Cimorene

We went to the TPS season opener again! They lost 3-1 to Ässät ('The Aces', from Pori/Björneborg: their logo is a card-suit spade), who according to Wax are supposed to suck, but they didn't suck last night. To my anxious eyes it appeared that Ässät had the puck all the time, but later they showed a possession map and it seems like it was pretty evenly divided. TPS didn't suck either... they just seemed to be struggling. Their one goal was courtesy of Holm, a Swede on his first game in Liiga. TPS' chief goalie, Rasmus Tirronen, was again the MVP and did nothing wrong in his life. Very nice facial hair.

The most memorable part actually was Ässät's three new players. A Swedish black man named Hedberg was responsible for the most beautiful of their three goals, and they also had a pair of Canadian identical twins who have played together their entire lives named Tylor and Tyson Spink. I mean #1 SPINK!, #2 they're a set so you get to call them SPINKS instead, #3 SPINX is the name of a hair salon in Turku because they meant to say sphinx but Finnish people are confused by 'ph', #4 TYLOR - that's the first time I've ever seen this particular Go Back to Alberta white boy spelling (but he's from Ontario and also they probably did it to match the vowels with his brother's name, but still). They saw a lot of ice time; they're pretty good.

2nd most memorable: Jore the teddy bear mascot came out with a tshirt gun that malfunctioned and shot the tshirt backwards instead, where it skidded across the ice. One of the people on the ice brought it over to the attendant at the guest penalty box, who blinked at it through his little glasses and then gamely baseball-tossed it up into the stands, where a guy in the very 1st row caught it easily and handed it to a kid. (Jore brought a functioning tshirt gun at the 2nd intermission and shot two more.)

Concessions were also funny. Wax discovered on her last trip that the Special Diet concession stand on the top (third) level of the arena, where they sell soy hot dogs and veggie burgers and the like, also has bagels, so she bought us these bagel sandwiches with grilled goat cheese, avocado, herbed cream cheese, tomato, and some kind of... cloudberry jam??? It was fuckin' weird. I mean, it was fairly good, but it was bizarrely gourmet and the jam was way too sweet, and also that was too much filling to successfully fit into a bagel. The bagel itself was of better quality (read: actually firm and dense and springy, like they're supposed to be) than Finnish bagels usually are. However, I regret not having time to eat popcorn, because the line to concessions in the 1st intermission never got shorter than 100 m, so we eventually gave up. Instead I ate half a chocolate bar from my bag.

Hello, new people and fellow rediscoverers of DW!

In light of Tumblr Exodus I thought I would point to the bio in my profile and the blanket permission statement there (though in short: comments from new people are welcome; feel free to follow me; feel free to introduce yourself if we don't know one another; almost nothing is access-locked). For anyone newly subscribing to this blog, you may be interested in the introduction post 10 Things I Assume You Know About Me If You Read My Journal (this was a meme that went around LJ in 2006. I've just had it pinned to my profile & periodically updated)(though in short: I'm 36 and have been in fandom since 2001; waxjism is my wife).

I have been using Tumblr more than DW over the past few years, and am now making an active effort to increase my engagement here. (I need to look for more communities, I suppose.) I used to do 'what am I reading and what am I watching' sort of roundups here, and I haven't done one in ages; therefore, here's a hopefully comprehensive ( Survey of My Fannish and Non-Fandom Interests and Hobbies )

I was surfing the parts of Wikipedia dedicated to Sesame Street the other day and discovered that one of my fav childhood movies, Don't Eat the Pictures: Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is available on DVD! It's been available on YouTube for ages (as has my other rare childhood film favorite, The Phantom Tollbooth (1970)), so I gave up looking for better-quality copies of both of them over ten years ago, but —

I just realized if I actually had a subtitled DVD of it I could capture a subtitled gif of the scene where Oscar walks into the gallery of Greek and Roman sculpture and says,

"Why, it's trash — the most beautiful trash I've ever seen!"


Even waxjism admits that this would be a really useful reaction gif.

But, sadly, it was printed in 2011 and the rights reverted and there's no indication anybody wants to release it again, besides which it was probably region 1 in the first place.

I don't actually know how to make gifs, either, although Wax figured out how one time last year when our Viaplay satellite feed got some bonus footage of the Leafs bench that nobody would have seen in North America and William Nylander used it to bite Auston Matthews's shoulder. She did it as a service to fandom. But I'm not sure the knowledge stuck around after that one weekend full of tutorials, anyway.

I'm not sure I'm up for trying it with low quality video source if I also have to make my own captions. But it might be worth it...