No doubt, the final score on Grey Cup Sunday had some unfortunate consequences for some of the denizens of Monstropolis. Come to think of it The Flame wouldn’t look terribly out of place with those guys…
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The Flame made an appearance on CBC Sunday this morning! Talk about momentous occasions. It’s a little hard to actually see the plume of flame pouring out of the torch on top of his football helmet, but this is the best I could do with limited video colour correction skillz. I wrote yesterday’s post, about the now almost certainly imminent demise of Maple Leaf head coach Paul Maurice, sometime in the afternoon. Later that same night, the Leafs went out and watched the Coyotes beat them 5-1. They offered approximately the same amount of resistance to the Coyotes as drifts of snow offer to howling gusts of wind in the middle of January. The players, aside from a few spirited (but ultimately pointless) circles around the ice skated by Boyd Devereux, looked largely disinterested in the result. I had a feeling the game might go that way. Cue the local citizenry, torches in hand:
First, let me say this: Paul seems like a decent fellow and I have quite enjoyed listening to him speak during his press conferences and media scrums. He seems like an intelligent guy with some very definite ideas about how to do his job, and he has a quiet confidence that I would expect to translate nicely into a leadership role in a hockey dressing room. Second, let me say that I have always maintained that it is impossible for anyone outside of an organization to express a meaningful and informed opinion about how “good” a coach is at his job; it has always been my contention that so much of a hockey coach’s job depends upon the personal dynamics on the team and inside the room that anybody who isn’t in possession of direct knowledge about them is necessarily uninformed about the very essence of the subject matter. Everybody at the NHL level is a wizard with the x’s and o’s and they can all evaluate talent. The key to the job is getting your twenty guys to want to skate through a wall for each other; anyone who isn’t part of those conversations just doesn’t know what the deal is. Bottom line: for that reason, I think it is nigh on impossible for any outsider to legitimately take the position that a coach “should” be fired because he isn’t doing the job. Click here to continue reading Rigor Maurice? I am still reading the NaNoReMo selection, Catch-22. I haven’t been blogging about the book recently because I am now ahead of the group schedule set out by Matthew and I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone. As they say on the news, “film at eleven.” The return of the Grey Cup game to Toronto after a 15 year absence is one of the very strong storylines underlying Sunday’s Winnipeg vs. Saskatchewan match for the CFL championship. Stephen Brunt, in his usual excellent fashion, has written a piece on Hogtown’s curious relationship with the Grey Cup game. In addition to making many salient points concerning Toronto’s persistent ambivalence about the Grey Cup, Brunt captures in a few paragraphs the very essence of the Rider fans:
Brunt has managed to say exactly what I was trying to get at (on the subject of the sheer awesomeness of ‘Rider fans) in my previous post on the game. I guess that’s why he writes for The Globe and I just hack away at my computer, spewing stuff into the anonymous ether. The point is that it is going to be tough for anyone without a direct fan affiliation to either team to root for the Bombers; yes, they have a compelling “win one for the Glenn-er” kind of angle going for them, and an inexperienced but aw-shucks kind of quarterback desperately and valiantly trying to fill the hole when his teammates need him, but come on. To root for the Bombers is to root for the disappointment of an entire seething green mass of people to whom this game matters, and to whom it has mattered since long before they ever got here. I don’t think I can, in good conscience, participate in hoping that all those great fans – a throwback to a mostly bygone era in the world of professional sports today – go home as glum as they are green. All of that aside, I still think Stephen Brunt’s bit might have been improved by a reference to Gainer the Gopher. There’s been a late breaking (but impressive) bid for a 2007 Darwin award: Two guys in Florida were fooling around with a loaded 9mm handgun, chucking it back and forth to one another. In doing so, the gun accidentally (though highly predictably) dischaged, with the result that one fellow shot himself in the hand – and his buddy died from a gunshot wound to the head. (via Apostropher)
Obviously, as a Ticats season ticket holder, I would prefer that the Hamiltonians would be present and oski-ing our collective wee wee. It was fairly obvious, however, following about Game 4 of this illustrious season that there was naught but a chance in hell about that. My thoughts have subsequently turned to the following monumentally important question: “For whom shall I root during The Game?” I decided pretty early on this summer that I would like to see the Saskatchewan Roughriders and Winnipeg Blue Bombers play for the Grey Cup, an eventuality that has come to pass as a result of yesterday’s Western Final in Vancouver and the Eastern Final in Toronto. Now my choice from the West is undoubtedly completely unsurprising to anyone who knows me, because I confess to an odd fascination over time with our Nation’s wheat basket; I don’t know if my fondness for the province was preceded by, or in the alternative caused by, my predisposition towards Kelvington’s Wendel Clark. The exact sequence of events in this regard is perhaps doomed to remain shrouded in mystery by the mists of time. Even if I weren’t a little loco about our most geometric province, though, Saskatchewan is such an easy team for pretty much anybody to pull for in the West. How can you not like the Green Riders with:
Eddie Izzard- Death Star Canteen From my friend (and Taiwanese Heroes in Rehab correspondent) April: the majesty that is Jeff Vader. We were out for a little drive earlier today; we slept in a little, headed south to Beamsville to collect some new riding boots from the Greenhawk store there, stopped for breakfast at one of our favorite little haunts, the Open Kitchen in Stoney Creek, drove up the new Red Hill Valley Parkway for the first time, then headed out to Dundas to pick up some horse blankets that had been cleaned for us. We took a little detour on the way home from Dundas to see if we could find any place for sale that might satisfy the Known Requirements and Specifications for the Kingdom of Juniorvania (we are looking for a new house). Anyway, after a while, conversation had kind of trailed off and we were driving along quietly. Spouse had lapsed into a reflective reverie of sorts, and I felt it rude to interrupt her mental journey. We passed quite some time without speaking to one another, the radio softly playing in the background. “Meat lasagna!” Spouse exclaimed, shattering the tranquility inside the vehicle. I paused for a moment and asked my brain to please confirm for me that my wife had just spent fifteen minutes thinking about something only to blurt out “meat lasagna.” “Yes, ‘meat lasagna’ is what she said – ears are functioning” said my brain. I allowed that little fact to sink in for a moment and said, “Wait – What?” Spouse explained that she had been thinking about something completely different [surprise! not thinking about carnivore pasta dishes!] when she had espied a truck driving down the opposite side of the highway from us. “What, you didn’t see it?” she asked me. “Um. No.” “Well, I guess if you didn’t see the truck, hearing me say ‘meat lasagna’ would probably be a little strange,” she allowed. Yes. It would. |
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I haven’t dipped into the MSM today to check on the status of Paul Maurice’s job as Leaf head coach, but man oh man, things are not looking good for him from where I sit. 
I can’t let the 2007 CFL season pass on without commenting on the upcoming