I bought Safety Not Guaranteed a while ago (almost exactly a year ago, I just noticed), and finally watched it. I went into it not really remembering anything about it, or even why I bought it, so it was kind of strange, to start. But I think it worked out well to approach it that way.
It's a very quirky movie, centered on three reporters at a local magazine researching a story about a guy who posts an ad in the classifieds, saying that he wants a partner for a time-traveling expedition. "Safety not guaranteed. Must supply own weapons."
There's no hint of what the expedition is, where or when it's targeting, or who's behind the ad.
The three reporters are technically one reporter and two interns. And they're all dealing with issues. The main character, Darius (played by Aubrey Plaza, of whom I'd never before heard), has never been terribly sociable, and isn't thrilled with where that's led her. Or with her job.
The other intern is doing it to improve his applications (for grad school, it's vaguely implied); he's a science (biology) major, and more than a little bit of a geek.
The full-time reporter, Jeff, is pretty much a sex-obsessed jerk who is using the story as an excuse to try to hook up again with an ex-girlfriend (his first blowjob, he subtly informs us at one point) who lives near the person who posted the ad.
They shortly find the guy, Kenneth (played by Mark Duplass, also new to me). When Jeff immediately antagonizes Kenneth, Darius is told to use her vagina to allay Kenneth's suspicions (her interpretation of their instructions).
So all of the main characters are dealing with feeling alone, all in different ways (how much different will only become clear well into the movie).
The dialog is pretty funny, and while Jeff is basically an affront to all humans, even his antics lead to some amusement.
The questions to be answered: can Jeff hook up with the ex-girlfriend? Can Arnau get laid, with Jeff's help? Does Darius like Kenneth? Is Kenneth sane? Is he paranoid, or are they really out to get him? If he is sane, is the claim of time travel for real?
The ending managed to be both mysterious and satisfying, which is a bit of a trick to pull off. And I liked that you got moments of vulnerability from all the major characters (though that probably still won't be enough to make you like Jeff). But it was a good way to spend a bit of time. It might be a while, but I'll probably watch it again.
20140603
Getting the most out
I mentioned, a while ago, using the fitness app Quick 4 to get myself doing exercise on closer to a daily basis. It has certainly helped my metabolism, although I can't really tell how much more than that it's done.
I haven't really lose weight (maybe a few pounds) in the intervening weeks, though it's possible body fat has gone down (I tend not to lose weight when exercising heavily, just to get more muscular. Dunno if that's a personal weirdness, or a symptom of how I exercise, or something else).
But since it only lasts four minutes, I have done some thinking (and experimenting) with how to make it more effective (burning more calories, at least). There are eight exercises, so here are my thoughts on each of them:
Running in place: lift knees up higher and swing arms more
Jumping jacks: keep arms straighter and spread legs wider
Push-ups: keep back, all the way from feet to head, straight; never rest weight on ground
Jumping squats: go all the way into a crouch, don't pause, go as close as possible to straight up
Bicycle crunch: be sure to pull with abs, not shoulders; have arms hit as far above knees as possible
Burpees: actually got nothing for this one
Mason twist: keep feet off ground, but move knees as far as possible; keep hands next to torso
Mountain climbers: arms and back straight, back parallel to ground, keep shoulders behind hands
All of them, of course, also increase impact by doing them faster.
I've also increased it by sometimes doing the Quick7 workout as well (a couple hours later).
I haven't really lose weight (maybe a few pounds) in the intervening weeks, though it's possible body fat has gone down (I tend not to lose weight when exercising heavily, just to get more muscular. Dunno if that's a personal weirdness, or a symptom of how I exercise, or something else).
But since it only lasts four minutes, I have done some thinking (and experimenting) with how to make it more effective (burning more calories, at least). There are eight exercises, so here are my thoughts on each of them:
Running in place: lift knees up higher and swing arms more
Jumping jacks: keep arms straighter and spread legs wider
Push-ups: keep back, all the way from feet to head, straight; never rest weight on ground
Jumping squats: go all the way into a crouch, don't pause, go as close as possible to straight up
Bicycle crunch: be sure to pull with abs, not shoulders; have arms hit as far above knees as possible
Burpees: actually got nothing for this one
Mason twist: keep feet off ground, but move knees as far as possible; keep hands next to torso
Mountain climbers: arms and back straight, back parallel to ground, keep shoulders behind hands
All of them, of course, also increase impact by doing them faster.
I've also increased it by sometimes doing the Quick7 workout as well (a couple hours later).
Jokulhaups?
I recently watched Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, and found it very off-beat, and weird, and pretty interesting.
It stars Steve Carell, to whom I have very varied reactions, and Keira Knightley, whom I generally like.
The world is about to end (I believe it had three weeks left, when the movie began), and the two neighbors meet for the first time. A day or two later, they are together forced out of the apartments where they've been living.
Dodge (Carell) decides to seek out an ex-girlfriend who sent him a promising letter, and Penny (Knightley) decides to accompany him to atone for holding on to that (misdelivered) letter for far too long.
They run into a number of people along the way, dealing with the impending end in a variety of ways, while they work, together, to deal with it in their own.
Essentially, you've got a love story guaranteed not to reach "happily ever after".
Will Dodge find the ex-girlfriend? Will Penny be able to get in touch with her family (in England)?
A great deal of fun, and some other emotions, arise from seeing how other people are handling things, and how they are.
The end is pretty predictable, but it's a bit of a roller coaster, emotionally, along the way. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Not sure if I'll watch it again, but I'm glad I did see it once (kind of like Dead Poet's Society, thinking about it. Slightly less depressing ending, though, surprisingly).
Actually, perhaps that parenthetical is important... It really didn't feel all that depressing at the end, somehow.
It stars Steve Carell, to whom I have very varied reactions, and Keira Knightley, whom I generally like.
The world is about to end (I believe it had three weeks left, when the movie began), and the two neighbors meet for the first time. A day or two later, they are together forced out of the apartments where they've been living.
Dodge (Carell) decides to seek out an ex-girlfriend who sent him a promising letter, and Penny (Knightley) decides to accompany him to atone for holding on to that (misdelivered) letter for far too long.
They run into a number of people along the way, dealing with the impending end in a variety of ways, while they work, together, to deal with it in their own.
Essentially, you've got a love story guaranteed not to reach "happily ever after".
Will Dodge find the ex-girlfriend? Will Penny be able to get in touch with her family (in England)?
A great deal of fun, and some other emotions, arise from seeing how other people are handling things, and how they are.
The end is pretty predictable, but it's a bit of a roller coaster, emotionally, along the way. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Not sure if I'll watch it again, but I'm glad I did see it once (kind of like Dead Poet's Society, thinking about it. Slightly less depressing ending, though, surprisingly).
Actually, perhaps that parenthetical is important... It really didn't feel all that depressing at the end, somehow.
Dot product
Recently discovered the iOS game Dots. Kind of a neat puzzle game. Kind of irritated that it keeps asking me to download 'Dots Two', though. Especially since I already did. Using a link that came from the 'Dots' game. Not cool
Debugging Vesper
I've listened to the last couple of Debug podcasts, and the latest involves Vesper (an iOS note-taking app, if you haven't heard of it).
There's a lot in there about sync, which is what they've been working on for the last couple of months. One thing that didn't get mentioned, is why they decided to announce that they were working on sync. Gruber mentioned a couple things (on The Talk Show, I think) about why, but a couple of podcasts (reinforced by this one) have led me to think that the real reason is that Bret wanted to blog about the process, and he couldn't do that if it hadn't been announced.
But the thing driving me to write this is that they came across one of my major irritations with a lot of online sites.
The whole point of asking for the password twice is as a sanity check (so you don't make the same typo twice, basically), because the user can't see the data being entered. If the user can see the data, then asking for it twice is just asking for the user to make a mistake. So if your site is asking for the email address twice (and I can't count how many times I've seen this done), don't do that! You're not providing additional security, and you're probably annoying the user.
There's a lot in there about sync, which is what they've been working on for the last couple of months. One thing that didn't get mentioned, is why they decided to announce that they were working on sync. Gruber mentioned a couple things (on The Talk Show, I think) about why, but a couple of podcasts (reinforced by this one) have led me to think that the real reason is that Bret wanted to blog about the process, and he couldn't do that if it hadn't been announced.
But the thing driving me to write this is that they came across one of my major irritations with a lot of online sites.
The whole point of asking for the password twice is as a sanity check (so you don't make the same typo twice, basically), because the user can't see the data being entered. If the user can see the data, then asking for it twice is just asking for the user to make a mistake. So if your site is asking for the email address twice (and I can't count how many times I've seen this done), don't do that! You're not providing additional security, and you're probably annoying the user.
20140602
A few thoughts on WWDC Keynote
I might well post a bit more about this after seeing some other people's reactions, but just wanted to post a few thoughts on Apple's announcements at today's WWDC Keynote.
First, kudos to Apple for streaming it (and I liked the split screen-ish way they showed it too); it was nice not to need to rely on live blogs again. Not to slight the people doing that, as I'm sure it's hard work, but unfiltered is almost always better.
Second, a friend noted, about forty minutes in, that the Apple store was still up. I wish I'd thought to check it; that made it clear that hardware announcements weren't coming.
The big parts of the announcements were not terribly unexpected. OSX, as predicted by Gruber, will be called Yosemite. The UI got a fair number of tweaks, including new typography and a lot more use of translucency to give depth clues. Some of that I think I won't like (especially the scrolling up under the title bar; I don't like it when that happens in iOS, as is), but much of it was hard to make out in the video.
The icons changed a bit, losing a bit of their shading. I don't have strong feelings about this, either. It's pretty much the expected iOS-ing of them.
In the details, there was some new stuff, though. Safari and spotlight have become pretty tightly integrated, and I think that will work better. Spotlight's input bar now floats in front of the screen, in the center, towards the top. I think that's going to help, as well. I'm actually just starting to use spotlight regularly, and I think that'll help me use it a bit more.
Mail has some added features; in-line annotations of attachments. I'm a tiny bit skeptical of that, but will try to keep an open mind. Most likely, it's something I'll rarely, if ever, use. They also added mail-drop, to enable attachments of up to 5GB. That's something I've wanted from time to time, and I expect to use it. They also added some swipe gestures to viewing mail, to make it easier to mark or delete messages (my one concern here is how easy it is to delete instead of mark).
Notifications got a number of enhancements, from allowing immediate responses (ie: without quitting whatever application you were in when received), to customizable views and UI elements from running applications. I think this will be really neat, although I worry about it being difficult to set up.
But the biggest thing is a feature called Continuity. And that's really a series of features, and I think I'll wait until talking about iOS8 before addressing them. But I'm very excited about them.
iOS8 doesn't have as much in the way of UI changes, but there's a lot of new stuff going on.
Notifications got a bit of an overhaul, and the ability to respond immediately to messages is a much bigger deal here than in OSX.
They added a bunch of customization to the keyboard. The biggest part of that is auto-completion of words, as you're typing. Adding to it is that it is context-aware, in terms of is this email going to a friend or a business partner. The devil's in the details, but that's got a lot of potential.
Siri is now accessible at any time (ie: without a button push), just by saying "Hey Siri". I don't have any Siri-capable devices, so I have no experience with it, but that sounds awfully cool.
The double-push of the home button to get the task switcher will now show most frequent contacts as well as running apps. That should make it even easier to contact people. I'm starting to worry that I might start forgetting phone numbers, as I will need them less and less.
The rumored home automation (HomeKit) and health data storage (HealthKit) frameworks are, indeed, there. These both have the potential to be game-changers, but we'll have to see about implementation and take-up by third parties. Consider me optimistic about both of these, although Healthkit seems like a mobile HIPAA violation. I'm sure lawyers were deeply involved in that part.
iPads get a bird's-eye view of open tabs in Safari similar (but enhanced) to what iPhones have now. Not a bit deal, but nice to have.
Photos are probably the biggest enhancement. For people using an iPhone as their only camera, new changes are going to be a godsend. All photos will be stored in iCloud, and will be put there as soon as they're taken. Increased iCloud storage will be available at pretty good prices, although it won't be all that great for people using pro-level gear (most notably, storage above 1TB will not be available at all).
But the instant storage, and concommitant inter-device distribution will be fantastic. My wife is totally the target audience for this; she'll love it.
There will be some enhanced editing within the photos app, and that will work directly on the cloud versions. Nice.
And there's some enhanced interprocess communication. That is to say, you can break the sandbox by borrowing part of another app's sandbox. Think of it like a plug-in architecture for all apps, as even UI elements can be part of the plug-in. I'm really looking forward to this for photo plug-ins in OSX (which will come, I assume; it wasn't directly mentioned).
iOS' OpenGL layer also got a big improvement (order of magnitude is claimed) with a new API called Metal. The idea is to allow much lower-level (or at least faster) access to OpenGL functions which should enable pretty amazing 3D effects on an iPad. The demos they had for this (Zen Garden, especially) were pretty darned cool; I look forward to seeing them live.
All of which brings us around to Continuity. There are several pieces to that, and they're all pretty good.
The first is pretty simple. SMS messages received on your phone will be echoed via iMessage to your other computers/devices. Simple, but profound. Love it.
Second, proximity will be enough to make computer and phone/ipad aware of each other, and will enable some neat features. For instance, you'll be able to start an email or iMessage on one device, and finish/send on another. Rock on! I really want to see this when third parties take advantage of it.
Third, if the phone is on the same network as your mac, you can use the mac as a speakerphone for the phone. I don't make nearly as many phone calls as I used to do, but this is pretty sweet.
Fourth, you'll be able to Airdrop files between OSX and iOS. This seems a little wonky to me, in terms of it requiring something resembling file system access in iOS, but I'll bet that it'll be extremely handy. I don't think I'll make a lot of use of this, but I'm fairly sure I'll do some.
So Continuity is basically a first pass at device-independent use of data. This will be big.
Which leaves the last element. Siracusa's been talking for quite a while about "Copeland 2010". The question was, what comes after Objective-C.
Well, Apple's been hiding a lot of cards; they have an answer.
It's called Swift, and it removes much of the C-isms of Objective C. It adds lots of things; the ones that caught my eye were generics (parameterized types), closures, type inference, garbage collection, and multiple return values. What I think is interesting is that it will allow (encourage?) a functional style of programming. I didn't notice if tail call optimization was in there.
As one with only the barest of clues of functional programming, I'm looking forward to learning it.
They're also claiming significant speed enhancements over Objective-C (though it was unclear, to me, where those improvements were coming from). It sounded like something close to 50% faster.
Oh, I almost forgot. They claim several different kinds of errors (buffer overflow, pointer dereferencing, goto (?)) become things of the past. That's impressive, if it works as advertised.
Anyway, I wasn't able to watch all of this part of the presentation (real life was getting in the way), but I'm excited about it. I want to learn a whole lot more.
Update: I knew I'd forget some stuff. On iOS, there's now an API for third-party apps to use TouchID. Not sure what to make of it, but it's interesting.
First, kudos to Apple for streaming it (and I liked the split screen-ish way they showed it too); it was nice not to need to rely on live blogs again. Not to slight the people doing that, as I'm sure it's hard work, but unfiltered is almost always better.
Second, a friend noted, about forty minutes in, that the Apple store was still up. I wish I'd thought to check it; that made it clear that hardware announcements weren't coming.
The big parts of the announcements were not terribly unexpected. OSX, as predicted by Gruber, will be called Yosemite. The UI got a fair number of tweaks, including new typography and a lot more use of translucency to give depth clues. Some of that I think I won't like (especially the scrolling up under the title bar; I don't like it when that happens in iOS, as is), but much of it was hard to make out in the video.
The icons changed a bit, losing a bit of their shading. I don't have strong feelings about this, either. It's pretty much the expected iOS-ing of them.
In the details, there was some new stuff, though. Safari and spotlight have become pretty tightly integrated, and I think that will work better. Spotlight's input bar now floats in front of the screen, in the center, towards the top. I think that's going to help, as well. I'm actually just starting to use spotlight regularly, and I think that'll help me use it a bit more.
Mail has some added features; in-line annotations of attachments. I'm a tiny bit skeptical of that, but will try to keep an open mind. Most likely, it's something I'll rarely, if ever, use. They also added mail-drop, to enable attachments of up to 5GB. That's something I've wanted from time to time, and I expect to use it. They also added some swipe gestures to viewing mail, to make it easier to mark or delete messages (my one concern here is how easy it is to delete instead of mark).
Notifications got a number of enhancements, from allowing immediate responses (ie: without quitting whatever application you were in when received), to customizable views and UI elements from running applications. I think this will be really neat, although I worry about it being difficult to set up.
But the biggest thing is a feature called Continuity. And that's really a series of features, and I think I'll wait until talking about iOS8 before addressing them. But I'm very excited about them.
iOS8 doesn't have as much in the way of UI changes, but there's a lot of new stuff going on.
Notifications got a bit of an overhaul, and the ability to respond immediately to messages is a much bigger deal here than in OSX.
They added a bunch of customization to the keyboard. The biggest part of that is auto-completion of words, as you're typing. Adding to it is that it is context-aware, in terms of is this email going to a friend or a business partner. The devil's in the details, but that's got a lot of potential.
Siri is now accessible at any time (ie: without a button push), just by saying "Hey Siri". I don't have any Siri-capable devices, so I have no experience with it, but that sounds awfully cool.
The double-push of the home button to get the task switcher will now show most frequent contacts as well as running apps. That should make it even easier to contact people. I'm starting to worry that I might start forgetting phone numbers, as I will need them less and less.
The rumored home automation (HomeKit) and health data storage (HealthKit) frameworks are, indeed, there. These both have the potential to be game-changers, but we'll have to see about implementation and take-up by third parties. Consider me optimistic about both of these, although Healthkit seems like a mobile HIPAA violation. I'm sure lawyers were deeply involved in that part.
iPads get a bird's-eye view of open tabs in Safari similar (but enhanced) to what iPhones have now. Not a bit deal, but nice to have.
Photos are probably the biggest enhancement. For people using an iPhone as their only camera, new changes are going to be a godsend. All photos will be stored in iCloud, and will be put there as soon as they're taken. Increased iCloud storage will be available at pretty good prices, although it won't be all that great for people using pro-level gear (most notably, storage above 1TB will not be available at all).
But the instant storage, and concommitant inter-device distribution will be fantastic. My wife is totally the target audience for this; she'll love it.
There will be some enhanced editing within the photos app, and that will work directly on the cloud versions. Nice.
And there's some enhanced interprocess communication. That is to say, you can break the sandbox by borrowing part of another app's sandbox. Think of it like a plug-in architecture for all apps, as even UI elements can be part of the plug-in. I'm really looking forward to this for photo plug-ins in OSX (which will come, I assume; it wasn't directly mentioned).
iOS' OpenGL layer also got a big improvement (order of magnitude is claimed) with a new API called Metal. The idea is to allow much lower-level (or at least faster) access to OpenGL functions which should enable pretty amazing 3D effects on an iPad. The demos they had for this (Zen Garden, especially) were pretty darned cool; I look forward to seeing them live.
All of which brings us around to Continuity. There are several pieces to that, and they're all pretty good.
The first is pretty simple. SMS messages received on your phone will be echoed via iMessage to your other computers/devices. Simple, but profound. Love it.
Second, proximity will be enough to make computer and phone/ipad aware of each other, and will enable some neat features. For instance, you'll be able to start an email or iMessage on one device, and finish/send on another. Rock on! I really want to see this when third parties take advantage of it.
Third, if the phone is on the same network as your mac, you can use the mac as a speakerphone for the phone. I don't make nearly as many phone calls as I used to do, but this is pretty sweet.
Fourth, you'll be able to Airdrop files between OSX and iOS. This seems a little wonky to me, in terms of it requiring something resembling file system access in iOS, but I'll bet that it'll be extremely handy. I don't think I'll make a lot of use of this, but I'm fairly sure I'll do some.
So Continuity is basically a first pass at device-independent use of data. This will be big.
Which leaves the last element. Siracusa's been talking for quite a while about "Copeland 2010". The question was, what comes after Objective-C.
Well, Apple's been hiding a lot of cards; they have an answer.
It's called Swift, and it removes much of the C-isms of Objective C. It adds lots of things; the ones that caught my eye were generics (parameterized types), closures, type inference, garbage collection, and multiple return values. What I think is interesting is that it will allow (encourage?) a functional style of programming. I didn't notice if tail call optimization was in there.
As one with only the barest of clues of functional programming, I'm looking forward to learning it.
They're also claiming significant speed enhancements over Objective-C (though it was unclear, to me, where those improvements were coming from). It sounded like something close to 50% faster.
Oh, I almost forgot. They claim several different kinds of errors (buffer overflow, pointer dereferencing, goto (?)) become things of the past. That's impressive, if it works as advertised.
Anyway, I wasn't able to watch all of this part of the presentation (real life was getting in the way), but I'm excited about it. I want to learn a whole lot more.
Update: I knew I'd forget some stuff. On iOS, there's now an API for third-party apps to use TouchID. Not sure what to make of it, but it's interesting.
The Comparative Kiki
I listened to the dub for Kiki's delivery service last weekend, finally. As a translation, it wasn't too bad. What drove me nuts were that a) Jiji never shut up and b) they added a metric truckload of sound effects that had no real purpose.
I don't understand the reasoning behind either of those decisions. Jiji did not seem to be underplayed in the original, and there were plenty of sound effects to know what was going on (I should know; seeing it raw without understanding Japanese, as I did the first several times I saw it, maximizes demand on crutches like sound effects).
I was wondering which version of the dub I have, and discovered that I placed the order all the way back in 2003, so it's definitely the old one. So maybe the new one's a bit better.
I don't understand the reasoning behind either of those decisions. Jiji did not seem to be underplayed in the original, and there were plenty of sound effects to know what was going on (I should know; seeing it raw without understanding Japanese, as I did the first several times I saw it, maximizes demand on crutches like sound effects).
I was wondering which version of the dub I have, and discovered that I placed the order all the way back in 2003, so it's definitely the old one. So maybe the new one's a bit better.
Adding color to the tea
I watched Pleasantville (and I must admit; I don't know where they got that cover, but it blows) for the first time in a dozen years or so, the other day. It was largely as I remembered it, and I still enjoyed it as much as ever.
What I thought was interesting, though, was how much it felt like (even if you ignore the racist implications) the current GOP, especially the Tea Party wing of the party. Things are changing, and we need to stop it, no matter the cost. That's a plan that would never work out well for anyone, but that seems to be what they're trying.
Let's hope they don't succeed, for our sake and theirs.
What I thought was interesting, though, was how much it felt like (even if you ignore the racist implications) the current GOP, especially the Tea Party wing of the party. Things are changing, and we need to stop it, no matter the cost. That's a plan that would never work out well for anyone, but that seems to be what they're trying.
Let's hope they don't succeed, for our sake and theirs.
Kings win the Cup! Kings win the Cup!
Well, I saw most of last night's Kings/Hawks finale, and it was quite the barn-burner. I turned it on in the first, with the Hawks ahead 1-0, just seconds before the Kings took a tripping penalty that led to Hawks' second goal. And boy, did it get chaotic after that.
Well, it was quiet for almost eight more minutes, but then it went crazy with the Kings scoring twice and the Hawks once in a sixty-three second span. That saw the Kings tie it, then the Hawks retake the lead on a very freaky skip off the ice.
The second period was much quieter, with matching goals (Chicago's goal being on the power play again, where they spent much of the first two periods).
The third period had no power plays at all (and as a side note: Olczyk is an ass for advocating non-calls for infractions, as he did between the second and third periods. The rules are what define the game as hockey; if you throw those out, you've just got muggings on skates. Ignoring penalties is not "keeping the refs out of the game", it's favoring a particular style of play that isn't terribly fun to watch. Basically, it favors the bigger team that's willing to push the boundaries further, which greatly increases the odds of injuries), and saw the Kings solidly dominate possession and eventually get it past Crawford. But that only tied the game; being Game Seven wasn't dramatic enough. Apparently, overtime was needed.
Well, first Quick needed to make a couple of tough saves with only a few seconds left, but he managed to do that.
Although both teams got chances, the Kings definitely had the better of the play in overtime. With both teams just throwing the puck at the net at just about every opportunity, eventually the Kings got a break when a wrister from the point went off Leddy's arm and past Crawford to seal the win.
Despite my provocative headline, while the Kings have a large edge going into the series, beating the Rangers is not a fait accompli. The biggest reason for that, of course, is Lundqvist, but they're far from talentless in the skating department.
What'll be really amusing is if it goes to Game Seven. Will the universe explode when Williams (7-0 all-time in Game Sevens, 14pts in those games) faces Lundqvist (6-1, .940-ish SV%)? Let's hope we get to find out.
Oh, one other factor; LA will be a bit more tired, after having to play the maximum of 21 games already. Not sure if that'll factor in; getting a couple days rest before Game One certainly helps.
Well, it was quiet for almost eight more minutes, but then it went crazy with the Kings scoring twice and the Hawks once in a sixty-three second span. That saw the Kings tie it, then the Hawks retake the lead on a very freaky skip off the ice.
The second period was much quieter, with matching goals (Chicago's goal being on the power play again, where they spent much of the first two periods).
The third period had no power plays at all (and as a side note: Olczyk is an ass for advocating non-calls for infractions, as he did between the second and third periods. The rules are what define the game as hockey; if you throw those out, you've just got muggings on skates. Ignoring penalties is not "keeping the refs out of the game", it's favoring a particular style of play that isn't terribly fun to watch. Basically, it favors the bigger team that's willing to push the boundaries further, which greatly increases the odds of injuries), and saw the Kings solidly dominate possession and eventually get it past Crawford. But that only tied the game; being Game Seven wasn't dramatic enough. Apparently, overtime was needed.
Well, first Quick needed to make a couple of tough saves with only a few seconds left, but he managed to do that.
Although both teams got chances, the Kings definitely had the better of the play in overtime. With both teams just throwing the puck at the net at just about every opportunity, eventually the Kings got a break when a wrister from the point went off Leddy's arm and past Crawford to seal the win.
Despite my provocative headline, while the Kings have a large edge going into the series, beating the Rangers is not a fait accompli. The biggest reason for that, of course, is Lundqvist, but they're far from talentless in the skating department.
What'll be really amusing is if it goes to Game Seven. Will the universe explode when Williams (7-0 all-time in Game Sevens, 14pts in those games) faces Lundqvist (6-1, .940-ish SV%)? Let's hope we get to find out.
Oh, one other factor; LA will be a bit more tired, after having to play the maximum of 21 games already. Not sure if that'll factor in; getting a couple days rest before Game One certainly helps.
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