisp, was located in, gasp, “the Red Light District.” Ah those liberal Dutch. While it was still the morning rush hour when we wandered in search of our hotel, I noted that the numerous “Coffee” shops we passed were in full swing, with customers lounging on sofas, and I suppose, inhaling to their hearts’ content. I thought, “hey is this a great town, or what?”

Refreshed after a brief nap, we went out to discover the charms of Amsterdam. The rings of tree-lined, interconnected canals, the bow-to-stern barges and houseboats, the eccentric, centuries-old Dutch architecture, cobbled streets and the bicycles everywhere combined to create a wonderful sense of being in a one-of-a-kind place. In a comfortably down-to-earth café, I ordered my lunch, a roast-beef sandwich with egg and mayonnaise, and a large draft of Heiniken. We’d been told that Dutch cuisine was less than stellar, but with my comfort-food palate, just about everything we ordered suited me well. Thus fortified, we began walking, a process that barely stopped for any of our waking hours during the three days we stayed in Amsterdam.

The canal-side streets, block after block of them, flow with the canals themselves in concentric rings defining and demarking the old city of Amsterdam. Each turn of the head is another photo-op, another perfect Netherlands motif. I began snapping and had to exercise a force of will to cease, to say “enough.” The day was sunny and there were shopping streets, book-stalls, street musicians and cafes with outdoor seating for coffee, pastries or wine. We were in search of the St. Nicklas’ Boat Club, a non-profit, cooperative canal boat tour service, an open-air alternative to the larger, glitzier glass-covered canal tour launches. But like so many cooperative ventures, the enterprise had run aground and was no longer operating. More wandering, more pastry, more wine and back to the hotel for a break before dinner.

One residual piece of three centuries of Dutch East Indies colonial history is Amsterdam’s array of Indonesian restaurants, a cuisine I’d never experienced. On a recommendation, we selected a “Rice Table” offering at Indrapur, one of the tonier Indonesian eateries. Rice Table meals are an Indonesian version of Chinese Dim Sum or the Iberian Tapas. In deference to my Irish heritage, we chose a “mild” (a misnomer) selection of over twenty different and exotically flavored small dishes, every one of which was a treat. Returning from our East Indies meal, we caught a tram to a mid-town carnival and rode a giant Ferris wheel up and over the lights of the city. There was a brightly lit, ten-story swing with seats for two that swung out over the carnival below. I dared my wife to no avail. Two nights later we were on it.

Our second day in Amsterdam day came on cold and wet. With rain jackets, umbrellas and our new competence at navigating the city’s tram lines, we arrived early at the already crowded van Gogh museum. As a lifelong fan, I was thrilled to discover, along with so many favorites, a couple of stunning landscapes I’d never before seen. More walking in the drizzle through a half-dozen block street market, more tram riding and then a surprisingly very good lunch in a pretentious restaurant with annoyingly indifferent service. Much more walking, window and actual shopping until exhaustion and the proximity to our hotel got us back to our room for a break.

Relatively restored, we headed back out into the rain for dinner. We were to have a meal of traditional Dutch cuisine, another recommendation. When we arrived at the address, the Dutch eatery had been replaced by an Italian restaurant. At a more Dutch place down the street, we were told we could be seated in fifteen minutes and that we could wait in the bar. After a half hour, we left. Back out in the rain and several streets away, we passed a small bistro named Prego. Why not? We were seated and began what was to be one of the best meals of the entire trip. Two aging gays were running the place and the vibe was a pleasant as it was unostentatious. The food was first rate and creative. I had wild boar, my first ever, and my wife a fish dish. Everything was just right and the dessert more than just right. After warm farewells from our host and our waiter, we headed out once again into the chilly drizzle and toward our king-sized hotel bed.

Sunday, our last full day in Amsterdam, began with the Hotel’s inclusive and first-rate buffet breakfast. Then, a one-hour canal tour on a glass-covered boat accompanied by a large group of Chinese tourists. Strangely enough, my canal photos taken from water level proved less pleasing than those taken ashore. The loop of the city by boat and the accompanying sound track was instructive.

One of the sights from the boat was the lineup of visitors waiting to tour the Ann Frank House, an Amsterdam attraction as famous as the canals and the van Gogh Museum. For better or worse, I opted to pass on the Ann Frank house, feeling as I do that I’m already too well aware of the horrors of the all too recent past. Prior to this trip, a friend had given me tourist information on Amsterdam that included a brochure from the “Dutch Resistance Museum.” The brochure rightly celebrates the heroism of those who dared to actively resist one of the most brutal terror regimes in human history. On the other hand only a single allusion notes the existence of the NSB, the Dutch National Socialist Party, the active collaborators with the Nazi Occupation. Over 100,000 Dutch Jews perished during the war, the highest death rate per capita in the occupied Western European countries, that and the fact that 100,000 Dutch citizens volunteered to serve in the German armed forces, mostly in the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front, speaks for itself. And finally, the Frank family, like so many of the resistance heroes, was betrayed to the Nazis, it seems, by a fellow Dutch citizen.

More shopping, a lot more walking, some lunch, dinner, more photo taking and finally back to the hotel and bed. On our way back through the Red Light district, I noted that by comparison, the coffee shop scene with its stoned college kids and dreadlocked skateboarders appeared downright wholesome.

In the morning, I managed one last stroll around the canals before leaving to meet our noon train for Paris.

John Brown’s Body

Driving through cold rain and heavy traffic to pick up some lunch, I overtook an old barge of a car waddling along doing about twenty-five in what was a forty-five zone. A disheveled early 1980s station wagon, its flashers were on and its read-end was plastered with “Right to Life” stickers. As a card-carrying subscriber to The New Yorker and the NYRB, my opinions can be largely predictable. I shook my head as I sped past the crawling low- end heap and what I reflexively assumed was its yahoo driver.

Given all of the above, I am caught between a willingness to doubt all, my own opinions included, and the dangers of doubt’s smug certainties. While I remain instinctively predisposed to support a woman’s right to choose, I have no illusions about the reality of what an abortion entails. Having become of late a doting grandfather probably also undercuts the clarity of any absolute position on so volatile an issue. Moreover, I suspect that my antipathy to so many of the Pro-Life advocates and their fanaticism is reaction based upon style, upon reasonableness, upon taste. The not-so-easily dismissed truth that enters my mind is the fact that even the worst of assholes are not of necessity, wrong.

To state the obvious, one shouldn’t judge the merits of a case by the nature, behavior or even the stupidity of its adherents. A self-styled Left Libertarian, a leveler of sorts, I like to believe that where I feel compelled to choose sides, I do so after having listened to what’s being offered. And even when genuinely convinced that a position on an issue is the work of what Mencken would have called “serfs, goose-steppers and poltroons,” my conclusions are too often tempered by reference to Cromwell’s words to the Church of Scotland in 1650, “I beseech in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken.”

In coming to grips with an issue as disturbing as abortion, the most powerful touchstone against any kind of certainty could be the case of John Brown, the anti-slavery John Brown of Russell Banks’ novel “Cloudsplitter,” the absolute fanatic Pottawatomie Brown, the unrepentant murderer Osawatomie Brown. Deemed a deranged psychotic by most of his fellow Americans and executed by his government, poor, mad John Brown, in his time and in his place, just may have been the only sane man in The United States of America. His example is one to give pause to received, hasty or unexamined opinions.

The Wild Blue Yonder Revisited

I am a captive to the evocative and iconic aspects of vintage military aircraft, particularly those from the mid-1930s through the mid 1950s, the period from the Boeing P-26 “Peashooter” through the F-86 “Sabrejet.”

In the company of several other knowledgeable and similarly afflicted aficionados, I left for a local airport where a non-profit outfit, “The Collings Foundation,” had flown in several of its vintage aircraft; a B-24 “Liberator,” A B-17 Flying Fortress” and a P-51”Mustang.” For a nominal fee of twelve-bucks visitors can go out on the tarmac and get up close to the planes, even clamber aboard.

For those with deeper pockets, much deeper pockets, a couple of hundred bucks will get you a group ride in one of the big bombers, and for a couple of grand you can get a seat in the Mustang fighter, even get to handle the stick in flight. We choose the twelve-buck option.

I’ve seen restored Mustang fighter planes up close, and I believe that they are in fact one of the most beautiful aircraft ever to fly. And in their later modifications toward the end of WW II, arguably the high point of propeller-driven aviation. The big, four-engined bombers have become a more rare species. Static, that is non-flying versions of the once giant craft, can be seen at some of the major air museums around the country. But to see working, flying, sixty-five-year-old heavy bombers is well worth a short car trip and a modest entry fee.

The beautifully aerodynamic B-17 is probably the most iconic aircraft of the Second World War, made famous by the USAAF’s, Eighth Air Force for the daylight bombardment of targets in Europe. Postwar movies like “Twelve-O-Clock High” with Gregory Peck and “Command Decision” starring Clark Gable, himself a veteran Eighth Air Force combat air crewman, established the B-17 as the face of the nation’s air war.

The rather ungainly, if not homely B-24 actually saw wider global service in the war, and was produced in greater numbers, over 18,000. The more comely B-17s numbered 13,000. With passage of over six decades, I found myself struck more by the physical presence of the rather dowdy and less famous B-24 “Liberator,” a solid manifestation of pure function.

Seeing both of the heavy bombers in the flesh, triggered some contradictory perceptions. On one hand, compared to today’s sleek supersonic jets, the F-22 Raptor for example, the WW II bombers appear hopelessly primitive. They came into being less than four decades after Wilbur and Orville first took to the air. At the same time looking at the two large multi-cylindered radial engines on each wing, and at the maze of cockpit instrumentation, navigation, communications equipment and the weaponry, the dominant impression is one of an almost overwhelming complexity.

Scrambling through the head-bumping maze-like interiors was like trying to move through a series of eccentric, poorly connected closets, spaces designed purely for the function of aerial warfare, oblivious to the simplest of human needs. What must it have been like to fly missions in one of these? What must it have been like to actually engage in high altitude combat in something like this? My own reactions were feelings of awe and a respectful humility. I remembered reading that Eighth Air Force aircrew casualty rates exceeded those of any other category in WW II, including combat infantry and submarine crews.

While we debated where to go for lunch, an announcement was made to clear the tarmac, all three of the planes were about to depart for a show at some distant airport. One after another, nine great engines came to life, belching black smoke before settling down. As they turned to taxi toward the runway, we braced against the prop wash until they disappeared down the runway to prepare for takeoff. One by one they roared past and then circled slowly overhead before fading away to the east. I wondered what it must have looked like and sounded like in the 1940s when these then giant planes rose in their thousands to do battle all over the world.

To end on a more realistic note, an extensive, in-depth study of the entire strategic bombing campaign conducted after the war implied that the game really had not been worth the candle, that the resources expended in strategic bombing could have been more effectively deployed elsewhere to shorten the length of the war. True or not, that conclusion in no way diminishes the epic heroism and absolute wonder of the whole enterprise.

Hiatus

Time to take a break from twenty-months of blogging. Time to finish up a long-delayed project, that of seeing a book, completed over five years ago, into print. Hope to be back to the Compost Heap before the end of 2009, maybe dropping something into the pile occasionally between now and then.

Another War Story

At one stage of my grown-up period when I was attempting to pass for a serious corporate type, I found myself in a conference room of a Harrisburg Holiday Inn, a last-minute, substitute delegate at a committee meeting of a statewide trade association.

I’d never before met any of the ten guys in the room, and had no clear idea of what I was supposed to be doing or not doing at the meeting. I knew only that I was there to show the company flag and to get through the day without embarrassing myself. The other committee members, this was 1976 and they were all men, were a good deal older than me, each representing utility companies from around the State, and they all seemed to be on easy, familiar terms with each other. I felt like a crasher at a private party. There was little serious attention paid to the meeting’s prepared agenda, and I figured that for most of those present, it was a day out of the office with best of all, a free lunch.
And it was to be good lunch indeed.

Deserting the Spartan accommodations of the Holiday Inn for a high-end, overpriced streak joint, we entered a dining room filled with state legislators drinking and chowing-down, all accompanied by smiling lobbyists. In an “aha!” moment, I concluded that like the politicians, we were about to dine well on somebody else’s money. The understanding among my fellow committee members was that the association’s marketing consultant, who had been chairing the meeting, would be putting the lunch tab on his expense account. I watched as my fellow committeemen ordered from the top of the menu. There were drinks all around, a hearty lunch and lots of good-old-boy jocularity. I did my part, smiling, grunting, eating, drinking and nodding.

After lunch and over coffee, one of more outspoken of the group, the association staffer, a big stuffy guy, self-important and decked out in full Ivy League drag, lit one of the cigars offered by the generous consultant, almost everyone still smoked in those days. “Mr. Big Deal” as I’d christened him, sent out his first clouds of smoke and began what would be a long monologue about his wartime years, all spent in the peaceful environs of Hawaii. “Best days of my life,” he went on. “Plenty of booze and horny women everywhere…,” and on and on. After a few minutes of that and looking for any escape, I turned to the guy seated next me, a guy from a gas and water company in Reading. I knew his name was Bernie. He looked about the right age. So I asked him, matter-of-factly, “hey Bernie, were you in the war?” Bernie was a little guy, even shorter than me. He wore one of those waffle-weave polyester blazers that were sold on the premise that they’d never wrinkle. It was mustard yellow. He too was puffing on one of the consultant’s freebee cigars.

Pausing as if to consider answering, he slid the cigar from his mouth and gave me a slow, flat, “yeah, I was in the war.” Willing to do anything to maintain an alternative to the “Remember Pearl Harbor” soliloquy going on across the table, I followed up with an equally disinterested “what were you in.” My new friend Bernie barely acknowledged my inquiry. In fact he actually turned his head away from me as he quietly said, “the air corps.” He said it like it didn’t really mean anything to him. It was my serve again, and I was beginning to tire of the whole thing. “Did you fly,” I asked. “Yep,” was all he said. Approaching terminal tedium with Bernie and his one-syllable answers, I asked what I thought would be the requisite and final question of a dead-end conversation. No longer at all that interested in Bernie, not in his war, not in his hideous sport coat – his necktie was worse – I threw out a casual, “what did you fly.” With a studied slowness, he pulled the cigar from his mouth and for the first time in our little back and forth, looked me in the eye. It was a look to say, “you really fucking want to know, don’t you.” Deliberately, slowly, and enunciating every syllable, he smiled for the first time and said, “P-38s.”

My outburst of “no shit” was involuntary and turned every head at the table in our direction. Catching myself, I allowed Mr. Big Deal to resume his Hawaiian rhapsody before trying to recapture Bernie’s attention with another “no shit, Bernie. Did you really fly a P-38?” He knew he had my attention. I got another sly smile and a modest, softly stated, “sure did.”

I was eight years old when the Second World War ended. Coming into awareness in the excitement of the biggest war ever fought, the content of the imagery inside my head anticipated the entire film library of the History Channel. My default settings for action, for excitement, for cool were all referenced to the photojournalism, the newsreels and the movies that had covered the war. I hadn’t cared a damn for sports, for cowboys, for cops and robbers. Nope, it was all tanks, Iwo Jima and John Wayne. I had spent the first conscious years of my life devouring the data, the statistics, the trivia of everything that came my way related to World War II. I knew that the .30-caliber, M-1 rifle, gas-operated, semi-automatic Garand was clip-fed, and had superceded the 1903 bolt action Springfield, that the Thompson submachine gun used the same .45-caliber ammunition as the Colt .45 automatic pistol, and that the Japs were real bastards.

On an unconscious level, too many of my aesthetic paradigms were weighted toward the imagery of the Second World War, toward the gracefully lethal. And of all the internalized configurations; the silhouettes of destroyers, of the Schmeisser machine pistol, even of the shark-toothed Curtis P-40 of Chennault’s Flying Tigers, it was always the supercharged, 400 mile-an-hour, double-boomed, twin-engined, Lockheed Lightning P-38 single seat fighter with its nose full of firepower that came closest to defining the absolute embodiment of deadly cool.

In “Populuxe,” his treatment of the design concepts that came to define the postwar consumer culture, Thomas Hine pointed out that Detroit’s addition of tail fins to American cars was a direct lift from the profile of the P-38. But that came later, after I’d let my enthusiasm for things military burn itself out while marking time for two years as a draftee in an army motor pool in Germany. In that expensive steak joint in Harrisburg, my brief conversational gambit with Bernie “whats-his-name” had struck and unearthed something primordial, something on which I was compelled to follow through.

After a couple of “wows,” and a “really,” I began pumping Bernie about what it had been like to actually fly one of those Harleys of the sky. The intensity of my enthusiasm seemed to disarm the laconic stoicism of my tablemate. “Well,” he said, “it’s not something you quickly forget about. I was only twenty-years old at the time.”

I got him warmed up, and I found out that he had flown in a fighter group based in Italy during the final months of the war. He had flown combat missions. He had been shot down. And, yes it had all been exciting, most of it anyway. He told me that it had been like hanging out with your high school friends. “Hell, we were all kids, really. Six or eight of us would go up together, loaded for bear. That plane had six fifty-calibers and a 20-millimeter cannon in the nose pod. “Christ,” he said, “you could cut a tree down with one burst from that sucker. And, it was fast, I mean really fast.”

He went on to tell me that the first time he was hit, a German plane had gotten behind him before he knew it. And that it wasn’t until the enemy plane shot past him that he realized he’d been fired on. “My one engine was smoking and he’d shot away most of one side of my tail.” He said he’d been at about ten-thousand feet and had had to bail out. “I didn’t have time to be scared until my chute opened, and then I worried all the way down.” He was over Allied lines and before he could gather his parachute, there was a jeep coming across the field to pick him up.

The second time, he told me, he hadn’t been as lucky. “We were shooting up trains and railroad tracks along the Inn River in Austria,” he said. “We were low, and I took a big hit, anti-aircraft fire, flak. I started losing control of the plane.” He told me that was too low to jump and had to ride the burning plane down, crash landing on a farm road, going through a hedge and finally stopping just short of a herd of dairy cattle. “It’s funny,” he said. “The last thing I could remember was those goddamned cows. One of them turned its head and looked at me. I can still see the big bell it had around its neck.” He said that was when he passed out. “I was pretty banged up,” he went on, “and I guess I had a lot of shrapnel in my legs. The local krauts must gotten me out of the plane before the fire reached me,” he said. “And that was the end of the war for me.”

“Boy! Bernie, that’s an amazing story,” I said. “I guess everything since must seem kind of flat after going through stuff like that.” “Well, not quite,” he said. “Looking back, I could have just as soon done without the whole thing.” A pause and then, “I didn’t get out of the hospital for almost a year and a half, Christmas of 1946. I’ve had nine operations on my legs.”

The waiter was clearing the coffee cups. Mr. Big Deal had finally finished the saga of his glory years, and the consultant was looking at his watch. Time to go back to the Holiday Inn and the conference room. Leaving the restaurant, I noticed that Bernie lifted each foot with the studied concentration of a man who wasn’t too sure he would actually be able to make the next step. I served on that committee for another four and a half years, for one six-month period I even chaired it. Bernie, his last name was Penowski, almost always got to the meetings before me, and he always saved me a chair next to his.

Oh No! Not Another Playlist?

1. Like a Hurricane – Neil Young Unplugged
2. How to Live Alone – The Pernice Brothers
3. Desperate Man Blues – John Fahey
4. Whether or Not It Matters – The Kingsbury Manx
5. All You Hide – Lenola
6. Wonder Struck – George Shearing
7. Red Dust – Calexico/Iron and Wine
8. Medication – - Son Volt
9. Down Colorful Hill – Mark Kozelek
10.Live Wire – The Meters

A Short Story – Outward Bound

Sitting on the warm, sunlit rock, Eddie hugged his knees. Still shivering and still dripping, he looked into the flat green current of the river as it sped past. Everything seemed so peaceful, the surprising near silence of the rapidly passing river, the lazy desert heat of the late morning, the opening in the canyon walls that let the sun pour down on him.

He knew David was safe. He had caught sight of him perched among the low rocks just below the last set of rapids. Upriver, in the muted colors of the shaded canyon, David’s bright orange life jacket had signaled his presence. The raft would be coming downstream any minute now, stopping along the way to pick up each of the seven swimmers who had jumped into the rushing water just minutes ago. Eddie was distracted by the sensation of his feet cooling under the wet straps of his new sandals. Another vanity, only the best. The high-end tech gear he wore was performing as promised, rapidly drip drying, while he sat trying to make sense of what had just happened to him in those last – what – ten, maybe fifteen minutes.

Neoprene O-rings. They had come in a little zip-lock bag along with the sandals. Cautionary copy offered step-by-step instructions for installing the rings over the velcro closings of the sandals. “Jumping feet first into deep water or fast moving currents, without properly checking your O-rings…” warned that you could lose your new sandals, and suggested implicitly that you might then compromise the safety of the entire expedition. “Yeah right,” Eddie had thought. “Me and Tenzing Norkay” He had been much amused at prosperous suburban types like himself having to have only the best in authentic outdoor gear. He thought of the sleeping bags certified to forty degrees below zero. Looking again at the O-rings, he felt a tiny shudder. He was back in that first set of rapids feeling the force of the moving water, a force beyond appeal, a force that came close to sucking these same sandals from off his feet.

Turning his head upriver, at the approach of the raft, he could see David standing near the front. David was not smiling. Eddie knew he now had acquired a story to dine out on for a season or two. But he also knew he would probably never tell the whole story.

Some Thoughts On The Cup Finals

This year’s Stanley Cup finals went to a game seven, defining a razor’s edge difference between the winner and the loser. Only an overtime win could have shaved the outcome finer.

In the days since Crosby and Company hoisted the Cup for their Pittsburgh Penguins, I’ve been trying to understand why what appeared to be a superior hockey team, the Detroit Red Wings, hadn’t been able to do a reprise of the previous season’s series. I use the term “superior” in regard to the Wings because throughout the series, it seemed that in basic execution – breakout plays, passing, puck possession, puck protection – the Wings had the Pens scrambling. And yet…

The Pens pretty consistently out-shot the Wings, but most of those shots were low-percentage tries. The five-year average age gap between the two teams was cited with statements that the Detroit players looked tired. They never looked all that tired to me. And with the exception of the Wings 5-0 blowout of the Pens in Game Five, the series was marked by low-scoring, relatively close games. Over the series, Detroit actually outscored Pittsburgh 17-14.

Here’s what I think happened. In Games One, Two and Five, Detroit was able to play their Cup-winning system, effectively shutting down the Pens. Pittsburgh was out-skated, out-passed, smothered in the neutral zone and continually bottled-up in their own defensive zone. But in Games Three, Four, Six and Seven, Detroit’s allocation of resources, matching both Lidstrom and Zetterberg against Crosby, began to appear counterproductive. While Crosby was kept to a single goal in the series, Maxime Talbot was able to score three times, accounting for over twenty percent of Pittsburgh’s total scoring. For the series, less than half of Pittsburgh’s goals came from the starring triumvirate of Crosby, Malkin and Stall. It might be that Babcock’s emphasis on Crosby was what allowed journeyman players like Letang, Fedetenko and Kennedy to get under the Wing’s radar and score. It also might be argued that the Wings commitment to what had proven to be a winning system left them at a disadvantage against the more nimble and opportunistic Penguins.

Finally, goaltending – Chris Osgood is a competent NHL goaltender. That’s to say, he is a superb and gifted athlete, but his success as a Cup winner might have had more to do with the defensive skills of his teammates, and to the Mike Babcock defensive system, than to his being a true money goalie. Osgood made big saves, but he didn’t have to perform throughout the series at the same dazzling level required of Mark Andre Fleury.

It seems to me that on the whole, the Detroit Red Wings were a more accomplished and possibly a better hockey team than the Pittsburgh Penguins, but as two-time Cup winner Bill Clement once put it, the nature of the game is that a lesser team can beat a better team if they are willing to pay the price. The series certainly could have gone either way, but from what I saw, the entire Pittsburgh Penguins team stepped up and paid in full for their Stanley cup win.

A Credible Creationism

Ten Reasons To Watch The Stanley Cup Playoffs

1. Hockey is played on ice skates

2. Hockey is a contact sport

3. Hockey is the only team sport other than polo that’s faster than a man can run

4. Hockey is continuous – five or more minutes of unbroken play can occur

5. Hockey player substitutions can take place without a stoppage in play

6. Hockey rule infractions result in the offending team playing short-handed

7. Hockey players control the game – within defined limits fist-fighting is tolerated

8. Hockey has the impact and violence of football

9. Hockey has the grace and beauty of ballet

10. Hockey has dynamic complexities of quantum mechanics.