Cornell Hockey

I've been told you haven't experienced the northeast until you've been to a hockey game in the northeast. So I guess I "experienced" the northeast tonight at the Cornell hockey game.

Unlike the northwest and especially the southwest, hockey here in the northeast is not "just another sport". It easily trumps baseball and basketball combined, and (at least here in upstate NY) it leaves football in the dust, too. Cornell is no exception, and the hockey games here are seeped in decades old Ivy league tradition. Here's a few examples:

A great action shot of our defenders

-It gets going before the game even starts: when the opposing team's starting lineups are read off, all the students bury their noses in newspapers and loudly make disinterested noises to drown out the announcer while shaking the papers. When they're done, all the papers get thrown out onto the ice.
-The Canadian anthem and American anthem are played at the beginning, and people sing along half-heartedly until the phrase "and the rockets RED glare...", when "RED" is punctually shouted by everyone at the game. (Cornell is known as "Big Red")

Wouldn't be a hockey game without it...

-There are of course plenty of chants and taunts and so on...
-Perhaps the best know tradition happens when Cornell plays Harvard, our biggest rival. In those games, fish get thrown out on the ice along with the papers. Don't ask me where that came from.
-For an undergraduate, tickets are notoriously hard to get. There is a week each fall when tickets will go on sale at any point of that week based on an announcement on a radio station or something. When that goes out, it names the place to get them, and the tickets are gone within 10's of minutes. People do crazy camping out and such, so its a pretty dedicated crowd. Fortunately, I scored a ticket from a friend who was out of town this game.

Another decent action shot. I was in the third row

Anyhow, as far as the game went, it wasn't the best one. We played some school from Connecticut (Really... what's in Connecticut? I don't even remember how to spell it!) It was a scoreless game into overtime when they sneak one in past our goalie. Bummer. I took one video on my camera the whole game and it just happened to be right at the end when they scored. I uploaded it at:

http://people.cornell.edu/pages/jdh74/videos/hockey.avi (2.5 meg).

Lynah Rink... Home of Cornell Hockey


Whatever the outcome of the game though, it was still quite the experience.

On a different note, Since I was uploading the hockey video, I put up a video from several weeks ago of a little antigravity lifter I made. Actually, its propelled by ionic wind from a high voltage power source that I needed for my research, but either way its pretty cool. And yes, it WAS research. I was studying the corona discharge properties of small diameter wire. (ok... maybe there was a little fun involved, too.)

http://people.cornell.edu/pages/jdh74/videos/lifter2.avi (5 meg)