Airing Fantasy Hockey Frustrations Part 1-Meet the Team

The title is a bit of a misnomer since the fantasy hockey season hasn't started yet and I didn't draft anyone that was already on the IR or currently on waivers, but I can guarantee you at some point this season I will want to tear into a team not named the Carolina Hurricanes. Trust me, if half of your team is on the IR and you're sitting in dead last waiting for someone (ANYONE) to find their scoring touch, you'd lapse into a pithy diatribe too.

But for now, it's all about fresh starts and a great 2010-2011 season. Oh and a little trash talking to boot. So without further ado, I am pleased to present my 2010-2011 team, Sutterly Camtastic (don't lie, you know that's cute).

Let's start with an ode to the offense and meet our forwards.

We have: Peter Mueller, Michael Cammalleri, Mason Raymond, Dustin Brown, Radim Vrbata, Ryan Callahan, TJ Oshie, Patrick Kane, Brandon Sutter, and Mike Fisher.

They are projected to tally over 500 points combined so that's not too shabby; especially when you consider my blueline isn't exactly going to collect Norris nominations like Halloween candy (more on that later). I had Sutter, Raymond and Fisher last season so I sort of know what I am getting there, but the rest, including Vrbata's very far set eyes, (don't believe me? Google him) are a mystery to me. They are even moreso "unknowns" when you consider 6 out of the 10 are from the Western Conference which is almost a complete reversal from last season's Eastern Conference-palooza.

I had a chance to draft Captain Serious but went with the Magical Mullet instead if only to make mouthguard jokes later in the season. Because that's how I draft-which player is going to give me the best return in terms of "I can't stand you" jokes. And based on how much I like you; yeah that plays a big role. Speaking of which...if you thought for a second that I was going to pass on drafting Sutter (and his brand spanking new "A") despite the fact he was ranked in the high 400s, you're crazy. In fact, it took every ounce of strength I had to wait until the 10th round!

As an aside, do you have any idea how difficult it is to find a picture of Mike Fisher actually PLAYING hockey on Google images now? I think I went through 5 or 6 pages of results before I found one that didn't have his (much) better half in it.

So the offense isn't atrocious, but what about the defense? Who's going to patrol my fake blueline and protect my imaginary goalie? Let's take a gander at the few, the proud, the D core.


This group is clearly headlined by Calder Trophy winner Tyler Myers (another holdover from last season). I'm expecting big things from him; like REALLY big things. The rest of the group is ok...Brian Campbell, Shea Weber, rookie sensation in the making PK Subban and Niklas Hjalmarsson (yeah he needs a nickname ASAP because there is no way I'm going to be able to spell that ever again). I had some major issues drafting D this season, losing Duncan Keith and Jamie McBain to opponents. Then I just couldn't get past my dislike of the guy and passed on Chris Pronger which of course means he'll set new records for points from a D-man this season. :Sigh: We'll see. Hopefully Chicago puts up a lot of goals from the blueline this season.

Finally, we come to arguably the most important position...goaltending. This area KILLED me last season; I will forever maintain that it cost me the championship. So this year I wasn't going to wait until the 4th or 5th round to draft a goalie. I had my eyes set on Ryan Miller and when I saw I had the 6th pick, figured I had a pretty good shot of getting him. But you know what they say about the best laid plans...

I know what you're thinking. Yes that is Marty Brodeur there in the middle. Yes the same Brodeur that I make fun of mercilessly. Yes the one I call fat and said cries tears of donut glaze. But I couldn't have a repeat of last season! I needed a legit goalie badly. And as much as I like making fun of him, he is a legit goalie and I took him in the first round.

I know that I've probably angered the hockey gods with my many Brodeur-Fat Jokes and that they will delight in unleashing their fury upon me, but I am making this promise in an attempt at reconcilliation:

Oh dear merciful hockey gods, I do solemnly swear that I will no longer mock, tease or belittle one Martin Brodeur if you allow him to be a brick wall for my fantasy team this year. I will show him the respect he deserves.

Phew I hope that works. Now in addition to donut hole...oh crap...uhhhh I mean in addition to the honorable donut hole I snagged Jaroslav Halak in the third round. Then I had a flashback to the horror that was my GAA last season, decided I needed a THIRD goalie and grabbed Scott Clemmensen in the 17th round. Frankly, I doubt the guy ever touches virtual ice, but maybe I can work him into a trade later. Or leave him to languish on the "bench" which, let's be honest, he's pretty used to doing.

So there you have it: the good, the bad and the ugly. It's bound to be an interesting (and humor filled) fantasy hockey season to say the least.

It Gets Better Project

Thanks to a link that Mary's sister provided, I was directed to this blog entry about the "It Gets Better Project." As the entry says:

"Stunned by the rash of LGBT youth suicides, Dan Savage has launched a YouTube channel called the It Gets Better Project in which adult LGBT folks can send the message to gay youth that while times may be tough right now, they will eventually see the light at the end of the bigoted tunnel."

On his blog, Dan Savage writes:

-----excerpt start-----

Billy Lucas was just 15 when he hanged himself in a barn on his grandmother's property. He reportedly endured intense bullying at the hands of his classmates—classmates who called him a fag and told him to kill himself. His mother found his body.

Nine out of 10 gay teenagers experience bullying and harassment at school, and gay teens are four times likelier to attempt suicide. Many LGBT kids who do kill themselves live in rural areas, exurbs, and suburban areas, places with no gay organizations or services for queer kids.

"My heart breaks for the pain and torment you went through, Billy Lucas," a reader wrote after I posted about Billy Lucas to my blog. "I wish I could have told you that things get better."

I had the same reaction: I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

But gay adults aren't allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don't bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don't have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.

-----excerpt end-----

Since that entry, there has now been another suicide, that of 13-year-old Seth Walsh. My heart goes out to everyone who has known and loved these kids, and to those who are suffering because of the hatred of others.

The "It Gets Better Project" has an extraordinary array of videos from all over the world; click here to see them.

As soon as I heard about the project, I knew I would do something. I've watched dozens of videos and they are beautiful and loving and gutsy. Over the weekend I put mine together (it's just shy of 15 min.), which marks the first time I've actually done a video of myself -- been learning my way around Movie Maker in the process:



In case the embedding code doesn't work, you can view it here.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other Journeys Promote Your Page Too












Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.)
Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite
Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny
Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines
Free downloads at the Deviations website and on Smashwords.

Go to Manybooks.net to access Covenant, Appetite, Destiny, and Bloodlines in even more formats!

Participant, Operation E-Book Drop. (Logo credit: K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Publications, Promos, Photos

Before I start talking about myself, here's an example of the power of positive energy: Apex Magazine editor Catherynne Valente is reading for a special issue that will "showcase writers of Arab descent and Muslim writers." Read her post for details.

The July/August 2010 issue of Star*Line (journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association) includes my poem "Evolutionary Variants on a Russian Proverb," a review by Edward Cox of my collection 30 Science Sonnets for April 2010, review of Valent Range (which contains an interview with me), and my write-up of the speculative poetry workshop I gave at Ancient City Con IV this past July.

Writes Cox, "The wide range of subject and information covered by the author form a big bag of ideas that are just waiting for some dreamer to extrapolate into tales of fantasy and wonder -- and, who knows, maybe someone will. But for the time being, while we're dealing with the truth, 30 Science Sonnets for April 2010 is an entertaining and thoughtful read, and one very strong reason why Twitter is a good thing." (Chapbooks are available directly from me, through the e-mail address on my website.)

But the standout piece for me in Star*Line 33(4) was Bryan Hall's article, "Freedom in Speculative Poetry." The art of escaping to other worlds while one's body is imprisoned isn't an allegory for Bryan; it's real. He writes of honing his craft and of connecting with fellow poets through the lens of incarceration's harsh realities. This piece alone is worth the price of the issue.



Back in August I participated in Folded Word's writing month event, called "24/7,". Participants spent the first 24 days of the month writing short works, then spent the final week in revisions. The second part of this entry gives more details.

I wasn't required to give a central theme to the entries, but I chose the theme "Divinations" and used a pair of dice to generate prompts. A linked index of my entries appears here.

I've now compiled those entries into the chapbook pictured above. I've made some revisions to the original works, changed their presentation order, and changed or omitted a few of the accompanying photos. Three works of "24/7" Twitter-fiction have appeared in Folded Word's publication PicFic: "Heisenberg's Metamorphosis," "Bittersweet," and "Fierce Harvest."

Thanks to Tracy S. Morris for her author spotlight of me on her blog "Rambling Roses, Purple Prose and other Asinine Alliteration" (and to She Nailed A Stake Through His Head editor Tim Lieder for this shout-out).

Coming up in October:

Spooky Empire in Orlando, FL, Oct. 8-10. In addition to gigs at the signing tables, I'll be on panels "Believers, Skeptics, and Cynics;" "Poetry: Spice Your Story;" "Villain or Victim: Which Is Easier to Write?"; and "Research and History Can Make or Break Your Story."

I'll be a panelist at the Citrus County Library's kickoff for its three-part NaNoWriMo series on Oct. 20. You can download the .pdf brochure here. Fellow panelists and I will meet soon to read participant wish lists before we finalize our presentations for the program's fourth year.

Necronomicon 29 in St. Petersburg, FL, Oct. 22-24. In addition to holding court in Author Alley, I'll be part of a speculative poetry workshop and will be on the panel "Pitfalls & Traps Writers Can Avoid on the Road to Success."

A closing photo-op...



Last week Mary and I were catching a quick bite at McDonald's when I spotted a young anole just outside one of the picture windows. The fly had come indoors. For the next few minutes, lizard and fly observed each other. From the look of the anole's open mouth in this shot, I can imagine it salivating; at times the fly's behavior seemed almost like taunting. Best viewed large.

Getting a decent photo of the pair proved challenging. Often my camera focused on the window itself, or on a tree behind and across the parking lot from the anole, making blurs of both lizard and fly. They were also backlit from the strong sunlight outside. This shot uses a 12x optical zoom from about six feet away, since I was wary of getting too close to the pair and frightening them off. I cropped the original shot and altered brightness, contrast, and gamma to bring out more detail.
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other Journeys Promote Your Page Too





Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.)
Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite
Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny
Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines
Free downloads at the Deviations website and on Smashwords.

Go to Manybooks.net to access Covenant, Appetite, Destiny, and Bloodlines in even more formats!

Participant, Operation E-Book Drop. (Logo credit: K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

A Gothic Hurricane (by hurricane_mario)

Genre: Melodic Death/Doom Metal, Gothic Metal, Symphonic metal, related genres.
Quality: Varied
About: I had a few of these songs going through my head the other day so I decided to make a playlist. I tried to steer away from non real gothic bands that idiots tag as gothic just because there's a female singer. But a few crept in towards the end when I ran out of ideas. I don't listen to gothic much, but when I do it's songs like these.

1. The Old Dead Tree - Start the Fire
2. Ava Inferi - Colours Of The Dark
3. To/Die/For - Guilt Ridden State
4. Flowing Tears - Godless
5. Moonspell - Everything Invaded
6. Rapture - (About) Leaving
7. Krypteria - My Fatal Kiss
8. Lacrimas Profundere - A Pearl
9. Theatre Of Tragedy - Silence
10. Aesma Daeva - The Camp of Souls
11. Xandria - Now & Forever
12. The Sins of Thy Beloved - My Love
13. HIM - Your Sweet Six Six Six
14. Sirenia - The Last Call
15. Within Temptation - What Have You Done (Feat. Keith Caputo)

Same as last time. The songs and a .m3u file. Hope it works right. Definitely will work in VLC though.


4shared Download

Please support the musicians that spent so much time, effort, and money to make this great music for you - Buy their albums and go to their concerts (if possible)!
(In this case, donate button in top right.)

Deep Carnivale 2010

Entrance to Deep Carnivale, which took place in the Performing Arts Building at Hillsborough Community College in Ybor City (Tampa, FL).

I attended Deep Carnivale on September 11, 2010. Thanks to David Audet and all the volunteers for putting on a great event!



The gallery.



More artwork, plus costumes.



The Performing Arts Building's A/C was in top form -- so much so that I ran out to my car for a change of clothing. I ditched my shorts for long pants and threw the denim shirt you see here over my shortsleeved print shirt.

Shown here is part of my display, which included:

1. Deviations: Covenant (paperback, Aisling Press).
2. Covenant and Appetite on CD (click here for more info and free downloads).
3. Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired by String Theory (Scriblerus Press, IPPY Silver Medalist; contains my story "Arachne").
4. Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet (Dark Scribe Press, Bram Stoker Award winner; contains my story "Memento Mori").
5. Issue 14, Electric Velocipede (Hugo Award winner; contains my story "Hermit Crabs," which is on the recommended reading list in The Year's Best Science Fiction, 26th Annual Edition). I am now down to my display copy. "Copies will be available soon at Night Shade Books," according to the EV website.
6. Oct./Nov. 2009 Asimov's (Contains my novelette "Flotsam" and poem "Derivative Work").
7. Vampyr Verse (Popcorn Press; contains my poem "Neighbors").
8. My chapbook 30 Science Sonnets for April 2010.
9. She Nailed A Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror (Dybbuk Press, 2010), set for official release in October. Pre-order here.



Thanks to K.L. Nappier and her husband Richard for their terrific hospitality after the event!



I've known Lara Zielinsky online via the Florida Writers Association, so was glad to finally meet her in person.



Patel Conservatory, part of the Straz Center for the Performing Arts.



LaFrance Vintage Clothing.



Community Stepping Stones ("Saving children, youth, and community lives through the arts").



Mary Jo Melone and Art Keeble, authors of Baseball Was My Life: Stories from West Tampa.



Nanette L. Avery.



WMNF 88.5 Community Radio.

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other Journeys Promote Your Page Too





Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.)
Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite
Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny
Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines
Free downloads at the Deviations website and on Smashwords.

Go to Manybooks.net to access Covenant, Appetite, Destiny, and Bloodlines in even more formats!

Participant, Operation E-Book Drop. (Logo credit: K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Just in time for the New Moon!

Large view

As I write this at around 9 PM on Sept. 9, the Moon is just past New (at 4 percent of Full). About five hours earlier, Mary and I got our first in-person look at a Luna Moth.

Actias luna, Family Saturniidae (Giant Silkworm and Royal Moths). We were exiting Office Max on a rainy day. I happened to look up, spotted this individual on an overhang, and ran back to the car for my camera. I normally carry my camera with me, but didn't want to risk getting it wet.

Wingspan ranges from 7.5-10.5 cm. according to Bugguide. (From a distance I estimate this individual was around 10 cm.) The feathery antennae mean it's a male.

"Three broods in the south, March-September," says Bugguide. Adults do not feed and have a life span of only about one week, to reproduce. In the U.S., this species ranges through every state east of the Great Plains.

Here are more camera angles:


Large view

The other day I spotted this Looper Moth:


Large view

Family Noctuidae, subfamily Plusiinae. This individual was hanging out at our local strip mall in early afternoon. (I love its little head fans.) Thanks to John Himmelman at Bugguide for the ID.

In publications news...

1. A blast from the past (in more ways than one)! My four-part report of a volunteer stint I did at the University of Florida's "Tapir Challenge" dig is part of The Boneyard 2.1, a blog carnival devoted to paleontology. Host David Orr was accepting non-recent blog posts, so I sent him my material from December 2006. The carnival is chock full of links that will keep me exploring for a while.

2. PicFic, a publication of the Folded Word literary press, posted three of my Twitter fiction pieces on Labor Day, along with others written by participants in its "24/7" event. Mine include "Heisenberg's Metamorphosis," "Bittersweet," and "Fierce Harvest."

3. "Far From Free Association" appears in the open-mic section of Poets for Living Waters, a poetry action in response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, here.

4. More Twitter poetry appears in microcosms.

5. Two poems have been accepted to Star*Line. Although speculative, these poems are based on actual news stories. The two-part "Duet Singularity" takes it cue from Greg Miller's, "Holy Surgical Side Effect" (ScienceNOW Daily News, Feb. 10, 2010) and Stuart Hameroff, M.D.'s "Quantum computation in brain microtubules? The Penrose-Hameroff 'Orch OR' model of consciousness" and is written in free verse 3-line stanzas. "Ciliate Sestina" takes its cue from Olivia Judson's "Unorthodox" (New York Times, Feb. 9, 2010). Unlike my science sonnets, these poems extrapolate considerably from the facts. I'll give a holler when the issue comes out.

This will be a science poetry-themed issue of the Science Fiction Poetry Association journal, Star*Line, guest-edited by Robert Frazier. Bob Frazier edited Star*Line when I first discovered SFPA in 1980, and had bought my first poem submitted to the journal. "Ybba," published in 1981, and "Wings," originally in Asimov's in 1983, appeared in an anthology he edited, Burning With A Vision: Poetry of Science and the Fantastic, Owlswick Press, 1984.

6. Author Rachel D. Thompson makes this mention of Deviations on her blog from August 4: "This series is definitely not for the faint of heart (as it involves cannibalism), but it was a wonderful story, with lots of insight, as well as character and world-building."

On tap for this weekend: Deep Carnivale in Ybor City, Tampa!

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other Journeys Promote Your Page Too












Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.)
Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite
Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny
Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines
Free downloads at the Deviations website and on Smashwords.

Go to Manybooks.net to access Covenant, Appetite, Destiny, and Bloodlines in even more formats!

Participant, Operation E-Book Drop. (Logo credit: K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.