Sunday, June 24, 2007

Stanley Cup Finals

Today, June 24th, is the anniversary of the latest the Stanley Cup Finals have ever ended. (1995 was the year.) This year, Vancouver was eliminated in round 2 by Anaheim, who went on to win the Cup.

If you're a Vancouver fan, you can find some solace in that fact. It's like, "We might have been defeated, but at least we were defeated by the best."

It seems to happen fairly often to Vancouver that the team that eliminates them from the playoffs goes on to win the Stanley Cup. It's happened in 2007, 2002, 2001, 1996, 1994, 1989, and 1982. (Of course, 1994 and 1982 are kind of cheats -- in those years, it's not quite accurate to say the team that defeated Vancouver "went on" to win the Cup.)

There are a couple of other NHL teams who can make similar claims.

"Whoever defeats St. Louis wins the Cup." This was true in 2002, 2001, 1999, 1998, and 1997. Five of six consecutive years!

"Whoever defeats Boston wins the Cup." This was true in 2003, 1995, 1992, 1991, 1990, 1988, and 1986.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

I have a cold

I went grocery shopping today while recovering from a cold. While standing in line, it occurred to me that it would be pretty funny if the following musical artists from disparate genres decided to go on tour together.

Oran "Juice" Jones
Vitamin C
Pulp

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Best of Craigslist

I just discovered the Best of Craigslist and man, is it ever funny. The next time you take a day off because you have a cold and want to find something to read on the computer all day, check it out.

Friday, June 8, 2007

Palindromes

At the subway station near my apartment, there's a door with the word "SIGNALS" written on it. I see that door pretty much every day, and so at one point during the academic year, it occurred to me that the following is a palindrome:

SLANG IS SIGNALS

The nice thing about this palindrome is that it's reasonably meaningful. "Slang can function as a linguistic cue that you belong to the same in-group as someone", or something along those lines.

After discovering this palindrome, I decided to Google it, since I was sure other people must have independently discovered it in the past. Sure enough, some people had, but there seemed to be surprisingly few.

One member of that small list is someone by the name of Dean Blehert, who has a long list of palindromes titled Light Verse.