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Interviewed on Prime Time Sports tonight (Fan 590 and Rogers Sportsnet) Toronto Maple Leafs Coach Ron Wilson let the (Swedish) cats out of the bag (so to speak).

Whilst being interviewed by Bob McCown and Globe and Mail writer (and Nick Cave hater) Jeff Blair the talk turned to Burkies intentional drafting of large North American blunderbusses over svelte European baby faces.

Wilson talked about the difference between the two types equating the Euro players to fast pricey sports cars and North Americans to Pick-Ups (you but them for completely different purposes) and then went on to say something which clearly caught McCown and Blair off guard:

“And I think y’know that’s where we find ourselves with the Leafs. I mean your hearing right now.. sounds very contradictory but ,,,there is a real possiblity I would think that we are going after the Sedins, let’s just speculate there…”

McCown immediately took off his headphone and started whispering to Blair. I don’t read lips very well. but it looked like “not supposed to say that, something something”  (maybe he meant tampering?) meantime Wilson moved on to talking about KAdri (unprompted) and was saying how Dale Hunter says that Wilson will love him as a player.

But Blair went right back to the Sedins and asked a follow up question saying that it would address the need to upgrade the top line in one fell swoop.

Wilson I think realized he had made a boo boo because he started umming and ahhing and qualifying that the Sedins might be looking at a lot of other teams.

McCown’s final question was around the risk of the Sedins coming in one package. To which Wilson said that he might have been concerned if they had gotten Braydon Schenn because you respond to what is happening to your brother good or bad.

He also said that the Sedins would be fun to have on a team because of their ability to cycle and their ability to play with any players big or small.

So looks like Burkie is intent on bringing the ginger twins to the “Mapes” and I must say I am starting to warm to the idea. I think it was Bill Watters on Leafs Lunch or whomever Howard was talking to on Hockey Central (John Garrett?) today that pointed out that the Sedins are 80 point a year players who might be available for less than 6 million whereas there are plenty of players who are similar in point totals but are making 7-8 million per year (I think Mats Sundin would have fallen into that category as well as Scott Gomez). When you put  it that way the Sedins look like a decent  pick up for a decent price.

Listen to the Ron Wilson interview here

Update: Berger (yes I am actually linking to Berger) says if the Sedins don’t sign with Vancouver then they’re Leafs property tomorrow

I spoke to a well-known executive of a Western Conference team this evening, who happened to be listening, on line, to THE FAN-590 during the noon hour today. Though I do not advocate Burke spending mega-dollars at this premature stage of the Maple Leafs’ restructuring, I ended the HOCKEY CENTRAL AT NOON program by offering a gut instinct: That if Swedish twins Henrik Sedin and Daniel Sedin are available on the open market at 12 o’clock tomorrow — thereby remaining unsigned by the Vancouver Canucks — they’ll both be members of the Blue & White by 3 p.m.

Berger also says something that I tend to agree with:

I’ve suggested Burke wait at least one more summer before taking the plunge. It’s conceivable that Henrik and Daniel could nudge the Leafs into playoff territory after a four-year absence, but they could also struggle in the absence of a supporting cast. Better, in my mind, to play the living daylights out of youngsters such as Jiri Tlusty, Christian Hanson, Tyler Bozak, Nikolai Kulemin and (potentially) Mikhail Grabovski, all of which will assume secondary roles to the Sedins in key offensive situations.

I have the same concerns and also what about the development of John Freaking Mitchell?

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Leaf haters even one of your own knows what’s coming.

We are going to be bigger and tougher. No matter what it costs us, we are going to be bigger and tougher. This is how my teams play, like it or not.” - Burke, yesterday.

In other words, the Leafs are eventually going to be relevant, and they will skate into your building and punch your prettiest players in the face. Burke will happily employ guys whom he refers to as “the beef,” and they won’t be out there to be liked. Unless, of course, you are one of the people wearing Doug Gilmour jerseys. Then, your cheers will drown out the locals on a good night.

“I think Toronto is the most important hockey market in the NHL,” Burke said yesterday.

Love him or hate him, he is right. And once he has transformed the Toronto Maple Leafs into a contender and into a bully, he will be proven even more correct.

The rest: Making the Maple Leafs more hateable

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

There are plenty of Leaf haters out there both in the media and fans of other teams. Many are unabashedly reveling in the current state of the organization but are still annoyed at the loyalty and insufferable (to them) optimism of Leaf Nation. Here’s a little warning: If you think we are annoying and insufferable now. Wait till we get competitive again and if you think that will be bad you better hope and pray the team doesn’t win a Cup. Leaf Fans: I can’t wait to rub everyone of their collective noses in it. Can you?

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On his scouting department:

“I hate the guys all year then sit on their ass on draft day.”

Wow he really hates his scouts doesn’t he? Read the whole thing here:

The Canadian Press: Leafs general manager Brian Burke heading into NHL draft with open mind

For the record his exact quote should have read “I hate the guys to work all year and then sit there on their ass on draft day”

Update: It’s now about 10 hours since I posted this and CP still hasn’t corrected the quote. It’s unintentionally funny but geez…

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“We had a passive group, all year long our trainer was on the ice,” Burke said at Mohawk Racetrack where he was the guest drawmaster for Saturday’s $1.5 million North America Cup harness race. “We are going to be a much more hostile group.

“We will be tougher. I’m not watching this again.”

First off. Burke was just 15 mins up the road from me and no one told me? I could have invited him over for slabs of brisket pork and smokey barbequed turkey. Maybe next time

But in all seriousness you doncha’ just love Burkies attitude? He’s not talking about winning more games or making the playoffs his priority first is to make the Leafs an absolute nightmare to play against. And at the same time isn’t this a bit of a shot at the supposed tough guys we had last year? Jamal Mayers we’re looking at you. I guess it didn’t seem like it was a critical issue to me last year but that is probably because the Maple Leafs haven’t really been a tough team to play against in the physical department since Roberts decamped to Florida at exactly 12:01 of the free agent signing period some years ago.

The great thing about this is the Leafs were pretty entertaining last year despite their awful record so even if they finish with roughly the same number of points this season they are going to be even more entertaining to watch and less fun for other teams to play against. Remember that game in Montreal when Grabovski was practically challenging the entire Canadiens bench? How recklessly will he act if he actually has some muscle to back him up? Recall if you will that in future games after that both Guy Carbonneau and Bob Gainey decided it would be prudent to match lines by putting Georges Laraque on whenever Grabovski was on the ice. For some reason or other this brilliant move garnered neither of them a Jack Adams nomination.

Here’s a second gem from our newest favoritest GM:

When I do go to mass on Sunday, I pray for our goaltending,” Burke said.

Hopefully that includes a prayer that Jonas “the Monster” Gustavsson is in God’s plans for the Maple Leafs.

BTW has anyone noticed that there has been a real dearth of rumors around what trades or moves the Leafs have in mind coming up this summer? This is potentially the most important off season for the Leafs in quite some time yet the papers and radio haven’t talked a lot about what the LEafs might do. Tomas Kaberle and Pavel Kubina are both trade eligible because their no trade clauses are void during the off season if the Leafs didn’t make the playoffs but we don’t hear a peep about what might happen to them. Last year the papers regularly had stories speculating as to where they might land. This year nothing. In fact the only time a story seems to appear is when Burke is directly quoted in public.

Could it be that Burke has finally clamped down on what was one of the leakiest front offices in the League? IF so there are going to be a lot of bored reporters around.

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Grizzlies, Black Bears, Wolves, Alligators all occupy a place in most people’s minds when it comes to fear of being eaten by something in the wild. The cougar however is absolutely the one to fear the most. Having said that I would move to Squamish in a heartbeat if I could.

A cougar living in a provincial park in Squamish has killed a dog and attacked another after conservation officers issued warnings of aggressive cougar behaviour last week.

The attacks happened on Friday night and Saturday morning on a hiking trail in Stawamus Chief Provincial Park, said conservation officer Chris Doyle.

“There had been reports earlier in the day of a cougar approaching people in the park,” he said. “Friday night a hiker was going up the trail, about two-thirds of the way up. She had her dog on her leash, the cougar came out of a tree, grabbed the dog from her, took it up a tree and killed it and ate it.” The victim was a Miniature Pinscher.

A Minature Pinscher? Jeez that thing wouldn’t be safe from my dogs.

And while we are on the subject of animal attacks. What’s with you people who jog/trail run/mountain bike/ hike in bear and cougar areas while wearing your IPOD? Aside from the fact that if you need to blot out nature by cranking the tunes you might as well just run in the city you are really increasing the risk that you will not hear a predator. Bears in particular will make warning noises before attacks. So leave the earbuds at home. Seriously.

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Related: (Via) Bears and other predators invade U.S. neighborhoods.

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• Cougar warning issued for Vancouver suburb (ctv.ca)

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Eddie Bauer Files for Bankruptcy

My entire non-business wardrobe is pretty much Eddie Bauer. I guess I’ll be going naked for a while.

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I like Guacamole. I can eat a whole bowl of it in one sitting and call it dinner. In fact I did so last week. I was too full to eat the bbq pork sandwich I had made to go with it. Most recipies for Guacamole are needlessly complicated imho. Here’s one that isn’t:

Guacamole, my way | Homesick Texan

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From Popular Science of all places: Your Guide To Following The Iranian Election Protests

Some very good links here and the twitter aggregation of popular retweets is staggering in the amount of information being posted real time.

Link via Instapundit.

FWIW the popular science post lists Huffington Post and Andrew Sullivan as two blogs covering the Iranian situation. And Daily Kos appears to be on it as well. Are there no right wing blogs performing the same service or did PopSci ignore them? Either answer would be somewhat shameful in my opinion

Update: LGF is blogging the situation and has this word of caution for those in the west who think this will bring about some sort of sea-change in Iran:

It should be noted that Mousavi himself, although he has criticized Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial and confrontational politics, is not pro-Western — and he had a hand in starting Iran’s nuclear weapons projects. We shouldn’t expect things to change very much in Iran even if the election is overturned — an unlikely possibility.

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Why do people spend so much time on the Internet during work hours? It is way better than TV that’s why. This is over a month old but it is the exact type of refreshing counterpoint that is missing from TV these days. I was pretty skeptical of Pajamas Media when it first started but I have to say they have come along way and this is absolutely worth watching.

Jon Stewart, War Criminals & The True Story of the Atomic Bombs

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At 4:00 a.m. the streetlamps went out. In the dark, armored personnel carriers rolled forward into the square. The protesters on the monument held their ground. Just before 5:00 a.m. the lights came back on, revealing the soldiers, guns at the ready, preparing to rush the monument. With that, the protesters began filing off the monument and out the south end of the square. By dawn, the army had sealed off [ the area ] and the streets around it.

Tank reinforcements were rolling into the [ city ]. The … mopping up of the protest movement began in earnest, marked by checkpoints, arrests and gunfire echoing here and there for days around the capital. There was also a crackdown across all of [ the country ]

Oh wait… nevermind

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If you remember my earlier post on How a Leafs Fan Watches the Playoffs you will remember that I proposed a simple formula to decide who to root for based solely on not adding fuel to the Leaf Derangement Syndrome that infects anyone who cheers for other NHL teams (especially the Canadian teams) and the entire Toronto Sports Media contingent.  Example: The Leafs Haven’t won a Cup since 1967 so if any other team who hasn’t had a championship in some time wins it will give those suffering LDS an opportunity to bring this up to Leafs fans on a regular basis.

This year featured several teams  with the opportunity to escape the from the clutches of the gravity well that holds teams to long droughts without a Cup.

However none of the long suffering fans of these teams will see their team escape this year.

Most significant among them is Chicago who is the only team who has a Cup drought longer than Toronto. When Detroit scored in overtime last night it ensured that the Black Hawks would again remain Cupless. They have not won a Cup since 1961 -  48 years.

Other gravity well dwellers include:

Boston   (37)

Calgary   (20)

Philadelphia (34)

Saint Louis (42)

Vancouver  (39)

Washington  (35)

My original cheering strategy was to cheer for teams that had won Cups recently and against teams who hadn’t  (with special considerations for some teams). As I said in my original post:

* Montreal is an exception to this rule. I don’t think there is anyway possible I could cheer for Montreal and besides Boston is crushing them.

** In a way I want San Jose to lose in the first round to the Ducks if only to keep the local sports writers from using it as a club to attack Ron Wilson with since he never won a playoff round with the Ducks.

Hey look what happened to both those teams!! I guess Ron Wilson wasn’t such a bad coach after all.

I must admit I had some mixed feelings when the Carolina Hurricanes made it to the final four. Mainly because they were coached by Paul Maurice whose presence behind the bench was already adding fuel to a TSM meme that went something like “how come Paul Maurice wasn’t good enough to coach the Leafs but now he has a team in the semi-finals”  of course any logical person could say that if Maurice was so good a coach then the Leafs must have been truly an awful team. Or the culture of entitlement (that the same reporters insisted existed) was much greater than anyone realized.

As a side note did anyone read this excellent post that was put up just the other day when Pat Quinn was hired by the Oilers? It is a summary of reactions from the Toronto media from the day that he was fired as coach of the Leafs. One particular comment stuck out at me

He found abundant good in captain Mats Sundin but sometimes accorded him the playing time of a scrub. Sundin responded by withholding any endorsement that might have changed Quinn’s fate.

“Mats’ lack of playing time was a big, big issue in the dressing room,” the former player said…

This is very significant considering the performance of the team under Maurice (when Sundin was getting big minutes) and the behavior of Sundin last year and over the course of the summer.  Perhaps Sundin was not an idle player in Quinn’s dismissal and believed that with Pat out of the way and with him getting more ice-time the team would be better. But let’s leave that for another post shall we?

So here we are with the team that I originally advised Leafs Fans to cheer for (Detroit) facing off against the same team they played last year (Pittsburgh). So based on my original formula we cheer for the Red Wings, right?

Not so fast.

As was pointed out quite adroitly by some commenters  a Cup win by Detroit brings them one step closer to catching the Leafs in total Cups won. And with the Wings showing no signs of needing a rebuild soon and the Leafs still three (ok five, maybe seven) years from a Cup this  could be a source of even more mockery on the part of the braying sports media.

So like any man of principle, when presented with a different set of facts – I change my mind (sometimes).

It is now perfectly fine – in fact imperative for Leafs fans to cheer for Sid the Kid and Evegeni the… the… Genie?

At this point the Penguins are of no real threat to us and quite frankly they are a pretty fun team to watch (until Marc Andre Fleury takes his mask off – yikes). Also it will perhaps put an end to this annoying “the Western Division is so much better but you idiots won’t stay up till 2AM to watch and appreciate it because your not real hockey fans” insinuations that pass for hockey analysis in this town.

Finally isn’t it great that the Finals are starting early so that the Cup will be hoisted earlier and we can get back to much more important things.

Namely, discussing who the Leafs might pick in the draft, discussing how Brian Burke will trade up to get Jon Tavares (or whomever is left at the third spot), discussing which free agents Brian Burke will sign and why we don’t want him to sign those two overrated inbred Swedish fellows currently playing for that team that Mats Sundin single handedly didn’t help at all during the playoffs.

In the meantime go Pens!

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Great post (and some good comments) worth reading

Skepticblog » The Fallacy of Locally Grown Produce

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Huge in England. Virtually unknown in North America The Jam were one of the great rock bands of the punk era:

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SDA has a post up this morning (also linked to by Kathy) that points out the rather quaint yet sinister tendency of the media to refer to Muslim extremists in somewhat counter-intuitive yet subtly biased manners.

This however is not a new thing I noticed a few years back in the Economist (a magazine that has gone so far downhill I won’t be renewing my subscription this time around.)

From The Economist July 19th 2007:

In the majlis these consist of a rump of Khatami-style reformists and a larger block of people who travel under the “conservative” banner but who are pragmatic in their approach and oppose Mr Ahmadinejad’s brand of what many outsiders have come to call “neoconservatism”.

That’s right you read it correctly. Two years ago the Economist was calling Ahmadinejad a neocon. Read the Original article. if you don’t believe me.

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Opeth: Funeral Portrait

With scenes from “300″ as the accompaniment (not a bad match if you ask me. )

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Consider the new Mitsubishi commercial with the bouncy little pop song:

Sorta suits the commercial until you dig up the lyrics and realize the song seemingly is a paean to hallucinogenic drug taking. Hey it doesn’t bother me. But I remember when drug references in songs were big time taboo let alone using them in commercials.

This makes four interesting songs I’ve discovered through car commercials. You can try to guess the other three in the comments if you wish.

Lyrics and video to original after the jump

Read the rest of this entry »

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Take a look at this video over at reason.tv on the subject of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s failure to deliver a common sense revolution in California. Anyone watching this will recognize the tactics from organized labor as very similar to the “Days of Action” organized by Ontario unions during the early years of Mike Harris‘ term as Premier.

The difference? In California the unions are winning. In Ontario, they didn’t (at least not in the short term). Just goes to show that a real terminator often is a doughy looking ex golf pro. Not a chiseled part time actor and full time body builder.

Oh be sure to watch at the 3:22 mark when a woman (presumably a teacher) advocates spousal abuse as a means of “reforming” your husband. Stay classy lefties!

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Season highlights were basically restricted to fights between our Norris division rivals (especially Detroit and Chicago). I remember one night in December 1989 I was wrapping Christmas my wife’s gifts in a friends apartment. We didn’t have a television and that year I had saved enough to buy her a colour TV. I had stashed it at my friend’s apartment (we lived in the same building) and came over to wrap it. Anyway he actually had a TV and I turned the game on (Leafs vs Chicago) to witness a fantastic brawl including a memorable shadow boxing match between Gary Leeman and Denis Savard.

I had totally forgotten about it till today when Down Goes Brown dug up a clip from youtube and has lovingly analyzed it here and as usual he is funny as hell.

In the middle of Leeman and Savard’s dance of futility, the camera pans by a young hockey fan wearing a #8 Leafs jersey that reads “Durno”. This begs two questions: how bad were the camera angles in Maple Leaf Gardens that a small child could block them, and what the heck is a “Durno”? Stay with me, I’m going somewhere with this.

Since nobody by that name ever played for the Leafs, I’m going to assume it’s the kid’s name. A few minutes of google research reveals a journeyman minor leaguer named Chris Durno, who at the age of 28 finally made his NHL debut this year by playing two games for the Avalanche. Chris Durno grew up in Scarborough, would have been nine years old when this game was played, and according to this interview he always wore #8 when he was growing up.

You know what? I’m going to go ahead and make the claim that that’s future NHLer Chris Durno blocking the camera in the middle of this fight!

Read the whole thing (in spite of the annoying ad for Liam Neeson’s last bomb playing on the right).

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When the price drops low enough the buyers will appear and they are appearing in droves in California and Florida.

Check out these two posts over at Carpe Diem for nifty graphs:

California Statewide Median Home Price in March Shows First Monthly Increase Since August 2007

Florida Home Sales Increase for 7th Straight Month

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