Stompin’ Tom’s classic hockey song reworked for the Gold Medal victory last week:

Mild Content Warning: The song contains the word “ass” and a picture of an ass. So some people might not like that. Or some people might feel that it would be inappropriate for kids to watch. Because I guess kids don’t know what an ass is. Or maybe kids don’t get an ass till they are 13. Or something. So if you have an aversion to ass, congratulations. You’re not gay.

Via: Puck Daddy

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Image by Dinur via Flickr

Well at least one NHL Team (the New York Rangers) appear to be.

January 14th/~3pm: I get an email from the agent and anxiously scroll down to see Chad’s contact information. Now, what I am about to say next is something that I have not told anyone before. The email address by which to contact the “real” Chad was the exact same one I saw on the Facebook just days earlier. I quickly open Facebook to double check only to find that the whole profile had been deleted (it has since been restored). Annoyed and confused, I then email Chad telling him what his agent told me and that we were good to go. He responds very quickly saying that it was not a problem, and just to clear it with Rangers Public Relations.

January 14/~4pm: I email the Ranger PR Director, who I will simply refer to as PRD (for PR Department). I am not expecting an email in return from him because I had never gotten a response in the past with any of my inquiries. I explain to him the situation and that I have the permission of both Chad and his agent to conduct the interview. PRD responds to me within ten minutes saying that I should have gone through his office in the first place and that Chad will not be available to do the interview. So I guess the human being himself wanting to do the interview isn’t good enough?

January 14th/~5pm: I CC an email to Chad and his agent telling them of my response and apologizing for any inconvenience. I then return PRD’s email saying that I did not go through him in the first place because I had never gotten a response back ever before. He replied, “You just did on the first email you ever sent to me.” Which is false because I had previous inquiries with both him and his assistant and they were never responded to.

The great thing about blogging is that it has eroded the ability of certain entities to “control the message”. When your attempts to control the message look ham-handed and foolish you end up worse off than if you had just let it go.

Read more: Ranger Rant: What Really Happened to the Chad Johnson Interview

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My experiences with three dogs (one who died of cancer at age 5) versus my father who wasted away from a debiliating disease resonate well with this reasonTV piece about human health-care vs dog health-care.

The crux of this piece is more focused on the relative ease with which animal hospitals are allowed to open vs human hospitals. My initial thought was that human hospitals are more complex and there has to be more regulation around operating one.

Nope, it’s other local hospitals trying to protect their monopoly and keep out the competition.

Treat Me Like a Dog: What Human Health Care Can Learn from Pet Care

Via Instapundit (still relevant after all these years)

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I have had great intentions to blog more this year but alas work keeps me away from blogging on a regular basis. One of the pitfalls of running your own business is the absolute commitment you need to make to it 24-7. It is a rare evening that I am not working and that includes Saturday and Sunday nights as well.

When I do have free time it is not blogging that comes to my mind first. But other things that take me away from my desk and office and into the physical world. So if given the choice between blogging and woodworking or blogging and hiking with the dogs I am more likely to take the latter option. That is, I know an abrogation of my responsibilities to the people who enjoy reading my blog ( I know you exist – I see the hits that come from RSS readers) but one of the pitfalls of living your life on-line 24-7 as blogging and twittering and other forms of social media are allowing us to do is that it divorces us from the tactile and 3D world outside our window.

There was a funny little statistic that I saw some time ago that said if people who watched cooking shows actually spent the 30 minutes in the kitchen that watching a show entailed they would actually become better cooks and actually cook real meals for themselves. To a degree we have fallen victim to this in the on-line world. We spend to much time commenting on the commentators who are commenting on other commentators and that really isn’t as productive as we think, is it?

Work is lightening up somewhat for me this year heading into Christmas ( I hope it isn’t a portent of a “soft landing” by the economy") so I am going to try and post some thoughts about things that have occurred over the year and also things I have been thinking about. I hope you will enjoy them.

Up first: Cilmategate.

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Holy Crap this guy is fucking buzz-saw.

Hat tip to Hot Air

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I think one might argue that we were first and the fish were second.

Something in the Water Is Feminizing Male Fish. Are We Next? | Popular Science

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Image via Wikipedia

Some guy named Ed Wardle decided to see if he could survive in the Yukon armed with nothing but a Fishing Rod and a Shotgun. He was filming it for a British TV Station (Channel 4).

He believed he would have no trouble finding food:

[…], telling the Daily Mail prior to setting off: ‘I imagine I have a long future of fish-eating in front of me. It’s going to be trout and grayling for 12 weeks.

‘But meat’s a relatively easy thing to get your hands on too. There are hares, squirrels and gophers. They’re good to eat because they’re fatty.

‘The porcupines are easy to catch because they don’t move very fast. As long as you’re careful with the spines, they’re a good source of food. You hit it with a big stick, roll it over, slice it open and peel the skin back, the same as you would any mammal.’

Instead he lasted 50 days before being airlifted out suffering from starvation. Apparently he had a twitter account and would update it once a day and people got worried when he started “hallucinating and talking to insects”

This isn’t altgotether surprising. He was afterall untrained in hunting and other aspects of wilderness survivial. But what’s striking is his confidence that the Yukon is some kind of bountiful larder where you wake up each morning and reach out your hand and grab the first critter that wanders by. The comments to the story are a mixed bag but here’s two that caught my eye. One from Canada and the other from somewhere else

There is a high end commercial lodge at the very same lake (google for “Tincup Wilderness Lodge, Yukon”) so I wouldn’t consider this to be wilderness.

I was watching one of his videos on the channel4 website - I had to quit half way through because it was so stupid I couldn’t stand it any longer.

Many comments here aren’t much better. To those who recommended to get big animals with a high powered rifle: this guy is nothing other than a tourist and there are strict hunting regulations in the Yukon. No big game hunting without a registered guide. As a tourist you can buy a small game hunting and/or a fishing licence and that’s it. He’s stuck with rabbits and porcies. Even squirrels are considered to be fur bearing animals and you have to have a trapping licence. ( Again only for residents)

With the money this idiot blew in a few weeks I could have lived comfortably for years. This really brings my blood pressure up.

- Kai Widdecke, Frances Lake Canada,

and

Oh for goodness sake - did he do his training on the mean streats of Islington? How on earth can anyone “starve” in the Yukon - it’s an enormously rich environment, not the Sudan! Silly little mummy’s boy.

- Alexandra, Maastricht, Netherlands,

So we have a comment from a Canadian and one from someone in the Netherlands. The Canadian obviously understands a reality that most people don’t. Despite the fact that Canada is 100% covered in forests except for that tiny slab of concrete called Toronto, guess what? We have rules. You can’t go out and shoot animals whenever you feel like it. So to all those people who want to wander into the wilderness with a rifle to mow down some of the millions of moose and elk and other tasty critters that are just begging to be shot - you are not allowed. Go home.

Now as for the second comment. First of all anyone who uses “for goodness sake” in print or speech immediately makes me think of a 65 year old spinster. Or a 20 year old wannabe spinster. But the instructive part of her comment is this: How on earth can anyone “starve” in the Yukon - it’s an enormously rich environment,

Well Alexandra you obviously have only watched nature documentaries which are 60 minutes of beautiful shots of animals which probably took about 5 years to film. They give the impression that you can’t walk ten feet in the Canadian woods without tripping over an animal. Nature documentaries which also promote a heavy environmentalist agenda have a vested interest in making every place seem to “teem with life” and biodiversity to fit the “don’t dare destroy a single pine needle” narrative.

And people like Alexandra sitting in her comfy walk up in Maastricht and Ed Wardle lap it up. Shit didn’t Wardle read “Into The Wild“?? or see the movie? Same story Ed only you had a satellite phone and were able to bug out.

I have over the past five years gone wilderness camping in the Algonquin back country every summer. Last year I did a 60 km 5 day trip. I went for almost 4 whole days without encountering another human being. It isn’t the Yukon but it has the highest concentration of black bears in Ontario. In five years guess how many bears I have seen? None. Zero. Nada. Despite the rebounding population thanks to the elimination of the spring bear hunt in 1996.

Guess how many times have seen Moose? Twice.

Deer? None.

Wolves? Never

Pocupine? Never

In fact I see more raccoons, porcupines, deer, skunk, gophers, possum, coyotes and rabbits around my own home just outside Toronto than I do in the wilderness. Why? Well for one the animals down here are more accustomed to humans and don’t hide as quickly. Also they don’t have a big wilderness to get swallowed up in. Just fragments. And because there is so much food to scavenge off humans they can live in denser populations.

Animals in the wild are spread out thinly because they need larger territories to find enough food to live. And they are very very secretive. They can hear and smell you coming a mile off and they hide immediately. Even Grizzly bears will get out of the way long before you even know they were there.

This idea that there is all this bounty in nature and you can live of the fat of the land is a naive fantasy born of people who live in cities, eat far too much and buy into the notion that if we did away with the entire infratructure that feeds us (”factory farms” and supermarkets) we could happily live in the woods without any trouble. After all the natives did it didn’t they? Of course they conveniently ignore the fact that hunter gatherers often faced starvation (ask the Inuit what they did to old people during famines - hint they didn’t eat them) and had a life expectancy that was a lot shorter than ours. And remember if all the movies are true the natives were super hunters who could find game anywhere. So if they starved sometimes why do we expect to walk out into the woods and not lose any weight?

Next time you have an opportunity to go to some large tract of woods - one big enough to get lost and die in. Look around, listen, ask yourself: “what have I seen that could keep me living and healthy for a month, a year?” Not much.

Oh and if you think only naive modern city folk make this mistake. Read Great Heart the account of how two experienced outdoorsmen and a very competent Indian guide who set out to explore remote Labrador in 1905 with plenty of food, guns and with access to lots of game (oh and did I mention they had a very experienced Indian guide? He was also an excellent hunter).

That one didn’t turn out so well either.

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RIP Patrick Swayze

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Image by hale_popoki via Flickr

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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Image via Wikipedia

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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Image via Wikipedia

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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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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Image via Wikipedia

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!

Via

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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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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

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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Image by websuccessdiva via Flickr

I wish I knew how to put that little icon on my site so everyone would know that I was selected as the Blogging Tories Site of the Week - April 26th. But I don’t know much about the technical side of blogging. I only know about the delicious side of blogging (whatever that means)

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