Grey Squirrels and Limey Genocide
This Green Food thing is getting out of hand
By Seamus O’Blaymus
They are killing defenseless Grey Squirrels in Great Britain.
They are killing them for food.
They are calling Grey Squirrels the next ethical meal.
Retired British colonels, dressed in pukkah regimental garb from India circa 1961, have taken to the streets with vintage carbines, locked and loaded for squirrel.
They take the dead Grey Squirrels to local butchers and specialty shops, which then sell the inexpensive meat, touting ethical determinants.
Because the Grey Squirrel is not indigenous but imported from North America, and because they are usurping territory formerly held by the native British Red Squirrel, many rodent racists are even saying that it’s good for the country.
The thinning of the Grey Squirrel herd seen through a funky prism could be viewed without prejudice as genocide.
But trust the Limeys to forego such blandishment. They argue that the meat is cheap and free range.
Business is booming – forgive the pun.
So, harsh economic times, the Green food movement and neo-racist tendencies are ipso facto contributing to our poor Grey Squirrel’s rapid demise.
I am paraphrasing here good readers. I’m Irish. I’m allowed.
A Charter called the Divine Right of Louts, Boors and Staggering Poets, giving free reign for me and my Blarney Tribe to spout, sputter and stutter sweeping suppositions, was penned in Dublin back in 1645 and was upheld by Papal Decree in 1647.
It’s shocking. A headline from the London Observer shouts: “The Ultimate ethical meal: A Grey Squirrel. It tastes sweet, like a cross between lamb and duck. And it's selling as fast as butchers can get it.”
Not since Churchill ordered hard rain on Dresden, as reproach for an equally debauched Nazi boondoggle on Coventry, have I heard such an outrageous assault on good sense and common decency emanating from the British Isles.
Well, there was that Falklands thing and that lamentable string of mass executions in India, but that’s just me spitballing. (See Divine Right of Louts, Boors and Staggering Poets.)
It’s as if the Brits, still pining hard over the recent legislated loss of their precious and pernicious fox and hounds hunt privileges have morphed into zombie mode. Bloodlust apparently runs free on the streets of London, Liverpool and Leeds.
Sad, sad, sad. Mad Brits devouring poor Grey Squirrels for fun and profit. It’s a fad gone viral.
“The Grey Squirrel, the American cousin of Britain's endangered red variety, is flying off the shelves faster than hunters can shoot them, with game butchers struggling to keep up with demand,” reports the Guardian.
“We put it on the shelf and it sells. It can be a dozen squirrels a day - and they all go,” said David Simpson, the director of Kingsley Village shopping center in Fraddon, Cornwall, whose game counter sells ever expanding amounts of Grey Squirrel meat.
“It's low in fat, low in food miles and completely free range. In fact, some claim that Sciurus carolinensis - Grey Squirrel - is about as ethical a dish as it is possible to serve on a dinner plate,” says the Guardian.
I blame the Greens and I blame the skinheads. The Grey Squirrel was brought to Great Britain from North America and we all know how those neo-nazi skinheads and jackboot loyalists like, well, like Prince Harry that fast-talking racist, and brown-shirt-sporting son-of-an-inbred-monarchist, for instance, feel about immigration policy.
While we’re on that topic. Prince Harry recently called one of his fellow soldiers a “raghead.” This after recently sporting a nazi shirt with swastika on Halloween. Hah! What a prince. Charming. Dropped lovingly from that weak-limbed Family Tree. With lamentably few branches to soften his fall.
And of course the Greens, those high-minded, low-life, populist iconoclasts, always looking for an ethical dilemma, have lunged upon this slaughter with unabashed abandon, relishing the fact that this may indeed pose a simple solution to the unethical slaughter of warehoused chickens and managed beef refineries.
Experts say the Grey Squirrel’s new-found popularity is partly due to its green credentials. “People like the fact it is wild meat, low in fat and local - so no food miles.”
Others offer sweeping genocide as argument for the cull.
Restaurateur David Ridley reckons that patriotism plays a big part since Red Squirrels, the indigenous variety, are threatened by the Greys. “Eat a Grey and save a Red. That’s the message,” laughs Ridley.
Four legs good, two legs bad. Animal Farm on steroids.
We know these Brits and their penchant for colonial paternalism. India, North America, Northern Island, Scotland, the Falklands, the list is long and nefarious.
Nice to know that the British people can still revert to form, still bring the weight of a pistol-toting monarchy to bear on the weak, the downtrodden and the defenseless.
Save our Grey Squirrel dear readers. Boycott that trip to London and write a letter to the UN. These Grey Squirrels deserve our support.
Write, blog and speak out against the rampant Grey Squirrelicide.
Remember what Gandhi said, some time before rooting those Loathsome Limey Louts from India’s soil.
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
So help us save the Grey Squirrel. Can I get a fshizzle for a hunger strike?
And while we’re here.
Can we get that mumbling old Queen off our currency?
Replace her with our own mumbling old queen.
Steven Harper.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Cherry V Ovechkin - Alex Stays - Cherry Goes
“The Washington Capitals’ Alex Ovechkin celebrated his 50th goal by putting his stick on the ice and then mimed warming his hands over it. Some observers called it hot-dogging; when Alex was a toddler in the Soviet Union it was called central heating.” — Comedian Torben Rolfsen, on the Web site of Vancouver’s The Province.
Alex Ovechkin’s Hot Celebration Leaves Pundits Fuming
The Burning Stick Routine Looked Good from here
By Terrance Gavan
Let’s get one thing straight.
Alex Ovechkin isn’t trying to rekindle the Cold War.
He hasn’t invaded Czechoslovakia.
He hasn’t moved any strategic missiles into Cuba.
And he has not, as far as I am aware, popped poison from an umbrella tip into any rogue secret agents.
So far he has no ties extant to the Russian mob.
He’s a young Russian hockey player.
He obviously loves playing the game.
He brings exuberance, excitement and a certain joie de vivre to this game.
Maybe we should just leave the kid alone.
Maybe the pundits, like Michael Farber (Sports Illustrated, TSN’s The Reporters) and Toronto Star’s Damien Cox, and yes, maybe even Don Cherry should just cut him some slack.
The three guys above, who all get paid a King’s ransom for popping off like popinjays at all things hockey, have taken fulsome swings at young Alex the Great for his on-ice celebrations.
Last Sunday on TSN’s The Reporters both Farber and Cox slavered loopily on about Ovechkin’s inappropriate celebration after scoring his 50th goal of the season.
For those of you who haven’t had a chance to see it during the 2,134 replays on TSN, it involves young Alex dropping his stick as if it’s too hot handle, and then warming his hands over the presumed flickering flames on the titanium shaft.
Fifty goals. Anyone else from Estevan, Saskatchewan or even Cole Harbor, Nova Scotia scored fifty yet?
Give the kid his celebration. Let him rant, jump, and burn that stick up. Smoke to the rafters.
Beautiful. Remember folks, this stick burning was an allegory, a metaphor if you will. People pay great money on Broadway to watch these little passion plays roll out across the stage.
Cox, for his part, just shrugged, in that way that young Damien has, going on about the lack of professionalism and yadda, yadda, yadda … forgive me I can’t remember the rest, because frankly Damien Cox is just plain boring when he gets on these “good for the game of hockey” screeds.
Farber, a Rutgers Phi Beta Kappa graduate and an erudite writer who has risen to hockey guru status at SI, said last Sunday on TSN that he found Ovechkin’s celebration trivial and banal. “It was staged and I thought it was stupid,” said Farber. Yeah, take your Phi Beta Kappa and go Kappa Beta bye-bye Mr. Farber.
Take your whine and cheese, go out to Central Park and have a picnic. Invite Cherry and Sydney Crosby and have a group groan and moan session where you pop, prattle and poop endlessly on about the lack of decorum in the NHL today.
We are raising hockey robots here in Canada. Most of the guys in the NHL today sound like Harvard MBA grads on a mission.
Think about this. In 1972, during the Summit Series, the Russians were pegged as robots, incapable of celebration. The Canadians won, it was said back then, because we brought heart and soul to the game.
There is a case to be made that the tables have swung full 180 since that Summit Series. Young Russians are showing the heart and young studs like Sydney and other Canucks are fast becoming the grumps.
And the pundits like Farber and Cox last Sunday on TSN are even grumpier.
Luckily, for us, those two guys are just plain boring. They’re not dangerous, they’re just well, ho-hum, banal, and frumpy.
The Mad Hatter, Don Cherry, is another story all together. Don Cherry is probably borderline dangerous.
But because he comes to his audience pimped up like a latter day dime store mannequin, dressed in material gleaned from the drapery section at Woolworth’s, we have tended to cut poor Don some slack over the years.
But people get grumpier as they age. Don is no exception. He’s morphed from joke, to funny, to sad and now to just plain precarious.
And please don’t tell me about those good deeds and the causes he supports.
The Teflon Don, Mafia Boss John Gotti (deceased from natural causes in prison, by golly) was loved by the residents of his old neighborhood, was a generous contributor to hospitals that help abused children, and to Hale House, which cared for infants exposed to illegal drugs.
That didn’t change the fact that John Gotti was John Gotti. Head of Murder Incorporated, and someone you probably shouldn’t follow into an alley at 2 am on a Saturday morning.
When Crosby Stills and Nash penned, “Teach your Children Well” they were not singing about John Gotti.
And for gosh sakes I’m not comparing our Rose-bedecked, dapper-dappled Teflon Don with the guy from Murder Incorporated. I’m just sayin’ that, good deeds notwithstanding, it’s time maybe for the CBC to pull the plug on the antics, the rhetoric and the borderline balkanism that Mr. Cherry is bringing to the airwaves at a chock a block and frankly scary rate.
Cherry, in an on-camera rant a few weeks ago (sounding somewhat Stalinesque, while we’re on the topic of Russian misdemeanors) even posted a verbal warning - a little pas de deux, sprinkled liberally with that oh so dainty jingoist rhetoric - that Alex the Great better watch his back lest some dull-meloned Canadian farm boy, not quite enamored of his boyish celebrations, greet him in the crease during one of those goal celebrations and “cut him in half.”
Please let this nifty piece of Canadian-exuberance sink in, for just a moment.
And forget the good deeds and the loving portraits painted of our boys in Afghanistan. And the beautiful little moments shared with our up-and-coming boys of winter. And his lovely dog Blue.
Forget all that, and remember what Don Cherry said, with muffled glee on our tax-funded network.
Don Cherry said someone’s “gonna’ cut him in half.”
And left unsaid, but certainly implied, was the concomitant fact that Alex Ovechkin would deserve it.
In the same piece Mr. Cherry teed up a clip of some black soccer players celebrating after scoring a goal.
He stared into the camera and warned aspiring young players that this was un-Canadian and not the way we civilized lads from the great White North do it.
Implied here, well, it’s actually too distasteful for me to imply. I’m wondering why the clip was of black players celebrating and not some English star or some Italian player sliding along the grass.
What’s implied in the clip is less important than what’s implicitly inferred by the clip. Inferred by me and some others, who have stated categorically that it made them very uncomfortable.
Let’s just say that Crosby Stills and Nash didn’t have Don Cherry in mind either, when they penned that seminal song on mentoring.
Let me put Mr. Cherry on notice here.
There is no place on any network anywhere and especially not on the CBC for that type of rhetoric.
We’re too busy right now, but perhaps there will be a time, when this economic tsunami subsides, for an MP to take this to Parliament.
Mr. Devolin, can a brother get an amen?n
Alex Ovechkin’s Hot Celebration Leaves Pundits Fuming
The Burning Stick Routine Looked Good from here
By Terrance Gavan
Let’s get one thing straight.
Alex Ovechkin isn’t trying to rekindle the Cold War.
He hasn’t invaded Czechoslovakia.
He hasn’t moved any strategic missiles into Cuba.
And he has not, as far as I am aware, popped poison from an umbrella tip into any rogue secret agents.
So far he has no ties extant to the Russian mob.
He’s a young Russian hockey player.
He obviously loves playing the game.
He brings exuberance, excitement and a certain joie de vivre to this game.
Maybe we should just leave the kid alone.
Maybe the pundits, like Michael Farber (Sports Illustrated, TSN’s The Reporters) and Toronto Star’s Damien Cox, and yes, maybe even Don Cherry should just cut him some slack.
The three guys above, who all get paid a King’s ransom for popping off like popinjays at all things hockey, have taken fulsome swings at young Alex the Great for his on-ice celebrations.
Last Sunday on TSN’s The Reporters both Farber and Cox slavered loopily on about Ovechkin’s inappropriate celebration after scoring his 50th goal of the season.
For those of you who haven’t had a chance to see it during the 2,134 replays on TSN, it involves young Alex dropping his stick as if it’s too hot handle, and then warming his hands over the presumed flickering flames on the titanium shaft.
Fifty goals. Anyone else from Estevan, Saskatchewan or even Cole Harbor, Nova Scotia scored fifty yet?
Give the kid his celebration. Let him rant, jump, and burn that stick up. Smoke to the rafters.
Beautiful. Remember folks, this stick burning was an allegory, a metaphor if you will. People pay great money on Broadway to watch these little passion plays roll out across the stage.
Cox, for his part, just shrugged, in that way that young Damien has, going on about the lack of professionalism and yadda, yadda, yadda … forgive me I can’t remember the rest, because frankly Damien Cox is just plain boring when he gets on these “good for the game of hockey” screeds.
Farber, a Rutgers Phi Beta Kappa graduate and an erudite writer who has risen to hockey guru status at SI, said last Sunday on TSN that he found Ovechkin’s celebration trivial and banal. “It was staged and I thought it was stupid,” said Farber. Yeah, take your Phi Beta Kappa and go Kappa Beta bye-bye Mr. Farber.
Take your whine and cheese, go out to Central Park and have a picnic. Invite Cherry and Sydney Crosby and have a group groan and moan session where you pop, prattle and poop endlessly on about the lack of decorum in the NHL today.
We are raising hockey robots here in Canada. Most of the guys in the NHL today sound like Harvard MBA grads on a mission.
Think about this. In 1972, during the Summit Series, the Russians were pegged as robots, incapable of celebration. The Canadians won, it was said back then, because we brought heart and soul to the game.
There is a case to be made that the tables have swung full 180 since that Summit Series. Young Russians are showing the heart and young studs like Sydney and other Canucks are fast becoming the grumps.
And the pundits like Farber and Cox last Sunday on TSN are even grumpier.
Luckily, for us, those two guys are just plain boring. They’re not dangerous, they’re just well, ho-hum, banal, and frumpy.
The Mad Hatter, Don Cherry, is another story all together. Don Cherry is probably borderline dangerous.
But because he comes to his audience pimped up like a latter day dime store mannequin, dressed in material gleaned from the drapery section at Woolworth’s, we have tended to cut poor Don some slack over the years.
But people get grumpier as they age. Don is no exception. He’s morphed from joke, to funny, to sad and now to just plain precarious.
And please don’t tell me about those good deeds and the causes he supports.
The Teflon Don, Mafia Boss John Gotti (deceased from natural causes in prison, by golly) was loved by the residents of his old neighborhood, was a generous contributor to hospitals that help abused children, and to Hale House, which cared for infants exposed to illegal drugs.
That didn’t change the fact that John Gotti was John Gotti. Head of Murder Incorporated, and someone you probably shouldn’t follow into an alley at 2 am on a Saturday morning.
When Crosby Stills and Nash penned, “Teach your Children Well” they were not singing about John Gotti.
And for gosh sakes I’m not comparing our Rose-bedecked, dapper-dappled Teflon Don with the guy from Murder Incorporated. I’m just sayin’ that, good deeds notwithstanding, it’s time maybe for the CBC to pull the plug on the antics, the rhetoric and the borderline balkanism that Mr. Cherry is bringing to the airwaves at a chock a block and frankly scary rate.
Cherry, in an on-camera rant a few weeks ago (sounding somewhat Stalinesque, while we’re on the topic of Russian misdemeanors) even posted a verbal warning - a little pas de deux, sprinkled liberally with that oh so dainty jingoist rhetoric - that Alex the Great better watch his back lest some dull-meloned Canadian farm boy, not quite enamored of his boyish celebrations, greet him in the crease during one of those goal celebrations and “cut him in half.”
Please let this nifty piece of Canadian-exuberance sink in, for just a moment.
And forget the good deeds and the loving portraits painted of our boys in Afghanistan. And the beautiful little moments shared with our up-and-coming boys of winter. And his lovely dog Blue.
Forget all that, and remember what Don Cherry said, with muffled glee on our tax-funded network.
Don Cherry said someone’s “gonna’ cut him in half.”
And left unsaid, but certainly implied, was the concomitant fact that Alex Ovechkin would deserve it.
In the same piece Mr. Cherry teed up a clip of some black soccer players celebrating after scoring a goal.
He stared into the camera and warned aspiring young players that this was un-Canadian and not the way we civilized lads from the great White North do it.
Implied here, well, it’s actually too distasteful for me to imply. I’m wondering why the clip was of black players celebrating and not some English star or some Italian player sliding along the grass.
What’s implied in the clip is less important than what’s implicitly inferred by the clip. Inferred by me and some others, who have stated categorically that it made them very uncomfortable.
Let’s just say that Crosby Stills and Nash didn’t have Don Cherry in mind either, when they penned that seminal song on mentoring.
Let me put Mr. Cherry on notice here.
There is no place on any network anywhere and especially not on the CBC for that type of rhetoric.
We’re too busy right now, but perhaps there will be a time, when this economic tsunami subsides, for an MP to take this to Parliament.
Mr. Devolin, can a brother get an amen?n
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Facebook and the Face of the Beast
Facebook a Looming Assault on Sense and Sensibility
Some Scientists Say there’s a cure.
By Terrance Gavan
I’m a sucker for new technology. But I have my limits.
I’ve been on Facebook. But rapidly left.
Facebook scares the beejeezuz out of me.
I have heard the stories.
Stories of people with 22,567 Facebook friends.
Pardon me just a moment here. But if you have 22,567 friends on Facebook, you are in dire need of some therapy.
I have two good friends. I’ve had them since university. I find it very hard today as I careen into my senior years, to maintain and cultivate those friendships. We are all three of us really busy with our separate preoccupations and life’s languid streams.
I send them a column once in a while and in the next few weeks we will be Twittering and emailing like fiends because we are involved in our yearly NCAA March Madness basketball pool. We’ve been doing it since college.
It’s just an excuse to get together vicariously, and renew that camaraderie that we negotiated back at the University of Manitoba.
We are busy. We, none of us, two writers and a Manitoba Union activist can afford the investment in another 22,565 extra friends, who poke, nudge, and stream pithy little net aphorisms like LOL and LMAO frequently and with apparent disregard for decorum and the rigors of the day.
We are all leery of Facebook. We are pragmatists. We are old. Wiser. We all grew up Catholic and we know the face of the beast.
We have heard the sordid tales of Facebook addiction. We follow the scary and vaguely loopy stories of Facebook: the bullying and coercive contracts made in the dim wee hours of the morning between 13-year-old girls and their 15-year-old boyfriends.
Contracts made in the subdued, salsa light of a Lava lamp set beside an Apple MacBook Air at 2 am on a Friday evening.
A teenaged girl, Lolita5912, aka Samantha McGilicutty, has just lost a spot on the cheerleading squad and nudges her Facebook boyfriend GothBoy13997, aka Jeremiah O’Hoolihan, telling him that something needs to be done.
“I’m very, very, very angry GothBoy13997. And you won’t like me when I’m angry! I think Amanda Ryan [aka Peachy4944] is such a weasel OMG I hate her! Sure, she can do the 1080 spin with the blunt force splits landing, and her teeth are perfect since those bloody braces came out last spring, but that’s my spot on the squad she took GothBoy13997. She needs a poke, a nudge. She needs to meet with an accident. Got it Goth Boy? She’ll be in the quad alone tomorrow after school. I got HannahMontana19876 to poke her with news of a special cheerleading meeting. LOL! No meeting; except with Destiny? LMAO! The tire iron is in my locker. You know the combo. Time for a good old fashioned Tonya Harding trailer-park beat down GothBoy13997. One good whack to the kneecap and I’m back on the pep squad. You’re blocked from my Facebook until I hear the wail of those sirens and see the whites of a paramedic’s eyes on the quad. Do it for me GothBoy13997. Do it for love!”
You will tell me I’m paranoid. That these incidents form the exception and not the norm.
But, I read the stories and I see the detritus of disappointment in those faces of the lonely, disenfranchised laptop languishers. I see the pasty white skin, the cross-eyed stares, facial tics and carpal tunnel syndrome, all first signs of Facebook palsy, a degenerative malady.
A few recent studies also indicate that Facebook is addictive.
A deep sucking wound on the heaving chest of society. It is disrupting workplace habits, reducing productivity, and slowly eroding our ability to conduct face-to-face conversations.
A University of Victoria Psychologist Rob Bedi says that Facebook is enslaving. “Notifications, messages, pokes, and invites reward you with an unpredictable high, much like gambling,” says Bedi. That anticipation can get dangerously addictive.
“Heroin addicts and alcoholics have it pretty easy,” adds Bedi. “They just put away the needle or flush the Jack Daniels down the toilet. Facebookaholics have the peer pressure and Apple ads. The pushers from the Best Buy Geek Squad are preying on us all, tempting us to the dark side of WiFi.”
Bedi and a group of psychiatrists on the front lines of this War on Nudge say that there may be a solution. “For some people, talking with someone might be the answer,” says Harvard Psychiatrist Manny Dangerfield.
Hah. LMAO! Talking! What the hell is that? Why the hell do you think God gave us opposable thumbs? Ask the brain trust at Research In Motion. We have opposable thumbs so we can communicate via Blackberry. Talking is dead.
But we digress.
This all comes too late for poor Lolita5912, aka Samantha McGilicutty.
At a recent basketball state championship young Samantha was launched 121 feet into the air by cheerleader Rob Luckenwold, aka KarmicBounce666.
As young Samantha completed her 12th twist on the way back to earth, Rob suddenly left his spot underneath the rapidly descending Lolita5912, and sprinted over to high five a pretty young lady in a wheelchair wearing a full leg cast.
You guessed it. The pretty girl was Amanada Ryan, aka Peachy4944. They both turned to watch the empty spot on the hardwood.
Seeing the danger, GothBoy13997 left the stands and positioned himself under the somersaulting McGilicutty. But whereas Rob stands 6’4, weighs 225 pounds and bench presses 459 pounds, GothBoy13997 is just 5’6 and weighs in at about 148. He has carpal tunnel syndrome, myopia, and a bad back. He did his best to catch Samantha, but sadly it did not end well.
Samantha and GothBoy13997 are both recovering in the County General. Lolita5912 is not accepting GothBoy13997’s pokes or emails and her mother is negotiating a deal with Fox for a movie of the week.
We need to do something about this Facebook thing.
Alas, good professor Bedi (aka BediTheJedi1313) offers solace in irony.
“You could join one of the 155 Facebook Addicts Anonymous groups on Facebook itself,” offers BediTheJedi – obviously not taught by Yoda or Obe Wan.
Poke me. I must be dreaming.
DNLOL!
Definitely Not Laughing Out Loud.
And … OMG! Help!
For I have seen the beast … and he is Facebook!n
Some Scientists Say there’s a cure.
By Terrance Gavan
I’m a sucker for new technology. But I have my limits.
I’ve been on Facebook. But rapidly left.
Facebook scares the beejeezuz out of me.
I have heard the stories.
Stories of people with 22,567 Facebook friends.
Pardon me just a moment here. But if you have 22,567 friends on Facebook, you are in dire need of some therapy.
I have two good friends. I’ve had them since university. I find it very hard today as I careen into my senior years, to maintain and cultivate those friendships. We are all three of us really busy with our separate preoccupations and life’s languid streams.
I send them a column once in a while and in the next few weeks we will be Twittering and emailing like fiends because we are involved in our yearly NCAA March Madness basketball pool. We’ve been doing it since college.
It’s just an excuse to get together vicariously, and renew that camaraderie that we negotiated back at the University of Manitoba.
We are busy. We, none of us, two writers and a Manitoba Union activist can afford the investment in another 22,565 extra friends, who poke, nudge, and stream pithy little net aphorisms like LOL and LMAO frequently and with apparent disregard for decorum and the rigors of the day.
We are all leery of Facebook. We are pragmatists. We are old. Wiser. We all grew up Catholic and we know the face of the beast.
We have heard the sordid tales of Facebook addiction. We follow the scary and vaguely loopy stories of Facebook: the bullying and coercive contracts made in the dim wee hours of the morning between 13-year-old girls and their 15-year-old boyfriends.
Contracts made in the subdued, salsa light of a Lava lamp set beside an Apple MacBook Air at 2 am on a Friday evening.
A teenaged girl, Lolita5912, aka Samantha McGilicutty, has just lost a spot on the cheerleading squad and nudges her Facebook boyfriend GothBoy13997, aka Jeremiah O’Hoolihan, telling him that something needs to be done.
“I’m very, very, very angry GothBoy13997. And you won’t like me when I’m angry! I think Amanda Ryan [aka Peachy4944] is such a weasel OMG I hate her! Sure, she can do the 1080 spin with the blunt force splits landing, and her teeth are perfect since those bloody braces came out last spring, but that’s my spot on the squad she took GothBoy13997. She needs a poke, a nudge. She needs to meet with an accident. Got it Goth Boy? She’ll be in the quad alone tomorrow after school. I got HannahMontana19876 to poke her with news of a special cheerleading meeting. LOL! No meeting; except with Destiny? LMAO! The tire iron is in my locker. You know the combo. Time for a good old fashioned Tonya Harding trailer-park beat down GothBoy13997. One good whack to the kneecap and I’m back on the pep squad. You’re blocked from my Facebook until I hear the wail of those sirens and see the whites of a paramedic’s eyes on the quad. Do it for me GothBoy13997. Do it for love!”
You will tell me I’m paranoid. That these incidents form the exception and not the norm.
But, I read the stories and I see the detritus of disappointment in those faces of the lonely, disenfranchised laptop languishers. I see the pasty white skin, the cross-eyed stares, facial tics and carpal tunnel syndrome, all first signs of Facebook palsy, a degenerative malady.
A few recent studies also indicate that Facebook is addictive.
A deep sucking wound on the heaving chest of society. It is disrupting workplace habits, reducing productivity, and slowly eroding our ability to conduct face-to-face conversations.
A University of Victoria Psychologist Rob Bedi says that Facebook is enslaving. “Notifications, messages, pokes, and invites reward you with an unpredictable high, much like gambling,” says Bedi. That anticipation can get dangerously addictive.
“Heroin addicts and alcoholics have it pretty easy,” adds Bedi. “They just put away the needle or flush the Jack Daniels down the toilet. Facebookaholics have the peer pressure and Apple ads. The pushers from the Best Buy Geek Squad are preying on us all, tempting us to the dark side of WiFi.”
Bedi and a group of psychiatrists on the front lines of this War on Nudge say that there may be a solution. “For some people, talking with someone might be the answer,” says Harvard Psychiatrist Manny Dangerfield.
Hah. LMAO! Talking! What the hell is that? Why the hell do you think God gave us opposable thumbs? Ask the brain trust at Research In Motion. We have opposable thumbs so we can communicate via Blackberry. Talking is dead.
But we digress.
This all comes too late for poor Lolita5912, aka Samantha McGilicutty.
At a recent basketball state championship young Samantha was launched 121 feet into the air by cheerleader Rob Luckenwold, aka KarmicBounce666.
As young Samantha completed her 12th twist on the way back to earth, Rob suddenly left his spot underneath the rapidly descending Lolita5912, and sprinted over to high five a pretty young lady in a wheelchair wearing a full leg cast.
You guessed it. The pretty girl was Amanada Ryan, aka Peachy4944. They both turned to watch the empty spot on the hardwood.
Seeing the danger, GothBoy13997 left the stands and positioned himself under the somersaulting McGilicutty. But whereas Rob stands 6’4, weighs 225 pounds and bench presses 459 pounds, GothBoy13997 is just 5’6 and weighs in at about 148. He has carpal tunnel syndrome, myopia, and a bad back. He did his best to catch Samantha, but sadly it did not end well.
Samantha and GothBoy13997 are both recovering in the County General. Lolita5912 is not accepting GothBoy13997’s pokes or emails and her mother is negotiating a deal with Fox for a movie of the week.
We need to do something about this Facebook thing.
Alas, good professor Bedi (aka BediTheJedi1313) offers solace in irony.
“You could join one of the 155 Facebook Addicts Anonymous groups on Facebook itself,” offers BediTheJedi – obviously not taught by Yoda or Obe Wan.
Poke me. I must be dreaming.
DNLOL!
Definitely Not Laughing Out Loud.
And … OMG! Help!
For I have seen the beast … and he is Facebook!n
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
John Mackey and Doug Harvey - Condolences
John Mackey and Doug Harvey – But for the Grace of God
Twin Pyres Burning – Broken Warriors and Retirement
By Terrance Gavan
You are always just one hit away from oblivion.
No one says it out loud.
But it’s there on the dais of any professional player’s career.
It was there when John Mackey redefined the tight end position. He was drafted by the Baltimore Colts in 1963 and his career never ended with one hit.
Instead, he rallied through a succession of hits and numerous undiagnosed concussions in the 60s and early 70s. He won a Super Bowl and was inducted into the Hall of Fame.
Of course John Mackey can’t remember any of that today.
John Mackey is a victim.
Mackey suffers from frontotemporal dementia, which makes him particularly protective of personal possessions and suspicious of anyone who tries to control his actions.
Frontotemporal dementia is not a pretty disease. It’s heartbreaking when it hits someone still young and in his prime.
Less pretty yet is the fact that the care necessary to keep Mackey safe from himself and others is not fully funded by the NFL Players Association or the NFL proper.
Ironic, considering that as president of the NHLPA, Mackey was there on the front lines, early in the game, when owners didn’t consider unions as part of their operations’ template. Mackey and his union fought on. And they eventually earned the right for arbitration, settlement strategies and free agency.
Alas, he can fight no longer. His wife Sylvia finally had to put John in the custody of a care facility.
She even went back to work as a flight attendant when she was 56 to make ends meet, and to get John the health insurance he needed to cope with the trauma of a mind lost.
What the hell happened?
Columnist and author Frank Deford wrote a nice little piece about John just before Christmas last year.
“When John Mackey starred for the Baltimore Colts, he pretty much created the modern position of tight end,” wrote Deford in a column for National Public Radio. “He was also bright and a leader, the president of the NFL Players Association. But as singular as he was, now he's just like so many other old pro football players: John Mackey has dementia.”
And that’s what happened.
John Mackey lost his marbles. And the NFL and the NFLPA couldn’t give a diddle.
Deford goes on to say that it’s been left to the wives and loved ones to carry the weight, a ball that the NHLPA and the NFL have thus far been loath to lug.
“Largely because of (Sylvia) and a few other loyal wives and children, the NFL and the players union started the 88 Plan — named for Mackey's old number — to help players with dementia,” Deford explained. “Ninety-seven of them are already receiving assistance, though the league is quick to say this certainly doesn't imply any link between football and brain damage.”
You can bet your right butt-cheek that the league is quick to distance itself from this particular controversy. They would prefer that it remain buried in a tidy, secure ward of a full care retirement facility.
Thankfully, this particular dirty little secret is gaining leverage as more doctors begin to plumb the deep, dark and deadly depths of brain trauma in contact sports.
I was watching hockey the other night when one of the announcers mentioned that a certain player had already offered to donate his brain to a medical study on brain trauma. It was met by a few chuckles and the de rigueur speculation from his on-air partner that he might have already done it.
And I chuckled too, before remembering Doug Harvey.
If Mackey redefined the tight end position, well, Harvey certainly did no less for the defense position in hockey. He patented the hard charging headman era of the flying juggernaut known as Les Habitants, playing with legends like Maurice Rocket Richard, Jean Beliveau, Henri Richard and Dickie Moore. He won six Stanley Cups with the Habs.
And like John Mackey, Harvey was also a player activist, involved in the creation, with Detroit’s Ted Lindsay, of the NHL Players Association.
And, like Mackey, Harvey’s retirement did no go as well as his career.
I grew up in Ottawa and I remember my father telling me the disturbing story of Harvey who was then eking out a ravaged existence sweeping floors at an Ottawa area race-track and living in a converted railway car.
On December 26, 1989, at the age of 65 Doug Harvey died of cirrhosis of the liver in Montreal General Hospital. He had stopped drinking three years before he passed away, but at that point it was too late.
Harvey’s problems stemmed from depression and untreated bi-polar disorder, and it’s hard to judge if shots to the head actually exacerbated Harvey’s condition.
It matters not.
What matters are two disparate lives, parlayed like chattel midst the callous indifference of professional sports.
Maybe we could take something from this.
Maybe the owners and the players associations could take some ownership, step up to the plate and dig in on the front lines instead of working like quirky Luddites in the wings.
Maybe it’s time to remember the guys in the trenches who long ago fought to bring some equity to the playing field and to the arena.
A point five percent cut on the gate and a similar surcharge on player’s salaries donated to player retirement and health care would not place an undue burden on owners or players today.
And I know it’s exactly how John Mackey and Doug Harvey might have drawn it up.
Back in the day.
When they were professional athletes; young, strong and invincible.n
Twin Pyres Burning – Broken Warriors and Retirement
By Terrance Gavan
You are always just one hit away from oblivion.
No one says it out loud.
But it’s there on the dais of any professional player’s career.
It was there when John Mackey redefined the tight end position. He was drafted by the Baltimore Colts in 1963 and his career never ended with one hit.
Instead, he rallied through a succession of hits and numerous undiagnosed concussions in the 60s and early 70s. He won a Super Bowl and was inducted into the Hall of Fame.
Of course John Mackey can’t remember any of that today.
John Mackey is a victim.
Mackey suffers from frontotemporal dementia, which makes him particularly protective of personal possessions and suspicious of anyone who tries to control his actions.
Frontotemporal dementia is not a pretty disease. It’s heartbreaking when it hits someone still young and in his prime.
Less pretty yet is the fact that the care necessary to keep Mackey safe from himself and others is not fully funded by the NFL Players Association or the NFL proper.
Ironic, considering that as president of the NHLPA, Mackey was there on the front lines, early in the game, when owners didn’t consider unions as part of their operations’ template. Mackey and his union fought on. And they eventually earned the right for arbitration, settlement strategies and free agency.
Alas, he can fight no longer. His wife Sylvia finally had to put John in the custody of a care facility.
She even went back to work as a flight attendant when she was 56 to make ends meet, and to get John the health insurance he needed to cope with the trauma of a mind lost.
What the hell happened?
Columnist and author Frank Deford wrote a nice little piece about John just before Christmas last year.
“When John Mackey starred for the Baltimore Colts, he pretty much created the modern position of tight end,” wrote Deford in a column for National Public Radio. “He was also bright and a leader, the president of the NFL Players Association. But as singular as he was, now he's just like so many other old pro football players: John Mackey has dementia.”
And that’s what happened.
John Mackey lost his marbles. And the NFL and the NFLPA couldn’t give a diddle.
Deford goes on to say that it’s been left to the wives and loved ones to carry the weight, a ball that the NHLPA and the NFL have thus far been loath to lug.
“Largely because of (Sylvia) and a few other loyal wives and children, the NFL and the players union started the 88 Plan — named for Mackey's old number — to help players with dementia,” Deford explained. “Ninety-seven of them are already receiving assistance, though the league is quick to say this certainly doesn't imply any link between football and brain damage.”
You can bet your right butt-cheek that the league is quick to distance itself from this particular controversy. They would prefer that it remain buried in a tidy, secure ward of a full care retirement facility.
Thankfully, this particular dirty little secret is gaining leverage as more doctors begin to plumb the deep, dark and deadly depths of brain trauma in contact sports.
I was watching hockey the other night when one of the announcers mentioned that a certain player had already offered to donate his brain to a medical study on brain trauma. It was met by a few chuckles and the de rigueur speculation from his on-air partner that he might have already done it.
And I chuckled too, before remembering Doug Harvey.
If Mackey redefined the tight end position, well, Harvey certainly did no less for the defense position in hockey. He patented the hard charging headman era of the flying juggernaut known as Les Habitants, playing with legends like Maurice Rocket Richard, Jean Beliveau, Henri Richard and Dickie Moore. He won six Stanley Cups with the Habs.
And like John Mackey, Harvey was also a player activist, involved in the creation, with Detroit’s Ted Lindsay, of the NHL Players Association.
And, like Mackey, Harvey’s retirement did no go as well as his career.
I grew up in Ottawa and I remember my father telling me the disturbing story of Harvey who was then eking out a ravaged existence sweeping floors at an Ottawa area race-track and living in a converted railway car.
On December 26, 1989, at the age of 65 Doug Harvey died of cirrhosis of the liver in Montreal General Hospital. He had stopped drinking three years before he passed away, but at that point it was too late.
Harvey’s problems stemmed from depression and untreated bi-polar disorder, and it’s hard to judge if shots to the head actually exacerbated Harvey’s condition.
It matters not.
What matters are two disparate lives, parlayed like chattel midst the callous indifference of professional sports.
Maybe we could take something from this.
Maybe the owners and the players associations could take some ownership, step up to the plate and dig in on the front lines instead of working like quirky Luddites in the wings.
Maybe it’s time to remember the guys in the trenches who long ago fought to bring some equity to the playing field and to the arena.
A point five percent cut on the gate and a similar surcharge on player’s salaries donated to player retirement and health care would not place an undue burden on owners or players today.
And I know it’s exactly how John Mackey and Doug Harvey might have drawn it up.
Back in the day.
When they were professional athletes; young, strong and invincible.n
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Full Contact Curling - Some Thoughts
It’s Brier Time
An Homage to Chucked Granite
By Terrance Gavan
If you’re smart, you will not admit an addiction to the game of curling.
You will not tell your friends that you’re too busy to come out tonight because you’re home watching curling.
People give you a hard time.
They will say things like: “What are you serious? Curling? Do you actually have a life, or are you just a congenital moron?”
I can take the insults.
What I can’t handle are the attendant slurs aimed at the roaring game. People who feel obliged to spout invective about you and your preoccupation with curling never stop there. They like to enforce their opinion by saying derogatory things about the game itself.
I find this intolerable. Insult me, fine. Do not carry on with the pop and prattle about the grand old game.
People who know nothing about the nuance of the sport feel entitled to sputter vile bile and vitriol.
“It’s a stupid game … it’s boring … people who like it are morons … like you Gav.”
It’s okay.
I forgive them. Most of them are not that bright anyway. And they have no idea about the niceties and the subtle flow of the great and glorious roaring game.
I have a friend, Jamie McBlarney, who compares curling to moronic pastimes like Frisbee Golf. “Curling is the most boring sport ever invented. It’s like watching paint dry, and I can’t believe that you can just sit there and watch it, like some moony-eyed couch potato in the last throes of a degenerative brain disease. What’s next, the World League of Frisbee Golf?”
Hey hold on here. Curling is much more exciting than Frisbee Golf. There are no pink brooms in Frisbee Golf; no Teflon sliders; no granite. People do not yell “hurry hard!” or “no,no,never!” in Frisbee Golf. Good-looking people like Jennifer Jones, Kevin Martin and Jeff Stoughton do not play Frisbee Golf.
Also, and this is paramount. In curling we are not subject to the whim of the terrorist canine.
Like that border collie in Head Lake Park who continuously patrols the Frisbee Golf playing field, You’re on the tee at number three and let fly with a perfect Frisbee Golf drive, and then bam, all of a sudden, that little black and white S.O.B. is sky-bound, soaring high in the air like some seminal refugee from Alice in Wonderland, and lickety-split, in a wink, he grabs the Frisbee, and then disappears over the creek and into the distance. Frisbee Golf game is ‘Over by Rover.’
I explain this to my friend Jamie McBlarney. “What’s that got to do with curling? Are you a total idiot?” asks Jamie. Jamie is not fond of the quick cut and thrust, suave parlay, or the facetiously simplistic argument for that matter.
“Simple,” I explain. “It is unheard of in curling circles for a dog, even a very, very, big dog like a Great Dane or a Newfie or a St Bernard to wander onto the curling surface and make off with the tools of the trade. A: No dog is fond of fetching a 45 pound lump of granite; and B: Big dogs find it very hard to walk on ice… especially when carrying an 60-pound rock.”
This of course sets Jamie off. “You bag of hammers. First it’s 45 pounds and then 60? Which is it, you simpleton? Here’s a suggestion: Turn off the curling and give your brain a rest … it’s turning to mush.”
It’s what a lot of people say to me. And I could google rock weight, just to keep Jamie in the loop, but you only need to know that those rocks are very heavy. And that a very very very big dog would get develop a huge hernia if he decided to fetch one home.
I will continue to watch curling.
I watch it because I fell in love with curling as a youngster in rural Manitoba.
And also because I was there when my Auntie Alice brought full-contact to a bonspiel.
It happened at the Halcyon Golf and Curling Club back in 1985.
My 75 year old Auntie Alice was playing in an early A-Side round in the local year-end spiel. She and my Uncle Baldur, my cousin Radnur and his wife Cheryl were playing mixed doubles.
They just happened to get locked into a duel with the spiel favorites, a team of ringers skipped by my cousin and another of Alice’s nephews, Thor Bjornason - who just happened to be skipping a Halcyon men’s foursome that finished second in the Manitoba Provincial Tankard in 1985. Thor was a killer on a sheet of ice. A baby-faced assassin.
My Aunt Alice liked to have a few sherries during a game, but this was her third draw of the day. And the sherries had somehow morphed to tequila shots. Don’t ask.
In the fourth end, with Thor up 6-1, Aunt Alice began mumbling. Thor had a beautiful delivery and a seamless slide to release.
He was removing rocks with abandon, but always apologizing deferentially to Auntie Alice after every made shot.
Thor was nothing if not a nice guy and genteel competitor.
I was down at ice level taking some pictures when I heard Aunt Alice’s muttered refrain. “Look at Thor, that young bugger; he’s sliding past the hog line; he’s holding that rock too long, dammit.”
It was the tequila talking, and we tried to reassure her that Thor’s release was legal. She mumbled again. Her mind was set.
And sure enough, on Thor’s next slide out from the hack, as he slid effortlessly to the hog line, I remember clear as polished ice, this tiny little lady sliding from the sideboards, and then the sudden flash of Aunt Alice’s old straw broom as she shoved it between Thor’s delicately balanced legs.
The rock went south and Thor went north. And Aunt Alice watched with glee as Thor’s stone jammed hard into the sideboards. And then just before leaving she gave poor Thor two whacks to his backside with the old straw broom.
“Let go of that damn rock or you’ll get the same again,” Aunt Alice said to Thor, who was, to his credit, smiling sheepishly. And everyone in the old curling club was laughing.
Why?
Well, because Auntie Alice used to give hundreds of curling students in Halcyon a few whacks on the backside when she was teaching us all how to curl over her four decades of volunteer coaching at the ol’ Halcyon Golf and Curling club.
Auntie Alice never again switched from sherry to tequila shots at a Halcyon Bonspiel. And Thor?
Well he went on to win that game 10-4, but he never slid out more than 10 feet from the hack for the remainder of the contest.
That’s why I watch curling.
Because today, every time I watch a Kevin Martin, or a Jeff Stoughton sliding smooth and serene from the hack, my mind flashes back to 1985; and just for a moment I see Auntie Alice’s old straw broom, flashing.
And as rock is released, a smile.n
An Homage to Chucked Granite
By Terrance Gavan
If you’re smart, you will not admit an addiction to the game of curling.
You will not tell your friends that you’re too busy to come out tonight because you’re home watching curling.
People give you a hard time.
They will say things like: “What are you serious? Curling? Do you actually have a life, or are you just a congenital moron?”
I can take the insults.
What I can’t handle are the attendant slurs aimed at the roaring game. People who feel obliged to spout invective about you and your preoccupation with curling never stop there. They like to enforce their opinion by saying derogatory things about the game itself.
I find this intolerable. Insult me, fine. Do not carry on with the pop and prattle about the grand old game.
People who know nothing about the nuance of the sport feel entitled to sputter vile bile and vitriol.
“It’s a stupid game … it’s boring … people who like it are morons … like you Gav.”
It’s okay.
I forgive them. Most of them are not that bright anyway. And they have no idea about the niceties and the subtle flow of the great and glorious roaring game.
I have a friend, Jamie McBlarney, who compares curling to moronic pastimes like Frisbee Golf. “Curling is the most boring sport ever invented. It’s like watching paint dry, and I can’t believe that you can just sit there and watch it, like some moony-eyed couch potato in the last throes of a degenerative brain disease. What’s next, the World League of Frisbee Golf?”
Hey hold on here. Curling is much more exciting than Frisbee Golf. There are no pink brooms in Frisbee Golf; no Teflon sliders; no granite. People do not yell “hurry hard!” or “no,no,never!” in Frisbee Golf. Good-looking people like Jennifer Jones, Kevin Martin and Jeff Stoughton do not play Frisbee Golf.
Also, and this is paramount. In curling we are not subject to the whim of the terrorist canine.
Like that border collie in Head Lake Park who continuously patrols the Frisbee Golf playing field, You’re on the tee at number three and let fly with a perfect Frisbee Golf drive, and then bam, all of a sudden, that little black and white S.O.B. is sky-bound, soaring high in the air like some seminal refugee from Alice in Wonderland, and lickety-split, in a wink, he grabs the Frisbee, and then disappears over the creek and into the distance. Frisbee Golf game is ‘Over by Rover.’
I explain this to my friend Jamie McBlarney. “What’s that got to do with curling? Are you a total idiot?” asks Jamie. Jamie is not fond of the quick cut and thrust, suave parlay, or the facetiously simplistic argument for that matter.
“Simple,” I explain. “It is unheard of in curling circles for a dog, even a very, very, big dog like a Great Dane or a Newfie or a St Bernard to wander onto the curling surface and make off with the tools of the trade. A: No dog is fond of fetching a 45 pound lump of granite; and B: Big dogs find it very hard to walk on ice… especially when carrying an 60-pound rock.”
This of course sets Jamie off. “You bag of hammers. First it’s 45 pounds and then 60? Which is it, you simpleton? Here’s a suggestion: Turn off the curling and give your brain a rest … it’s turning to mush.”
It’s what a lot of people say to me. And I could google rock weight, just to keep Jamie in the loop, but you only need to know that those rocks are very heavy. And that a very very very big dog would get develop a huge hernia if he decided to fetch one home.
I will continue to watch curling.
I watch it because I fell in love with curling as a youngster in rural Manitoba.
And also because I was there when my Auntie Alice brought full-contact to a bonspiel.
It happened at the Halcyon Golf and Curling Club back in 1985.
My 75 year old Auntie Alice was playing in an early A-Side round in the local year-end spiel. She and my Uncle Baldur, my cousin Radnur and his wife Cheryl were playing mixed doubles.
They just happened to get locked into a duel with the spiel favorites, a team of ringers skipped by my cousin and another of Alice’s nephews, Thor Bjornason - who just happened to be skipping a Halcyon men’s foursome that finished second in the Manitoba Provincial Tankard in 1985. Thor was a killer on a sheet of ice. A baby-faced assassin.
My Aunt Alice liked to have a few sherries during a game, but this was her third draw of the day. And the sherries had somehow morphed to tequila shots. Don’t ask.
In the fourth end, with Thor up 6-1, Aunt Alice began mumbling. Thor had a beautiful delivery and a seamless slide to release.
He was removing rocks with abandon, but always apologizing deferentially to Auntie Alice after every made shot.
Thor was nothing if not a nice guy and genteel competitor.
I was down at ice level taking some pictures when I heard Aunt Alice’s muttered refrain. “Look at Thor, that young bugger; he’s sliding past the hog line; he’s holding that rock too long, dammit.”
It was the tequila talking, and we tried to reassure her that Thor’s release was legal. She mumbled again. Her mind was set.
And sure enough, on Thor’s next slide out from the hack, as he slid effortlessly to the hog line, I remember clear as polished ice, this tiny little lady sliding from the sideboards, and then the sudden flash of Aunt Alice’s old straw broom as she shoved it between Thor’s delicately balanced legs.
The rock went south and Thor went north. And Aunt Alice watched with glee as Thor’s stone jammed hard into the sideboards. And then just before leaving she gave poor Thor two whacks to his backside with the old straw broom.
“Let go of that damn rock or you’ll get the same again,” Aunt Alice said to Thor, who was, to his credit, smiling sheepishly. And everyone in the old curling club was laughing.
Why?
Well, because Auntie Alice used to give hundreds of curling students in Halcyon a few whacks on the backside when she was teaching us all how to curl over her four decades of volunteer coaching at the ol’ Halcyon Golf and Curling club.
Auntie Alice never again switched from sherry to tequila shots at a Halcyon Bonspiel. And Thor?
Well he went on to win that game 10-4, but he never slid out more than 10 feet from the hack for the remainder of the contest.
That’s why I watch curling.
Because today, every time I watch a Kevin Martin, or a Jeff Stoughton sliding smooth and serene from the hack, my mind flashes back to 1985; and just for a moment I see Auntie Alice’s old straw broom, flashing.
And as rock is released, a smile.n
Saturday, March 7, 2009
The Code is BIG FAT LIE - Ban Hockey Fighting
“The players, the fans, the coaches, the general managers like it … who doesn’t like it?”
Don Cherry
“To me it regulates the violence that takes place on the ice sheet.” Brian Burke, Maple Leaf GM
Fighting is part of the game …it is the nature of the game …it is the nature of constant non-stop action.”
Gary Bettman
The Code Airs to Clear The Fog of Icy Wars
CBC’s Fifth Estate Drops the Gloves on Fighting and the Big Lie
By Terrance Gavan
The CBC’s Fifth Estate documentary The Code hosted by Bob McKeon aired last Friday and it will take some hits on the chin for its forthright examination of hockey’s bullyboy mentality.
The Code featured interviews with a few NHL enforcers, and the de rigueur talking head shots of some pro-brouhaha gurus including CBC commentator, Don Cherry, Leafs GM Brian Burke and NHL Commissioner and pugilistic apologist Gary Bettman. The father, the son and the holy ghost. Who’s who? It’s a Vegas pick ‘em.
What irks me most about this triune coven of contrarians - Cherry and Burke and Bettman - is that inordinate air of haughtiness. Speaking like Moses from the burning bush.
They dismiss anyone harboring anti-fighting ideals with an opulent puissance and a self-aggrandizing conceit. They remain insufferably arrogant and self-important on the subject of fighting.
Cherry regards people in the anti-fighting camp as simpletons or no-nothing leftists. Tree huggers, pansies, patsies and traitors. Cherry, in his fist-popping, ham-handed glee, accuses the anti-fighting set with conspiracy; conspiracy to bring down “hockey … the only thing we (Canadians) do well.” Yes Cherry said that in the course of an exchange with McKeown.
Apparently Donny-boy was somewhere getting his melon frazzled in the A-League when Lester Pearson won the Nobel Prize or when TC Douglas put up his dukes, chugged into a political void, and brought a world-renowned health care system to Canada.
According to Cherry, Bettman and Burke there is no room in the fan base for those wimps who feel hockey could survive without the punch, bump and grind.
Cherry, Burke and Bettman remind me of Rush Limbaugh, that Republican Party mouthpiece, who, like Cherry, has access to a national microphone and who is similarly prone to wielding hyperbole, cynicism, and fanaticism like an AK-47 stuck on auto.
Recently, on his nationally syndicated radio show, Limbaugh said that returning soldiers and war veterans who espouse contempt for the conflict being waged in Iraq are “phony soldiers.”
The comment sparked an outcry against the overstuffed redneck conservative flak. An outcry from those soldiers who had lost legs, arms and their sanity in the conflict. They carried the guns and feel they earned the right to speak yea or nay about the topic of Iraq. They are seriously pissed at Rush Limbaugh.
Forgive poor Rush. He’s only using a time-honored tactic of the morally ambivalent. When challenged on ethics, shoot the messenger. Limbaugh and his neo-con ilk utilize the legacy of the “big lie” as their set piece.
Primary principle of the big lie? “Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
That quote, of course, taken from an excerpt of a US army psychoanalytic report on Adolph Hitler commissioned during World War II. Hitler was a big fan of the big lie.
I prefer New York comedian Richard Belzer’s take on the “big lie”: “If you tell a lie that's big enough, and you tell it often enough, people will believe you are telling the truth, even when what you are saying is total crap.”
The big lie in hockey states that, “fighting is part of the game.”
In the Fifth Estate last Friday evening the big lie was punched, pooped and propped ad infinitum, ad nauseum by that legion of fighting proponents. And when challenged they sounded like Limbaugh. They offered disdain, they grabbed statistics from thin air, and they lashed out at the flower children, and the “phony fans.”
Phony fan? According to Cherry it’s a hockey aficionado with leftist tendencies that deigns to challenge the entrenched cognoscente with their lily-white abolitionist rhetoric. We are pansies, we followers of hockey who prefer the even-tempered dance of an International Olympic event with its attendant concentration on free-flow and exuberant dedication to skill, skating and style.
Fifth Estate host Bob McKeown interviewed a few non-pugilist activists including Fan 590 radio host Bob McCown who remains steadfast in his quest to staunch the bloody legacy of NHL fighting, and has for years been a no-nonsense dissembler and activist.
“I said somebody is going to get killed in a hockey fight and when it happens we’ll see the hockey world turned upside down,” said Bob McCown in the documentary.
McCown explained that when he first professed that very sentiment many years ago on his national radio show, Don Cherry didn’t talk to him for four years. McCown had done the unthinkable. He challenged the Big Lie long before it was fashionable. And he earned the ire of the mainstream pundits, including Cherry. Cherry branded McCown as a “phony soldier” engaged in a struggle to ban fighting from the game. McCown was deemed a threat. An insider and sports guy who should know better. He became the enemy at the gates. The first tenet of the big lie kicked in. “Never concede that there may be some good in your enemy.”
An interesting exchange between McKeown and Cherry serves to illuminate just how fervent this struggle has become. McKeown told Cherry that a poll found that 60 percent of fans wanted a ban on fighting in hockey.
“No, no, no, no,” said Cherry. He then went on to cite his “real” poll, which suggested that 70 percent or the “real fans” of the game and the bulk of hockey insiders supported fighting. Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” and Cherry’s “phony fans.” Part and parcel of the propaganda. Dismiss with disdain the “fakers.”
A more disturbing excerpt was the little ditty came from Commissioner Bettman who said, “Fighting is part of the game …it is the nature of the game …it is the nature of constant non-stop action.” Again, flirtation with the big lie, which has been refuted in basketball, in soccer, in football, and in countless other world sports events where fighting is rewarded with an automatic ejection.
And from Burke that sourpuss, newly-minted savior of the Leaf Nation comes this gem: “To me it regulates the violence that takes place on the ice sheet.”
Which sums it all up quite nicely. Fighting for peace.
A beautiful little snippet of inevitable logic sliding from the big lie that begs the question.
Is Burkey being oxymoronic or just moronic?
Or both?
Don Cherry
“To me it regulates the violence that takes place on the ice sheet.” Brian Burke, Maple Leaf GM
Fighting is part of the game …it is the nature of the game …it is the nature of constant non-stop action.”
Gary Bettman
The Code Airs to Clear The Fog of Icy Wars
CBC’s Fifth Estate Drops the Gloves on Fighting and the Big Lie
By Terrance Gavan
The CBC’s Fifth Estate documentary The Code hosted by Bob McKeon aired last Friday and it will take some hits on the chin for its forthright examination of hockey’s bullyboy mentality.
The Code featured interviews with a few NHL enforcers, and the de rigueur talking head shots of some pro-brouhaha gurus including CBC commentator, Don Cherry, Leafs GM Brian Burke and NHL Commissioner and pugilistic apologist Gary Bettman. The father, the son and the holy ghost. Who’s who? It’s a Vegas pick ‘em.
What irks me most about this triune coven of contrarians - Cherry and Burke and Bettman - is that inordinate air of haughtiness. Speaking like Moses from the burning bush.
They dismiss anyone harboring anti-fighting ideals with an opulent puissance and a self-aggrandizing conceit. They remain insufferably arrogant and self-important on the subject of fighting.
Cherry regards people in the anti-fighting camp as simpletons or no-nothing leftists. Tree huggers, pansies, patsies and traitors. Cherry, in his fist-popping, ham-handed glee, accuses the anti-fighting set with conspiracy; conspiracy to bring down “hockey … the only thing we (Canadians) do well.” Yes Cherry said that in the course of an exchange with McKeown.
Apparently Donny-boy was somewhere getting his melon frazzled in the A-League when Lester Pearson won the Nobel Prize or when TC Douglas put up his dukes, chugged into a political void, and brought a world-renowned health care system to Canada.
According to Cherry, Bettman and Burke there is no room in the fan base for those wimps who feel hockey could survive without the punch, bump and grind.
Cherry, Burke and Bettman remind me of Rush Limbaugh, that Republican Party mouthpiece, who, like Cherry, has access to a national microphone and who is similarly prone to wielding hyperbole, cynicism, and fanaticism like an AK-47 stuck on auto.
Recently, on his nationally syndicated radio show, Limbaugh said that returning soldiers and war veterans who espouse contempt for the conflict being waged in Iraq are “phony soldiers.”
The comment sparked an outcry against the overstuffed redneck conservative flak. An outcry from those soldiers who had lost legs, arms and their sanity in the conflict. They carried the guns and feel they earned the right to speak yea or nay about the topic of Iraq. They are seriously pissed at Rush Limbaugh.
Forgive poor Rush. He’s only using a time-honored tactic of the morally ambivalent. When challenged on ethics, shoot the messenger. Limbaugh and his neo-con ilk utilize the legacy of the “big lie” as their set piece.
Primary principle of the big lie? “Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
That quote, of course, taken from an excerpt of a US army psychoanalytic report on Adolph Hitler commissioned during World War II. Hitler was a big fan of the big lie.
I prefer New York comedian Richard Belzer’s take on the “big lie”: “If you tell a lie that's big enough, and you tell it often enough, people will believe you are telling the truth, even when what you are saying is total crap.”
The big lie in hockey states that, “fighting is part of the game.”
In the Fifth Estate last Friday evening the big lie was punched, pooped and propped ad infinitum, ad nauseum by that legion of fighting proponents. And when challenged they sounded like Limbaugh. They offered disdain, they grabbed statistics from thin air, and they lashed out at the flower children, and the “phony fans.”
Phony fan? According to Cherry it’s a hockey aficionado with leftist tendencies that deigns to challenge the entrenched cognoscente with their lily-white abolitionist rhetoric. We are pansies, we followers of hockey who prefer the even-tempered dance of an International Olympic event with its attendant concentration on free-flow and exuberant dedication to skill, skating and style.
Fifth Estate host Bob McKeown interviewed a few non-pugilist activists including Fan 590 radio host Bob McCown who remains steadfast in his quest to staunch the bloody legacy of NHL fighting, and has for years been a no-nonsense dissembler and activist.
“I said somebody is going to get killed in a hockey fight and when it happens we’ll see the hockey world turned upside down,” said Bob McCown in the documentary.
McCown explained that when he first professed that very sentiment many years ago on his national radio show, Don Cherry didn’t talk to him for four years. McCown had done the unthinkable. He challenged the Big Lie long before it was fashionable. And he earned the ire of the mainstream pundits, including Cherry. Cherry branded McCown as a “phony soldier” engaged in a struggle to ban fighting from the game. McCown was deemed a threat. An insider and sports guy who should know better. He became the enemy at the gates. The first tenet of the big lie kicked in. “Never concede that there may be some good in your enemy.”
An interesting exchange between McKeown and Cherry serves to illuminate just how fervent this struggle has become. McKeown told Cherry that a poll found that 60 percent of fans wanted a ban on fighting in hockey.
“No, no, no, no,” said Cherry. He then went on to cite his “real” poll, which suggested that 70 percent or the “real fans” of the game and the bulk of hockey insiders supported fighting. Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” and Cherry’s “phony fans.” Part and parcel of the propaganda. Dismiss with disdain the “fakers.”
A more disturbing excerpt was the little ditty came from Commissioner Bettman who said, “Fighting is part of the game …it is the nature of the game …it is the nature of constant non-stop action.” Again, flirtation with the big lie, which has been refuted in basketball, in soccer, in football, and in countless other world sports events where fighting is rewarded with an automatic ejection.
And from Burke that sourpuss, newly-minted savior of the Leaf Nation comes this gem: “To me it regulates the violence that takes place on the ice sheet.”
Which sums it all up quite nicely. Fighting for peace.
A beautiful little snippet of inevitable logic sliding from the big lie that begs the question.
Is Burkey being oxymoronic or just moronic?
Or both?
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Tennis Needed a Boycott
Tennis Tournament Bars Israeli Player – No Fair Play in Sight
Roddick Walks Saying Politics and Sports Don’t Mix
By Terrance Gavan
As reported on the wire and throughout the world press last week, religion, unbridled jingoism and shortsighted neo-fascist national policies are running rampant on the battlefield of sports.
Last week, Israel’s leading female tennis player, Shahar Peer, was refused a visa for entry into the United Arab Emirates, and politics threatened the future of one of the world's richest tennis tournaments.
The UAE does not have diplomatic relations with Israel and tournament organizers believe the decision to refuse entry to Peer was a reaction to the recent conflict in Gaza.
This is wrong. Unacceptable.
Sports, that humble but often illuminating backdrop, has performed admirably as effervescent and consuming catalyst against ethnocentric intolerance, racism, balkanism and fanaticism.
The world held South Africa and apartheid accountable through a boycott on trade and sports. The pressure, the embargo and the shame staunched a tide of jackboot colonialism that imprisoned Nelson Mandela for most of his adult life, and many aver that apartheid fell as a direct result of that worldwide pressure. Sports played its solid, bubbling, and textured role in the stemming of apartheid.
Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson danced a dilly of a duet in 1947 and down went the color barrier in major league baseball. Robinson, the catalyst, and Rickey, the mentor, eschewed together the petty thoughts and dalliances of an entrenched hierarchy, preferring to ignore the spills, the jeers, the death threats, the taunts and the epithets. Forging an alliance for the greater good. Clearing the path.
Sports is like that. It moves vaguely in the shadows, blunting the sharp sword of intemperance, applying comradeship judiciously and placing a modicum of sense midst the madness.
Big Bear Don Haskins sounded a death knell for a Jim Crow platform of all-white college basketball when he started five black players for Texas Western College against an all-white University of Kentucky team, winning the 1966 national NCAA championship.
He beat court legend and Jim Crow practitioner Adolph Rupp, a coaching guru. Kentucky, despite being beaten in that game, spent another decade bucking the trend, eschewing the recruitment of black players and appeasing their big-buck-wielding and not vaguely racist southern alumni by continuing to boycott black players.
Too late. Haskins and his freewheeling five proved the point. Basketball conformed and the Big Bear’s dance down Glory Road sparked the turn.
In sports a great leveler. A thin edge of a wedge. A foot in the door. A jackhammer at the gates, dispensing with niceties of the norm, and refusing to commit to the status quo.
Because sports is just that. The bulwark against the norm.
World conflicts are borne from fear. Fear of religion, of humble practice, of the color of skin; fear of difference. Fear promulgated by the hierarchy of intemperate souls who rule blithe in haughty impertinence.
On the platform, on the dais, on the rink, the field, and the pitch and in the raw heat of competition there is fear, but seldom does that fear translate to hatred.
Players know that sports remains as the great leveler.
Players play and they play by the set of rules they are given. They play peer to peer.
Players seldom ask another player what god they worship. They care not about the color of another player’s skin.
They simplify the equation. Can I win?
Is he faster? Are we better? Does she rise higher than I?
And so tennis was presented with a problem. The UAE tournament in Dubai banned Shahar Peer. We remain stunned by the lack of player action.
Every player should have walked.
Every woman player on that circuit should have told Dubai and their 10-star hotel accommodation and their multi-zillion dollar purse to stick their tourney where the sun never shines.
They should have stood solidly in support of Peer. That’s, after all, what peers do.
It’s what Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, Don Haskins, and a legion of other committed athletes have done.
Instead women’s tennis did nothing.
Even the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena agreed to uphold their contracts to play the tournament in Dubai.
Shame. Two players who should know better. Two players who should have learned from Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe, American players who worked very hard to pave the way for black players on courts everywhere.
Venus and Serena should have stepped to the plate.
Their countryman Andy Roddick did.
He withdrew from the men’s side of the Dubai tournament.
Roddick is the defending champ and he said that he was pulling out because of his concerns over the treatment of Sharar Peer and her denial of a spot in the draw. “I don’t know if it’s the best thing to mix politics and sports,” said Roddick.
And then he packed up his rackets and went home.
Good on you mate.
We need the voices in the wilderness.
To keep the wolves from the door.
Roddick Walks Saying Politics and Sports Don’t Mix
By Terrance Gavan
As reported on the wire and throughout the world press last week, religion, unbridled jingoism and shortsighted neo-fascist national policies are running rampant on the battlefield of sports.
Last week, Israel’s leading female tennis player, Shahar Peer, was refused a visa for entry into the United Arab Emirates, and politics threatened the future of one of the world's richest tennis tournaments.
The UAE does not have diplomatic relations with Israel and tournament organizers believe the decision to refuse entry to Peer was a reaction to the recent conflict in Gaza.
This is wrong. Unacceptable.
Sports, that humble but often illuminating backdrop, has performed admirably as effervescent and consuming catalyst against ethnocentric intolerance, racism, balkanism and fanaticism.
The world held South Africa and apartheid accountable through a boycott on trade and sports. The pressure, the embargo and the shame staunched a tide of jackboot colonialism that imprisoned Nelson Mandela for most of his adult life, and many aver that apartheid fell as a direct result of that worldwide pressure. Sports played its solid, bubbling, and textured role in the stemming of apartheid.
Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson danced a dilly of a duet in 1947 and down went the color barrier in major league baseball. Robinson, the catalyst, and Rickey, the mentor, eschewed together the petty thoughts and dalliances of an entrenched hierarchy, preferring to ignore the spills, the jeers, the death threats, the taunts and the epithets. Forging an alliance for the greater good. Clearing the path.
Sports is like that. It moves vaguely in the shadows, blunting the sharp sword of intemperance, applying comradeship judiciously and placing a modicum of sense midst the madness.
Big Bear Don Haskins sounded a death knell for a Jim Crow platform of all-white college basketball when he started five black players for Texas Western College against an all-white University of Kentucky team, winning the 1966 national NCAA championship.
He beat court legend and Jim Crow practitioner Adolph Rupp, a coaching guru. Kentucky, despite being beaten in that game, spent another decade bucking the trend, eschewing the recruitment of black players and appeasing their big-buck-wielding and not vaguely racist southern alumni by continuing to boycott black players.
Too late. Haskins and his freewheeling five proved the point. Basketball conformed and the Big Bear’s dance down Glory Road sparked the turn.
In sports a great leveler. A thin edge of a wedge. A foot in the door. A jackhammer at the gates, dispensing with niceties of the norm, and refusing to commit to the status quo.
Because sports is just that. The bulwark against the norm.
World conflicts are borne from fear. Fear of religion, of humble practice, of the color of skin; fear of difference. Fear promulgated by the hierarchy of intemperate souls who rule blithe in haughty impertinence.
On the platform, on the dais, on the rink, the field, and the pitch and in the raw heat of competition there is fear, but seldom does that fear translate to hatred.
Players know that sports remains as the great leveler.
Players play and they play by the set of rules they are given. They play peer to peer.
Players seldom ask another player what god they worship. They care not about the color of another player’s skin.
They simplify the equation. Can I win?
Is he faster? Are we better? Does she rise higher than I?
And so tennis was presented with a problem. The UAE tournament in Dubai banned Shahar Peer. We remain stunned by the lack of player action.
Every player should have walked.
Every woman player on that circuit should have told Dubai and their 10-star hotel accommodation and their multi-zillion dollar purse to stick their tourney where the sun never shines.
They should have stood solidly in support of Peer. That’s, after all, what peers do.
It’s what Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, Don Haskins, and a legion of other committed athletes have done.
Instead women’s tennis did nothing.
Even the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena agreed to uphold their contracts to play the tournament in Dubai.
Shame. Two players who should know better. Two players who should have learned from Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe, American players who worked very hard to pave the way for black players on courts everywhere.
Venus and Serena should have stepped to the plate.
Their countryman Andy Roddick did.
He withdrew from the men’s side of the Dubai tournament.
Roddick is the defending champ and he said that he was pulling out because of his concerns over the treatment of Sharar Peer and her denial of a spot in the draw. “I don’t know if it’s the best thing to mix politics and sports,” said Roddick.
And then he packed up his rackets and went home.
Good on you mate.
We need the voices in the wilderness.
To keep the wolves from the door.
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