The sky is falling…

Four straight losses. Down six in the last eight. Definitely not the sign of a championship team. Well, so long as this lovely streak the Canucks are on continues. Tonight’s 4-1 loss to Winnipeg (held hostage in Phoenix, AZ for the last decade) was especially painful to watch.

What’s more painful is how the fans are reacting. Most specifically, the ones that call in to Team 1040. Fire Vigneault they say. Bench the coach. Trade Luongo. Sundin was a mistake. Cripes, if there was any weight behind any of the plethora of ideas to quick fix the Canucks, Mike Gillis might actually be worried about his job.

Luckily, this is the constant whinging of the ‘average’ Vancouver Canucks fan. Having lived and visited a great variety of Canada, it pains me to say that Canuck fans are almost as whiny and hockey-ignorant as the standard Leaf fan. Just as in New York Jr. Toronto, fans in Vancouver are Canuck fans more than hockey fans. Though in Vancouver’s defence, we’ll buck up and cheer a non-Toronto Canadian team in the late rounds of the playoffs.

Look at it logically. At the end of the season, Nonis is out, Gillis is in. Gillis lets the vets go and brings in youth, anchored by our superstar goalie, Roberto Luongo. To me, with a diverse experience in hockey, tells me one thing. We’re rebuilding. But unlike Toronto, it’s not COMPLETELY from scratch. But still, with rebuilding, I would like to tell Canuck fans out there:

It really means we won’t be a big playoff team for a couple of years at least. We must allow time for the team chemistry to develop and the youth to develop into the players and team they can be. Keeping that sentiment in mind, here’s my armchair GM rebuttal to all the village idiots in the GVRD who think they know more than Gillis.

1. The priority right now is to re-sign Bobby Lu. Period. Though we are rebuilding, we’ve gotta show him something in terms of post-season. He’s spent every year of his career, short one, NOT MAKING THE PLAYOFFS. If this rebuilding trend leads us to early April golf, kiss this all-star goalie goodbye.

2. In regards to point one, Sundin helps here two-fold. He gives us more scoring depth, which means the Sedins don’t have to face the strong checking lines every game, and opens up scoring. Our offense is anemic.

3. Sundin isn’t a quick fix. He’s older. It will take time for his stride to really hit. We must all be patient. I’d rather him score like a man possessed in March, not pushing himself too hard now and pulling an end to his career a la Doug Gilmour.

4. Vinnie Vigneault must be patient. Constant line juggling is retarded. You have a young team. Let them grow. Changing things each time you have a panic attack is killing our team.

5. Take that fucking A off of Mitchell’s jersey and give it to Boom Boom already. We’ve endured two Luongo-less months, and if one thing is obvious, it’s the lack of real, heart on your sleeve leadership. Bieksa and Burrows are the only two skaters who fit that bill. Hell, give Ohlund’s A to Burrows while we’re at it. We need to light a fire under their proverbial asses.

6. Bench Taylor Pyatt permanently until some team actually wants to trade for him. Fuck me, look how he plays. It’s like he’s straight from Timbit’s hockey. Why bench Wellwood to have Pyatt? Why not just go to a local rink and find a young kid to play with the Sedins each night?

7. Don’t fire a coach mid-season. Don’t bench a coach. Don’t trade Luongo for Lecavallier. Don’t release Sundin. Don’t… well, you get the point. It seems all of management’s moves are knee jerk responses to fan complaining. If you want to listen to us for one real useful thing, get the fuck rid of the pay-per-view nonsense.

/rant over.

Sometimes you gotta roll the hard six. Like tomorrow, the beginning of the end.

I have a monitor again, election reflection, watching Watchmen, and one will be revealed.

Dear Gods, I am a bad, lazy, infrequent blogger. I must be getting old. My lack of text is far from a lack of something to say. Rather, if my thought is accurate that Battlestar Galactica is truly an allegory to my life, lately nothing has been more true than this:

Months o­n the run, and what do we have to show for it? Casualties. Deteriorating conditions. This crew needs a rest. It’s finally hitting them, that’s all. Our old lives are gone. The o­nly thing we have to look forward to is this.

Commander William Adama, Flight of the Phoenix

Months of working too much for too little, with no leads on new jobs. First a back injury, then a three week stint with serious damage to my Achilles tendon. Engine block on the car fried. Need to work more to make payments on the new vehicle. LCD computer monitor goes on the fritz, so Dawn and I can fight over computer time. No end to the monotony in sight. All I have to look forward to is more work just to get by.

Well, last night was another small turn in the road. We have a library of sorts in our building, more like a small alcove in which people drop off and pick up old novels and such. Sometimes, however, other things appear there. Like a Samsung computer monitor.

Needless to say, the monitor issue is a non-issue. It is a CRT, but still, until the financial situation greatly improves, which is in process with the union contract being re-negotiated, along with a potential side business venture I’m undertaking, it will more than do. So long as someone doesn’t smash it up tomorrow (which seems to be my luck these days), we should be all good. Though in all honesty, I can’t imagine causing over $3000 in damage to a cheap computer monitor.

The car, on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky. Two days after driving off the lot with it, I got rear-ended. See a few posts back. The good is the deductible has been waived. The bad is that I’m worried shitless that some kind of vandalism will befall the loaner the body shop gave me. I really don’t need any more car problems in, oh, about forever.

Our lives have even been graced with elections (one to come in a week, and one early next year still to come, however), which in itself is allegory to the end of Season 2.

They don’t want to hear the truth. They’re tired. Exhausted. The idea of stopping, laying down their burdens and starting a new life right now is what is resonating with the voters.

Tory Foster, Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I

Not so much in Canada. We re-elected the king of personality, Stephen Harper, in an election that spent loads of tax dollars and changed next to nothing in the House of Commons. I guess one positive came out of it was that Stephane Dion stepped down as Liberal leader. I appreciate the honesty approach. When I lived in Onterrible, Dalton McGuinty got elected on a platform of ‘no tax cuts’, giving a ‘real’ plan as opposed to hollow empty promises. That’s one thing. Telling voters well before the election is even called you plan to tax us more is just plain suicide.

Still, it’s now only a matter of time before Justin takes the reigns. Probably one leader removed from another Trudeau Prime Minister dynasty.

Luckily, things are looking up down south. Congrats to Barack Obama for doing two things. First, being the first African-American voted in as President, but more importantly, having an ELECTION THAT ONLY LASTED ONE DAY. Actually, to think of it, most elections I can think of from down south really offered a result in only one day. Except two. Both elected that Dubya character. I can’t imagine that it’s only down to ballot counters having the same mathematical and academic capacity as the current puppet President. Co-incidence?

Say what you will about economic policy. I think this election might actually be a sign that the US is joining the rest of us in the 21^ST century, being able to rise from the past, go against the grain, and select a man who not even 50 years ago, wouldn’t have even been fathomed as the leader of the free world.

Yeah, I said it. Many in the world look to America as a beacon of hope. And Tuesday, this beacon of hope may have been re-lit. Through fiscal policy, budget, deficit, debt, and the like, we can easily lose sight of the social conscience that government must wield. We live in a much smaller world, thanks to many ingenious things such as the interweb. Different cultures, different gender orientations, different faiths are increasingly at ends, must either learn to co-exist or they will end up destroying one another.

I can only hope the election of Obama will forward the cause of co-existence.

It could be worse. We could have had five successive terms of Richard Nixon. Though for that to have happened, I think we might have needed an omnipotent blue dude with a diagram of a hydrogen atom on his forehead.

I’m really looking forward to the Watchmen film. I’ve only read the graphic novel a handful of times, as I’ve (until very recently) had to borrow it from friends, never finding a copy of my own. Until now.

I just hope that trailer isn’t the only thing to tide me over until the second half of season 4. Well aside from hockey. Tonight’s score: Winnipeg Jets 0, Kevin ‘Boom Boom’ Bieksa 1.

Interdum vos ut volvo ferrus six.

The return of Twisted Filler and other observations in the dawn of great change…

One thing came up in the twisted filler.

From Paul. Big shock there. Good ol’ Pastehead keeps finding these rarities. As such…

The Nietzsche Family Circus.

Feel free to email any humourous oddities to me at neolithicfilms@gmail.com.

I’m going to need a lot of them these days as our dear Vancouver Canucks are flirting with cellar dwelling this season in the Western Conference. Out are Naslund and Morrison. In come Steve Bernier, Ryan Johnson, Darcy Hordichuk, and Kyle Wellwood. And in all honesty, I do think the Canucks need to go to the drawing board, and definitely start from scratch. If the ‘Nucks do make a consistent commitment to the draft and developing young talent, they can be a force to reckon with in several years time. In the meantime, it makes for very boring hockey. However, there is a wild card. Is Luongo, our star goalie, willing to put up with a carbon copy of the dogma fed to him in Florida, a team that sucks so much balls? Though the direction is in the future, towards the youth, maybe getting a good name player to stand tall with the Sedin twins might give ol’ Bobby Lu enough motivation to stick around until the Canucks rise as a potent force once again.

I’ve been mulling it over, and there is one player I do have in mind. Not a free agent though, so it would have to be a trade…

So how about…

Kevin Bieksa to Philadelphia for Daniel Briere?

Briere’s probably not available, and the Flyers might not jump at this idea, but I do love the way Briere plays. Even if he beat the beloved Habs in the spring playoff dance (fucker).

Though in all sincerity, this isn’t the worst deal I’ve seen in the last 24 hours. Telus and Bell will start charging for incoming text messages starting in August. Revamping costs, or making a quick buck on the spam text message market that’s becoming as obnoxious as it has on the email front.

Thank fuck I’m with Rogers.

Interdum vos ut volvo ferrus six.