Vancouver Goldeneyes 0 – 2 Boston Fleet
The Boston Fleet have made a remarkable turnaround this season. From missing the playoffs last year, they had a chance to go to the top of the standings tonight if they could pick up three points against the Vancouver Goldeneyes. With Aerin Frankl in net, recording her sixth shutout of the season, they won and went to the top of the table.
Vancouver can’t beg for a win lately. They are on a dismal run of form right when they can’t afford to be losing games. They won last week but in their last seven games they are 6-1. Still, they sit only six points out of a playoff spot and in every game they keep looking like a team that is willing themselves to make it. Tonight they had a dominant third period, chasing a 1-0 deficit that was afforded by Kluge’s tipped puck in front of Campbell in the second period. The Goldeneyes were relentless in front of goal but Frankl is that good. In a small league like this, with the quality the PWHL has, you know the goalies are going to be the best eight players in their position in the world and goals are hard to come by. Of course it doesn’t help that Sarah Nurse takes a mugging on a regular basis and the refereeing was a little iffy. The third period penalties to Nurse and Thompson were marginal, and didn’t impact the score sheet, but they broke the momentum.
The game was in Lowell, Mass., but you knew it was pure Boston every time the crowd chanted “U-S-A, U-S-A” when Nurse and Thompson were sent to the box.
The Vancouver hockey media, who only ever know what it’s like to lose, are starting to write about whether the Goldeneyes should start tanking to improve their chances at a good draft pick I’m looking at you Steve Ewen, you absolute muppet). This is what passes for punditry in some North American cities, where fans who advocate this line of thinking start to accurately express what the league incentivizes. The idea that professional athletes would ever tank a season to get a better draft pick is bizarre. The idea that women playing pro hockey in a league they have only ever dreamed about would take their foot off the gas for a second is an insult to all of them. Fans calling for their teams to lose every game at the end of the season are generally unpleasant to be around and shouldn’t be trusted.
The PWHL is a great league. It is intense, condensed, and hosts the best players in the world. These are athletes at the top of their game, seizing the brass ring, and testing themselves against the best competition in the world. It’s a great thing to watch and I’ve finally been bitten by it. Sarah Nurse and Sophie Jaques have stolen my heart for this team. I went along to my first game two weeks ago and it was brilliant.
It’s amazing to watch how quickly women’s professional sports have become normalized. Where before it seemed like there was a glass ceiling to overcome, the rapid establishment of the PWHL and the NSL here in Canada has shown that it was just gas lighting all along. There never was a ceiling, just a group of millions of people looking for women’s pro teams to get behind. Well, here they are!
Lots going on around here. Spring has sprung, we’ve prepared our beds for veggies and flowers. Bird song is changing in the morning, with creepers wheezing out their little songs and the first yellow-rumped warblers calling out to each other. (Birders sometimes refer to these birds as butter-butts!).
I have a plumbing crew tearing apart one of my bathrooms because the old plumbing in this house fails from time to time and a leak has been discovered. It’s not the first and given the original materials used on this house, it won’t be the last, but we’re talking this opportunity to do a retrofit of most of the joints and water line in the plumbing stack. It’s going to cost a small fortune, but you can’t mess around with water in the house.
It’s somehow a bit indicative of the state of the world at the moment. I’m reading Vanessa Machado d’Oliviera’s book “Hospicing Modernity” and I think I’m just resonating with inevitable decline of essential systems and how every time we convince ourselves we’ve repaired something, we know it’s just delaying the inevitable.
The cliffs at the end of the world, near Sagres, Portugal.
Tottenham 0 – 3 Nottingham Forest
I moved to Cheshunt, Herts, in England in 1978, just six weeks after the English football season ended. Under the guidance of Brian Clough, Nottingham Forest won the First Division that season, setting them up for an epic couple of years in which they were the dominant force in European football. Tottenham on the other hand had been dire. They were relegated to the second division in 1976-77, and won promotion the following year on the strength of goal difference alone. When I arrived on the scene, Tottenham was back, a top flight local team stacked with fresh talent like Glen Hoddle and World Cup winners Ricardo Villa and Ozzie Ardilles. That team grew in stature and swagger, winning the FA Cup in 1981 and 1982 and then the UEFA Cup in 1984.
So I never knew the pain of relegation for Spurs, nor could have I ever imagined that Nottingham Forest would not be the best team in the world. And yet here we are, Tottenham coming off our first European trophy since that UEFA Cup, and Forest FINALLY pulling themselves clear of 23 years outside of the top flight.
This morning, a six point game beckoned. Forest, who have struggled this season travelled to north London to play Tottenham. Six points were on the line here. It was Nottingham’s chance to leap frog Spurs towards 16th place and some modicum of safety. Tottenham, West Ham and Forest are trying hard to NOT finish in 18th place. We had to win.
And we didn’t. We outplayed Forest for much of the game, sending corner after corner harmlessly into the box. We hit a couple of posts and crossbars and exacted a couple of key saves. But in the end? It was dire, terrible, uninspired, without shape or identity or any kind of idea. Forest found three goals from think chances, and on a normal day you might say that the scoreline flattered them but not today. Today our undoing was the collective shrug we played with. Archie Grey, the 20 year old midfielder was the only one who see to show any kind of creativity. Mattias Tel, cutting in from the left wing provided a handful to deal with, but there isn’t much point winning corners if they serve no further purpose.
I can’t help think that we are going down. Two home wins in the premier league all season. No wins in 2026, and it’s almost April. The only good news today was Arsenal bottling the League Cup Final, but even a lost trophy to our biggest rivals is no salve for the wounds. Spurs are bleeding.
I am so grateful that I can make music. It’s a language that allows me to speak in the pure vocabulary of emotion with people. It allows me to relate to people in a way that is totally different from every other form of social interaction, even sport, which comes closest. And it allows me to connect with myself as well.
A bunch of musicians have put together a short film that aims to tell you why they make music. If you are not a musician, it’s almost impossible for me to tell you WHY I make music, but I can always give you an experience of what it feels like. No one needs to be laden with the identity of “musician” to make music. I can show you right now. They next time you meet me, ask me to make music with you. We will do it on the spot and you’ll taste what it is that all musicians chase with this language.
I found that by following a link from Patti Digh to a site about creativity.
From Dave's post today on the relationship between anthro-complexity, Human System Dynamics and the OODA Loop.:
If orientation is constitutive of observation, and if the relevant unit of analysis in most complex situations is not the individual but the community of practice, the organisation, the institution, then the question becomes: where does collective orientation live? The answer is not inside any individual generative model. It is distributed across the epistemic landscape, the structured field of what is perceivable, thinkable, and actionable within a given community at a given time, prior to any individual act of observation or deliberation.
An epistemic landscape is not a shared mental model. It is not a consensus. It is the pre-reflective background that makes certain things available for perception and certain kinds of thinking possible before anyone decides to attend to them. It has terrain: available distinctions that make certain differences legible, narrative structures that make certain sequences of events coherent, inscribed artefacts that hold certain patterns stable, silences where distinctions have not been developed, and differences therefore do not register. Moving through it does not feel like a constraint. It feels like the world’s natural shape.
This is tremendously geeky stuff, but important reading. As he has been exploring these ideas in chapter-length essays, he is bringing clarity, for me, on the role and position of the practitioner within the field in which the practitioner is working. These observations and declarations about the nature of epistemic landscapes, contexts, and constraints are important.
Interventions that work on the landscape itself are of a different kind. You cannot do it by training people to think differently within existing categories, because the categories are what you are trying to change. You cannot do it through after-action review, because after-action review operates within the narrative structures the landscape already makes available. You have to work obliquely, through the practices, artefacts, distinctions, and narratives that constitute the background before anyone starts deliberately attending. This is harder, less amenable to programme design, and less visible as an intervention. It is also, in conditions of genuine complexity, the more consequential one.
Dave's essays are so timely for me assignee January I have been thinking a lot about how to make this same point within the dialogue tradition that privileges the container as the primary space of change. I think dialogic containers are very important but I believe that without understanding them in the context of the many layers of context – landscape, substrate, form of life, constraint regimes – we can only have limited effect in "making change." And because dialogic containers are important places of encounter and the spaces in which people feel and experience change most intimately, they become seductive. They seem to be the easiest places to control and contribute which gives everyone a warm fuzzy feeling, but without attending to the larger scales of context and the affordances and avoidances that appear there, deeper structural change is impossible. Facilitation will not save the world, nor will hosting or any other kind of dialogic practice. Not alone, and not without attending to context.
Dave concludes:
We still have much to do in anthro-complexity, both in terms of our own methods and in market acceptance, to make the shift from containers to landscapes and to substrate management. We’re not there yet, and the pressure from purchasing executives with Augustinian expectations can require compromise for survival. But we’ve started the journey, and the invitation is open for others to join.
This is the work.