The NHL Playoff Mascot Battle Part One: Canucks v. Predators

Though this idea would've provided more (hopefully) yuks-yuks in round one, I woke up this morning thinking about my predictions for the second round of the NHL playoffs. Watching hockey domestically with a "life partner and best friend" who 1. doesn't care about hockey, but 2. will sit beside me as I watch, affords a fine time to answer obvious questions and reflect about why it is that sports are 1. Fun to watch, 2. Hard to explain literally.

Inspired by the fairly cool Spike TV show Deadliest Warrior, where violent scientists simulate who would win in a war between say, Ninjas & Vikings or KGB agents & the 1978 Pittsburgh Steelers, starting today (and finishing before each Game One starts), I will examine who would "literally win" the round two NHL playoff battles were they meetings between the actual team mascots.

Series One: The Vancouver Canucks vs. The Nashville Predators

What's a Canuck?
Well, nothing much to report here: A Canuck is slang for a Canadian. Given the size of our home and native land, and the constant redefining of what a Canadian is during the current federal election, I suppose we need to be a bit more specific. A quick Googling narrows down the term Canuck to a 19th century Americanism for, specifically, a French Canadian. Though there are as many "types" of French Canadian as there are Canadians, the election run-up tells me that a French Canadian, as of May 2011, is either NDP or Bloc Quebecois. As I am more familiar with the NDP, let's say that in this battle, the Canuck is Montreal born Jack Layton. (see endnote 1)

Bring it on, Pussy!

What's a Predator?
Another broad one. Animals, plants and conservatives can all be predatory. Schwarzenegger took on a Predator with dreadlocks, and even he couldn't kill it (somehow, Danny Glover was able to though). The Nashville logo gives us an easy clue as to which type of predator we are dealing with: why it's a sabre-tooth cat named Gnash!

A Top Ten Logo in Sports Blog coming?

The sabre-tooth cat has been extinct for a good 9000 years, but in its day, it could take down a mammoth. Were the Green party around 9000 years ago, they would've attempted to protect this predator, and it would have eaten them.

Don't vote strategically, and do shoot high on Luongo!

So what would happen if a sabre-tooth cat fought Jack Layton?
I suppose it depends if Jack Layton carried a weapon. His platform is certainly anti-gun, so all Jack has for this one are bare hands, tenacity, and 30% national support. Unfortunately, a sabre-tooth cat has little interest in political platforms, and can't understand Layton's attempts to compromise rather than fight dirty. Though Conservative and Liberals both have torn through Layton's plan to increase taxes, the sabre-tooth cat tears through his thigh flesh. Thanks to his focus on health care, Layton manages to escape with his life (and his seat), but realizes that the he could've beaten the cat as part of a larger team. Alas, it's too late, and the sabre-tooth cat is onto the next round battle (or, the Western Conference final).

Result: Predators win. (Sorry, Canucks. That's sort of what Predators do.)

Get over here, Harper. I just want to ask you a question.

Tomorrow: A Red Wing meets a Shark, and oh baby!, Lightning will fight the Capital. The results will astound you.

Note 1: the results end up the same if the Canuck is Gilles Duceppe, except that scenario ends with Duceppe having his leg separated from his body.

Another Top 5: Sport Beards!

I don't have a hairy back, and I can't grow a beard. You win some you lose some, I guess. I often think about beards. Don't read anything into this, although, please, keep reading.

Though I don't have any stats to back this up, my guess is that more men have beards in April than in any other month. There might be a case for more beards-a-sproutin' in whatever month it is that people enter week 2 of mountain climbing expeditions, but we are entering NHL playoff beard season, and University exam beards are in mid-swing, so in North America, I hypothesize that beard season is upon us. Now (let's make the connection) having just watched professional sports for 10 hours straight and counting, I feel the need to take a hairy little look at the top 5 Regular Beard Wearing Athletes of all time (playoff beards not eligible). I'm not the first to do this, I'm really not, but who has time to obsess about being original anymore? And besides, no other list drops a Jeff Reardon reference (OH! TEASER ALERT!)

1. Brian Wilson (2006 - Present)

Wilson's the obvious number one, for having both a thick and lustrous beard and for practically branding the thing. This includes the phenomenally extraneous site where you can play with his beard and click on it for fun little follicular surprises (try it). This guy's ebony beard is so famous, his twitter is a silhouette of a featureless bearded face. In 20 years, when my brain cells can't quite access the name of the pitcher who closed the 2010 World Series, I will remember a beard and a Giants' cap.

2. Randy Moss (1998 - Maybe the Present)

Besides being one of my favourite athletes of all time (when he was a Patriot), Randy Moss's eyelashes nearly touch his beard. Randy sports the rare case of a beard at high tide that threatens to take over the entire face. I remember a high school math teacher who possessed a similar lupine appearance, but instead of catching passes from Tom Brady, he seeped brown armpit stains. If Randy Moss wore slightly large sunglasses, you might see no unbearded cheek skin of the Mossy one. Sort of like how Teen Wolf looked in the segment of the movie where he starts to turn into an asshole....

Hey, Boof. Can you believe I'm 5'3 and on the basketball team?

3. Clark Gillies (1974 - 1988)

Though the most dramatic beard in hockey history has to go to Mike Commodore, that was a playoff beard and is disqualified from top 5 contention. A bit of a nostalgic choice, Clark Gillies' regular beard is really the only thing I remember about his face. It seemed a lot of 1970s New York Islanders looked like members of the Spartan Army. I'll go out on a limb and declare that the best team facial hair in NHL history would probably have to go to the 1979 New York Islanders, though because I don't want to research it, I will accept nominations. The internet is abuzz with rumours that Gillies was the first playoff beard, and though he would end up going moustache only through the 1980s, his best seasons were in full beard-face.

4. Jeff Reardon (1979 - 1994)

Growing up, I can only remember one player on my baseball cards who sported a full beard to any conspicuous degree. It was Jeff Reardon, who looked like my best friend's dad and who has had a rough post-baseball career which has included the death of a son, a charge for armed robbery, and a legal declaration of drug-induced insanity. There's nothing funny about that, but man, as both an Expo and a beard wearer, The Terminator was pretty great. I hope Jeff Reardon someday Googles himself, finds this blog, doesn't sue me for posting the picture, and sees that I thought he was pretty awesome.

5. "Macho Man" Randy Savage (1973 - 2005)

Ohhh yeah, dig it. The Macho Man's beard is so pure, that one wonders just how much of the savage was derived from the beard itself. I remember being a kid and wondering how a man with such a hairy face could have such a smooth body. WWE chest hair removal methods remain its great cultural contribution (not that I'd know). Because I had a massive crush on Miss Elizabeth (who didn't? She screwed up a generation of boys' image of what a beautiful woman was), I thought that my hairless body was half way to my dream of injuring Ricky Steamboat and kissing Miss Elizabeth on the mouth. I dreamed of the day (I was guessing maybe 16) where a beard would christen me "macho" - alas, it didn't happen, though I did pick up a small mound of chest hair in my early twenties.

Honorable Mentions (but disqualified for being too obvious or lacking in material for me to write a paragraph about): Dan Fouts (too Will Ferrel), Alexi Lalas (talking about U.S. Soccer is pretentious), Brett Keisel (too everyone else has already talked about his beard), Kimbo Slice (MMA people will find my blog and write "Homo" in my comments), Sebastien Chabal (too nobody reading this will know him), Hacksaw Jim Duggan (too...Two Wrestlers?).

Anyone make to the end of this? Anyone have any favourite bearded athlete they care to discuss? Come on anonymous bots and people putting porn links in my comments - I know you're going to tell me how informative my blog is for your essay, but go out on a bearded limb. Let me guess: you like 70s Bjorn Borg.

I am not David Beckham.

Rebecca Black & American Idol “does” Nirvana

Some people love ketchup. I am not one of those people. However, I will admit that ketchup is food. Last night, I finally caught up with the two phenomena I’d been behind on: Rebecca Black’s Friday (6 days late to the meme party) and season ten of American Idol, who “broke ground” last night when top 12 contestant Casey Abrams became the first to perform a Nirvana song. Both Black and Abrams present themselves like music, but both were not music.

Not Music

Rebecca Black’s video Friday is awful. This seems to be the consensus, and add me to the pile of high-minded self-righteous lefty writers who seem obsessed with blogging about this girl. If you haven’t watched the video, please, do it now. Please.

Most likely you have watched (the official video has 11 million youtube hits) the 3 minutes and 48 seconds of a vacant video faces, partying without alcohol, and observances and metaphysical quandaries such as “Kickin’ in the front seat/Sittin’ in the back seat/Gotta make my mind up/Which seat can I take?” Rebecca certainly has a lot on her plate—or bowl, as her first decision in the video is to eat cereal—and now she’s more famous for being a joke. As a joke, she’s much more Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? than she is Justin Bieber.

There are so many obvious jokes in this song, and the easiest target is Black’s recounting of the days of the week: “Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday/Today is Friday, Friday/Tomorrow is Saturday And Sunday comes afterwards” that unless this song and its video were written, produced, directed and distributed entirely by 13 year old savants, there is no way Friday is not an adult deconstruction of that THING that makes Justin Bieber a music celebrity. It’s sort of what bands like Bush did to Nirvana. Or Weird Al Yankovic did to Nirvana. Or soldiers in basic training do to guns. Break it down, show the component parts, and then build it back up to show you know exactly how it works.

Though it has already received multiple parodies on YouTube, my gut tells me that it is itself the parody. A respectable friend of mine thinks it’s no worse than anything Justin Bieber is doing, but in its coyness, it is worse. Being put in the position of defending Justin Bieber is not a case I take lightly, but even O.J. Simpson has lawyers. Black’s Friday is much worse for not tipping its hand (yet) and telling us how to watch. Pop music, even “bad” pop music has never needed a legend to tell us how to read it. That said, I understand that men in their 30s are not Rebecca Black’s target audience, but I still need to know what’s ketchup and what isn’t, so that I can avoid it. So I grapple. And maybe, you are still reading.

Rebecca Black is not “so bad it’s good” because it is so bad, it’s scary. In six days, it has entered the category of Macarena bad. It’s Wrath of Khan earwig bad, burrowing into the brain, feasting, feasting…Rebecca Black’s Friday will likely kill us all if it is real. But it can’t be real. It just can’t be. Please, let this be an exercise in the vein of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds or Joaquin Phoenix’s fake breakdown. Let the joke be on us, and let us get the joke…soon.

Music

And then there’s Casey Abrams. Ryan Seacrest’s twitter account had pre-announced that a contestant would be “taking on Nirvana” on Tuesday night’s live American Idol. The show saw the top 12 singing a song from their birth year, and Abrams was born in 1991, so you guessed it: Smells Like Teen Spirit. While it's still an active link....

Now, I recognize the place Nirvana had in the world of my fellow white people born between 1971 and 1980, but they’ve always been ketchup for me. If you asked me what the defining moment of 1994 was for me, it wasn’t Cobain’s death, it was that I had finally made out with a girl and that Quiz Show was released.

Part of my somewhat cool Nirvana reception has always been the borderline fanaticism of Cobain fans, that if he was as cool as his fans believe (which he probably was), he would hate the reaction. Cobain fans are like Bieber fans. Cobain fans are like Dave Matthews Band fans. It’s not really the music that’s the problem, it’s the way in which the musician is worshipped that becomes the problem. By all of my other musical standards and tastes, I should love Nirvana. They fit right into my musical map. But I’m getting off topic here. The point is not to slag Nirvana. They are not a-musical.

American Idol is not a-musical either. The people can sing. Abrams, who in watching his promo seemed like the funny guy, can sing. He also played a bass on stage, has a beard, and is the only top 12 contestant not whitening his teeth to the molars. He is 1993 quirky. But Nirvana fans are having none of it. More common tweets when Abrams was singing Smells Like Teen Spirit were “Kurt Cobain would come back to life and shoot himself in the head again” and “He’s ruining my youth!” But for whatever reason, perhaps it’d be considered my shortcoming, I don’t agree with those who think American Idol cannot touch Nirvana. If Weird Al and Tori Amos can do it, we aren’t treading on sacred ground here.

American Idol contestants should continue to do songs they shouldn’t. It’s interesting. It’s maddening. It’s what good television drama is. My problem with the Abrams’ “doing” Nirvana was that it wasn’t particularly good. This is not because it was on Idol, and this is not a critique of a 20 year old song which is at least as good as any other rock song that year and definitely better than Rebecca Black’s Friday. Abrams certainly took on a big song, but unlike my unproven Rebecca Black Theory, there was no breaking it down and building it up. He sang the song, but he didn’t quite show that he knew “how it worked,” and that’s not to suggest that I do know, but hey, I’m not on American Idol. This year at least.

But Idol doing Nirvana is, in effect, a joke I know how to take. It is ketchup, but it is food.

Rebecca Black as truth scares me. It is calling itself ketchup, but I worry about what its consumption will do to my insides.

Andy Griffith and Blogger Stats

So, yesterday I discovered Blog Stats. I know, it's simple and stupid and I should've been more in touch with the now generation of Vox Populism and becomingtrubie who consider stats and analytics the same way I used to consider Dill Pickle Chips, Jolt Cola, and Saved by the Bell: things you must consume everyday.

Turns out, my post "Top 5 Musicians with Muscles" gets a lot of hits (mostly it appears, through people who google Iggy Pop Muscles). That was a fun one.

My most contentious post has been "The Worst Sport in the World: Volleyball." When it first came out, I had a few emails from people who called me Fat for not liking Volleyball. It was funny, but who takes the time to send an email to an ectomorph with mesomoprh tendencies to call them fat? The comments from Anonymous Volleyball playing people were quite right: I am ridiculous, and the reason I don't like it, is because I suck at it. I mentioned that in the post, but people still seemed angry. I suppose that's another reason why volleyball could suck: volleyball players not reading. I realize, almost two years after that post (which had 15 views today), that I was basically trying to write about Volleyball the way Andy Griffith discussed football.

It's cool to see that more Russians than Brazillians have stumbled onto this blog. That 14% of people who have been to Spartan use Macs. And that I am interested in this makes me feel very out of touch as I know this discovery is akin to currently "digging" a DJ Shadow album that came out in 1999. In a sense, I am more Andy Griffith than I ever thought I would be.

And so, while I look at the masturbatory Blogger Stats and stare at the bright colours and flashy things, here's some Andy Griffith discussing football. Spartan will be making its way back to Andy Griffith terrain over the next little while since that seems to be what makes strangers come to this thing. Though perhaps, I was always here:

Snow Day 2011: a Snow Day Retrospective

Every ten years, I get a snow day. Perhaps I only remember two.

The first was in North Bay in 1991. North Bay will always seem much colder than any other place I've ever lived, and my memory of the snow was that one morning it piled up 6 feet high at our doorstep. Perhaps that's relative since I had probably just cracked 5 feet in height. The highlight of that day was filling garbage bags with snow and using them as sleds down the driveway. It was all very folk art of us. We couldn't have imagined that something like the internet would be around some day, and I am positive that garbage bags were made a lot stronger 20 years ago when it didn't matter as much what went into landfills. By 2 in the afternoon, we were probably in the basement watching Jenny Jones and that was as perfect a day as a slow-to-develop-preteen-would-need until a few months later when someone introduced me to chewing tobacco and slow dancing.

In 2006, I heard this song over 200 times and went ten months without seeing snow.

My second snow day was in Vancouver, probably 2001. Vancouverites are like Americans when it snows: the city shuts down emotionally, people become "shocked" by the mere existence of cold precipitation that doesn't land on Whistler, and everyone starts driving like a raccoon in a live-action kids movie would, especially if there wasn't another raccoon working the pedals. As I was part of the workforce in '01, slinging vitamins for a company owned by the cult of Jehovah's Witness, this snow day was less about exploration, and likely turned into an excuse to drink on a Wednesday afternoon. Jenny Jones was still on TV, so I probably watched it. The best part of this snow day was that by noon, the snow had melted and I actually saw grass. The Vancouver snow day was like a Sphinx riddle: what acts like an osteoporotic ex-tennis pro in the morning and actually plays tennis by mid-afternoon? Or something.

In 2010 Captain Beefheart died, and it snowed all day.

That's it. Until 2021,
SnowDayve.

4 Alternative Theories: The 90s

I've been listening to a lot of 90s music lately. It's the only music I can claim first person or non-pretentious nostalgia for (like I do when I claim that music was soooo good in the 1940s and those were the good old days; or that Janis Joplin is listenable; or that I was into Motley Crue in 1981, but I was 2 years old, and they were already one year into 5 combined venereal diseases.).

I was planning a number of long pieces on the 1990s, and still might have a go at them, but in the past few weeks, here are some things I've been thinking that can't fit in a tweet or status update (except maybe #4).

1. The only band of the "alternative era" that was both truly alternative and truly popular was The Presidents of the United States of America. Primus was too alternative to be popular. Smashing Pumpkins were popular but not an alternative to anything by time Siamese Dream was out. You can make an argument for Tool, but Tool is perhaps outside of the genre of alternative and are probably art metal. The big four (Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Nirvana and Pearl Jam) were all just rock and roll bands of varying degrees of awesome.




2. Of all the lead singers who died young, Mother Love Bone's Andrew Wood is perhaps the most significant. Mother Love Bone would have made Porno for Pyros unnecessary if Andrew Wood could've have avoided a heroin overdose before grunge "broke." Not to mention, Pearl Jam probably doesn't happen if Wood doesn't die. This was a really cool band, and when nostalgic 90s movies start getting made, MLB will be playing in the background of party scenes.



3. The best movie about the 1990s is somehow 1993's Dazed and Confused which is a movie set in the 1970s. This seems like something I didn't think of on my own, yet I know I've thought it for a while, probably because everyone was dressing like the kids in D&C in 1993 (unless you were dressing like 2Pac). Possibly someone else has expressed this idea (Klostermann maybe, he says shit that we're all thinking all of the time). Singles, Reality Bites and Threesome do not transcend the era like Pearl Jam's Ten, Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger or even Mudhoney's Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. In a 100 years, Back to the Future Part II will be a more accurate depiction of 2015 then any of these movies are of 1993. Which is not saying a lot.

4 more years until this is a reality!

4. Axl Rose probably killed Kurt Cobain. He had motive.

Tour with us, Kurt! We play stadiums and have 3 junkies in the band for you to play with!

Kickstart my Blog

Setting: Skype. Time: Today.

Q: "Why have a blog if you aren't going to post anything?"
A: "I know."
Q: "So post something?"
A: "Why, will you read it?"
Q: "Maybe."
A: "I've just listened to 9 straight hours of 1970s progressive rock. I don't feel like writing anything for instant public consumption. Check out Jake Mooney's blog. He's interesting. And diligent."
Q: "Cool. Anything good?"
A: "You mean, music or the blog?"
Q: "Music."
A: "Yes, everything good."
Q: "Like what?"



A: "Did you listen to it?"
Q: "Yes."
A: "Liar."
Q: "I listened to it. It's cool near the end. "
A: "I believe you because it is very cool near the end. Most of the time people don't click links."
Q: "Yep."
A: "So I'm going to post this, okay?"
Q: "Post what?"
A: "This conversation."
Q: "Boring."
A: "Yeah, but I woke up with only about 150 words in me, and you just took them all up with your questions."