TRIVIA TODAY - Monday, February 4, 2013

Greetings Infomaniacs,

I'm so glad the NHL lockout is over and we can get back to hockey! I love the Chicago Blackhawks and I missed watching them play! Here are some fun facts from mentalfloss.com about hockey pucks.

Enjoy!
Melissa

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TODAY'S MYSTERY QUOTE
QUOTE: "A puck is a hard rubber disc that hockey players strike when they can't hit one another."

HINT: (1909-1973), sports journalist inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame for his coverage of the sport.


RANDOM TIDBITS
The earliest hockey games were played with chunks of frozen cow dung. This dates back to the game's outdoor roots. For understandable reasons, modern athletes prefer the vulcanized rubber disc we all know today.

In space travel, the threat of free-floating equipment drifting off is a very serious one. Houston's Johnson Space Center prepares astronauts for this problem at the Precision Air Bearing Facility (PABF), which works like a gigantic air-hockey table and includes what the Center officially describes as a set of "two-ton hockey pucks" hovering over the floor. These are pushed around by aspiring astronauts.

The first rubber hockey pucks were made from sliced-up lacrosse balls. When the sport moved indoors, whole balls were originally used, but rink owners soon found it preferable to cut them into thirds and keep the middle section. This basic design was the standard by 1885.

The word "puck" was first recorded in the February 7th, 1876 edition of the Montreal Gazette, so the NHL regards this date as the hockey puck's birthday-even though they'd already been used for decades by then.

In 2000, the Canadian Taxpayers' Federation urged the country's citizens to protest their government's $12 million bailout of domestic NHL franchises. How? By mailing oodles of hockey pucks to then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien. According to group president Walter Robinson, "When the rubber hits the Prime Minister's office in a shower of hockey pucks, Mr. Chretien might have some sense knocked into him and respond." The Prime Minister never revealed how many pucks he'd actually received.

"Smart pucks" were released by Fox television in 1996. Also known as the "FoxTrax," these high-tech gizmos sported a hidden microchip that transmitted an infrared signal to a series of computers which superimposed blue and red halos around the puck on television screens during play, making them easier to see.

Read the full text here: --brought to you by mental_floss!



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TODAY'S MYSTERY QUOTE
QUOTE: "A puck is a hard rubber disc that hockey players strike when they can't hit one another."

ANSWER: Jimmy Cannon.

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