Soon we will return to juvenile rants about why the Detroit Red Wings are God’s gift to hockey. And whooo boy, they sure look the part these days.

It is, after all, springtime, and this is what we do every Spring.

But first, I read something today that helped clarify an idea I’d been wrestling with — and since it’s about preserving the very fabric of the industry that employs me … I figured the hockey could wait.

Before we begin, a shout out to an excellent blog penned a by a friend who puts forward an idea that is fascinating, if unwieldy, and — apologies for the bluntness, but it’s how we do things here — would kill the damn beast faster than just lining copy editors up against the wall and shooting them in the head.

(But it’s totally a gloriously creative new idea, and well worth a look, so go take one so we’re all on the same page here.)

“What it really means is that newspapers are spending far, far too much money on far, far too many people producing far, far too many stories on far, far too many pages.”

As a senior editor at a free daily newspaper that publishes in five markets with a staff of, roughly, 17 … I could have told you that without all the math.

And I’d argue with both Gerson and LaPoint to say that it’s not unused content in the form of totally unread stories on pages that people just  don’t read — it’s the final 400+ words of EVERY story that go consistently unread because less than 5% of the population really wants to read all 800 damn words some daily reporter lugged back from a city hall debate about garbage. I’d argue that readers have no problem reading 24 pages, or 24 stories, if those stories don’t take them five minutes or more apiece to read.

Frankly, if it wasn’t part of my job to see who put what in which story … I’d only read the first seven grafs of 80% of a newspaper’s content. And I love to read, but I know I’m not alone.

An 80 page newspaper costs a lot of money to print, especially now that it won’t be close to paid-for by advertising revenue … but if you chop the last half off of almost every story (we’ll say, for the sake of maintaining some sort of journalistic integrity here, that we’ll leave a few Important stories, as well as most of the columnists, alone) you can go from an 80-page paper to a 45-50 page paper and, I promise you, nobody except the writers and other journalists would care.

But the central idea in the Gerson’s post is one I want to talk about. There’s more to it than I’m quoting (because it’s easier to make my point that way, of course), so go read it already, but here’s the gist. She thinks that focusing on giving people exactly what they want is one way for newspapers to maintain some profitability:

“Why not divide the product up, sell it separately and publish according to readership? So, you maybe have a 10-page, quality news section in tabloid format that comes out daily for free. Your sports is the next big money maker, but your readership and game schedules means it makes sense to publish it only on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, for example. Charge 25 cents for each of those. Sell the arts sections once or twice a week for $1 a pop. Then offer a high quality weekly newsmagazine on weekends that sums up the week’s news and contextualizes in long-form, combined with features. You could charge $1.50 to $5.00 on that alone. Then take your fashion and lifestyle sections, put them into a monthly glossy magazine format and sell them on magazine newsstands at standard magazine rates.”

See what I mean? Now that is some ambitious shit. It takes an idea I’ve had for a while — that newspapers should not be afraid to change their style to focus on what they do best — and takes it to the sort of extreme that would send the industry over a cliff instead of slowly walking down the other side of the hill and off into the sunset. I love the spirit of the idea, but it would never work.

Newspapers  don’t do niches, which is essentially what this is. They can’t. Here’s why in three reasons.

1. The Internet exists. The biggest niche marketer in the history of humanity has cornered the market on that kind of stuff. In the quest to save newspapers from the Online Demons, a lot of people seem to come up with ideas that involve newspapers turning into some sort of World-Wide-Web-on-Paper. It can’t happen like that. The reason newspapers are still read at all in this age when info is everywhere and I can find the answer to any question you might want to ask me in 3.5 seconds is because some people want a simple island that has a little bit of everything they need for (intellectual) life without them having to risk the spooky forest to forage for it. That — and by this point, it’s pretty much ONLY that — is the advantage a daily newspaper has over the ‘net. It’s simple. It’s all here. It’s in one place, and you don’t have to hunt for a news site once you’re done with the sports site and then navigate yourself over to a site that has entertainment listings and then on to weather.ca. Just turn the page. But if I want just sports, or just arts listings or just politics … then I already know where to find as much of a specific subject as I want. I’ve got ‘em bookmarked.

2. Reporters aren’t experts, and neither are columnists. They’re good writers, adept at turning things around quickly, cleanly and spinning a tale about something they knew nothing about eight hours ago. Those are real skills, but with the exception of the shrinking club of beat reporters who haven’t been long ago stripped of their daily beats for budgetary reasons, they’re Just. Not. Experts. They can’t do as thorough a job covering those niches as the people I already go to for my “focused” coverage.

I’m not going to drop a buck to read a thrice-weekly from a bunch of writers from the Toronto Star sports section when there are publications like The Hockey News or Baseball Digest that already go way beyond what The Star is doing and focus entirely on the niche I really want — ie, all hockey, no baseball or basketball. Similarly, I’m not going to pay magazine prices for content that belongs in a newspaper lifestyle section. Why the hell wouldn’t I just buy Vanity Fair or Chatelaine or even Maxim? Pay $1 for a newspaper Arts section once a week?! How about I just grab Now — who do pretty much nothing but Arts and Life — every week for free? Drop $5 for a newsmagazine written by newspaper reporters? Ummm … naw, thanks. I already have Time or MacLean’s for that, and they’ve been dropping weekly newsmagazines since back in the days when people were actually paying $0.50 for a big ol’ newspaper.

3. This plan doesn’t save newspapers, anyway. It breaks them down to their basic components and puts them on the auction block, hoping in desperation for some bids. It’s like a contents sale at the home of a recently deceased person who died intestate. Newspapers, for good or ill, are what they are: A collection of stories that range from news and crime to lifestyle, and arts to sports and politics, and fashion to terrible advice columnists that make me want to throw my coffee against the nearest wall. I’m not trying to romanticize newspapers here, I’m just defining them. That’s what they are. Even our crummy little free daily newspaper has the same basic newspaper elements that you get when you purchase the New York Times.

I’m not saying this idea is without merit. For one thing, nobody is trying to think of things like this, and even though cynics like me love to throw darts, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing worth using here.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve often thought that newspapers should focus on what they do best, and include the other stuff behind it. Focused marketing, if you will, instead of straight up chopping it all up and going straight for the niches. For instance — and this is the example I always use — the Toronto Sun should make itself a Sports newspaper. Do it now, while people still recognize it as Canada’s best sports section. Throw the remaining money into sports. Make the cover a sports cover unless something so huge it can’t be ignored happens. Make sports the first section in your paper, then crime, then the Sunshine Girl, then everything else. That’s what Sun readers want, anyway. But the key thing is that everything else has to be there — because that’s what newspapers are, a collection of everything that happened yesterday.

You change that, even to help them survive, and you’ve killed them. And the seedlings you grow from the fertilizer provided by the corpse will die shortly thereafter — because while people are increasingly less willing to cough up a buck for a paper, they’d be even more hesitant to cough up a buck for a bastard publication that looks like a newspaper but only has one section.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Yeah … this is an essay about JRR Tolkien, the hero’s journey and how it applies to flameouts in the NHL Playoffs. Deal with it.

That's the look.

One of the most common elements of any story, from the most banal of children’s literature to the great epics of all time, is the plucky hero confronting the unknown.

If you took the posters from 100 adventure movies and the covers from 100 fantasy novels, more than half of them would feature the protagonist as he gazes with a mixture of fear and purpose into the abyss of whatever awaits.

It’s not always because he wants to, and it’s never without trepidation and anxiety, but the hero unfailingly works up his courage and forges on. The hero is usually given a chance to back out; to leave the task to others, to escape while there’s still time or to just take the blue pill and “you wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe…”

But they don’t, of course. If they do, there’s no story. If they do, the adventure goes on without them, we all read a different book or see a different movie and nobody remembers or cares about the hero who almost rose to the occasion, but couldn’t quite do it.

Which is why nobody will remember, or care, about the San Jose Sharks. Assuming of course that they proceed to lose the first-round series that they currently trail 2-0 to the Anaheim Ducks.

And while Frodo wished that the ring had never come to him, the Sharks actively worked to qualify for the 2009 playoffs.

I haven’t set this entire post up to make fun of the Sharks (that one is reserved for when they do finally lose) but to try and explain the kind of mentality that produces success in the playoffs, and to try and figure out what’s keeping the Sharks (and what kept all those great — in the regular season anyway — Ottawa Senators teams) from ultimate glory.

There are a few things to consider, and they all deal, as Bilbo so aptly described, with the dangerous business of going out your door.

First, it’s just not that hard to play hockey in the regular season. The schedule is set several months in advance. You can plan travel days, practice days and book your tee times for the three-day November layover in Florida well before the season begins. You know which team you’ll be facing, and then which team you’ll be facing after that. You know that you’ll lose some games and hopefully win a bunch more. You know that a handful of those games will be against the best teams in the league, and that a whole bunch more will be against the bottom-feeders. The rest will be against teams that are solid, but not great. You know, in short, what to expect and when to expect it.
Second, though it seems obvious to say, the stakes in the regular season are low. This applies especially to the Sharks (and the Senators of old). When you’re reasonably sure, before the first puck has been dropped, that you’ll be in the playoffs come April, it doesn’t matter so much if you drop a home game that you should have won — or even if you somehow steal a game you had no business winning. It’ll all balance out and you’ll be there at the end.

Finally, there’s time to fix things. If someone gets hurt, they have time to heal. If the goalie implodes, you can send him home for a week or two to get his head on straight. If the team stinks out the joint, you can fire the coach. And any glaring weakness can be addressed at the trade deadline, which is only a few weeks before the end of the regular season.

So yeah, the regular season is competitive professional hockey, and it would certainly be difficult to predict the outcome of every game. But … it’s a known. It’s expected, it’s familiar and there is a fairly large margin for error.

It’s not a dangerous business and you — assuming you’re a professional who has been playing hockey his entire life — certainly don’t have to go very far out of your door.

The playoffs, though, are unique. Moreso in hockey than in any other sport, they are a dangerous business; a chaotic arena where anything can happen in an instant and the smallest twitch of a skate or bump in the ice can set in motion events that can destroy a team’s season.

“The quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fail. But hope remains, if friends stay true.”

Unlike football, basketball, baseball or soccer, where one team tends to control the play (by virtue of possessing the ball at the time) a large part of a hockey game is spent with the puck in nobody’s possession, as it flips and rolls down the ice into the zone, gets tangled among several feet along the boards and careens off the glass and down the ice, waiting to be recovered by the first man who can reach it.

That’s the unexpected. The unknown. You can go to where you think it will be, but it won’t always be there. You don’t even get it back after you give up a goal. You have to win a battle every time you want to possess the puck.

In the regular season, where thousands upon thousands of these battles are fought over months — between some players who know they’ll be in the playoffs, and some players who know they won’t be there — it all tends to even out.

But in the playoffs, the one battle you lose could be the one that kills you. If you’re not prepared for the unexpected, if you’re not willing to face that kind of unknown, you’ll be paralyzed. And then you’ll lose every battle. And then you’ll go home, muttering cliches about how you “didn’t get the bounces”.

Or if you’re Sharks coach Todd McLellan yesterday: “We just didn’t get the puck luck we needed.”

You’re never going to get all the puck luck you need if you’re worried about the puck luck. Thinking about how chaotic and fraught with danger every bounce of the puck can be will leave you so tight you won’t be able to hit an open net.

The puck is going to bounce. You’re going to win some of those bounces and lose them, and McLellan is right that a lot of them will be lucky.

The key thing, in both the hero’s journey and the Quest For The Cup (I probably owe the NHL royalties for typing it with caps like that) comes from embracing the unknown. It’s only when Frodo and the other hobbits find their sense of adventure, when Harry Potter just makes the damn broomstick fly without worrying about the proper way to do it and when Neo looks up at a room of strange people and announces “I know Kung Fu”, that the heroes are able to be effective in their endeavours.

The Sharks faltered the last few weeks of the regular season. So did the Detroit Red Wings. It was only natural on the part of both teams, having long ago locked up home-ice advantage in the playoffs.

But, the difference is, the Sharks felt that to let up, even for a game or two, would cost them as they prepared to launch into the great unknown. They worked hard through the last weeks, losing more than they would have liked, but doing it with the utmost concentration and Very Serious Looks on all their players’ faces.

“If we want to go into the playoffs with a half-hearted effort and we think we’ll turn the switch on, I don’t think that can happen,” said coach McLellan.

They didn’t take any lighthearted moments to remember what they love about the game and why they should be fighting for it — an essential element of any literary hero preparing to go into battle. There’s a reason that Frodo is shown laughing and cavorting in the Shire, and later in Bree, Rivendell and Lothlorien. Moments of untroubled glee are a necessary part of preparing to enter the underworld for a struggle against the unknown.

They were deadly serious all the time and now they can’t loosen up when they desperately need a light moment.

The Red Wings — and I would normally hate to use my favourite team as such a homerific example, but they’re perfect here — on the other hand, allowed themselves a deep breath before the plunge.

“We were a little bored at the end of the season,” said Chris Osgood. “That sounds bad, but it’s honest. We were looking forward to playoffs 100%. We couldn’t wait to get through that last month. I was actually shocked by how many wins we got in March.”

“It’s good we got this over with and no one got hurt in these last two games,” Detroit coach Mike Babcock said. “We get a day off tomorrow and get prepared. It’s not like we haven’t been through it before. We understand what it takes and how hard it is going to be.”

And that’s the difference. The Sharks never took a breath. They’ve been playing as hard as they can all year under the comforting umbrella of the expected regular season. They stressed over the way they were playing in the leadup to the playoffs, and the looming uncertainty made it even more important to be playing as well as possible going into the fray.

Now they’re facing the unknown without a blueprint for handling it. They’ve got a few seasons of failures in their head and no recent success to draw upon. They also don’t have a reserve to dip into and … well … there’s not a lot left.

Right now, if you offered Joe Thornton the blue pill, he’d swallow that motherfucker in a minute.

(I just wanted to share the video)

Aaron Downey is a hockey player — a tough guy from the prairies who has carved out a career for himself in the NHL by being more than willing to fight anyone.

Sometimes it works out well for him.

Sometimes it really doesn’t.

But that’s not why I love Aaron Downey — though it is how I came across this clip. The best part starts at 1:08, but it’s all worth watching:

“I really take pride in philosophy. I’ve been reading for 12 years now. Books from Sigmund Freud to Plato to the great Norman Vincent Peale. I like books, you know? I like reading. I like self-development. I like enlightenment and spirituality. I think that one of the reasons we live is to kind of better ourselves every day. I got started back in 1995 … in the minor leagues with long bus trips. Just didn’t feel like staring out the window any more so I got into reading.”

That’s pretty awesome for an NHL tough guy. Aaron Downey, you just made my Monday a lot nicer.

(Keep watching after he talks about philosophy and you will hear Aaron Downey talk about yoga. Which is also kind of awesome.)

In our ceaseless quest to forcibly inject literature and poetry into the realm of professional sports, we are returning to the poignant haiku and the always-amusing limerick as a means of eloquently and succinctly previewing the coming season for every NHL team.

After all, if you can’t sum up a team’s potential in 17 syllables or a catchy rhyme scheme, then it’s not worth discussing. But we can, and we will, and we’ll do one division every couple of days for the next week or two.

We’ll begin with the NHL’s contribution to the ‘weakest division in sports’ debate: The Southeast Division

Last season:

1. Washington Capitals — 94 points
2. Carolina Hurricanes — 92 points
3. Florida Panthers — 85 points
4. Atlanta Thrashers — 75 points
5. Tampa Bay Lightning — 71 points

This season:

1. Washington Capitals
2. Carolina Hurricanes
3. Tampa Bay Lightning
4. Florida Panthers
5. Atlanta Thrashers

Washington Capitals

Ovie’s Russian friends

Make his winter happier

Ovechkin and Kozlov

Theodore still sucks

_______________

There was an ex-MVP ‘tender

Who tended to go on a bender

But he wouldn’t sip drinks,

he’d just fail at the rinks,

and be chained to the bench by December

Carolina Hurricanes

Now that Staal is signed

what more can we fret about?

Oh right, the defence

_______________

The Cup win is now three years gone

the fanbase is starting to yawn

‘Give us a contender,

or we might not remember

that hockey’s not played on a lawn.’

Tampa Bay Lightning

Franchise was remade

by ambitious millionaires

Not by hockey guys

_______________

A talented skater named Vinny

embarrassed his teammates at shinny,

to the point that they said,

while hanging their heads,

‘It’s clear now — he’s macro, we’re mini.’

Florida Panthers

Come to Florida!

Play some hockey and some golf!

Be home by April!

—————

It’s a tough life, being a Panther

and Bryan McCabe is not the answer

This ex-Leaf won’t aid

your team’s crusade

In fact, he’s a locker-room cancer

Atlanta Thrashers

Fall brings newborn hope

Hope that quickly disappears

when jerseys are donned

_______________

If a team plays in the ‘A’

and to see them nobody will pay,

do they even exist?

If they leave, are they missed?

Or can we just move them away?

Hockey in Atlanta, Georgia

It’s not easy, sometimes, being a Red Wings fan.

Okay, I’m lying. A lot of the time it’s easy as hell; I get to watch elite players share the puck and play keepaway from lesser teams, the best management and scouting in North American sports continually drafts and develops all-stars, the finest captain in hockey history and the best defenceman since Bobby Orr both played their entire careers in the Winged Wheel and, every five or six years there’s a Stanley Cup banner heading to the rafters.

(Oh, and speaking of Bobby Orr, the iconic image came immediately to mind last night)

The only problem with being a Wings fan is the reckless hate that gets thrown around, forged in the fires of jealousy and spite, by the fans of other teams.

The Red Wings are not the Yankees of the National Hockey League — no matter how much the rest of the league may want to paint them that way. They draft and develop their elite talent, bring in only a couple of free agents to round out the picture and swing a small deadline deal to prepare to the team for playoff runs.

The Yankees buy their team. And, recently anyway, don’t even do that good a job of it.

But watching the collective meltdown by the Pittsburgh Penguins and their fans over the first two games of this Stanley Cup final has been highly entertaining — if only because it’s fun as all hell to watch an entire team, led by their coach, degenerate to the level of the average fan.

The Pens — especially head coach Michel Therrien — are whining about diving, complaining about the Refs, accusing Niklas Kornwall of dirty hits … in short, they’re acting like fans, and not even the most rational of fans at that.

How else can you explain these quotes from Therrien in the post-game press conference?

Between games, Penguins coach Michel Therrien radically altered his forward lines in the hopes of sparking something approaching offensive pressure. It didn’t work. After Game 2, he suggested the problem was that the Wings were cheating.

“It’s really tough to generate offense against that team,” Therrien said. “They’re good on obstruction. It’s going to be tough to generate any type of offense if the rules remain the same. So, it’s the first time we’re facing a team [where] the obstruction is there and we’re having a hard time skating to take away ice.”

Therrien also accused Osgood of diving on both of the goaltender interference penalties assessed against the Penguins in Game 2.

“I’ll tell you something, I reviewed those plays. He’s a good actor. He goes to players, and he’s diving.”

Yeah … if we could only somehow change the rules, maybe the Penguins would have a chance.

I won’t jinx this series by saying that it’s over. The Penguins haven’t lost at home in more than three months, and Sidney Crosby is the real deal, even if his buddy Evgeni Malkin looks a little bit lost these days.

I’m just pointing out that when a coach is reduced to talking about anything except the quality of his own team’s play, that’s because he knows his team is thoroughly humiliated and beaten down. The Penguins are beyond criticism from Therrien right now, and he knows it, so he lashes out.

The problem is that he’s lashing out at the most disciplined, effective and utterly professional NHL team I’ve ever had the fortune to watch. How do you think the Red Wings will react?

Well, first, they’ll ignore the bullshit.

“I’m not really concerned about it right now,” Osgood said. “The minute the buzzer goes, it’s out of my head. I don’t think about the past. I just played between the whistles; that’s all I do. I’m more concerned about next game than about this game.”

Then, they’ll answer with their play. If I were a Penguins fan (or player or coach, since right now they have all been reduced to the same spectator status) this quote would scare the living daylights out of me:

“We’re going to play better. We’ve been a good road team all year. We’re going to have a real good game in Pittsburgh. And we’re excited to get on the road. And sometimes at home, when you’re matching all the time, it disrupts your flow a little bit. We can get to Pittsburgh and let the guys just go, let them go out the door and play hard.

“And we feel we can be better. We thought when we got up 2‑0, we kind of got a little cautious, instead of staying and going after them. But we’ll be better next game.”

– Mike Babcock

Well … yikes.

Two to go, and should they go as planned, I’ll have a nice little essay up here shortly afterwards; an essay about the most effective NHL team I’ve ever seen play.

Two to go.

I’m not one for penning tiny blog posts to share a single link without, you know, yammering on for several paragraphs about what I think about it … but the following essay in the Washington Post is such an excellent little opinion piece that I’m going to let it speak for itself. Mostly.

I knew that it was bad, but the fact that ‘more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book — fiction or nonfiction — over the course of a year’ just floors me.

I can’t go a week without reading one. Of course, some of them are terrible, so maybe it balances out.

Anyway, read the essay. It’s good. Then read the post below this one about Mats Sundin, because I know you all hate the Leafs as much as I do.

Far be it from me to take issue with the inanity of an article that appears in the Sunday Star … but one begins to wonder after a while if that paper (interesting as it sometimes is) is becoming the newspaper equivalent of academics who talk to hear the sound of their own voices spouting obvious truths.

(This right here, by the way, is the blog equivalent of the same thing, only with curse words and added vitriol. And I don’t charge you $1. Yet.)

In today’s breaking news, there are similarities between the stories of Harry Potter and Jesus Christ.

Surely, this is a heretofore undiscovered aspect of JK Rowling’s stories. In fact, she just might be the first writer ever to, unconsciously or no, echo the Biblical story in a work of fiction. Harry Potter may also be the first literary hero for whom Christ-like comparisons can be drawn.

But, just in case some wily fiction writer has attempted to slip one past us over the countless years that humans have been telling stories, let us use the writer’s (in the interest of fairness, I note here that this article is actually reprinted from the The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.) piece to set up a checklist of sorts:

1. A profound, if subtle, moral interplay is found between Harry and Dumbledore, who effectively lead the joint forces of good.
2. Dumbledore knows Harry plays a unique and indispensable role in the battle against evil and outwardly helps him from time to time. Yet, for most of the series, Dumbledore keeps Harry unaware of the depth of their relationship, of the goings-on known or orchestrated by Dumbledore involving the bigger picture. In the course of his young life, Harry often feels Dumbledore is ignoring his personal needs. A well-known, heart-wrenching passage in the Bible, from an anguished Jesus on the cross, captures their relationship well: “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”
3. Harry has followers who are devoted to him even if they don’t always understand him, and other fair-weather fans who probably don’t know what to make of him half the time. And, of course, enemies. Sound familiar?
4. Dumbledore, for his part, is a benevolent, godlike presence at the school. He doesn’t seem to want to show all his powers, perhaps to avoid exerting pressure that would impede others’ freedom of choice.
5. Well, in the Gospels, Judas is allowed access to Jesus, and is allowed to alert the authorities to his whereabouts. God the Father didn’t prevent this. In fact, Christianity teaches that the crucifixion following Jesus’s capture was necessary to redeem the world. Dumbledore repeatedly says he trusts Snape, but what does he mean by this?
6. In death, then, he would save the world.

So … as we can clearly see from this list, Rowling is utterly unique in the way she takes one of the oldest stories known to humankind and draws parallels to it through her modern work of fantasy and/or science fiction. Obviously, the Star (or at least the writer that they are publishing this Sunday) has worked long and hard to find the qualities in a fantasy hero and his mentor that closely echo (or at least faintly echo) the relationship between the Christian God and Jesus Christ.

I was personally very shocked to see this laid out in newsprint for me. It’s almost like Rowling was just following some sort of archetype, perhaps without even knowing it herself.

It is funny though how she, and she alone, managed to finally echo the works of the Bible and turn it into popular fiction. You would think, the Bible being as old as the Earth, and thus more than 2,000 years young, that somehow a writer out to make a buck would have taken the story of the Bible and slapped some cool clothes on a character in a blatant effort to create a new-age Jesus…

Since the latest movie opens this week and the final Harry Potter book is only a few weeks away, it seems like a suitable time to smack the little boy wizard back to his rightful place. Just so he doesn’t get out of line.

In a poll taken in Britain, Harry Potter is only the third-best wizard ever (though how a 17-year-old is better than fucking Merlin, I can’t understand). Still, throughout my enjoyment of the entire Potter series, the one thing that runs through my mind is that Dumbledore — nice, kind and goodly wizard that he is — couldn’t carry Gandalf’s jock. And the English people have come through for me.

For more on this great battle, you can read commentary from an awesome site that used to narrate epic battles like this all the time.

In other Potter-related news (I know that’s why half of you come here):

• Some people have taken geekdom to a whole new level by creating ‘wizard rock’ in which “each (band) chooses a character from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories and writes songs from that character’s perspective.” The show organizer claims that “There’s never been anything like this before,”but clearly she missed out on both the Lords of the Rhymes as well as the classic Star Wars Rap. Draco and the Malfoys score points with me, however, for what is now my favourite wizard-rock song title: “My Dad is Rich, Your Dad is Dead.”
• Also, Daniel Radcliffe is staying away from female actresses, because they are “insane”. In other words, Emma Watson told him to fuck right off. Also, Radcliffe warns that you cannot call him Harry Potter during sex, or he will kick you out of bed. Can I still call him ‘horsey-boy’, then? Is that still cool, Dan?
• For the hardcore geeks out there, lots of people have been wondering if Snape was hiding under an invisibility cloak while Voldemort killed Harry’s parents. Rowling says that, “No, he wasn’t.”

I try to avoid writing about science. For two reasons. One, because I don’t have time to call people and interview them for this blog. And two, because I went to Ryerson, so if I’m going to write about science, I generally like to have someone on hand to, y’know, ’splain it to me.

But this isn’t science, really, it’s psychology. (Sorry, three-quarters of my extended family). And there’s nothing quite like psychology for taking several paragraphs to explain why something that we already know to be true is, in fact, true.

Psychology Today has published a list of Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature. It’s quite an interesting article, provided you understand that most of the research behind it is psychology-based and thus still open to speculation.

A few of the truths are of the ‘Duhhh’ variety:

• Muslims are more likely to be suicide bombers because they believe that 72 black-eyed virgins await them in heaven.
• Men prefer big-breasted blondes because hair colour and breast size (as well as waist-to-hip ratio) have all been historically symbolical of youth and fertility).
• Monogamy benefits men more than women (because we live much shorter lives when we don’t have anyone to ‘get inna kitchen a bake me a pie!’).

Others are a little more interesting:

• Politicians and other powerful men risk it all for affairs because, consciously or not, the reason they worked so hard to attain all this power was to have reproductive access to a greater variety of women and produce more heirs.
• Most creative people produce prolifically in their early adulthood and then settle down to enjoy the fruits of their labours, producing sporadically, if at all, after that. (This one is notable for Psychology Today calling out an ex-Beatle by boldly stating that “Paul McCartney has not written a hit song in years.” Ouch. When you get called out by a psychology journal, you’ve been judged, homie.)
• Having sons reduced the risk of divorce because it’s by maintaining his wealth and land to pass on to his progeny that men can make a successful son. While no amount of land and wealth can keep your daughter young and pretty or stop her from giving it up to some dude with 22-inch rims and a sweet grill.

But this one, I found kind of fascinating, especially considering it was a woman who wrote the article (rather, the book the article was excerpted from):

Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist

Sexual harassment cases of the hostile-environment variety result from sex differences in what men and women perceive as “overly sexual” or “hostile” behavior. Many women legitimately complain that they have been subjected to abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment by their male coworkers. Browne points out that long before women entered the labor force, men subjected each other to such abusive, intimidating, and degrading treatment.

Abuse, intimidation, and degradation are all part of men’s repertoire of tactics employed in competitive situations. In other words, men are not treating women differently from men—the definition of discrimination, under which sexual harassment legally falls—but the opposite: Men harass women precisely because they are not discriminating between men and women.

I know that drawing conclusions from psychology research is like sketching the first draft of a cartoon — when it’s finally done, it’s going to look a little different than you planned, but you can at least hope to get the basics right — but I actually see this play out in my small office every day. (Not the sexual harassment per se, we’re right down the hall from Human Resources, after all). But our office is divided (and it wasn’t done this way on purpose, fairly close to along gender lines. But there are two exceptions, there is one man who has a desk in the middle of a circle of desks occupied by women. And there are two women who sit very close to me and four male co-workers in what has been dubbed ‘Manzone’.

The man who sits in the middle of the women has been — if not emasculated — toned down significantly. And one of the women who sits near us has become, over the three months we’ve been in this new office with this new seating plan, much cruder and more sexualized. That’s not to say that their core personalities have changed, because they haven’t really. But they’ve had to adapt their repartee and office yakking to fit in with those around them. (Hey look, I’m taking tiny sample sizes and extrapolating them to fit my conclusions … I’m on my way, baby!)

But really, nothing sums this idea up better than Homer Simpson:

“I engaged in sexual intercourse with your spouse or significant other … Now THAT’s Psychiatry! Eh? Eh?”