My first live Vancouver Goldeneyes game. A result typical of the last year of sports in my life, but an amazing atmosphere and culture in the arena. Everyone watches women’s sports.
So here is a rundown of the last eight months of sports in my life:
The ugly:
- TSS Rovers Men hold first position in the league until the last week of play. Langley United scores as added time penalty in the last game of the season against the Whitecaps and steals the title from us.
- The Toronto Blue Jays lose the World Series in extra innings in game seven.
- The Canada men’s and women hockey teams both lose their gold medal games in overtime to the USA.
- The Rugby Six Nations ended today with Ireland needing England to beat France. Nearly 100 points are scored and by the end of the game, England lead by one. At the clock ticks over the 80th minute they concede a penally for a high tackle and Ramos for France kicks a 45 yard penalty to win the Six Nations and break every heart in Ireland, and every Irish heart everywhere else.
- The Toronto Maple Leafs blow a million two goal leads, and lost another one tonight in the shootout. They drift towards the bottom of the standings, now 12 points out of a playoff spot.
- Tottenham Hotspur look to be facing relegation for the first time since 1977, and just bungled the first leg of their Champions League knockout round campaign. The new manager is, let’s say, not loved. Igor Tudor, we hardly knew ye.
- The Vancouver Goldeneyes drop two overtime losses in a row, making it four in a row lately.
Important individual games that provided moments of extreme quality and deep heartbreak. And seasons for some of the teams I follow that have drifted into bizarre and sustained failure.
The beautiful:
- TSS Rovers women win the Metro Women’s Soccer League on the last game of the season for the first time in their 15 year history.
- Vancouver Rise (including former TSS Rover Kirsten Tynan) slide into the playoffs, beat Ottawa on penalties in the second leg of the semi final and upset League winners AFC Toronto in the final to win the Championship.
So, focus on the women’s football. Rovers and Rise seasons starts next month.
I have a bunch of little slogans that I use to help me make sense of my hosting practice. One of these is “the shortest distance between two people is a story,” a line that I learned years ago from Patti Digh. I read Patti’s blog daily and today she evoked the line again, talking about the connections that were made in a weekend long creative writing workshop. Appreciation for this line. It helps me remember that a story, narrative, anecdote, and nonsense are ways that we connect, or ways that we suddenly see who we are with, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse!
Have you ever had a frozen shoulder? I have my first, and hopefully only one. I did something to my shoulder in the summer, I don;t know what, but it managed to degrade and evade physio treatment to the point where my physio team said I should get a cortisone injection. Yesterday I got an early start and headed over the North Vancouver to Revive Medical where a very clear and efficient doctor administered an injection and my shoulder began to feel better immediately. I have work to do to rebuild strength and range of motion, but boy is it nice to have the acute pain gone.
You know what else is frozen? Tottenham’s chances of surviving to play another season in both the Champions League and the Premier League. Today’s Champions League match against Athletico Madrid was a car wreck, surrendering four goals in the first twenty minutes and causing Tudor to retroactively admit that selecting Kinsky in goal was a bad idea. The match finished 5-2 with Porro and Paulinha colliding at the end and both suffering nasty head injuries, summing up everything this team is at the moment. Rudderless. The Premier League campaign is worse than last year’s and that is saying something. We are in very real danger of being relegated for the first time since 1976-77. And to be honest, I wouldn’t care too much. A season in the Championship might be everything we need to get our heads clear after the last few years of debacle.
Locally, our TSS Rovers are gearing up for the season. The women have done a tremendous job of preparation, winning the Metro Women’s Soccer League title for the first time in their 15 year history, securing the title away in Abbotsford. Given the football I’ve been watching all winter, I can’t wait to see some quality play for a change! If you’d like to come out to a match this spring let me know and I’ll send a ticket your way.
I’ve just finished reading 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez;s brilliant book about time and history set in a village and a family in Colombia. The central thesis of the book is that time is a circle.
Today I watch the war in the Gulf with the history of a person who was 25 when the US attacked Iraq in 1993. At that time Moxy Fruvous wrote a song, and it spoke to me then, and, as time is a circle, here it is again.
Gulf War Song
We got a call to write a song about the war in the Gulf,
But we shouldn’t hurt anyone’s feelings.
So we tried, and gave up, cuz there was no such song,
But the trying was very revealing:
What makes a person so poisonous righteous,
That they’d think less of anyone, who just disagrees?
She’s just a pacifist, he’s just a patriot.
If I said you were crazy, would you have to fight me?
Fighters for liberty,
Fighters for power,
Fighters for longer turns in the shower.
Don’t tell me I can’t fight ’cause I’ll punch out your lights
And history seems to agree
That I would fight you for me.
So we read, and we watched
All the specially selected news,
And we learned so much more about the good guys.
“Won’t you stand by the flag?”
Was the question unasked,
“Won’t you join in and fight with the allies?”
What could we say? We’re only 25 years old,
With 25 sweet summers, and hot fires in the cold.
This kind of life makes that violence unthinkable.
We’d like to play hockey, have kids and grow old.
Fighters for Texaco,
Fighters for power,
Fighters for longer turns in the shower.
Don’t tell me I can’t fight ’cause I’ll punch out your lights,
And history seems to agree
That I would fight you for me,
That us would fight them for we.
He’s just a peacenik,
And she’s just a war-hawk.
That’s where the beach was,
That’s where the sea.
What could we say? We’re only 25 years old,
And history seems to agree that I would fight you for me,
That us would fight them for we.
Is that how it always will be?
Cynefin is just one of seven frameworks used by the Cynefin Co. to understand and work with complexity. Here is the complete list at present, left here for posterity:
- The Cynefin Framework
- Estuarine Framework and Estuarine Mapping
- Flexuous Curves Framework (originally Apex Predator)
- The Uncertainty Matrices – emphasise various forms and levels of knowability
- 3 As, Agency, Affordance and Assemblage – critical tools for change
- ASHEN – designed for KM, adopted for leadership and understanding organisations
- AIMS – what you can manage in a complex system: Actants, Interactions, Monitors, and Scaffolding
- The WRAS(SE) framework – it adds a critical human lens to the Cynefin ecosystem, helping organisations understand how people react under stress and ambiguity, and how those reactions shape outcomes, often more than formal plans or structures.
The links take you to the entries on Dave Snowden’s blog or to the Cynefin wiki, where methods and frameworks are developed and documented by practitioners.
This is from a page advertising a two day masterclass in these frameworks being held in London in March .
The story of six Tongan boys who were stranded on a desert island and thrived for more than a year. No, it wasn’t a real life version of Lord of the Flies. The complete opposite, in fact. This is hopeful.
Here in Canada, populist provincial governments are using the notwithstanding clause in our Constitution on a regular basis to suspend the rights of their citizens. Recently it has been used to de y the rights of children and youth freedom of expression and to deny workers their right to practice their freedom of association. These are the same governments that champion individual rights when it suits them. As a result, for the better part of the next five years some citizens in these provinces will have fewer rights than others. Don’t take your eyes off of it and be sure to understand what the use of this clause means. Yes it’s a (shitty) legal mechanism. And yes it suspends Charter protected rights.
Don Schafer provides some context for the vote in BC Legislature denying the introduction of a bill to repeal the BC Human Rights Code Act.
And if shit like this makes you angry, Peter Rukavina is willing to provide you with a creative container – The Books of Anger – in which you can explore the emotions of resentment, irritation, exasperation, frustration, and fury.
Good labour policy supports a vibrant business sector. Today rabble.ca reports on a bunch of good ideas that could easily be implemented to support the massive sector of the economy that are self-employed entrepreneurs. Government tends to define “entrepreneur” as a person who creates employment, but 80 percent of women in business are self-employed. It’s time we recognized this sector of the labour market and provided equitable supports and security for these workers.
I don’t quite know what it will take to unhook politics from polling and money. In this week’s New Yorker, the editorialist dissects the Democratic Party’s election strategy and it all sounds like how to do things that will shift numbers. The cynics will tell me that’s how you win elections and there is nothing more important than winning. But my brain and heart tells me that current electoral politics is more about who has the saviest consulting firm than whether the electeds can a) actually understand what needs to happen in our societies and b) have the capability to govern with the courage and smarts to do it. We’re failing. Badly. This is not hopeful.
Also from the current New Yorker issue from a profile of composer Stephen Spencer:
You’re in the sandbox playing,” he said. “Let’s postpone the judgment or appraisal and feel free to make music joyfully and in an unfiltered way. My students make fun of me, because they’ll say something like ‘How do I practice this?’ And I’ll be, like, ‘You have to love yourself.’
The man is not wrong.