Working in Montréal today -- Ocular Blunt Trauma

Good morning folks,

I will be working in Montréal today.

Hey kids,  ever wonder what happens to your eyeball when it gets hit with a speeding ball?  

First thing, as the energy of the ball is imparted into the eyeball, the cornea starts to flatten out turning the eyeball into a flatter ovoid shape or into a disk, this results in the intra-ocular pressure to rise rapidly.  This is largely because the eyeball has nowhere to go.  Immediately behind the eye is the Sphenoid bone, it's the back and upper outer side boundary of the socket.  To the inward side the Lacrimal bone sits, and the lower outside in bounded by the Zygomatic bone.

Yes, the same bones that are there to protect the eye and brain can hold it in place like your big brother holding that kid the stole your bicycle when you were 9 so you could punch him, but then in your debut as 'Flailing Arms Puckett' you ended up punching him in the ear.  The right hook that wasn't.  Yeah, that's right -you read correctly, a bit of street justice.  Word up.

Back to the eye.  And yes, another bone of note, the Supraorbital Process which forms your eye brow and the upper boundary of the socket.

Now as the eye's anterior chamber is compressed the pupil rapidly dilates like high school student's on pot, so rapid that tearing may occur, not so funny now is it Stoner?

The damage continues.. The aqueous humor (the liquid that nourishes the front of the eye) is pushed peripherally damaging the drainage channels which can result in secondary problems like Glaucoma (not for dipping tacos).  The increased tension and pressure on the peripheral iris can cause separation from its root, and what the hell, while we are at it, severe bleeding - the hallmark of any good intra ocular blunt trauma.  But there's more!

Detachment of the retina, secondary hemorrhaging, corneal and optic nerve damage, that's if the eyeball actually stays in place!  Consider the vacuum effect of a compressible ball such as a racquetball, as the ball shape deflects into the eye socket, a vacuum can form and as the ball return to shape on its rebound exit from the socket, can pull the eye free from the confines of connective tissue and eyelids.  Ew.

But all of this can be prevented.

Eye protection, sports safety equipment, goggles aka glasses.

And yesterday Alun (it's like Alan, but Welsh) demonstrated the handiness of such.  Tony (playing front) and I (playing back) were playing against Alun (playing front) and Larry (playing back) when I played the ball with a forehand shot after it came off the back glass.

For some reason..  Alun had just looked back.  Whack!  He took the ball cleanly and directly into his glasses.  The force pushed his glasses into his eyebrow, compressing the flesh between glasses and his Supraorbital Process, rupturing some small internal blood vessels along the way and also pushed into his nose, cutting the skin layering his Nasal Bone.  Ouch.

Brian had been standing, watching the game from behind the back glass and rushed in to take Alun and get the blood cleaned up.  Not because Brian is an humanitarian, but because he says that fresh blood on the wood court floor scares off new players.  I disappeared for a moment and returned with a chem-ice bag to help Alun control the inevitable swelling, and to relax my guilt a bit.

The great news, after 30 minutes on the bench with the chem-ice, Alun looked almost good as new.   Yay safety equipment.

Have a great day -- play safe. 

Working in Ottawa today --keep the sticks in the air

Good morning folks,

I will be working in Ottawa today (tomorrow too).

Every now and then I write a Pulp that just plain pisses off some identifiable group of ppl.  This is not the same as me promoting ire against an identifiable ppl, to be clear I have been known to generate ire IN an identifiable group of ppl :)

I distinctly recall when I wrote http://pulp.puckett.ca/2010/02/working-in-montreal-today-curling-is.html a critique of whether or not curling was a sport, that I received a flurry of email from Thunder Bay, which apparently considers itself the Defender of Curling and Virgins and all things Pure, oh wait.. that's St. Joseph. Except the Curling part.

And now.. I may feel the wrath again, this time from twirlers.  Twirlers? Yes.  You thought for a second I would write about Twerking, yes?  No.  Baton twirlers.  The other evening, perhaps around 1 AM I was laying in bed pondering if I should try counting sheep, had a very brief evaluation with whether 'sheep' was both singular and plural like 'fish' but not like 'cattle'. So I turned on the TV and the Miss America pageant.. I mean scholarship award program was on.  My first thought was damn, popularity is an all time low if it was kicked out of the 8 PM time slot.

And then.. The talent show.. first a violinist, very nice, then some gal sang a song - also well done, and then it happened.  Baton Twirling! Yes, the gal from Florida took the stage with some good ol' fashioned baton twirling!  And this caused me to think..

Does baton twirling, as an endeavor, have any appeal to anyone not in a beauty pageant? I mean scholarship award program?  The whole thing reminds me of Stewie on MAD TV, "Look what I can do!" followed by some half hearted joint bend and body hop to the right.  Is the sport.. er.. activity usually practiced by anyone older than 15?  To be clear, the 20 year old from Florida, Myrrhanda Jones, is a real trooper.  She was on stage doing her twirling thing with her knee in a brace after she had a fall during practice and tore her anterior cruciate ligament (you've heard it called the ACL). My friend Rob cried like a baby and had to have his girlfriend come get him from the club when he damaged his :)

But does anyone twirl as late as 20? Are there 30 year old gals proudly stating, "I scored 3rd in my majorette competition on Saturday and then hit the bar for some brewskis!" All of the feeder sports that I know of, t-ball, ring hockey, touch football, are all part of the transition to REAL sports, but what does twirling transition to? Tell me, does twirling require more skill than a YoYo?

To be clear, this is a stick with rubber ends.. in theory to prevent putting your own eye out.  What can you do with a stick to impress your friends?

You could hit a ball with it. Either one that someone threw at you or just one laying on the ground.  You could throw the stick.  Or failing all of these things you could twirl the stick.  Yay!

Does it come up during job interviews like semi pro ball does?, "yeah, I tell you what, I could have gone pro, but I tore up my ACL when I was with South East Redskins --Shout out to home boys in Florida State!  Now I think I would like to sell cars". "And we want you to sell cars!  Welcome to the TEAM!".

Doesn't quite work with twirling does it?, "Sports? YES-- I twirled a baton, I wanted to be the next Hollie Neilson but I tore my ACL, then I wanted to be Miss America but that biotch from New York won, now I want to sell cars."  "Oh. um... hey thanks for coming in, and uh.. be sure to get your parking validated, we'll call you..".

But Uncle Daniel, don't you usually give some kind of history of stuff like this?  You told us where the baseball cap came from, why not this?

Okay, fine, but I am really out of time and didn't really have anything to write about today and was grasping at straws.  Uh, let's see.  Armies march.  It used to be common for a marching army to have a skilled rifle twirler up front, I don't know.. some major's daughter wanted to be at the front of the parade?  Too small to twirl a rifle?

"Right shoulder - arms!" "Left shoulder.. oh, she's down again."  Bill, can't you give her something smaller?

I do know that the first baton twirling training came to the U.S. when Major Millsap started Millsap college in the great state of Mississippi after the U.S. Civil War.

That's all I have.  Have a great day, keep the balls sticks in the air.