Monday, January 30, 2012

What does it say about Vanek that he is not an All-Star?

I know All-Star selections are meaningless when it comes to conference standings but don't the people who choose the team have some insight into who the elite players are in the NHL? After the fans pick the first six spots, the NHL Hockey Operations Department picks the rest of the all-star roster. That's people like Rob Blake and Brendan Shanahan making the decisions, and they consult the rest of the league's General Managers who are paid very well to be very good at assessing the talent levels of NHL players.

Vanek is certainly paid to be an All-Star. The All-Star game has a roster of 42 NHL players (more if you include the injured players that had to be replaced by alternates) and Thomas Vanek has the 13th highest cap hit in the league. Vanek can brush off the suggestion that he should be disappointed not to have the opportunity to play in the all-star game, but he should not poo-poo the notion that he should be there based on salary.


Vanek has an offense-focused game that you would expect to get recognition from the people assembling the All-Star roster. He has great puck skills and has demonstrated that he can dazzle with his dekes. It could be that a lack of defensive responsibility kept him off the All-Star roster in the eyes of the Operations Department, but that would not be the most market-friendly reasoning when it comes to attracting the elusive casual fan.

The best spin on Vanek's absence from Ottawa is that he was slightly injured and he asked not to be obligated to make an appearance because he wants to focus on rejuvenating himself for a stretch run like Selanne and Lidstrom. You could argue he is more focused on winning on a Stanley Cup than on public relations events, but that line of reasoning does not make as much sense when Vanek's team is circling the toilet this season.

By not picking Vanek for the All-Star game, the NHL Hockey Operations Department are overlooking someone who was tied for 31st in points and 20th in goals. The most likely explanation is that the Sabres have been ugly this year so it wasn't reasonable to pick more than one Buffalo player and Pominville's 47 points pushed him ahead of Vanek's 41 points even though Pominville's game is more workmanlike and less aesthetically pleasing. (No one ever bought a ticket because they wanted to see Pominville carry the puck end-to-end.)

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Gagaku in Wisconsin


Bon Joviver reminds me of traditional Japanese court music (a.k.a. Gagaku). Basically, what happened with Gagaku was that as Buddhism was imported to Japan (from India via China) it brought with it a musical tradition. Japanese courtiers tried to learn how to play this new music but they were terrible at it so they only learned to play the songs very slowly and that became the music of Japanese emperors for centuries.

Bon Joviver did something similar with Bon Jovi's music. They demonstrated that if you slow a song way down, take out the drums, and sing in falsettos, you can turn pretty much any song into a Bon Iver song.

Monday, January 23, 2012

One does not simply eat a pomegranate

I'm not an idiot. I could tell you couldn't just bite the thing open, so I took a knife to the beast. On the outside was a heart-shaped POM sticker. On the inside things were much less cozy; splayed open, the beast's cross-section looked like a wall from a Halo 3 level set in Flood HQ.


A red liquid spilled onto the cutting board -- later I would learn that the stain from this claret was nearly impossible to remove from wood without sandpaper. I had hoped that once the beast was divided it would be conquered, but it was obvious that this was no mere collection of simple drupes. The challenge this produce presented was much more formidable than that even of a grapefruit.

The pomegranate had seized the initiative and with bloody juices leaking over my kitchen table I was forced to react. I ran to the cupboard to grab a bowl and a spoon then returned to my seat and tossed the foul abomination into the bowl. I set myself to the task of extracting the red globules from the beast's innards on the presumption that they were the edible component. Mixed with the globules was a white, fibrous tissue pervading the fruit's innards in a three-dimensional fractal pattern. I could not be sure that this mess of white tissue was not poisonous so I had to extract carefully.


As I painstakingly worked my way through the beast's innards, I wondered if there was not a better way to separate the seeds from the rest of the fruit. I considered checking ye olde internet but I had already surpassed the time allotted for breakfast while still needing to replace my dress shirt that was now speckled with maroon blemishes. Hungry as I was from not eating since the evening previous and needing victuals to sustain my wavering stamina through the workday, I had no choice but to push on down the obscured path I had set upon in what struck me now as a bout of the utmost foolishness.

Some difficult tasks become easier as they progress while others wear you down with each costly step so that the finish line appears to recede faster than you make progress. Disassembling a pomegranate certainly falls into the latter category. Its arils are oddly adhesive to each other and frustrating to detach but once isolated they bear no affinity for stainless steel spoons. Finally, after an interminable period of suffering, I had collected a hundred or so red casings in the bottom of my bowl. It was hard to fathom that there were more calories there than I had expended collecting them.

With gusto, I set upon my prey. "From hell's heart, I bite at thee!" I shouted through my mastications as the seeds sprayed bitter burgundy against my hapless taste buds and scorched my molars with discolouring fluids. I was shocked by how bitter the embryos could be despite being 90% bland seed. It was like eating bird seed coated in acidic tonic water. My limited experience with POM pomegranate juice had led me to believe that pomegranates are a naturally sweet fruit, but it was evident that I had once again underestimated the processed drink industry's reliance on sugar to make its products palatable.

Despite these tribulations, I persevered until none of the wee bastards lay against my fiestaware. I took great satisfaction in the knowledge that each seed I consumed was one less that could germinate into another beast. Battered but victorious, I cast the empty bowl into the sink and scoured it with a blast of hot water then threw the beast's hollowed half-shell into the compost with more force than was absolutely necessary.

Final verdict: pomegranates are a pass. You are much better off sticking with grapefruit if you want to take 20 minutes to eat half of something. Eugenio's Four-Cheese Pizza on the other hand, is definitely not a pass. Take it away Leonard!


Graph


Sunday, January 22, 2012

Liam of the Rings

It surprises me that Liam Neeson was not in Lord of the Rings. He would have fit right in. He's got the foreign accent. He has been in a lot of fantasy movies (Clash of the Titans, Narnia, Wrath of the Titans). He has been in a lot of franchises (Star Wars, Battleship, Batman). He has been in a lot of movies where he is running around in the forest (The Grey, Kingdom of Heaven, Seraphim Falls). You could import his Rob Roy character into Middle Earth with only a few tweaks.

Whenever they do make the Stalin biopic, Liam Neeson will star in it with few prosthetics

Of course, it could just be that he is in every movie so it now feels weird whenever he isn't on screen. Either way, kind of feels like Peter Jackson make a big mistake. Not a King Kong-sized mistake, but still a pretty big one.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Conspiracy Theory 3 - Sabres 3-year Plan

Guys, what if this losing streak is all part of the three year plan? Right now the team is within striking distance of a top-3 overall pick and tumbling beautifully towards the first-line centre that Sabres fans have been pining for since July 1, 2007. This is a team that hasn't picked in the top 10 since it picked Vanek 5th overall in 2003. It badly needs a rejuvenating injection of high-pedigree talent.

We know from Ted Black that there's a three-year plan of some sort in place and losses this year don't affect your ability to make the playoffs two years down the road. Right now every player on the team save two (the captain and Atlas) are underperforming. And I don't just mean that most of the players are playing to less than their full potential, I mean virtually everybody is on-track-for-career-lows underperforming. But if everyone can suck miserably at the same time, couldn't it swing the other way, especially if you change up the head coach? Couldn't we see a team chock full of Pegula's special testetorone/PED blend playing above their normal abilities?

 
Two years from now Miller, Pominville, Gerbe, and Vanek will be in contract years and Miller in particular will be past the concussion cobwebs. Roy, Gaustad, Hecht, Boyes, Kaleta, Leopold, Weber, and Ellis will be sullying different franchises. Stafford will be reinvigorated by a new coach. Leino will learn/remember how to play centre. McCormick will be relegated back to the minors. Gragnani will be decomposing at the bottom of a pit in the Marcellus somewhere and his salary will come off the books. Ennis will be re-signed on a cheap contract because he sucks this year and go back to being a flashy 20-goal scorer. Foligno, McNabb and Kassian will still be on their entry-level contracts and they will be a step ahead because of the experience they gained this year. Myers, Sekera, and Ehrhoff will still be under contract and Regehr's services could be retained to fill out a solid top-four of veteran defencemen. Add a legit center through the draft and another one through free agency and you are talking. 
 
We believe that Ruff and Regier are safe because they recently re-upped their secret contracts. But does that really mean anything? Maybe their contracts are short and the plan was to fire them after one year all along. Pegula was stuck with those contracts when he came in and the team went on a crazy run into the playoffs before he had a chance to fire anyone. It makes sense for him to bide his time when the current coach is delivering what he wanted -- losing and lots of it. Now he gets to act like he was loyal to Sabres icon Ruff and pretend he is catering to the fan base when he shitcans him over the summer just in time for fans to renew their season ticket packages..


Do you really think that a billionaire businessman like Pegula doesn't know how to demand accountability? What's more likely: a) that Pegula bumbled his way into the Forbes 500 by being super nice to shoddy employees or b) that he is ruthlessly smart and knows how to take the long view? Pegula will condone blaming injuries for the team's poor showing because he wants the team to feel sorry for themelves so they'll continue to suck this year. Works for him. I wouldn't be surprised if he caused a lot of injuries to the defence corps himself. If Myers and/or Sekera get a staph infection from equipment that wasn't properly washed at home then we will know for sure.

The team has already sold all the tickets it needs to sell for the year and the chances of winning a Stanley Cup are not promising, so why not focus on next year and the year after. Get a good coach in place who isn't sentimentally attached to backchecking German forwards, hire a GM that isn't sentimentally attached to his draft picks, add a top-3 center pick with a full year under his belt (a la Tyler Seguin) and you can contend for a Stanley Cup, for real this time.

P.S. Obama is a Muslim.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Some French have all the subs

How come the French Subway jingle sounds so much more catchy than all the vexatious attempts in English Canada?


My hips don't lie when this advertisement plays. Involuntarily, I begin to bounce my head to the side in time with the beat. This song is better than 60% of the Billboard Hot 100 and 100% better than its English equivalent.


Le vomit. I'd rather listen to country music.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Sabres After-Action Report - 11/12 Season - Game 39

The Sabres won deservedly after the Oilers wore down in the third period and Thomas Vanek became the all-time franchise leader in camera shots of him yelling swear words on the bench after missing a scoring opportunity with 305 expletives in 508 career NHL games. Careful, Thomas, your kids are going to be old enough to watch you on TV soon.

Going into the third period, I was curious to see if two inter-conference opponents would play conservatively to secure the single point. It looked to me like they didn't, at least not Buffalo. The Sabres put more shots on net (13) in the third period than in either of the first two despite having a lead for the last quarter of the third period and accordingly shifting to a more defensive posture. That change in approach contributed to Edmonton's final goal, in my opinion.
The call against Kaleta was a bad one but it illustrated why he is no longer a valuable member of the team. He is a useful penalty-killer and a punishing bodychecker but his major value used to be that he drew a lot of penalties without getting thrown in the box too much himself. Now it is the opposite. He seems to have a bad reputation with officials in the league so referees watch Kaleta carefully instead of focusing on what the other team is doing to him, which means he no longer draws as many calls and takes more penalties himself.

Jordan Eberle has a great toe drag. Remember when Drew Stafford used to pull off that move? Now all he does is drive wide.

Brad Boyes is just too slow to be a very dangerous offensive player in the NHL anymore. He's not a sloth but he can't threaten to beat defensemen outside so they can play him one-dimensionally. He can still protect the puck, find the open man and bang home a rebound, but he is mostly benign to his opponent and to his own team. I am glad I picked him to go under 57.5 points this year because that bet is a lock. I only wish I bet more than a dollar on it.

It's always interesting to see Colton Teubert because he was the guy that the Kings wanted instead of Tyler Myers. He seemed OK, nothing special. I really wonder what LA thought they saw in him. Maybe his NHL Combine performance?

Monday, January 2, 2012

Bills After-Action Report: 2011 - Game 16

Two years in a row (and counting) of losing at least 7 consecutive games in a season, 12 years (and counting) of missing the playoffs, and 16 years (and counting) without a playoff win certainly dampens my enthusiasm for Buffalo Bills football. The team has been so bad for so long that I can't even look down on Cleveland and Cincinnati fans any more. That the team jumped out to a 5-2 record again (like in 2008) before collapsing in the second half of the season makes it feel like Buffalo has explored all of the possible ways to lose so now the team is in re-runs.

Really, the game today felt like a microcosm of the whole Bills season. They started strong, Ryan Fitzpatrick looked like a top 10 quarterback, the defence was holding its own, and even our long-time archrivals the New England Patriots were beatable. Then, after about a quarter of the game/season, everything fell apart: Fitzpatrick started throwing picks at a league-leading rate, the defence couldn't stop anything, our poor-pedigree receivers couldn't get separation, and we fell back into fourth-place in the AFC East.

Remember when this was only 90% ironic?

Another sore point for me is that the Dolphins are somehow picking ahead of the Bills in the first round of the 2012 NFL Draft despite both teams having the same 6-10 record. (I actually do understand why this is the case -- weaker strength of schedule for Miami -- but it still bothers me since I take almost as much joy in the Dolphins losing as I do in the Bills winning.) Adding insult to injury, the Bills are stuck below the Dolphins in the standings on the NFL website because the Dolphins won both games against the Bills and so have the first tie-breaker. Those South Florida wankers are eating their cake AND still keeping much better beach bodies than those of us in colder climes.

For me, the only real redeeming part of football today was the Jets blowing their chance at the playoffs thanks to terrible play by Mark Sanchez. My schadenfreude reached its pinnacle after Sanchez threw his third interception, the Dolphins ran the ball back 30+ yards virtually sealing the game for the Dolphins, and Dan Dierdorf exclaimed, "What a great tackle by Sanchez!" The incongruity of that statement with the significant aspect of what had just transpired made me, literally, laugh out loud. And it wasn't even a great tackle.