CT

Who knows how Glavine's hockey career would have turned out, and if he would have played for the Kings or some other club. But, as long as we're playing what-if, how's this one:

In August 1988, as the Edmonton Oilers were dickering with Los Angeles over a trade package, they get a read on a Kings prospect playing college hockey in Massachusetts. They ask, the Kings oblige, and Tom Glavine gets shipped to Edmonton, along with a bundle of players and picks, in exchange for Wayne Gretzky (with Mike Krushelnyski and Marty McSorley as throw-ins).

Gretzky does his Hollywood thing, while Glavine breaks into the NHL with the Oilers. He blossoms, becomes part of a 1-2 punch down the middle with Mark Messier, and is part of second Cup-winning dynasty for the Oilers through the end of the 1990s.

Hey, might as well maximize the potential!

Any number of ways to dissect this etymologically. "Videogame" is, of course, a holdover from the 1970s, when the idea that you could control objects on a television screen was pretty fantastical. The focus was on the repurposing of a formerly one-way medium into an interactive one; that was the required perceptional adjustment to convince people to introduce a computer into their homes -- a laughably daft idea 30 years ago. Atari had to push the idea that this was an easy-to-use consumer product, just an extension of your TV. Similarly, in arcades, games were promoted as easy-to-understand interfaces that were worth approaching; so again, the familiarity of TV was invoked.

This culminated in the original name of the first console heavyweight: Atari VCS, or Video Computer System (later the 2600).

So, we ended up with "video". Which, by itself, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I ran into that recently, when I read about games designed for blind players. Obviously, it's a stretch to call games that function via audio cues and motion-sensitive stimulae as "video" games...

Are we ready for a rebranding now? We're still talking about gaming experience, after all, even if the complexity and structures are well beyond kids' play. And while the "video" was over-emphasized from the start, the fact remains that most gaming requires visual interaction.

If anything, the best option might be "digital gaming", or even a very generic "digital" as a shorthand. But it's probably an uphill climb.

Hockey fan here too, and I really like the new spots. Anything's an improvement over the league's past ham-handed marketing efforts. It's great to see the NHL taking itself more irreverantly. I can only hope it resonates with non-fans; I'm probably dreaming, but something tells me it's an effective start.

Horror movie? Dude, I'm right there with you:

http://www.populationstatistic.com/archives/2006/09/11/little-zuni-scissors/

This is coming from someone who's strictly an enduser: I don't care for Notes. It was imposed upon us by our IT department. All we really need it for is email; none of the other features are being used, and they never will be used by our department. I find it to be pretty clunky and outdated for email usage in 2004/2005, and I'd even prefer to backtrack to Netscape Communicator rather than struggle along with Notes.