What a fascinating country and with only 12 days we hardly covered it, but with so many treasures around the world there simply isn’t time to repeat. Here’s a few shots from the trip in December.
I also made a video, which is better viewed on my Facebook site due to Youtube’s 10Mb limit to uploading…hence the pixelation.
I many wonderful shots, also on Facebook…it has sort of taken over all extra moments of time and is so convenient…and I thought blogs were where it was at??
Somehow I forgot to post this after Christmas last year…this blog is taking a beating!
I cannot let this issue go. There is so much to read about any subject on this planet and yet the one that bothers me the most is the subject which involved leaving this Earth.
THE APOLLO MOON MISSIONS…they may have happened but did they reach the moon?
Here are a few creditable links to alternative opinions:
Before we get to how he’s done it, let’s first put the milestone Martin Brodeur is on the verge of reaching into perspective.
“You’re probably looking at the 700 home run club, 20,000 points in basketball, and you’d probably have to go to 350 wins in baseball,” are the comparisons longtime Rangers broadcaster Sam Rosen used in reference to 500 wins for a hockey goalie, which Brodeur could get Friday night when the New Jersey Devils faceo ff against the New York Islanders at the Prudential Center. “It’s really an incredible number when you think about it because it’s two guys, it’s Patrick (Roy) and it’s Marty.”
What if you take 500 wins and break it down even further, taking into account the modern era of sports?
“A modern era pitcher coming in in 1993 like Marty did getting 100 complete games, because nobody gets them anymore,” is how Mike Emrick, the voice of the Devils and the NHL’s national telecasts, described the milestone.
Needless to say, Brodeur is on the verge of joining one of the most exclusive clubs in all of sports.
The founding member of the 500-win club, and still only member thanks to the Rangers’ 4-2 win Wednesday night, is Patrick Roy, who finished his career with 551 victories. The closest active goalie besides Brodeur is Dominik Hasek, who is still 133 victories shy of 500 win status.
“If it was that easy, you’d have five or six (with 500 wins),” Rosen said. “We’re talking about two.” n terms of hockey’s most exclusive fraternities, only two even compare: The 800-goal club, whose only members are Wayne Gretzky (894) and Gordie Howe (802), and the 1,000-win club, which is so fashionable that Scott Bowman is the lone member.
Five-hundred goals is an incredible milestone, but Jeremy Roenick became the 40th member of that fraternity this past weekend. It’s not even in the same stratosphere of exclusivity as 500 wins.
In baseball, only Cy Young has 500 wins, which he did in an era when pitchers pitched everyday. The modern day milestone is 300, and 23 members belong to that club. Heck, there are even three members of the 700-home run club now.
The exclusive modern day fraternity outside of hockey that draws the closest comparison lies in the NFL, where Brett Favre and Dan Marino are the only two members of a pair of clubs: 60,000 yards passing, and 400 touchdown passes.
Only four NBA players have scored 30,000 points, but Kareem-Abdul Jabbar, Karl Malone, Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain are all retired. The closest active player is Shaquille O’Neal, but he’s still more than 4,400 away and may never get there.
“It’s a pretty amazing milestone,” said Devils veteran left wing Jay Pandolfo, “and Marty is still young enough to where you don’t even want to think about how far he can go.”
Brodeur, 35 years old and in his 14th season, has arguably been the most consistent goalie in history. He has won 30 or more games in 11 straight seasons and counting, including 40 or more the last two, and six times overall. He set an NHL record with 48 wins last season.
Roy, who played 18 seasons before retiring at 38-years-old, won 30 or more 12 times in his career. He won 40 just once, in 2000-01 when he led the Colorado Avalanche to the Stanley Cup championship, beating the Devils in a seven-game series.
In fairness, though, Roy played an average of 57 games per season during his career, while Brodeur entered this season playing in close to 69 per season. He has played in 70 or more games in 10 different seasons. Roy’s career high was 68 in 1993-94.
“He’s had so many 30-win seasons in a row now that that would probably be equivalent to that many 35 or 40 goal seasons in a row,” Emrick said of Brodeur, “and that would be strung through an era where nobody got that many.”
Some argue that Brodeur has reached his milestone riding the coattails of one of the League’s best defensive units of all time for most of his career. Scott Stevens just gained entry into the Hall of Fame, and Scott Niedermayer is sure to eventually follow.
The stats back up that great defense since Brodeur has faced roughly three less shots per game than what Roy saw, but former NHL goalie Chico Resch argues that part of the reason for the discrepancy is nobody plays the puck better than Brodeur.
“Marty’s style was tailor-made for the defensive style, more so than the butterfly,” said Resch, a Devils broadcaster for the last 12 seasons. “If you’re getting pounded with shots you’re smarter to be in a butterfly because that’s getting hit, and you want to be hit. But, when you’re playing under the environment he did, his thing was to make a save and get it off to where you have those great defensemen.” Resch said Brodeur is a master at pushing rebounds into the areas he wants them to go, which in turn keeps an offense from getting second and third attempts.
“Marty Brodeur has started more rushes out of his team’s end than any other goalie because he knows how to get it out,” he added.
Brodeur critics – or Roy fanatics – also choose to look at the post-lockout, no-tie rules that have helped Brodeur shoot up the all-time wins list. He has 18 wins via a shootout, wins that would have gone on his record as ties before the lockout.
Brodeur’s backers counter by saying overtime has gotten harder on goalies because it is now 4-on-4 as opposed to 5-on-5, and a shootout is all about the goalie.
“If he’s getting the wins now, he’s finishing them off himself,” Rosen said. “We’re talking about longevity and consistency, and he’s that. One of the main reasons the Devils won is for over a decade Marty has been the goalie.”
Now all that’s left is for him to finally put 500 in his back pocket. Brodeur and the Devils have twice failed to reach the milestone since win No. 499 came last Thursday against Philadelphia.
“We had a great opportunity here by having the Rangers in town to get over that hump, but we just couldn’t do it,” Brodeur said following Wednesday night’s loss to the Rangers. “I just want to win. It’s always about winning.”
Four-hundred ninety-nine times and counting.
“I remember one night, it was before the lockout in overtime when you just played to a tie, (Mario) Lemieux got loose and was in all alone with (Jaromir) Jagr as his trailer, and Marty stopped them both,” Emrick recalled. “After the game I said (to Pittsburgh radio broadcaster Mile Lange), ‘You know Mike, that’s as good as it gets because you have the best goalie and two of the best shooters.’
“He said, ‘Sometimes you realize it’s just a blessing to be where we are.’ That’s how we feel having watched Marty so many times.”
I realize that I have been so caught up with Facebook…crackbook for some…that I have neglected this blog. I have also been totally trying to adjust to my new surroundings in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. I have completed two weeks of classes now and the kids are pretty much the most talkative students I have ever experienced. It is part of the culture and now part of my hell.
The last post was from July 21st and so much has happened so I will throw up a few pics from the summer and some from the current scene. My apologies to all fellow bloggers for not keeping up with this blog and your blogs.
Las Palmas, Gran Canaria
…soon to come…this is taking way too long…and I am boiling hot!!
Every summer from here on in for the next five years at least is going to full of marriages and babies…hold on to your seats as the real ride is about to begin!
Lovers
Cake
Hotties
The Old Guard
Blue Eyes
Different Cities?
The Big Man
The Hulk
The Man beaten by the Hulk
…my apologies but there just were not too many other photos…blame Bowen Island.
It was a wonderful night. A celebration of a cranial anomaly. A man of wit, charm, humor, and most of all….good looks. A man whom I may no longer associate with not because of the colour our skins but rather the significance of our statuses.
All the family was together, hearts were open, tears were real, love was genuine, and all of it because of one man and one woman that epitomize the truth of love.
An Earth Day editorial from Paul Watson: It’s not the number of automobiles but the number of people
By Capt. Paul Watson* Special to A.M. Costa Rica
Earth Day is almost here. I don’t believe in Earth Day myself. I think it’s a little silly to devote one single day of the year to being concerned about the environment, but I suppose one day is better than no day at all.
Having been an environmental activist since 1968, I have seen the movement go up and down like a roller coaster in popularity. It was big in 1972 with the Environmental Conference in Stockholm which I attended, and it became big again in 1992 with the U.N. Environmental Conference in Rio De Janeiro that I also attended. I remember that the priority issue in 1972 was the danger of escalating human populations, but by 1992, that concern was not even on the agenda.
Well we are approaching the end of another 20-year period, and it looks like ecology is in vogue again thanks to global warming and a few other scary things. Green is once again popular.
I can always tell when the environment is getting to be faddish again. My indicator is the number of lectures I am booked for around this time of year. It reached its peak in 1992, practically disappeared for awhile and now it’s coming around again.
What worries me is that the movement is constantly being sidetracked by the issue of the day.
It’s global warming now. When we were trying to warn people about global warming and climate change 20 years ago, no one was interested. Now it’s become the “in” issue and the big organizations are tapping the public for donations to address the problem although no one has come up with anything that makes much sense. But global warming is good for business if you’re one of the big bureaucratic organizations whose primary concern is really corporate self preservation.
Greenpeace is even telling people that they can slow down global warming by (and I kid you not) “singing in the shower.” Yep, you see all you have to do is run the water, then get wet, shut the water off, and sing in the shower as you lather up and then open up the faucet and rinse off. Ah, so simple to save the world.
The problem is that these big organizations are too politically correct to address the ecologically correct solutions. Instead they are baffling everyone with abstract concepts like carbon trading and carbon storage or trying to sell us a new hydrid Japanese car.
Even Al Gore with his “Inconvenient Truth” totally ignored the most inconvenient truth of all. I’ll get to that in a moment.
But let’s look at the NO. 1 cause of global greenhouse gas emissions.
First and foremost it is human over-population, the very same issue that was the priority concern at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Environment in Stockholm.
It’s 6.5 billion people, folks.
Remember in 1950, the world population was 3 billion. It’s now more than doubled. 6.5 billion people produce one hell of an annual output of waste and utilize an unbelievable amount of resources and energy. And this number is rising minute by minute, day, by day, year by year.
And most of the people having children have no idea why they are even having children other than that’s what you do. Most of them don’t really love their children because if they did they would be very much involved in trying to ensure that their children have a world to survive in.
Unless over-population is addressed, there is absolutely no way of slowing down global greenhouse gas emissions. But how do you do that within the context of economic systems that require larger and larger numbers to perform the essential task of consuming products?
Corporations need workers and buyers. Governments need taxpayers, bureaucrats and soldiers. More people means more money.
I’ve said for decades that the solution to all of our problems is simple. We just need to live in accordance with the three basic laws of ecology.
First is the Law of Diversity. The strength of an eco-system lies in diversity of species within it. Weaken diversity and the entire system will be weakened and will ultimately collapse.
Second is the Law of Interdependence. All of the species within an eco-system are interdependent. We need each other.
And the third law of ecology is the Law of Finite Resources. There is a limit to growth because there is a limit to carrying capacity.
Human populations are exceeding ecological carrying capacity. Exceeding ecological carrying capacity is diminishing both resources and diversity of species.
The diminishment of diversity is causing serious problems with interdependence.
Albert Einstein once wrote that “if the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”
That is the Law of Interdependence.
Forget global warming folks. The disappearance of the honeybee could end our existence as human beings on this planet far sooner than we think.
And the honey bee is in fact now disappearing. Why? We don’t know why. It could be genetically modified crops, I could be pesticides or it could be that our cell phones are interfering with their ability to navigate.
Whatever the cause the fact is that they are disappearing. All around the world bees are disappearing in a crisis called Colony Collapse Disorder. And bees pollinate our plants. Everywhere on the planet, bees are hard at work making it possible for you to live and enjoy life.
We hold on to our place on this planet by only a toehold. If anything happens to the grass family, we are screwed. If the earthworms disappear, we are in big trouble. If the bees disappear, well, according to Albert Einstein who was considered somewhat smarter than most of us, we will have only four years. Just enough time to get a college degree to discover that everything you learned is relatively useless when sitting on the doorstep of global ecological annihilation.
We are cutting down the forest and plundering the oceans of life. We are polluting the soil, the air and the water and we are rapidly running out of fresh water to drink. Only corporations like Coke and Pepsi have figured out that water is more valuable than gold. That is why they are bottling it in plastic bottles and selling it. This week I saw a bottle of water in my hotel room that I could have drunk for only $4.
Unbelievable. That means that water is now being sold for more than the equivalent amount of gasoline. I hope that I’m not the only one who thinks this is insanity.
Now for Al Gore’s really inconvenient truth. In his film he does not mention once that the meat and dairy industry that produces the bacon, the steaks, the chicken wings and the milk is a larger contributor to greenhouse gas emissions than the automobile industry. You see, Al may drive a Prius but he likes his burgers.
This is why the big organizations like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club will not say a thing about the meat industry. Last year I saw Greenpeacers sitting down for a baked fish meal onboard the Greenpeace ship “Esperanza” while engaged in a campaign to oppose over-fishing.
When we pointed out that our Sea Shepherd ships serve only vegan meals, the Greenpeace cook replied, “that’s just silly.” We see what we want to see and we rationalize everything else.
The oceans have been plundered to the point that 90 percent of the fish have been removed from their eco-systems and at this very moment there is over 65,000 miles of long lines set in the Pacific Ocean alone and there are tens of thousands of fishing vessels scouring the seas in a rapacious quest to scoop up everything that swims or crawls.
This is ecological insanity.
The largest marine predator on the planet right now is the cow. More than half the fish taken from the sea is rendered into fish meal and fed to domestic livestock. Puffins are starving in the North sea to feed sand eels to chickens in Denmark. Sheep and pigs have replaced the shark and the sea lion as the dominant predators in the ocean, and domestic house cats are eating more fish than all the world’s seals combined. We are extracting some 50 to 60 fish from the sea to raise one farm raised salmon.
This is ecological insanity.
Yet the demand for shark fin is rising in China. Ignorant people still want to wear fur coats. In America, we order fries, a cheeseburger and a “diet” Coke.
Ecological insanity, folks.
Last week a reporter called to ask me if I had really said that earthworms are more important than people. I answered that yes I had. He then asked how I could justify such a statement.
“Simple,” I answered. “Earthworms can live on the planet without people. We cannot live on the planet without earthworms, thus from an ecological point of view, earthworms are more important than people.”
He said that I was insane for suggesting such a ridiculous idea when people were made in the image of God, and earthworms were not.
What we have here of course is a failure to communicate between two radically different world views. His which is anthropocentric and sees reality as human centred and mine which is biocentric and sees reality as including all species equally working in interdependence. He sees us as divine and better than all the other species, and I see us as a bunch of arrogant primates out of control.
But that’s my two cents worth for Earth Day 2007.
Consider the humble honey bee and remember that the little black and yellow insect you see flitting busily from flower to flower is all that stands between us and our demise as a species on this planet.
We better see to it that they don’t disappear.
* Capt. Paul Watson is a co-founder of The Greenpeace Foundation and is president and founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Watson got into trouble when his “Sea Shepherd” crew sprayed water on Costa Rican shark poachers in Guatemalan waters. His column is used with permission.
