Sticks and Skates

1. In your opinion, what was the purpose of this blogging activity? (Why did I choose to do blogging instead of traditional writing activities?)

My opinion on the choice of blogging over other methods of writing is that we may be more compelled to bring out our true writing abilities in a more unique form of writing. In a blog, your audience is the possibly the entire world, which means that you can connect with other bloggers who like the same things as you or agree with your opinion. Writing a blog is also much more compelling than just writing with a pencil on paper. For some people, blogging gives them the chance to shine, where the same person may have been unable to apply the same voice on paper. I especially like this activity over the others because we were given free range to write whatever we wanted. It makes sense that people would be most skilled at writing about their favorite topics. For example, I was able to connect to my work because I wrote about my favorite sport, ice hockey. Writing on a blog was the most captivating and enjoyable activity this year.

2. What have you accomplished during your blogging?

        During the blogging activity, I was able to achieve things in writing I probably never would achieve in other shapes of writing. Since we were privileged with the choice to write on any topic we wanted out of the blue, I myself was able to write about something I had always wanted to. Thanks to my blog, I think I was able to tell a couple of people what the most famous players were all about and the history of certain aspects of the game. I’m not just making this stuff up either, my Clustrmap tells me that more people that just my teacher looked at my blog. I also achieved my imaginary merit badge for researching and plagiarism prevention. Making sure that my work is in its own words is so much easier now.

3. What key concepts have you learned while blogging? (This can be about writing, research or technology etc.)

             A couple of key concepts I have learned while working on my blog was that my researching skills were greatly improved.  Since much of my blog consisted of biographies, I had to do a lot of research about the players from many different sources. I had to do research from many different sources so that I could be certain that some facts were reliable. Back to the topic, after my research was complete, I had a ton of information in my head, but the problem was, those words are somebody else’s words. Which means that I had to improve my skills of turning somebody else’s words into my own without stealing the work of others. I also learned what a blog was and to use and write on one. I had heard of blogs much before the class activity, but I could never get my lazy self to do anything with a blog. And I think the most important key concept I learned while working on a blog was putting voice in my writing, putting something in it to make the reader know who is writing before even reading the authors name. Something in my blog that forced me to put more voice in my writing was that the entries in my blog just listed fact after fact. Writing with lots of facts in it takes the voice out of the picture and gives the reader the image of a robot speaking. I tried my best to put as much voice as I could into my writing, and in my opinion, I was successful.

4. Based on the skills you learned while blogging, how will this benefit you in the future? This may be inside or outside of school.

            The skilled I learned while blogging could benefit my future self in a number of ways. The one I think that could be used everywhere and with everything is putting source information into my own words.  This can be used for writing essays for other classes, such as history. Or it could be used for just taking research notes. Voice usage is very good to utilize for my future. Voice is very important if I plan to say any speeches when in high school or when I am an adult. And using voice in an everyday conversation makes me a more charismatic person and thus making me a better person around people.

            I found this activity to be the most entertaining writing experience the whole year. I actually got really engrossed in my blog and in trying to improve it. It left a great impact on me and left me always thinking twice about an activity that may seem dull or pointless at first.  

Mario Lemieux

Mario Lemieux was born in Montreal, Quebec on the 5^th of October, in the year 1955.  His parents were Jean-Guy and Pierrette Lemieux. Mario was the youngest of the three sons they raised.  He grew up like any other Canadian kid, playing hockey every day after school with his friends, which was his first chance to show his pro-hockey potential. He was so talented that by the age of six, he was blowing past nine and ten years old. His father said that he was sure; by the time Mario was six that he would play professionally in his future.

            When people talk about Lemieux now, he is often compared to the greatest, such as Wayne Gretzky. Like all of the best players, his fans came up with names and titles such as “Super Mario” and “Le Magnifique.” Throughout his junior career, Mario Lemieux broke many records, such as the highest scoring junior of all time. He was also voted the best junior player in Canada in 1983 and 1984.

            His professional career began when the Pittsburg Penguins chose him first in the 1984 draft. Many other teams approached the Penguins with offerings in exchange of the rookie superstar. One team actually was willing to trade all their picks for Lemieux. People were so proud of his potential that they bestowed upon him the number 66, as upside down version of the famous number 99, which belonged to Wayne Gretzky. 

            Mario Lemieux definitely left a good first impression on his first game in the NHL. He scored his very first goal during his very first time on the ice on his first shot. The Penguins were considered failures at the time, and the fate of the franchises future was in the hands of Lemieux. In the same season, Mario received the “rookie of the year” award. He would also go on to become the first rookie to receive “most valuable player” in the All-Star Games.

            In 1993, something would happen to Mario Lemieux’s that would change his life forever. Mario would wake up one day and discover a lump on his neck. He would then get diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, which is cancer located in the lymph nodes. He then right away took ten weeks off get it taken care of.

During those ten weeks he rested up and went under a course of radiation treatment. He survived the cancer and he returned to Pittsburg after his time off.

            At the end of his career, Lemieux was definitely not done being involved

with pro hockey. After his retirement, the Penguins still owed Mario about forty million dollars. This debt forced the team to surrender to bankruptcy. Mario saved the penguins one more time by lowering the amount of cash they owned in exchange for primary control and ownership.

            Ice skates were used an exceedingly long time before the times of hockey. The oldest pair of skates ever found were discovered in Switzerland and dated back to about 3000 B.C. The fact that they were found at the bottom of a lake also supports that they were one of the most early and convenient ways to traverse frozen lakes. They were made from the bone of a creature with hooves, such as a reindeer or an elk. They were fashioned to strap onto the boot so that they could be taken off after use and he or she had come off of the ice.

            Later, as ice-skating got more popular, they were being used all over Europe and the States. And the first skating arenas were built in Canada. And the very first ice that was made like it is today was made in London at an arena called the Glaciarium. 

            During the sprouting popularity of skating, many new forms of skates came about. The people of Holland would wear these tall platforms that would be strapped to the boot for skating. On the bottom of the platforms, a smooth steel plate was put to make the skates slide across the ice as the wearer used long poles, similar to ski poles, to move across the ice surface.  A century later, in the fifteen hundreds, the same people, the Dutch, came up with a much thinner blade that is basically the same as they are today. This new from of skate left the hands free since the poles were not necessary for the athlete to move forward.

            As time passed, people began to get more adventurous with the activity. When people started to get competitive and began to show off who could skate the fastest, someone must have came up with a different skate design to give his of herself an edge against his rivals. This is probably how the speed skate came to rise. When dance was fused with skating, it became figure skating. And to improve the height of the jumps and technique, the figure skate was made, which has a special tip at the front of the blade to spring the skater up into the air.  And as the game of hockey came into the world, the people crafted special skates to improve the sport.

            The ice skate has made hockey possible, along with other sports, and they are one of my favorite inventions that I can think of.

Sydney Crosby

In case you forgot what a hockeyography is, or maybe this is your first time here, a hockey biography is designed to tell you all about the background of some of the NHL’s most famous players.

          Like most of the great ones, Sydney Crosby was born and raised in Canada. His birthplace is Halifax, Nova Scotia and he was born August 7, 1987. Though being born in Halifax, Crosby grew up in Cole Harbour with his mother and father. His mother, Trina Crosby, worked in a grocery store and his father played goaltender in junior hockey. His father was renowned for his habit to “drop the gloves,” which means he would get into a lot of fights. The reason it is called that is because players always drop their gloves on the ice before they start a scrap. Back on the topic of Sydney’s dad, when hockey as a career never came to be for Troy Crosby, he worked as a facilities manager at a law firm in Halifax.

          The very first experience Crosby had with hockey was when he would play against the washing machine in his basement with a tiny, sawed off hockey stick. By the age of three, Sydney had ditched the basement and moved on to a more slippery surface, the ice. He had a chance to display his talent when he started competing at local tournaments two years later at the age of five. His very selfless parents took on strange extra jobs to raise extra money to pay for new hockey equipment. For an example, in all the spare time she could get, Trina would hand out flyers for some extra cash.

          Although his rise to fame began the instant he was born, it became most visible when Crosby was skilled enough to be interviewed at age seven. As he got older, he left summer hockey camps with the teacher’s jaws dropped and his fellow competitors dazed, he was known country wide even before his advancement into the NHL.

          One of the many things that aided his advancement into the NHL was his best friend, Jackson Johnson. The friendly competition between the two of them helped them advance together into better and smarter players. Sydney Crosby is one of the greatest hockey talents ever and, from this part of the bibliography, he would climb the ladder, rung by rung, into the player he is today.

Just to start you off, hockey history is focusing on a single aspect of the game, how it began and how it is today. They are designed to inform the readers what things were like “way back when.”

The very beginning of the game of hockey if very debatable, but for a fact, the very first official rules for the game were made at McGill University of Montreal in 1879. a couple of years later, in 1892, Lord Stanley, the Governor General of Canada at the time, came up with the name for the league. He named it “Lord Stanley’s Dominion Challenge Trophy” but is said today as just the “Stanley Cup”.

In the early history of the game, players were in charge of making their own sticks. It was usually made of a 3 foot piece of alder or hickory. If you have ever seen a field hockey stick, ice hockey sticks looked about the same at that time. If you have never seen a filed hockey stick, just imagine a candy cane. But like most, if not all, things, they evolved over time. Players made the shaft much longer in order to eradicate the “hunch back” position whilst playing. And the original “candy cane” blade as I call it was made squarer and longer so that the player could have greater stick handling and control over the puck.

The problem with making sticks with wood is that the thin blades would often crack and splinter, thus ruining the entire stick. But a Montreal stick manufacturing company came up with an extraordinary remedy to this problem. In 1928, they came up with the “two piece” hockey stick. This stick is made up of a shaft and a blade, but the blade can be removed and interchanged so that the whole stick is not sacrificed if the stick blade is damaged. This helped players use the same stick for a longer time, which saved wood and effort.

There was a change in stick manufacturing when the price for the favored kind of wood, ash wood, became higher and higher. By the 1970’s companies that produced hockey sticks were looking into different ways of lamination. Lamination makes sticks stronger and prevents them from splintering. When a exemplary form of lamination came about, manufacturers started using different kinds of woods because they could substitute the strength of ash wood with lamination.

Information gathered at: www.madehow.com

Jarome Iginla

Since this is the first hockeyography, let me just start you off with what a hockeyography is. Hockeyography stands for hockey biography and they are designed to let people know more about the people behind the mask.

Jarome Iginla is the first black player in hockey history to play as a team captain. His team is the Calgary Flames and his position is right wing. He is the top scorer in Flames history and is an amazing player who uses his size and speed to his advantage.

Jarome was born in Edmonton on Canada Day, which is the 1^st of July. Nine years before that in 1968, his grandparents moved to Canada from Oregon, where his mother was raised. During the 70’s Jarome’s mother, Susan Schuchard met Adekunkle Iginla, who later changed his name to Elvis so that Canadians could actually call his name. Jarome was born in 1977 and his parent split up two years later in ’98.

Before getting involved in hockey, Jarome played and got quite good at baseball, where he played all of the positions fairly well. Since most Canadian boys were on skates as soon as they were on their feet, his grandfather had him start playing hockey. By the age of eight Jarome was participating in organized hockey.

The Edmonton Oilers success in the playoffs was the first thing that got Jarome interested in hockey. His favorite player at that time was Grant Fuhr, the Edmonton goaltender. He was his favorite player because they shared African heritage and he mostly liked his style of play. These are the probably the reasons that he played goalie for his first two years of minor hockey.

When Jarome played hockey, he caught on to the art of skating slower that the other boys. This is why his parents doubted him ever having a career in hockey. They though it would make more sense for him to make a career out of music, he had a wonderful voice and his family tree was littered with music.

Despite it all, he would be chosen as 11th draft pick in the first round for the Dallas Stars. He would then be traded to the Calgary Flames where he has spent his career since.

Get your equipment everybody, be prepared for the latest and greatest of all hockey blogs ever. thats right, I am gonna be telling all you fans what’s up with the NHL. I will be trying my best to give all of the game results for each week that i post. I am going to be the source where you can learn the history of hockey, the modern game, and how it has changed over the years, along with the greatest players and memorable moments. And since it is the all Canadian game, I will prove one myth about Canada right or wrong each week. Here is one to start you off: all Canadians live in igloos. False, sure the Inuits might live in them occasionally, but we live in very nice, well built houses, and we also drive cars.