Exodus

Oh, I am loving every single minute of this. I was right, AGAIN, and I’m not going to shut up about it for, oh, like, the rest of my life.

Gotta start at the beginning. I am, or more accurately, used to be, a rabid hockey fan. Born in Toronto, played since I was 8; moved to Chicago and nearly won the IL State Championship my junior year of high school; massive Blackhawks fan, published a fan web site for about three years; I mean, I ate/drank/breathed/pooped the sport.

Until the lockout. Until they decided to turn the most time-honored sport on the North American continent into pond hockey with beer sales. But we won’t get into the whole shootout debacle, history will prove me right on that front too. I walked away from the sport last year, and I am proud to say I have not watched a single NHL game since the new collective buffoonery agreement was signed.

No, today we are talking pure and simple economics, specifically the contentious sticking point between players and owners during the lockout: the salary cap. Players didn’t want it, owners wouldn’t sign a deal without it. Ultimately they did implement a cap with a floating scale tied to owners profits, one of the dumbest clauses ever written into a legal contract, and both sides have just witnessed the first step in the eventual demise of what today we call the NHL.

The following is an excerpt from an article I wrote for my fan site, Talking Hawks, in July of 2005:

“First, the salary cap. As if putting a limit on a player’s earnings wasn’t bad enough, the players have foolishly agreed to tie their collective earnings to the owners’ revenue. This will cause a never-ending downward spiral, causing player salaries be cut in half by the start of next season, and making it more lucrative for top-name talent to play in Europe. Permanently. The NHL has just guaranteed itself the position of no-longer-the-premier-hockey-league in the world.”

Well, training camp is about to start in early September for NHL teams. There are just a few weeks left for teams to sign their free agents. But what are they finding? Some of them have already signed with…

…wait for it…

Russian teams.

According to an article posted August 24th on the TSN.ca web site, there is a wave of players shunning the low-ball offers from the NHL teams that own their North American rights to go play for more money in Russia. The Tampa Bay Lightning has lost winger Eugeni Artukhin to Locomotiv Yaroslavl, who will be teammates with defenseman Denis Grebeshkov and winger Sean Bergenheim of the New York Islanders. The Vancouver Canucks have lost promising backup goaltender Mika Noronen to AK Bars Kazan in Russia, and star winger Nikolai Zherdev is holding out from the Columbus Blue Jackets with an offer on the table from an undisclosed Russian club.

The exodus has begun. The end is near.

This should not surprise anybody with two IQ points to rub together. It’s simple supply and demand. The NHL owners arrogantly believed that they were the only game in town, not realizing that “town” now includes teams on three continents. By limiting the amount of money that their own teams can spend on player salaries, they opened up opportunities for European and Russian teams to come calling.

And it isn’t as if these players need to go out and attend tryouts for these overseas clubs, they all have agents to do the leg-work for them. Agents get paid more money if a player signs a bigger contract, so how long do you think it took the agents to start soliciting offers from across the Atlantic? About as long as it took the ink to dry on the new collective bargaining agreement. This wasn’t just a possibility, it was an undeniable certainty.

So right now we have four gone and one strongly considering it, what happens next? A bunch of things. First, more European teams will see that quality players can be had for less money than they had thought, and many of them will enter the running to bid on these young men. This will increase demand for NHL players whose contracts are expiring. This will force bidding wars for NHL players, not just between NHL teams, but with overseas teams as well.

Next, NHL teams will respond with higher offers to keep their talented players. But to do that, they will need to lower salaries on their higher-paid players in order to stay below the salary cap. So the gap between “stars” and the rest of the team will narrow, but the average salary will start a slow decline. Why? The players jumping ship to Europe and Russia will have to be replaced, necessarily with less-talented (and cheaper) players. So the highest salaries will be lower, the lowest salaries will be lower, and the average salaries will be lower. Bad news for players all around.

Next, the talent pool in the NHL will be diluted. We have to create an artificial universe here to illustrate the situation, so bear with me. Let’s say the NHL has two teams of 20 players each, a total of 4 “stars” on each and the other 16 players are just your average NHL fare. Well, now the two European teams (with less-than-NHL caliber players) comes to realize that they can afford to pay for four average players each from the NHL. So they do that, luring away 8 players from the 40 that are currently playing. That puts 8 European team players out of a job, so they go sign for peanuts with the NHL teams. So the result of this is, the NHL has lost 8 average players and replaced them with crappy players, and the European teams have replaced 8 crappy players with 8 NHL players. Distribution of talent is spread across more teams, and with a fixed number of NHL caliber players on planet earth, no matter whether it is four teams or four hundred, the talent pool will be thinned on North American shores.

And finally, right now the exodus consists of players that are replaceable. But if these Russian teams can afford average players today, what’s to say that they won’t be able to afford top-tier players tomorrow? Top-name talent salaries will soon be on the decline (see above), making such players more affordable to overseas teams. With the addition of NHL talent, these Russian teams are going to be winning more games, putting a better product on the ice, selling more tickets, and generating more revenue. That means more money to spend on more talented players, which means more wins, which means more ticket sales, which means more money, and so on. This is nothing but good news for European teams who want to take the plunge and invest in some NHL hockey talent.

And what does it mean for the NHL? As I said, it is the beginning of the end. As the exodus continues and the talent pool thins, the league will be putting a poorer-quality product on the ice. The upward spiral of wins, ticket sales, and revenue in Europe will be mirrored in the opposite direction over here: fewer wins, lousier games, lower ticket sales, lower revenues, less money to spend on good players, which means fewer wins, and so on.

There’s a salary cap in basketball, sure. Why hasn’t this happened to the NBA? Where the heck else are players going to go? Italy? Japan? What about the NFL? There’s a salary cap there too. But have you seen many players snubbing their NFL teams to go play in the Canadian league? Methinks not so much. These sports truly have a monopoly on talented players, because there are no other leagues that rival them. Not so for hockey, where viable professional leagues have been flourishing in Europe and Russia for decades. There is an established (and growing) fan base and solid ownership abroad, ready and willing to make a substantial investment in premiere talent in order to boost their bottom line. The NHL is in trouble, and they have nobody to blame but themselves. Adding to their misery is that the owners are, collectively, too proud to admit what they’ve done to themselves, even if they were smart enough to realize it. Which they aren’t. They will all wake up one day and find themselves without a fan base, without a team, without a league. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of hyper-capitalist mercenaries.

Who suffers? The fans, and the great sport of hockey. The paradigm shift with the most recent collective bargaining agreement was the death knell for this great sport, put to a slow and painful death by 30 bankers and the impotent homunculus who calls himself Commissioner. When it’s all over but the crying, let’s be sure to lay the body at their feet.

Insecurity

Here we go again.

Earlier this week the British police and investigative agencies, in conjunction with one or more “assets” placed close to the source, made more than two dozen arrests of terrorists plotting to blow up commercial airliners in a coordinated attack. Reaction across the globe was swift, with additional arrests being made in Pakistan, and terror alerts being raised to don’t-let-the-kids-outside levels.

As these cowards started spilling their guts to the authorities, it was discovered that the intended explosive agents were to be brought aboard the planes in liquid form, then combined and detonated. The detonators were to be concealed within cell phones and “iPod” personal stereo units. Within minutes, airport security checkpoints from Los Angeles to Moscow were prohibiting passengers from bringing drinks on board commercial flights.

You can imagine what the next step is: no cell phones, no iPods, and who knows what else. Laptops, personal digital assistants (“Palm” organizers), and hand-held gaming systems are also commonplace among business travelers, but are also possible places to conceal implements of terror. Even your electric toothbrush or your child’s Speak ‘n Spell could be seen as potential hazards. Screening every passenger for all types of these devices, essentially anything containing wires or microchips, would require staggering amounts of manpower and time. So to speed the screening and boarding process, we are but weeks if not days away from an outright ban on all electronic devices aboard commercial jets.

The result will be longer lines at security screening, increased frequency of airport shut-downs and terminal evacuations, and a decrease in business for commercial airlines. Many working professionals cannot afford to be idle on a plane for 2 – 10 hours, and some companies will eliminate business trips outright in favor of virtual conferences via the internet. Airlines will absorb another staggering (and for some, fatal) decrease in revenue, and our economy will take another devastating blow.

Unless we change our philosophy.

Whether we think so or not, our governments (federal, state and local) put a price tag on human life. As an example, let’s assume a road is being refurbished. The decision about whether to place a median or a guardrail between the lanes needs to be made. Guardrails have been shown to prevent more traffic deaths from head-on collisions than medians. A median will cost X dollars, a guardrail will cost X+Y dollars. It is believed that the addition of the guardrail instead of the median will save Z lives over its usable lifetime. In making the decision about the median versus the guardrail, the government must decide: is saving Z lives worth Y dollars? Eventually the decision is made, and we have established at least a baseline for the price of one human life — Z divided by Y.

These decisions go on every day of our lives in committee rooms and City Council chambers all over this country. We turn a blind eye to it, because we are always taught that you can’t put a price on human life. But our governments are putting prices on our heads with every decision they make. And so it should be with this one.

The decisions concerning the safety of our air travel need to be subjected to this kind of standard. By implementing the kind of security measures we are certain to see from this latest terrorist plot, we will perhaps terminally cripple the airline industry. Thousands of jobs will be lost; hundreds of families will go without adequate food, shelter and medical care; and the investments of countless millions of people with no connection to the airline industry will become worthless scrap paper. So there is a very real cost to implementing these changes.

Failure to implement these changes may result in loss of life. Not one or two poor souls on a highway, but dozens, perhaps hundreds of people. Businessmen and women, community leaders, families on vacation, next-door neighbors, even ourselves. This is the potential cost of doing nothing.

These are the damned-if-you-do choices we are faced with in these situations. So perhaps a third factor should be considered: are the terrorists winning by us choosing one or the other option? When that is factored in, the decision becomes clear.

The purpose of these terrorist attacks is not to kill us. These attacks are meant to cripple us economically. The premise is this: kill people on airliners, people become afraid to fly, people buy fewer plane tickets (and hotel rooms and rental cars and restaurant meals), people in those industry lose their jobs, government spending on unemployment and welfare increases, taxes get raised, etc. They are trying to do to us what we did to the Soviets during the cold war: beat them at the bank.

To a large degree, that strategy is working: we have already seen more than one airline file for bankruptcy protection; tourism dollars in major cities all over the globe have been strangulated; and with war and instability in the Middle East as a result of this latest round of unpleasantness, the amount of money that we spend annually on fuel has more than tripled in the last ten years.

By making airline travel even more inconvenient, we will shrink the aggregate dollars spent in that sector. This will further the overall goals of the terrorists, encouraging them to continue this type of activity. By protecting ourselves from these barbaric acts, we are actually increasing the likelihood that we will be a victim of one. That leaves but one option.

Stop the lengthy and cumbersome security checks at airports altogether. Screen for guns and other obvious weapons, just like the old days, but apart from that we should rescind the mandates for increased security checks handed down after September 11th. We need to make the air travel experience pleasant and convenient, encouraging more people to travel by air, increasing demand, increasing airline profits, increasing competition, lowering costs, and setting the sector on a course for growth instead of crippling contraction.

The air travel sector is a massive part of our overall economy, including not only the airlines themselves, but also airplane manufacturers as well as associated travel and tourism industries. Even excluding airline workers, Chicago’s O’Hare Airport by itself is one of the largest employers in the state of Illinois. Allowing more crippling blows to that part of our economy will necessarily cause a ripple effect that will, to some degree, affect every person in the industrialized world. The terrorists have chosen a very effective target: what we cannot do is allow them to succeed in bringing it down. These are not easy choices to make, but we must make them.

Planes will explode. People will die. In reducing airport security, this is what we must accept. But we must also remember that while these spectacular events burn in our memories, the alternative is sentencing hundreds if not thousands of our own neighbors to the torture of economic collapse. Those events don’t make headlines. The UN doesn’t pass resolutions condemning corporations for laying off their entire workforce. Nobody erects makeshift shrines with pictures and candles at the place where a family lost their house and was forced to move with their children into a homeless shelter.

We must decide what kind of cost we are willing to bear, and have the courage to stand by our decision until these pathetic weaklings are all flushed from their lairs and slaughtered in the streets like the dogs that they are. That day is coming, and when it does, we can all hop on a plane for no reason at all, just for the fun of it, to go celebrate.

Feeling Blue

It takes a lot to make me laugh.

I worked at a comedy club while I was in college, and so I saw a different comedian four nights in a row, every week. Repetition led to memorization, and by the time the week was over I was finishing the jokes in my head. Month after month, joke after joke, I gradually became desensitized to comedy.

So when I sat down to watch an early episode of NBC’s Last Comic Standing, I was skeptical about anybody being able to bring the funny. Seeing some of the wanna-be contestants go through the audition process was as painful as a colonoscopy, except it lasted longer. But on that first show I saw somebody who I thought was possibly good enough to win the whole thing.

Wednesday night, he did.

Josh Blue described himself accurately on the penultimate show on Tuesday: he looks like “Animal”, the drummer from The Muppet Show. Crazy frizzy hair, googly eyes, and sporadic loss of motor control. That isn’t exactly a fair depiction, because Josh has Cerebral Palsy.

“This is the part of my show where I tell you that you’re all going to hell for laughing at me…”

When we encounter an entertainer with a disability, our natural reaction is to be encouraging, but lower our expectations. “He did great,” we say out loud, not uttering the next phrase that reverberates in our head, “…for a guy with a disability.” We feel guilty for thinking it, but it’s a natural reaction. Which is exactly why Josh Blue is so disarming: that second part never comes.

Josh incorporates his disability into his act in a way that people without disabilities can relate to. He doesn’t take us into a world of diseases and wheelchairs, he tells us stories of how he adjusts to life in the world we experience every day. The result is a performance that is fresh, well-rounded, light-hearted, and funny.

“My mom’s great, I love my mom. She’s the only person who can tell when I’m drunk…”

There are three categories of comedians. The writers are the guys like Bill Cosby, Woody Allen, and Jerry Seinfeld whose strength lies in the material itself. Their forte is putting together material that connects with a crowd, letting the words generate the laughs. On the opposite end of the spectrum are the actors, such as Andrew Dice Clay, Gilbert Gottfried, and Steven Wright. Not that their stuff isn’t funny, but it’s not the focus of the show. Their “act” is what people come to see.

The ones who have the most potential are those who are able to combine the two into a cohesive performance. Steve Martin comes to mind, somebody who puts a brilliant writing talent together with a consistent and likable stage persona, and the result was visionary.

Josh Blue has the same such potential, though I think he would be the first to admit that he is still developing as both a writer and a performer. His stage presence is innocent and appreciative, and he still telegraphs his punch lines to a small degree. As he ages and his life experience expands (marriage, kids, etc.) he will open a new treasure trove of potential material. His subject matter will have to expand beyond his current niche if he wants to continue succeeding at his craft.

But in the mean time, Josh Blue is a performer that is just plain fun to watch. His skittish, sometimes spastic movements on stage are endearing, and his material doesn’t rely on sexual or bodily function humor to earn laughs. He has defined a niche for himself, and he is comfortable residing there and inviting the audience to join him.

“I was walking down the street one day, and the drunk tank picked me up. I said, ‘Officer there must be some mistake, I have Cerebral Palsy.’ The cop said, ‘Those are pretty big words for a drunk ass…’”

All of the finalists on Last Comic Standing were far from amateurs. The five comedians duking it out for top honors all have their own careers, mostly in their hometown markets. Josh hails from Denver, Colorado, but with his exposure on NBC his popularity is growing. His list of credits prior to Last Comic Standing include appearances on several TV and cable networks, a $10,000 Grand Prize at the Royal Flush Comedy Competition, and a guest star appearance on Comedy Central’s Mind if Mencia. He just recorded a sold-out show in Denver for release as a DVD, and he is embarking on an ambitious national tour this fall.

It would be easy to classify Josh as a “lovable loser” type, and he does somewhat nurture that perception in his act. But to do so would be inaccurate. Josh is very much a winner, not only in the literal sense, but in the way he comports himself. He will, whether he likes it or not, be placed into the role of Disabled Celebrity Spokesperson, and time will tell how he adapts to that role.

As his fame grows, we will see the requisite features on the syndicated show-biz gossip shows, showing the real Josh and the struggles he faces every day. With luck, he will use these as opportunities to give a light-hearted brush-off to people who would pity him. To compete on a level playing field with hundreds of non-disabled comedians and come out on top, pity is the last thing he needs.

“I play soccer for the U.S. Men’s Paralympic Soccer Team… During one of our matches I got injured, and our coach had the nerve to put me on the disabled list!”

It takes a lot to make me laugh. I’m looking forward to laughing at Josh Blue during his upcoming tour. And hopefully I won’t go to hell.