Saturday was spent recuperating from the demands of another work week in my usual fashion: in the manner of a cultured and intelligent philosopher king. Specifically, I was camped out on the couch in front of the television soaking in about seven hours of NHL hockey.
Dedicating myself to torpor and sloth meant for the most part eschewing the pleasures of the great outdoors; it also meant eschewing (temporarily) the coincident burdens of the surrounding environment, such as the requirement to cut the grass. Careful readers will recall that cutting the lawn – an inconvenient recurring nuisance for some – has, in the past been more of a life-threatening spirit quest for me.
Sunday's Taskmaster
But (news flash) Sunday dawned, and after a morning cup of tea, there was a jay in the tree outside the window sounding a call to action. Against the aforementioned backdrop of timorous langour then, I ventured out into the Wide World and saddled up for 2009’s Maiden voyage aboard the JMV Eradicator. I am pleased to report that Mission 1-09 successfully and safely achieved its primary objective, the ensmallinating of the grasses. All systems were operative aboard the Mowing Vehicle, with one exception: the People’s Engineers will be receiving a request to review the Eradicator’s musical delivery systems. In order to avoid angry legal entanglement with the kind folks at the John Deere Company of Moline Illinois, I hasten to point out that these systems were added on an “after-market” basis. In particular, the system consists of the operator wearing an iPod and earbuds. Actually, the system consists of the operator wearing and iPod and ATTEMPTING to wear earbuds because – as every iPod user knows, iPod earbuds do not under any circumstances remain inserted in one’s ears.
Is that Dick Cheney?
Spotted and photographed on the scouting perambulations prior to climbing aboard the Eradicator: the charming little fellow pictured at left. This specimen was located using Top Secret and patent pending Juniorvanian Reptilian location technology: an unsuspecting and somewhat foolhardy individual with a pair of Crocs carelessly slipped onto his bare feet is dispatched into the surrounding flora armed with a camera and tasked with obtaining a photograph of a bird – perhaps a nearby blue jay. In this way, the collector is encouraged (by way of diversion) to keep his head up and his line of accordingly elevated and most decidedly NOT fixed upon the ground. The large holes in the aforementioned footwear will automatically, if somewhat alarmingly, assist in locating the desired reptile. Potential side effects may include the emission of a somewhat embarrassing and decidedly little girl-like yelp as contact is literally made between our startled naturalist and the disgruntled fauna.
Sunday also featured a lovely visit from my folks; my Dad brought a can of paint he had hanging around the house for my grandfather’s old porch rocker, now adorning our front deck. The name of the particular tint: “Cleveland Brown.” The marketing department at CIL must be one crazy hilarious place to work; what a bunch of slapstick knuckleheads they must be.
At the end of a long Sunday of yardwork, I found myself stiff and aching. Nevertheless, the grass was green, the sky was blue, and I was tickled pink to be spending time outdoors again. Hey, CIL guys – how ’bout giving us a few knee-slapping monikers to represent those colours?
It is, as Spouse has dubbed the Series, “Crosbys vs. Ovechkins” in an intriguing second-round matchup of two of the game’s most marketable and thrilling stars. My allegiance, of course, lies with my adoptive team: the Washington Capitals. A playoff orphan, in view of the continued on ice suck-itude at Bay and Front, I am once again cheering for the Caps and this guy:
Ovechkin prepares to drop a bomb from the point on the Tampa Bay goalie
Update: Holy goalie Batman, Simeon Varlamov was awesome. Ovechkin had a great game (at one point early in the second period, I had him with one goal, two posts and another quality scoring chance that Fleury stoned him on) – but Varlamov made the difference in this one.
I thought the Capitals came out a little flat and let the Penguins control the play in the first period, and the young goaltender stood his ground pretty well. He couldn’t be faulted for missing Crosby’s rocket from the slot at around the 5 minute mark. The Washingtonians seemed to come on after Steckel got what was essentially a fluky goal on a weird bounce right on to his stick in front of Fleury. The Gr8 Eight started to put on a bit of a show following that, including one sequence where he went basically Harlem Globetrotters on Matt Cooke in the neutral zone, irritating the Penguin forward enough to cause him to draw a hooking penalty. The Caps scored on the ensuing power play.
The Crosbys drew even in the second period on a long shot from the point that Varlamov appeared to misjudge; the puck glanced off his glove and ended up behind him. Momentum in the game could easily have swung back to the Pittsburgh bench at that point – after all, despite carrying the play for the majority of the game, the Penguins were even up on the road. Crosby and his mates sensed the opportunity and put on a push late in the second, and it was here that Varlamov truly shone. In what may turn out to be the save of the entire playoffs, just minutes after the blunder that tied the game, Varlamov turned away a certain goal off the stick of Sidney Crosby on a bang-bang play in deep. A turnover up ice had given the Penguins an opportunity on the rush. The Penguins played their attack perfectly, criss-crossing on the way into the Washington zone. Mike Green and Tom Poti bungled the defensive coverage, with Poti switching off fluidly but Green seeming to hesitate. The end result was that Sidney Crosby was briefly totally uncovered to Varlamov’s right. The Penguins’ puck carrier Chris Kunitz saw the opening and fed the puck quickly cross ice to Crosby, leaving the Capitals’ cage essentially undefended from the Penguin captain’s vantage point. A Penguin goal seemed inevitable, but Varlamov would not quit. As Crosby redirected the pass perfunctorily towards the open net, Varlamov turned, dove across the crease and extended his stick in an emergency maneuver. He blocked Crosby’s tap-in at the very moment that it arrived sliding along the ice at the goal line. With that save, instead of facing a one-goal deficit at the end of the second, the Caps headed to the dressing in the intermission with a chance to regroup and get back to the responsible defence and deadly counter-attack tactics that had served them well since approximately half way through the first period.
The third period was almost an anticlimax; you could sense at that moment that the Caps had regained whatever confidence had momentarily been lost in their 21-year old rookie goalie. They continued to press the attack and – although Pittsburgh, to their credit, did not fold – the final result was never seriously in doubt.
Following game 7 of the Rangers/Caps series, Spouse and I were both of the view that the Caps could not beat the Penguins. I am equally certain now that I was wrong about that; I had not given the Caps enough credit for their defensive ability. They won’t fool anybody into believing they’re the vintage trap-era New Jersey Devils, but – aside from the opening eight or ten minutes of the game – they played a discipline and committed system. Sergei Fedorov and John Erskine in particular were both generally terrific on Sidney Crosby. Malkin and Jordan Staal were more or less invisible.
On the whole, the game was exciting and filled with fast moving, creative and exciting hockey. I won’t be missing a minute of it.
Keeping in mind that in days gone by I have been one of the all-time hugest defenders of CBC play-by-play man Bob Cole, it has to be mentioned that Bob is definitely showing signs that he is now well past his prime and ready for retirement. That Simeon Varlamov play? Coley missed it entirely – he had Crosby’s shot going off the post. The most amazing save of the playoffs, and Bob didn’t see it.
As it turned out, I wasn’t able to make it to tonight’s Spitfire/Batallion match, the second of the OHL best-of-seven final. I had looked into buying tickets earlier in the week, but work concerns had me wondering whether I’d be able to get out early enough to make it down the 403 in time for the game. My concern was justified, as it was half past six again tonight before we were able to straggle out of the office.
I didn’t even get a chance to listen via Internets radio.
Windsor won, 5-3. Game three is back in the Rose City on Monday. I have purchased tickets for Wednesday night’s game, and I am hoping – without jinxing anything – that the J. Ross Robertson Cup will be making an appearance on the ice that night. It would be nice to see the Spits book their ticket to Rimouski for this year’s Memorial Cup.
Unrelated bonus humour, brought to you at my expense:
I have been experiencing some soreness in my right shoulder. Nothing serious, but enough of an annoyance to cause the occasional gasp as a stealthy stabbing pain sneaks up and punches me in the mind. Spouse was theorizing that this might be resulting from Lord Henry’s recent decisions concerning the sleeping arrangements – always cuddled up tight against my ample girth, he has been moving progressively closer to my pillow over the last couple of weeks. I was telling her that on one particular early morning, Henry was nestled into the “crook of my shoulder”.
Spouse looked at me, not comprehending.
“You know, the crook of your shoulder,” I said, pointing to the general area in question.
“What’s the crook of your shoulder?” she asked.
“You know, the crook” I said, frustration beginning to creep into my voice.
“Are you talking about your armpit?” she asked.
“Uhhh, yeah. Armpit. Armpit is a hard word to remember, you know.”
A quick mention, before I head off to work, that the Windsor Spitfires destroyed the Brampton Batallion 10-1 in the first game of their OHL Championship series last night. The crowd at the new WFCU Centre must have been thrilled. I am hoping to go to game 2 of the series Friday night in Brampton to cheer the Spits on to victory.
Posts two days in a row after a month of silence? What what?
I can’t let the NHL playoffs pass without observing that it’s a shame that Boston defenceman Andrew Alberts didn’t play for a Canadian-based team, and about twenty years ago. The reasons for this are, in my opinion, obvious – provided you spent some time in Canada during the 1980s, owned or had access to a television in that same time period, and currently have space available in your brain’s memory banks to devote to useless ephemera. Useless ephemera, you say? Sounds like the intellectual wheelhouse for HiR:tb…
If Alberts played in Canada back in ye olde 1980s, there is no question in my mind that nary a game would have gone by without an “Albert” (no “s”) chant getting started at some point. Alberts wouldn’t have needed to play particularly well, he wouldn’t need (necessarily) to be on the ice, he might not even need to be dressed for the game; Canadian fans would have gotten a kick out of having a legitimate opportunity to chant this guy’s name. Why? Because of this ad (which, incidentally, was pretty much ubiquitous in the Great White North about 25 years ago):
This commercial was wildly popular back in the day, despite – or maybe because of – the sappy script, the cheap sentimentality and the clumsy acting. There is of course, also an obvious and glaring flaw: why the hell is Albert’s given name on the back of his jersey at the end of the ad? How did something so deeply flawed become such a widespread cultural phenomenon? Some mysteries will endure forever, I suppose.
Anyway, I know that Canadian fans would have been chanting for Alberts, because the “Albert” chant at the end of that spot actually did make an appearance at some games back in the late 80’s, despite the complete absence of anyone on either team with such a surname.
Stick with me for a moment, because I need to flesh out some of the cultural background for this story. When the Leafs were truly awful in those latter Ballard years, the frustration of a fanbase that is now (unfortunately) called “Leaf Nation” was overflowing. Keep in mind that back then, we The Disappointed did not have this public spleen-venting outlet you kids call The Internet, because Al Gore hadn’t got around to inventing it yet. There was no Barilkosphere within which to proclaim loudly our anger, restlessness or dissatisfaction. So we did things like showing up at Leaf games with paper grocery bags on our heads¹. Expressive grocery-related haberdashery was all well and good, but chief among the limited and primitive expressive mediums of sports fans at this time was The Chant. The Chant is essentially the same idea as The Heckle – a shouted barb or witticism, occasionally devolving into mere profanity – but syntactically simplified (to permit the synchronization of many mouths) and with a super-added element of loose mob-style organization (to give it superior moral authority).
Thus did it happen, and not infrequently, that as the Leafs were once again thoroughly outclassed on home ice by their opposition of the day, Leaf fans from time to time expressed their angst by chanting “Albert! Albert! Albert!” This was truly a watershed moment in the evolution of chanting: highly constrained by the inherent technical imperatives of the short-form structure of the medium, chant-makers had historically struggled to bring depth and intellectual maturity to their work. Consider, for example, the innate challenges in bringing lyrical beauty or a deeper truth to the world through an expressive form traditionally used to publicize the onset of a toga party, to encourage the commencement of a food fight, or to recommend the drunken public display of female breasts. Yet the “Albert” chant succeeded where so many others had failed: making use of an ironic and humorous reference to a shared cultural externality, Leaf fans made it clear that they needed – nay, demanded – a real life hero, someone like Albert, to lace ’em up for the Blue and White.
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¹That sentence is so dated culturally, it’s the lexical equivalent of an archaeological dig in Egypt. For example, going to the game with a bag on your head made reference, in a way, to the Unknown Comic. Also: paper grocery bags were then still the industry standard, not the enviro-retro-chic that they are now (suitably recycled, of course).
To quote a certain incompletely deceased peasant from a classic Python film, “I’m not dead yet.”
It’s been an absolutely harrowing month for Spouse and I, work wise. Ten or eleven hour days are the norm, work is still being brought home nonetheless, and neither of us feels as though we are keeping up with the incoming flow. We are North Atlantic swimmers treading water in our work, wondering what’s going to get us first – hypothermia, drowning or the sharks. Obviously, one specific casualty of all the hours spent working, going to work, coming home from work, trying to get work out of our minds and – my favourite – resting up so we can work some more is that this little Internet thingy has been somewhat orphaned, as my time in cyberspace has been more or less non-existent over the last few weeks. I ask your patience, those of you who are still dropping by here occasionally despite the persistent silence. I am told that there will come a time when I get my life back. I promise that when this happens, I’ll include y’all in it via this here web thingy. In the meantime, if I am going to live the life of a shipwrecked sailor, I have decided that – at work, anyway – it behooves me to speak and act in the manner of Robert Shaw as “Quint” in the movie Jaws. A rousing chorus of “Farewell and Adieu” ought to spice up the dreary old office somewhat, I should think. At the present time, however, I choose not to adopt either the tonsorial or sartorial fashion of my role model. I’ll keep you posted.
So work has been intruding into my life, and many of my projects and pastimes have had to sit on the shelf. The Nation’s chores, however, will not be put off. In particular, there is a vast area of fertile garden (cleared in October, blogged about in this post, another entry that begins with an excuse about why I have not been blogging – sigh) around the grounds that requires tending. We know the garden is fertile because there is an ample amount – I believe the metric system term is “a shitload” – of this stuff growing in it:
Garlic mustard, before the slaughter of April 2009
It’s garlic mustard or Alliaria petiolata, and our garden is currently populated about 80% by volume with the stuff. From the linked article, I learned that it’s not native to our part of the world, having been brought to North America by European settlers. The same informative article also tells me that each little plant will produce between 150 and 850 seeds, and that each of these seeds can remain “viable” (which is geek-speak for “growing like a motherfucker in your garden”) for FIVE YEARS. Thanks a lot for this little gift, pioneers! I guess you just forgot to bring along giant bowls of ebola virus and some barrels full of testicle-attacking poisonous reptiles too.
Anyway, as I stood in the middle of what is supposed to be a flower bed looking around at our bumper crop of this invasive little species, it occurred to me that – had I closed my eyes for a moment and just inhaled the pungent aroma – I might have mistakenly believed myself to be standing knee deep in a bowl of that butter they give you with escargot. Um, I think it’s called “garlic butter.”
Okay, so my writing chops are a little rusty.
My mission, assigned to me by the Juniorvanian Minister of Natural Resources (Spouse), was a delicate, highly technical and intricate operation; it was a job tailor-made for me, as it demanded inexhaustible stores of careful patience, an attribute for which I am reknowned across the very width and breadth of the world. Ahem. My job was this: take a whippersnapper to all that shit, and cut the little fuckers back to the stone age. In about the amount of time it takes to clip a rechargeable battery to a battery operated weed-whacker, I became the Genghis Khan of the garlic mustard civilization. In this way, I gardened in a genocidal rage for perhaps an hour, at which time the indiscriminate slaughter was halted a battery recharge (the weed-whacker’s, not mine). I resumed the butchery after tea.
By day’s end, I had laid waste to a significant number of the blighters, at the expense of only one minor casualty for our side: a stiff and crampy trigger finger. War is hell. For the garlic mustard – for now, anyway – Black & Decker was their Waterloo; but tomorrow is another day, and as an afternoon rain approached and I retreated to the relative safety of the living room to care for the wounded (with an ice-cold root beer and Game 6 of the Flyers-Penguins series), I cast a nervous glance out the window to the Eastern Front. Reinforcements are massing under the spruce trees out there in an apparent flanking maneuver.
You will see no “Mission Accomplished” banner draped across the Juniorvanian Capitol tonight; this could get ugly.
p.s. I hesitate to mention it, on account of I don’t want to jinx anything, but – since you promised not to tell anyone – the Spits beat their arch-rivals the London Knights (and soon-to-be New York Islanders’ number one draft pick John Tavares) to advance to the OHL Final. Go Spits Go!!!
I’m sorry, I haven’t had a chance to focus on writing anything really for this site over the last month or so. The last couple of weeks in particular have been an absolute beast at work and – as usual – friends, family and projects are being given short shrift while the demands of work are like a vampire to the blood of my leisure time.
Sigh. The big excitement hereabouts today was the sighting of this little fellow:
A Visitor.
He is a white winged crossbill, and – apparently, according to the authorities available to the Juniorvanian Department of Science – his presence ’round here is somewhat of a rarity.
I promise, when The Man stops kicking me in the crotch 24/7 with his hobnails, I will post a l’il sumpin’ sumpin’ – and oh, how we’ll laugh.
Graham crackers, of all things, were originally envisioned as a sort of “health food” that would discourage young men from acting on “impure” carnal impulses and engaging in “self-abuse”. They are named after the kooky fellow who believed a diet of bland foods could achieve this goal. The guy who invented Corn Flakes had similar motives. I am not making this up. (I learned this from Loser Domi, in a conversation that had nothing to do with hockey, over at Pension Plan Puppets);
With the OHL playoffs approaching (and the Leafs out of contention for this year’s post-season tournament), I am excited about the prospects for my former favourite team in the whole goddam world, the Windsor Spitfires. I have to confess that it has been a long time since I attended a Spits game – I think it was 1992 and I was in my last year of law school at the time. After moving away from the Rose City in the summer of ’92, I haven’t really followed the team very closely at all. With the economic downturn absolutely slaughtering the North American auto industry – and taking out a large part of the town I grew up in the process – I am happy, for the people of Windsor, to see that the Spitfires have been a dominant force in the league this year.
There was a story in the Toronto Star today about the Spits‘ goaltender setting a record for most wins in a season. I will reproduce it in its entirety here, because the links on the Star website don’t seem to last long:
WINDSOR, Ont.–Goaltender Andrew Engelage earned his 46th win last night, setting an Ontario Hockey League single-season record, and the Windsor Spitfires beat the Plymouth Whalers 5-1.
Engelage made 23 saves en route to beating the former record of 45 wins set by Steve Mason of the London Knights in the 2006-07 season. Mason is now in the NHL with the Columbus Blue Jackets and a leading candidate for rookie of the year.
Dale Mitchell opened the scoring for Windsor with his 33rd goal of the season when he took a centring pass from Mark Cundari and deposited a backhander behind Whalers netminder Matt Hackett.
Eric Wellwood scored short-handed to put the Spitfires up by two goals before the end of the first period. Andrei Loktionov and Taylor Hall scored 34 seconds apart midway through the third period to chase Hackett.
Scott Wedgewood replaced Hackett. The Plymouth netminders combined for 31 saves.
Jesse Blacker had the other goal for Windsor (57-8-0-1), which has already wrapped up first place in the OHL.
Matt Caria scored for the Whalers (35-26-5-0), who missed a chance to move into a tie with Saginaw for third place in the Western Conference.
Windsor has supported junior hockey in general and the Spitfires in particular very well over the years, through a lot more thin than thick. There were a few years in the late 80s where the team was something else.
Leaf fans could well understand the heartbreak of the 1988 season. After years of mostly middling mediocrity that left the team either outside the playoffs looking in or eliminated in an early round, the Spits went on a run in 1987-88. Led by the Shannon brothers (Darryl and Darrin), and coached by future Kings coach Tom Webster, the team went on a phenomenal streak that saw them go all the way to the Memorial Cup final game, where they faced a Medicine Hat Tigers team that featured Trevor Linden. Going in to this game, the Spits had remarkably gone undefeated through the entire OHL playoffs; in all, they had won 39 of their previous 40 games entering the Cup Final. As I recall, they even led through two periods but some late game heroics on the part of the Tigers – involving Linden himself, if I remember correctly – produced a one goal victory for Medicine Hat and a heartbreaking Memorial Cup “almost” for the lads from Windsor.
It was a devastating loss. Aside from one Wayne Maxner coached team in 1980 (that went to the OHL final and lost to Peterborough), that’s basically the sum total of success as far as hockey success goes in Windsor. Since that time, there have been some bad teams, a period of ownership instability, some controversy about the construction of a new facility for the team to play in, a notorious hazing incident involving Steve Downie, and the tragic death of the team’s Captain Mickey Renaud in February 2008.
Times are tough all over and in a globally interconnected world economic reversals are not isolated or insular, but the people of Windsor are taking a disproportionate shit-kicking right now because of the difficulties being experienced by the North American auto industry. The heavy concentration of people employed directly by the automakers or indirectly by their suppliers has Windsor’s unemployment rate, according to today’s Windsor Star, at 12.6% – the highest in the country.
I know it’s facile to suggest that the success of a Major Junior A hockey team could realistically alleviate the suffering that any of the families directly affected are going through, and I’m not going to go there. Those people are more concerned about how they’re going to put food on the table and keep the heat on. For those folks, I wish them well and hope that they are able to start caring about such trivial things again sooner, rather than later.
As for the rest of the people in the area, though, some Sptifire success would help. I was living in Windsor during the last recession in the early 90’s, and I have seen first hand the kind of effect that such high unemployment rates can have on everybody living in the area – people all over town get kind of grim and worried, and rightfully so. Even those who still have jobs and whose businesses aren’t failing see the problems their neighbours are having. They feel terrible for their neighbours and wonder how long it will be before the wolves are at their own door. They wonder what long-term damage is being done to their community by the impoverishment of the tax base. They wonder how long will investment in the construction and repair of infrastructure will be put off in hope of more prosperous times, and they wonder if their town will survive the downturn and continue to be the kind of place in which they can live, work and raise their kids.
The thing that keeps people determined to keep going in times like that is hope, and hope – like fire – needs a flash point. So here’s hoping, on behalf of all of those in the City of Roses waiting and hoping desperately for some good news for a change, for those needing something “feel good” to nourish their flagging spirits, that the Spits can go on another run this spring and bring home a Memorial Cup Championship. I am going to make it my mission to follow along a little, where I can.
I have mentioned elsewhere that following the Spitfires as a kid is what really gave me the taste to follow sports of any kind. I well remember sitting high in the stands at the old Windsor Arena on a Sunday afternoon with my father, my uncle and my brothers; listening to the cowbell lady urging on her charges from somewhere down near the end boards; feeling the passion of the assenbled throng follow her, gather, and find expression in a full-throated Go Spits Go chant that could, in the tiny confines of that building, visibly be seen to spur the Spitfire players on to tremendous flurries of pressure; and finally erupting in the joyful celebration of a late goal to send the Spits to victory over their hated rivals the London Knights. I want to do my part to start the chant right here, and right now: Go Spits Go! Go Spits Go! GO SPITS GO!
Boone’s Farm is a kind of malt beverage that is the punch line to rather a lot of jokes;
The maximum salary an NHL player can earn is 20% of the team’s payroll;
The word “proactive” can be – and often is – terribly overused;
The lunch meeting I thought I had on Friday the 6th will actually be occurring on Monday the 9th. I wish I learned this fact prior to showing up for the said meeting; and
Someone has broken in to our house and stolen my sneakers. Nothing else, just my sneakers. The thief in question is skilled beyond belief, having left beyond absolutely no sign whatsoever of forced entry. Moreover, nothing has been disturbed inside the house. Yet I know that the fiend has executed his evil plot, as I cannot find my shoes. If you have any information, I urge you to contact the appropriate authorities.
