HiR:tb Toots (@warwalker)
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By junior on January 28, 2010, at 1:00 am I went down to the Leafs/Kings game at the Air Canada Centre last night with my Dad.
I’ll wait a moment or two while you make whatever derogatory, insulting and completely justified remarks about the woeful performance of the Blue and White.
(taps foot. scratches ear. coughs. looks at watch. scratches ear again. yawns. checks email. still scratching ear. you done yet? cracks knuckles…)
Well, that took some time but I’m glad we got it out of the way. Very inventive use of profanity by you, by the way; you have a special gift. Your mother must be so proud! To summarize, then: the Leafs’ recent performance ranks somewhere on the acceptability scale between “cannibalism” and “child pornography”; let us all agree that the Buds’ bed is now well and truly shat and – though it’s only late January – this has to be seen as another lost season.
I’ll have more to say about the reasons I think these things have happened and I hope to get into some discussion about the future too, but for now I want to give MLSE props where props are due. I can hear the yowls of protest from the talk radio haters now; what good could possibly be said about MLSE? Everybody (well, at least everybody who calls into talk radio shows) knows that MLSE is a soulless corporate behemoth, one that greedily hoards every spare cent for the Pension Plan, right? Everybody knows that the greed of ownership is the reason the Leafs always suck, right? And everybody knows that’ll never change because the suits don’t have any incentive to ice a competitive team when they’re making money hand over fist already, right?
Except that the truth is more complicated than that. As for basic economics and the impetus to compete, this myth has been compellingly debunked elsewhere by a commentator no less cynical than Sean at Down Goes Brown. Some pretty compelling arguments have been made that the notion of the perennial mediocrity of the Leafs is about as firmly grounded in fact as that of unicorn-riding leprachauns (read the piece by daoust at Pension Plan Puppets).
As for the heartless greed of MLSE, consider this: last night, MLSE and the Leafs arranged to collect funds from fans entering the building for relief of those affected by the recent earthquake in Haiti. Typical, right, MLSE reaching into your wallet for your dollars, all the while cackling maniacally on a giant stack of their own money, right? Except that the Leafs were matching every dollar collected threefold; that’s right, for every dollar collected from fans attending the game last night, MLSE is chipping in three bucks of their own for the emergency relief fund. Apparently, the Leafs did the same thing at a Marlies game on the 23rd and a Raptors game on the 24th. This doesn’t appear to me to be an attempt to grab some cheap publicity; I wasn’t able to find any reference online to how much the promotion raised, though I did find the newspaper stories and press release announcing MLSE’s intentions to do the fundraiser. None of the MLSE Twitter feeds make any reference to how much money was raised, according to a search I did earlier tonight. I’m going to try and contact MLSE tomorrow to see if they can confirm the results. I’d also like to find out whether that money is going to be funnelled through a charity to which the federal government’s matching program applies – which would effectively convert every dollar handed over by the fans into eight bucks in the hands of relief organizations in the quake zone.
Incidentally, I learned about the Leafs’ efforts in this regard from the big boss himself; when I entered the Air Canada Centre with my Dad for the game at around 6:20, Brian Burke himself was at the front door, schlepping a coffee can for donations. Say what you will about the way Burke is running the team; go ahead and criticize the way his rebuild plan for the hockey club is unfolding. Whatever you feel about either of those things, you’d have to agree that it takes some flat out balls for the General Manager of a Maple Leafs team that’s on its way to missing the playoffs for a fifth consecutive year to stand right there in the lobby, look the paying customers in the eye as they come through the turnstiles, and ask them to pitch in for an excellent charitable cause. When I spoke to him, he was careful to tell me that MLSE was kicking in the extra matching funds, and he seemed genuinely interested when I told him about the fundraising efforts that the crew at Pension Plan Puppets recently made.
The Leafs have rightly taken a lot of heat for their performance on the ice this year. Give them their due when it comes to community responsibility and good corporate citizenship.
By junior on January 26, 2010, at 6:38 pm My career as a semi-dedicated Leafs blogger is off to a scintillating start: a second post in as many days is up over at Maple Leafs Hot Stove, and has been summarily decreed to be prolix and pointless (though not in those precise terms), except for the part where I mention how awesome Luke Schenn is.
I beg to differ somewhat; I personally think this post is entertaining and amusing. It’s closer to what I’m hoping to achieve in my posts at MLHS, a combination of humour, perspective and analysis. If I were to critique it, I’d actually say the bit about Schenn is the weakest portion of the article because it relies too much on general impressions and my personal perspective on Schenn’s play. Lucky for me, I think the stats (and a more studied analysis) will generally back me up on this one, Schenn’s play has indeed improved since his worst struggles in November and December. I would like to avoid relying on those sorts of generalities, though, when writing these posts. One thing I found when I wrote my piece for the Annual, I learned an awful lot in the research phase of the writing process (sort of another way of putting Yogi Berra’s “You can observe a lot just by watching,” but easy enough to forget in its own way).
Also: I’m trademarking the name “The Gary Nylund Compendium”; PPP is absolutely right, that has to be one of the best names for a band ever.
By junior on January 25, 2010, at 8:41 am If you’re looking for me here today, you won’t find me at home. Instead, I’m over at Maple Leafs Hot Stove (in a virtual and metaphorical sense only – in real life, I’ve gone to work, honest, boss).
Alec Brownscombe has asked me to contribute my thoughts occasionally over at MLHS, and I’ve agreed to do it. It doesn’t spell the end for this site; I plan to continue posting here just as sporadically as always. We may find, you and I, that my thoughts about the Leafs get plastered more frequently over there instead of here. I honestly don’t know how this will go. Anyway, I told Alec a couple of weeks ago that I’d “have something for him shortly”, which of course translated into a two week delay. I think I was having a very difficult time deciding exactly what to write about in my first post. I felt that what was needed was something fresh and different, a thematically consistent column with insight, humour and unassailable logic.
Instead, I told a story about one night in a bar in Washington D.C. Oh, and the Tragically Hip makes an appearance. Go on over and check it out; let me know what you think, provided your feedback is positive.
(Kidding.) (Mostly.)
By junior on January 20, 2010, at 12:26 am I have very little time, at the moment, to indulge in any new pastimes. Recently, however, I declared an intention to begin rooting for a team in the English Premiereship – I’ve felt I’m missing something in not following the beautiful game more closely – and I felt the best route towards a greater knowledge of it would be some good old fashioned partisanship.
Via Twitter, I sent out a call for suggestions – which club should I make my own? In short order, Godd Till of Cox Bloc/Zambonic Youth fame had convinced me that I was a spiritual match for Manchester City. Blue and white colours, tragically underachieving, its most hated rival a much more decorated club clad in red, the parallels to Leafdom were fairly obvious. But what sealed the deal for me was the song – Blue Moon. When I saw that video, I knew I’d found a football home. Though there are many other songs celebrating the Citizens, Blue Moon being sung from the stands spoke to me.
As usual, real life got in the way and I kind of shelved the project for a few days. At lunch today, though, I got thinking about it again – after a little prompting yesterday from Godd Till – and decided that I needed to stop dicking around and just make a choice.
So I made the decision, right around two o’clock today: City ’til I die for me.
Well, it turned out that today was a good day to start rooting for City; the Blues were paired off against United in a Carling Cup (yeah, I don’t know what that is really either) semi-final match this afternoon. I was unable to watch the match, but I did follow along via Twitter as City rallied from an early deficit to chase the visitors by a margin of 2-1 in the first leg of a two-match test that by the sounds of it is a total goals deal. Some fellow named Tevez apparently played ridiculously well and notched both goals in the win; evidently this is somewhat poignant as Tevez was formerly employed by his adversaries, leaving the United lot behind in rather acrimonious fashion as I understand it.
I did a little more research this evening into the antecedents of my new team. Good news! It turns out the owners of the club are filthy rich, which ought to come in handy. As I understand it, there’s rather a lot of money involved in the EPL and I am greatly relieved that my new club seems to have the means to field a competitive squad.
Now all I have to do is figure out how the hell I”m going to watch the matches.
By junior on January 17, 2010, at 11:21 pm  Sign on Elevator Panel in Hamilton Office Building The above picture was taken in an elevator in the building where I work. The thing that makes me laugh about this sign is that it just so happens that quite a few people suffering from various mental illnesses have occasion to come in to the building on a daily basis. I know it isn’t a real plus karmically, but I get a strange pleasure out of imagining the effect that this little hastily printed sign has on those who are afflicted with various forms of paranoia.
By junior on January 12, 2010, at 12:39 am Spouse and I have had four straight days of nearly uninterrupted bliss: with Friday and Monday away from work, we have been enjoying an uncharacteristic surfeit of leisure time. Spouse was bold and adventurous; on Saturday, she headed off to do some volunteer work with some horses and disabled children.
As for myself, in order to attempt to ensure that you do not think ill of me, I will tell you that I had plans. Big plans. I was going to do some writing for a new project that I’ve become involved with (more details on that yet to come). I was going to make a quick little phony “Planet Earth” style documentary about Henry, Juniorvania’s top cat and number one clown. I was going to get back to work repairing that old computer upstairs. I was going to fool about with the new MacBook, GarageBand and my little music studio upstairs. I was going to finally get that podcast that Doug and I did together edited and ready for whatever release it’s going to have.
So it’s not like I didn’t have any ambition. Then I sat down in my favourite reading chair and started reading Stephen Brunt’s excellent book Searching for Bobby Orr. Brunt’s 2006 examination of the rise to prominence of Parry Sound’s most famous citizen is a fascinating and engaging read. The book is not a typical biography. Orr himself is frustratingly absent from the book in any kind of current or intimate sense; Brunt explains in the acknowledgements that the retired superstar declined to become directly involved with the book (citing the desire to potentially write his own story instead). Rather than providing the reader with direct access to the hockey hero, it instead primarily features the public and historical Orr, the bits of Bobby Orr we already know because he lived large portions of his life in the public eye: the rise to prominence with the Bruins, the Cup winning goal immortalized in that photograph, his public frustration at not being able to participate in the ’72 Super Series, his final triumphant turn on the ice in the ’76 Canada Cup and – finally, tragically – his split from one-time super agent Alan Eagleson. Denied intimate access to the man himself and his thoughts about the events of this most famous hockey life, Brunt manages to weave a compelling narrative by re-interpreting and contextualizing the events we already know about, spicing his own re-telling of the well-known tale by dropping in some lesser known details and the perspective of others who were involved in the making of Bobby Orr; from Bruins bird dog Wren Blair, the man who located the future Bruins prodigy as a young teenager; from the occasional team-mate or opponent; from his own perspective.
 Henry is in the Bag A book about Bobby Orr that contains precious little Bobby Orr may seem a little paradoxical, but my sense is that this is the closest thing to a true image of Bobby Orr that Brunt could construct. No doubt Orr is a different person with those within his inner circle, but the point is that his inner circle is insular and distant. Orr shades awfully close towards “recluse” for a man whose life was so fundamentally dependent upon his celebrity and his ability to entertain the public. Because Bobby Orr exists in this book only in his public persona and only insofar as one’s character can emerge from the historical record of postgame interviews and the occasional (surprisingly rare) magazine feature, and because that version of Bobby Orr is supplemented only a very little bit by what amounts to a suggestion that there is a side to Bobby Orr that we don’t know (one that involves lots of women and something other than the “aw shucks” Bobby Orr when alcohol was involved), the picture of Orr that emerges is of a distant, guarded and mysterious man. This is probably as “true” or accurate a depiction of Bobby Orr as may be objectively assembled, in a sense: Orr very defiitely struggled to keep a large portion of himself hidden from public view.
More interestingly, though, the book is as much an essay about the ways in which the public’s relationship with its athletic heroes have changed. In the wake of Tiger Woods’ parade of mistresses and bizarre automobile accident, the topic is timely, if not especially novel. To his credit, however, Brunt manages for the most part to avoid facile analysis and the mere repetition by rote of obvious tropes. It is here that Brunt’s book really shines; his examination of the emergence of the NHLPA, the ways in which the players contributed to (and were partly responsible for) their exploitation by the NHL owners, along with a more general consideration of the role in our lives played by athletes and sporting entertainment are all worthy enough of a read on their own. In the end, the stuff about Bobby Orr ends up being the gravy, rather than the meat of the meal. This is almost as much a book about Alan Eagleson, Phil Esposito, and the Adams family (owners of the Bruins) as it is about Bobby Orr.
I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone with a passing interest in professional hockey.
Terrific fact I picked up from reading this book: in the fall of 1966, when Bobby Orr prepared to join the Bruins as an eighteen year old rookie, there were only ten rookies in the entire NHL (this was the final year of the “original”* six team NHL). That’s how tough it was to break in to the league back then; only ten new jobs opened up league-wide.
One other book I read over the past few days was Photographing Your Family by Joel Sartore with John Healey. Published by National Geographic, this book is kind of a how-to pep talk for aspiring hobbyist photographers. It gives the budding photography enthusiast some strategies for making better pictures, and some basic information about equipment, terminology and techniques.
I used some of the stuff I learned to take the picture to the right of this post. Over the past few days, Henry has taken to obsessing over this red cloth shopping bag that has been on the carpet. He jumps inside it and attacks the bottom of the bag, then curls up inside it and – I’m not kidding – basically demands to be carried around the house, up and down the stairs. He seems to even like it when I swing him around in a circle, enough to make me dizzy. He climbed into the bag yesterday afternoon and I grabbed the camera and put some of the principles I have been learning about to work. I’m quite pleased with the results.
By junior on January 9, 2010, at 1:26 am On New Year’s Eve, the coffee shop that we usually go to near the office was closed. Despite the impending festivities, it was a crazy busy day for Spouse and I, and at some point it became necessary to make a caffeine run. I headed out the door, a little off the routes that I would habitually have occasion to pass along, and loaded up on Tim Horton’s steeped tea for Spouse and I, as well as a few other souls also unlucky enough to be in the office.
As I retraced my steps through the frigid December air, hands full of the supplies I had been sent to retrieve, I had passed by the City of Hamilton’s public nativity display in Gore Park. As I’ve already said, it was a busy day and I had about six trillion other things on my mind; I was in one of those mindsets that I get into when I have a lot of tasks to accomplish in a short period of time and I’m afraid of getting off schedule and causing complications further on down the line. Single-minded, laden with cups of tea and timbits and striding purposefully back to work, I only half-noticed the display out of the corner of my eye. I had completely passed the display and was just stepping into the street when what I had seen scrambled up out of my subconscious and screamed at me to do a double-take. I stopped, turned around and walked back and couldn’t stop laughing when my second look confirmed what my peripheral vision had told me was there. As pressed for time as I was, and even though it was difficult to juggle about forty-five cups of tea while I fished my iPhone out of my pocket and got the camera app ready to go, I just had to take a picture:
 Nativity, Hamilton Style Close-up view:
 The eyes of the Lord are in every place, watching the evil and the good." (Proverbs 15:3) “…and in the darkness shineth
an everlasting light…”
Next step in Hamilton’s war against magi thieves? Three words: “booby-trapped Balthasar.” Can’t be too careful with all that gold, frankincense and myrrh laying about.
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By junior on January 3, 2010, at 10:45 pm  TSN'S Pierre McGuire, with piehole semi-closed (photo obviously retouched). Proposed: a new verb, “to McGuire” (v. tran.); to repeat or reiterate a concept an inordinate number of times, so as to induce vomiting, rickets and spontaneous human combustion among those within earshot of the speaker’s voice. An eponym, from the bald-headed pedantic broadcaster who apparently refuses to believe that anyone could possibly absorb the full substance of his exclamations after but a single iteration.
Canada’s leading non-medical cause of tinnitus, Pierre McGuire, was in peak aneurysm-inducing form earlier tonight during the Canada/Switzerland World Junior Hockey Championship semi-final. Those of you who have had your ears assaulted by Mr. McGuire’s work in the past will know that he is in fact a knowledgeable hockey person. The problem is that he unfortunately is apparently predisposed to sharing his every thought with all the variety and nuance of an eight-year old in the backseat inquiring of the family vehicle’s progress toward Disneyland. There are a number of things that drive me crazy about the content Mr. McGuire adds to TSN hockey broadcasts; his insistence, for example, on over-intellectualizing basic concepts is infuriating. It is absurd and asinine to refer to the act of one hockey player propelling the puck to his teammate as a “puck distribution”. He did not “distribute” the puck, he “passed” it. Jerk.
Worse than that laughable assault upon common sense and the English language, however, is Mr. McGuire’s apparent obsessive-compulsive disorder, which evidently compels him to constantly re-visit one or more observations earlier made and thoroughly covered. This evening, his refrain concerned the Swiss goaltender’s alleged superior “initial puck-stopping ability”, a talent so remarkable that it evidently required not one, not two and not three, but fully a half-dozen mentions by the five-minute mark of the second period. We may have heard more about the Swiss netminder’s “initial puck-stopping ability” (and my head might have fallen right off my neck and rolled under the end table next to our couch) but Pierre was also essentially chanting an incantation to the effect that Canada needed to “cycle the net and not the corner”. This particular phrase was repeated with such rhythmic urgency, consistency and frequency that I fully believed he was employing some sort of black magic spell in an effort to create an army of zombie broadcasters hell-bent on eating my brain from the inside out.
The shame of it is that Mr. McGuire knows his hockey; his analysis is not wrong, it is just unnaturally and infuriatingly recurring, like a particularly spicy bit of salami or a chili-coated Burkie dog. Nevertheless, it won’t surprise me in the least when next season’s big winner on Dragon’s Den is the guy who has invented an audio filter that focuses on those specific portions of the audio spectrum in which Mr. McGuire’s repetitive exclamations reside and which digitally processes the signal to remove him entirely, leaving the relieved viewer to enjoy Gord Miller’s splendid call of the World Junior games in blissful ignorance of the observation du jour.
Update: Also, Jerry D’Amigo (a Leafs prospect, 6th-rounder) appears to be awesome. I thought he was good in the New Year’s Eve Canada/U.S. round-robin game, though he spent a little too much time trying to impale Nazem Kadri for my comfort; in tonight’s game against the Swedes, he was fucking nails.
By junior on December 31, 2009, at 3:34 pm John Ibbitson draws attention to an interesting quote from Stephen Harper in 2003:
The government will prorogue the House so that it will not be held accountable for its shameful record.
Mr. Harper, then the leader of the Official Opposition, was outraged at the possibility that a then-Liberal government would prorogue the House of Commons; Mr. Harper evidently believed that the Liberal government was shirking its responsibilities to meet – and answer to – the Parliament elected by Canadians.
As Ibbitson points out of course, Mr. Harper is doing the very thing now that he correctly (if somewhat hypocritically) condemned then. This government does not like being held accountable by anyone, ever; not journalists, not public servants, not even the country’s highest elected democratic assembly. Just over a month ago, Mr. Harper waxed poetic about what a wonderful thing it is “when journalists are free to pursue the truth, to shine light into dark corners, and to assist the process of holding governments accountable” – and then (believe it or not) refused to take questions from reporters gathered to hear his remarks. It’s no wonder that the PM doesn’t want to talk to reporters, because they might ask embarrassing questions about the government’s knowledge of possible abuses of detainees in Afghanistan. Those were the questions being asked by the Military Police Complaints Commission, when the government decided to send the chairman on an extended, involuntary, and permanent vacation. The same embarrassing questions were coming from Parliamentary Committees concerned about the Government of Canada breaching its obligations in Afghanistan under the Geneva Convention. No problem. How does a nice two month long vacation for all Parliamentarians sound? And there will be Olympics to cheer! Yay!
The idea is that it is fundamental to our notions of responsible government in a parliamentary democracy that the government of the day must “meet the House”; though majority governments may (by virtue of the number of elected members of the party sitting in the House) possess the ability to ram through legislation and seemingly act at will, even they must answer questions about the government’s actions and agenda in the House, questions asked by the Opposition. This requirement that the government of the day must meet the House is supposed to (through the mechanisms of moral suasion and public debate) keep it honest. Of course, this Harper government does not even have the luxury of a majority, or the democratic mandate that would go along with it. Minority governments are supposed to be more, not less, responsive to the concerns of the elected members of the House.
Instead, by summarily terminating Parliament in this way, Mr. Harper and his government seeks to stifle what little public debate has occurred to date about these issues. It is anti-democratic, and Mr. Harper (as demonstrated by the quote reproduced above) knows it.
Bruce Arthur, in the National Post, points out the timing of this announcement:
Our Prime Minister could have chosen the bustle of Christmas Eve, or the hangover of New Year’s Day, or any of the other attention-demolishing moments of the holidays to let slip the suspension of democratically elected debate in this country, such as it is. Plenty of options there.
Instead, he did it while Canada was hotly debating the relative merits of Patrice Bergeron over Martin St. Louis, or Drew Doughty over Jay Bouwmeester. Say what you will about the man in charge of our country, but he’s got a sense of timing, if not much of a sense of democracy.
Mr. Harper is behaving as a despot, and he knows it. He’s actively trying to conceal it by burying this announcement as background noise to the Olympic hockey discussion, in the thick of the holiday season. It is an outrage, and this government is a repeat offender at this kind of shit. It’s despicable. For shame, Mr. Harper. For shame.
By junior on December 24, 2009, at 1:11 pm (With apologies to John Moe for totally ripping off his excellent stuff:)
POLICE OCCURRENCE REPORT – DECEMBER 25, 2009
Police were dispatched to a location in the general vicinity of complainant’s residence on the morning of December 25th in relation to a report of a deceased elderly female. Upon arrival, officers spoke to complainant/reporter, who advised that the deceased – who he referred to as “Grandma” – had been struck and killed by reindeer en route from complainant’s residence at an unknown point during the previous evening. Officers responding to the scene requested that detectives from the homicide unit attend, as complainant told police that one Santa CLAUS (d.o.b. unknown) is responsible, though complainant did not actually observe the alleged incident in question. Detectives advised complainant that CLAUS is not a viable suspect, in view of his fictional nature. Complainant insisted that he and his father “believe.” Homicide investigation commenced.
Police believe alcohol played a role in the incident. Deceased last seen alive by a witness who indicates that deceased had been consuming egg nog to excess prior to departing from a nearby residence, apparently seeking certain (unspecified) medications (a toxicology work-up has been requested). Witness observed indicia of physical impairment, as the witness indicates that deceased was seen to “stumble” as she departed into the snow.
Deceased was discovered this morning with obvious trauma to the head and torso. It must be noted for continuity purposes that the crime scene was not secure, as family members appear to have attended and conducted their own investigation prior to contacting police, compromising officers’ ability to examine the scene for sleigh or animal tracks, and other items of possible evidentiary value. Relatives of the deceased are adamant that markings on the deceased’s forehead are consistent with hoof-related injury, and further that abrasions noted on deceased’s back may be forensically linked to CLAUS. Crime lab has been requested to locate and dispatch a pathologist with expertise in injuries inflicted by larger mammals.
Deceased’s husband was not prepared to give a statement to police, claiming he was too distraught to do so. Suspicions of police, however, were later aroused when the man was observed watching televised football and socializing over cards with a “cousin” named “Belle.” Officers also observed several family members (descriptions unavailable, as all were wearing black) attempting to tamper with evidence at the home, variously and inconsistently claiming that they wished to either open the deceased woman’s gifts or return them to the point of purchase. The scene has since been taped off and the gifts in question secured by officers for subsequent expert examination. Ident unit dispatched to take photos of various areas of the subject residence, in particular a dining room in which officers noted a prepared goose and a pudding containing pork products. Police specifically requested that the assigned pathologist rule out food-borne illness and/or heart disease during conduct of autopsy. Dining room also noted to contain a table with a candle, blue and silver in colour, the shade of which is suspiciously and strikingly similar to the material used to create the deceased’s wig.
Police learned that at least one unknown family member was alarming nearby residents, warning them to beware of CLAUS’ reckless sleigh operation. It may be that this individual was attempting to deflect suspicion as this individual has also reportedly been agitating against the government’s decision to issue vehicle permits to sleigh-operators and circulating rather fantastic rumours among neighbours that the killer consorts with elves.
Police re-iterated to family that CLAUS is not a suspect in this occurrence; family continues to insist that he is responsible.
Homicide investigation ongoing. Surveillance of deceased’s husband and his new companion recommended.
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