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it's a miracle!
When we went to bed last night, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
iuliamentis and I could not get our computers to connect to the internet via our little home network dojiggy. It was very weird - both our computers, when we clicked on local area connections, would show a status of 'connected' and little reassuring changing numbers of packets and bytes and so on, but we couldn't connect, either to the internet or to one another's computers. The home networking wizard repair thing couldn't assign our computers new IP addresses and told us to call our ISP; Ameritech told us to call our hub's manufacturer's tech support, which was the point where we concluded that yesterday's storm - which, judging by the state of the clocks when we got home, included a power outage - had done some relatively subtle damage to the hub and we were going to have to buy a new one. And since there was another storm rolling in, we shut down all the computers and sat down to watch Miracle, about which more in a second.
But this morning, I got up, booted up the main computer with the modem attached to it, started up Blondo, and, wonder of wonders, I'm online. At 8:30 on a Saturday, which is maybe not such a cool miracle, but, online! Yay!
Anyway. Back to that movie.
Okay, apparently I didn't talk about it the first time I saw it, in the theater, but Miracle, in spite of having one or two irritatingly Disneyfied moments (I suggest replacing the word "family" with "team" in the one scene where they say "family" when they mean "team") it's - well, it's a ninety-minute love song to hockey, really. So for me, that movie is practically a religious experience. (I mean, seriously: I suspect that some people are that moved by the expression of their religious beliefs. For me, it's Hockey and T.S. Eliot.)
Oddly, given that one of the montages includes three naked boys goofing around in the showers, the movie really isn't intensely slashy - but that's because Miracle is, ultimately, a movie about Herb Brooks, the head coach who created the team that went all the way - and like God in his heaven, Herb stands apart from his creation; the closeness of the 1980 US Olympic Hockey team is shown only to demonstrate what Herb made, and what Herb is not, and can never be, a part of, and in that sense, it's a really kind of sad movie.
That said, though, it's also a movie that rings true with everything I know and love about hockey (plus! pretty boys with wicked Boston accents! OMFG!) and, just, yes. I spent the entire movie unable to speak, except for occasional outbursts of "Yes! This is why I love hockey!" and, okay, little bursts of "Eeeee! Jimmy's dad!" which would make sense if you'd seen the movie. During the pivotal game against the Soviets, both the first time I watched it and tonight, despite the outcome being, y'know, the title of the movie, I was watching just like I would a real game, on the edge of my seat, throwing my hands up for a goal, urging the players not to get disheartened when they were scored on.
Also, as a point of pride, I have to point out that two of the real men - boys, at the time, really - portrayed on opposite sides of the epic battle, Mike Ramsey on the US Olympic team, and Slava Fetisov on the Soviet team, went on to play together for the Red Wings. If Mike had played a few more games in '96-97, they'd have their names engraved together on the Stanley Cup. That's hockey, y'know, bringing people together.
So, in short, go watch Miracle and feel the love.
iuliamentis and I could not get our computers to connect to the internet via our little home network dojiggy. It was very weird - both our computers, when we clicked on local area connections, would show a status of 'connected' and little reassuring changing numbers of packets and bytes and so on, but we couldn't connect, either to the internet or to one another's computers. The home networking wizard repair thing couldn't assign our computers new IP addresses and told us to call our ISP; Ameritech told us to call our hub's manufacturer's tech support, which was the point where we concluded that yesterday's storm - which, judging by the state of the clocks when we got home, included a power outage - had done some relatively subtle damage to the hub and we were going to have to buy a new one. And since there was another storm rolling in, we shut down all the computers and sat down to watch Miracle, about which more in a second.But this morning, I got up, booted up the main computer with the modem attached to it, started up Blondo, and, wonder of wonders, I'm online. At 8:30 on a Saturday, which is maybe not such a cool miracle, but, online! Yay!
Anyway. Back to that movie.
Okay, apparently I didn't talk about it the first time I saw it, in the theater, but Miracle, in spite of having one or two irritatingly Disneyfied moments (I suggest replacing the word "family" with "team" in the one scene where they say "family" when they mean "team") it's - well, it's a ninety-minute love song to hockey, really. So for me, that movie is practically a religious experience. (I mean, seriously: I suspect that some people are that moved by the expression of their religious beliefs. For me, it's Hockey and T.S. Eliot.)
Oddly, given that one of the montages includes three naked boys goofing around in the showers, the movie really isn't intensely slashy - but that's because Miracle is, ultimately, a movie about Herb Brooks, the head coach who created the team that went all the way - and like God in his heaven, Herb stands apart from his creation; the closeness of the 1980 US Olympic Hockey team is shown only to demonstrate what Herb made, and what Herb is not, and can never be, a part of, and in that sense, it's a really kind of sad movie.
That said, though, it's also a movie that rings true with everything I know and love about hockey (plus! pretty boys with wicked Boston accents! OMFG!) and, just, yes. I spent the entire movie unable to speak, except for occasional outbursts of "Yes! This is why I love hockey!" and, okay, little bursts of "Eeeee! Jimmy's dad!" which would make sense if you'd seen the movie. During the pivotal game against the Soviets, both the first time I watched it and tonight, despite the outcome being, y'know, the title of the movie, I was watching just like I would a real game, on the edge of my seat, throwing my hands up for a goal, urging the players not to get disheartened when they were scored on.
Also, as a point of pride, I have to point out that two of the real men - boys, at the time, really - portrayed on opposite sides of the epic battle, Mike Ramsey on the US Olympic team, and Slava Fetisov on the Soviet team, went on to play together for the Red Wings. If Mike had played a few more games in '96-97, they'd have their names engraved together on the Stanley Cup. That's hockey, y'know, bringing people together.
So, in short, go watch Miracle and feel the love.