Just away from WordPress, otherwise it’s the exact same blog, with the same foul language, sports metaphors and (hopefully, shortly after a couple of happy hockey posts this week) the same political and journalistic intrigue.

http://dirtygames.ca

Please adjust your browsing, blogrolls and bookmarks accordingly. And for those getting bored with all the hockey, one way or another, it ends this week.

Thank you for your attention.

There are plenty of arguments one could make both for and against government offering a bailout to newspapers.

And the arguments, at least in America, would probably fall on deaf ears, as the White House seems to have already made up its mind:

With the Boston Globe just the latest big-city newspaper teetering on the edge of shutdown, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs brushed aside a question about whether the federal government will consider stepping in to help save newspapers, as it has with so many other industries.

“I don’t know what, in all honesty, government can do about it,” Gibbs told reporters.

Well … what, in all honesty, government could do about it is the same damn thing government has done for every other failing industry — throw buckets of cash at the problem.

I acknowledge that, as CNN goes on to paraphrase Gibbs, there would certainly be hurdles and questions involved in bailing out an industry that (at least theoretically) lists “examination and criticism of government” as one of its top priorities.

However, I would imagine there are ways around that problem. In the grand scheme of things, withholding bailout money from a traditional industry because part of their job involves interacting with government and reporting about it to the people smacks of either pettiness … or resignation. Or, of course, pragmatic politics.

While President Obama’s superhero shine may have dimmed somewhat in the eyes of leftists as he has moved towards the centre since his inauguration, most of us would still have a tough time believing that he’d be unable to find some cash to keep newspapers afloat while still managing to allow them to report independently about his administration.

If it was a priority to keep newspapers afloat, believe me, they’d find a way.

But in brushing off the question, Gibbs goes for the quick shot, implying that there are issues of coverage and objectivity in play:

“You guys didn’t think $100 million meant a lot a few weeks ago,” Gibbs said. “But looking at some of the balance sheets, $100 million seems to mean a lot.” Ouch.

That’s nothing more than a glib way — and kind of funny — way to duck a real explanation. And I would speculate that the reason for the dodge is because, if the White House has considered a bailout for newspapers at all in the middle of all of this, it’s been flatly rejected because there’s no point in throwing good money after bad.

So long as network television news, CNN and their cable news buddies, mainstream magazines like Time and Newsweek and newsradio from all sides of the political spectrum are going strong … why would the White House step into save newspapers, really?

There are the altruistic motives, sure, about the fourth estate and all that … but really? Aside from journalists themselves and their ever-shrinking cadre of True Believers, who cares about that?

In the minds of many more people, tossing $100 million at the quickly fossilizing newspaper industry would be tantamount to propping up the failed status quo in order to keep the market from evolving into its next iteration — and that would be a fairly un-capitalist stance for a White House already hearing the ceaseless yap of retarded talk radio DJs with a special case of “Socialist!” Tourette’s.

Add to that the Republican-manufactured image of an election given to Obama by the mainstream media — we all remember how “in the tank” became part of the political lexicon for those six months, right? — and you’re just poking the Right with a stick a few short weeks after the saner elements of the party finally began to climb on board.

A government bailout for American newspapers can’t happen right now. Not only is it probably a waste of money, but the political optics are terrible and the industry as we know it is well past the point where a $100-million injection could really “save” anything.

Soon we will return to juvenile rants about why the Detroit Red Wings are God’s gift to hockey. And whooo boy, they sure look the part these days.

It is, after all, springtime, and this is what we do every Spring.

But first, I read something today that helped clarify an idea I’d been wrestling with — and since it’s about preserving the very fabric of the industry that employs me … I figured the hockey could wait.

Before we begin, a shout out to an excellent blog penned a by a friend who puts forward an idea that is fascinating, if unwieldy, and — apologies for the bluntness, but it’s how we do things here — would kill the damn beast faster than just lining copy editors up against the wall and shooting them in the head.

(But it’s totally a gloriously creative new idea, and well worth a look, so go take one so we’re all on the same page here.)

“What it really means is that newspapers are spending far, far too much money on far, far too many people producing far, far too many stories on far, far too many pages.”

As a senior editor at a free daily newspaper that publishes in five markets with a staff of, roughly, 17 … I could have told you that without all the math.

And I’d argue with both Gerson and LaPoint to say that it’s not unused content in the form of totally unread stories on pages that people just  don’t read — it’s the final 400+ words of EVERY story that go consistently unread because less than 5% of the population really wants to read all 800 damn words some daily reporter lugged back from a city hall debate about garbage. I’d argue that readers have no problem reading 24 pages, or 24 stories, if those stories don’t take them five minutes or more apiece to read.

Frankly, if it wasn’t part of my job to see who put what in which story … I’d only read the first seven grafs of 80% of a newspaper’s content. And I love to read, but I know I’m not alone.

An 80 page newspaper costs a lot of money to print, especially now that it won’t be close to paid-for by advertising revenue … but if you chop the last half off of almost every story (we’ll say, for the sake of maintaining some sort of journalistic integrity here, that we’ll leave a few Important stories, as well as most of the columnists, alone) you can go from an 80-page paper to a 45-50 page paper and, I promise you, nobody except the writers and other journalists would care.

But the central idea in the Gerson’s post is one I want to talk about. There’s more to it than I’m quoting (because it’s easier to make my point that way, of course), so go read it already, but here’s the gist. She thinks that focusing on giving people exactly what they want is one way for newspapers to maintain some profitability:

“Why not divide the product up, sell it separately and publish according to readership? So, you maybe have a 10-page, quality news section in tabloid format that comes out daily for free. Your sports is the next big money maker, but your readership and game schedules means it makes sense to publish it only on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, for example. Charge 25 cents for each of those. Sell the arts sections once or twice a week for $1 a pop. Then offer a high quality weekly newsmagazine on weekends that sums up the week’s news and contextualizes in long-form, combined with features. You could charge $1.50 to $5.00 on that alone. Then take your fashion and lifestyle sections, put them into a monthly glossy magazine format and sell them on magazine newsstands at standard magazine rates.”

See what I mean? Now that is some ambitious shit. It takes an idea I’ve had for a while — that newspapers should not be afraid to change their style to focus on what they do best — and takes it to the sort of extreme that would send the industry over a cliff instead of slowly walking down the other side of the hill and off into the sunset. I love the spirit of the idea, but it would never work.

Newspapers  don’t do niches, which is essentially what this is. They can’t. Here’s why in three reasons.

1. The Internet exists. The biggest niche marketer in the history of humanity has cornered the market on that kind of stuff. In the quest to save newspapers from the Online Demons, a lot of people seem to come up with ideas that involve newspapers turning into some sort of World-Wide-Web-on-Paper. It can’t happen like that. The reason newspapers are still read at all in this age when info is everywhere and I can find the answer to any question you might want to ask me in 3.5 seconds is because some people want a simple island that has a little bit of everything they need for (intellectual) life without them having to risk the spooky forest to forage for it. That — and by this point, it’s pretty much ONLY that — is the advantage a daily newspaper has over the ‘net. It’s simple. It’s all here. It’s in one place, and you don’t have to hunt for a news site once you’re done with the sports site and then navigate yourself over to a site that has entertainment listings and then on to weather.ca. Just turn the page. But if I want just sports, or just arts listings or just politics … then I already know where to find as much of a specific subject as I want. I’ve got ‘em bookmarked.

2. Reporters aren’t experts, and neither are columnists. They’re good writers, adept at turning things around quickly, cleanly and spinning a tale about something they knew nothing about eight hours ago. Those are real skills, but with the exception of the shrinking club of beat reporters who haven’t been long ago stripped of their daily beats for budgetary reasons, they’re Just. Not. Experts. They can’t do as thorough a job covering those niches as the people I already go to for my “focused” coverage.

I’m not going to drop a buck to read a thrice-weekly from a bunch of writers from the Toronto Star sports section when there are publications like The Hockey News or Baseball Digest that already go way beyond what The Star is doing and focus entirely on the niche I really want — ie, all hockey, no baseball or basketball. Similarly, I’m not going to pay magazine prices for content that belongs in a newspaper lifestyle section. Why the hell wouldn’t I just buy Vanity Fair or Chatelaine or even Maxim? Pay $1 for a newspaper Arts section once a week?! How about I just grab Now — who do pretty much nothing but Arts and Life — every week for free? Drop $5 for a newsmagazine written by newspaper reporters? Ummm … naw, thanks. I already have Time or MacLean’s for that, and they’ve been dropping weekly newsmagazines since back in the days when people were actually paying $0.50 for a big ol’ newspaper.

3. This plan doesn’t save newspapers, anyway. It breaks them down to their basic components and puts them on the auction block, hoping in desperation for some bids. It’s like a contents sale at the home of a recently deceased person who died intestate. Newspapers, for good or ill, are what they are: A collection of stories that range from news and crime to lifestyle, and arts to sports and politics, and fashion to terrible advice columnists that make me want to throw my coffee against the nearest wall. I’m not trying to romanticize newspapers here, I’m just defining them. That’s what they are. Even our crummy little free daily newspaper has the same basic newspaper elements that you get when you purchase the New York Times.

I’m not saying this idea is without merit. For one thing, nobody is trying to think of things like this, and even though cynics like me love to throw darts, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing worth using here.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve often thought that newspapers should focus on what they do best, and include the other stuff behind it. Focused marketing, if you will, instead of straight up chopping it all up and going straight for the niches. For instance — and this is the example I always use — the Toronto Sun should make itself a Sports newspaper. Do it now, while people still recognize it as Canada’s best sports section. Throw the remaining money into sports. Make the cover a sports cover unless something so huge it can’t be ignored happens. Make sports the first section in your paper, then crime, then the Sunshine Girl, then everything else. That’s what Sun readers want, anyway. But the key thing is that everything else has to be there — because that’s what newspapers are, a collection of everything that happened yesterday.

You change that, even to help them survive, and you’ve killed them. And the seedlings you grow from the fertilizer provided by the corpse will die shortly thereafter — because while people are increasingly less willing to cough up a buck for a paper, they’d be even more hesitant to cough up a buck for a bastard publication that looks like a newspaper but only has one section.

You know what? If Barack Obama honestly believes this, then he’s finished. Done. Cooked. Hopeless. Expired.

And in some of his strongest language yet, Obama suggested that, in its new ad, the McCain-Palin ticket was simply trying to “make stuff up.”

Senator Obama, I know you have spoken time and again about listening to opinions from the global community. You’ve mentioned the need to allow the rest of the world to whisper in those overlarge, Will-Smith-as-Fresh-Prince-style ears that you have. You’ve stressed that the United States cannot exist in a vacuum and that our — speaking as a non-American citizen — views count, too.

So, on behalf of the rest of the world, I offer: Yes, you fucking idiot. Yes, they are.

There is reams of data from all walks of life to back this argument.

There are studies that place the American national IQ at 98, the lowest national average among the world’s developed countries.

There are surveys that find that only 20 – 25 per cent of American are “scientifically savvy and alert.” The rest of them are embarrassingly ignorant:

Dr. Miller’s data reveal some yawning gaps in basic knowledge. American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century.

There are dozens more articles, studies and surveys exactly like these, and you can find them by typing “American stupidity” or “Dumb Americans” into Google. Doing that, Senator, will no doubt depress you. And it should.

But fear not. If you type the same thing into Youtube, you get all sorts of amusing clips:

Who could forget that shining example of how retarded the populace you are currently courting can be?

You have probably never heard of a man named Rick Mercer (or maybe you have, you sometimes seem like you might be into that kind of humour — you know, the kind tinged with ‘elitism’), but I urge you to consult his research before placing your faith in those mouthbreathers who will be punching ballots in two months.

Senator Obama, Americans can be good people and they can do good things, and I hope to God they elect you President.

But a solid percentage of them are so fucking dumb that they can’t find any country aside from America on a map and the depths of their ignorance continues to reveal itself on an almost-daily basis.

If you honestly believe the statement you made above … you are as stump fucking dumb as the rest of them.

Sincerely,

A Canadian Dude

I’m not going to be snarky, angry, disgusted, repulsed, horrified, sarcastic, wryly amused or even righteously indignant about the American election today.

It’s more effective (and so much fun!) to simply dig through massive amounts of news stories, blogs and political analysis in order to find a bunch of quotes that have gone public in the last few days and let readers wonder why the GOP ticket of John McCain/Sarah Palin has even a snowball’s chance in hell of winning in November. As any half-decent journalist knows, a good quote can speak for itself.

These quotes are all real, all sourced and not intentionally taken out of context:

• “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” — Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain
• “I think God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that … Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.” — Sarah Palin, on the Iraq war
• “We need to think like Jesus thinks. We are in a time and a season of war, and we need to think like that. We need to develop that instinct. We need to develop as believers the instinct that we are at war, and that war is contending for your faith. … Jesus called us to die. You’re worried about getting hurt? He’s called us to die. Listen, you know we can’t even follow him unless you are willing to give up your life. … I believe that Jesus himself operated from that position of war mode. Everyone say “war mode.” Now you say, wait a minute Ed, he’s like the good shepherd, he’s loving all the time and he’s kind all the time. Oh yes he is — but I also believe that he had a part of his thoughts that knew that he was in a war.” — Sarah Palin’s pastor, Ed Kalnins, senior pastor of Wasilla Assembly of God since 1999.
• “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” — John Stein, former mayor of Wasilla.
• “Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.” — Sarah Palin, when asked if she was offended by the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. (The words “under God” were added in 1954; the pledge was written in 1892. The founding fathers were all … ummm … dead by then.)
• “I realized months ago that Obama can get away with just about anything because all that too many Americans seem to care about are charisma and the term “change.” It doesn’t matter if Obama plagiarizes speeches, who his pastor and spiritual mentor was for 20 years, that he has the most liberal voting record in the Senate, that he refused to wear the American flag as a pin, that he didn’t place his hand over his heart during the national anthem, that his wife just recently has become proud of her country, or that he is sympathetic to Muslim terrorist groups, etc.” — Chuck Norris, discussing Barack Obama.
• “I don’t want kids.” — Levi Johnston, the poor boy who is being forced into fatherhood by his mom-in-law to be, on his since-deleted MySpace page.
• “I’m a fuckin’ redneck who likes to snowboard and ride dirt bikes. But I live to play hockey. I like to go camping and hang out with the boys, do some fishing, shoot some shit and just fuckin’ chillin’, I guess. Ya fuck with me I’ll kick ass.” — More from Levi. Hey, at least he likes hockey!
• “(We) vetted her through Google and clipping services. They didn’t send lawyers there or talk to people who knew her.” — A GOP official with ties to the McCain campaign, speaking of the thorough research behind his choice of VP candidate.

But the final and — in a stunning sign of the current state of political discourse in the United States — most coherent political argument of the day goes to … Lindsay Fucking Lohan:

• “The real problem comes from the fact that we are taking the focus off of getting to know Sarah Palin and her political views, and what she can do to make our country a less destructive place. It’s distracting from the real issues, the real everyday problems that this country experiences.
  I am concerned with the fact that Sarah Palin brought attention to her daughter’s pregnancy, rather than all world issues and what she believes she could possibly do to change them — if elected. I get Sarah Palin’s views against abortion, but I would much prefer to hear more about what she can do for our country rather than how her daughter is going to have a child no matter what.
  Maybe focus on delivering some words and policy with stronger impact like Joe Biden.” — Lindsay Lohan, writing about the Palin controversy on her (God help us all) political blog.

When a woman best known for her underwhelming acting ability, terrible pop music, public intoxication, rampant promiscuity and the red hair that frames the lips of her vagina is asking you to please discuss the issues … maybe that’s a sign.

I love it.

Now that I’ve taken a few deep breaths … now that I am no longer so quick to become scornful and condescending over how ridiculously superficial American politics can be when the Fate Of The Whole Wide World is hanging in the balance … now that I’ve realized that Canadians won’t ever allow our political discourse to sink to these depths.

Now … I fucking embrace shit like this. Can’t get enough.

The 17-year-old daughter of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is pregnant, Palin said Monday in an announcement intended to knock down rumors by liberal bloggers that Palin faked her own pregnancy to cover up for her child.

If I highlighted the above paragraph, cut it out, and pasted it back into an All My Children episode summary in Soap Opera Digest … how out of place would it look?

By the way … to make matters just a little bit more fun … This is from a Q&A form filled out by Sarah Palin while she was a Gubernatorial candidate:

3. Will you support funding for abstinence-until-marriage education instead of for explicit sex-education programs, school-based clinics, and the distribution of contraceptives in schools?
SP: Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.

Heh. Well, you get what you pay for Sarah. Good luck with all that.

Hopefully, at least if Barack Obama wants to win this election, he’ll tiptoe around this issue and let the 24/7 networks (as well as idiot bloggers from Canada who revel in wallowing in the mud of our neighbours) play around with it.

It accomplishes nothing for him to mention the personal issues of his rival’s running mate. It would give the McCain campaign proof that the Obama campaign isn’t as high-minded as Barack claims. It would also give Sarah Palin a Cheney-esque “Leave my family out of this! They aren’t running for office!” moment that — no matter how silly and contrived … Sarah Palin is running on a family-values-abstinence-works-no-sex-till-marriage platform, remember? — a number of mouthbreathers would absolutely get behind.

So yeah … Obama should leave this alone. But me? I fucking love it. Better than the NFL playoffs; and with fewer illegitimate children!

Speaking of which … you know the only way this could get any better?

Well … if that there baby comes out of the womb blacker than Barack Obama … that would be … just perfect.

*****

UPDATE: Obama does exactly what he should do regarding the Palin family’s dirty little teen sex revelation:

“I have said before and I will repeat again: People’s families are off limits,” Obama said. “And people’s children are especially off-limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin’s performance as a governor or her potential performance as a vice president. So I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18 and how a family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn’t be a topic of our politics.”

— From Politico.

You know a smart administration is making the decisions when they “take scientists out of decision making on species status.”

And it’s just awesome that doing so “doesn’t require the approval of congress.”

In totally unexpected reaction to this move, “developers welcomed the plan, while environmentalists derided it.”

No! Really?

Environmentalists derided a plan that would put the decision-making power into the hands of politicians when determining if construction projects will adversely affect wildlife?!

Never that.

After all, people in America’s federal agencies have never done anything like ignoring the dangers of action or inaction for the sake of political expediency.

Do you know why they made this move? Well, it’s because “the existing regulations create unnecessary conflicts and delays.”

Yes, conflicts like ‘building this shit might kill off this endangered species’ and delays such as ‘maybe we should find out if there will be any place for these animals to live after we build this highway.’

The Interior Department cited its recent decision on polar bears as an example. While listing polar bears as endangered due to melting sea ice habitat, it argues that scientists at this time cannot “draw a direct causal link between greenhouse gas emissions and distant observations of impacts affecting species.

“As a result, it is inappropriate to consult on a remote agency action involving the contribution of emissions to global warming because it is not possible to link the emissions to impacts on specific listed species such as polar bears,” the department stated.

Well, that’s one (retarded) justification for this move.

However — even though I’m not a scientist — I’m pretty sure that in some situations it just might be possible to draw a “direct causal link” between building a fucking superhighway or a megadam and the loss of habitat for species that live in forests or wetlands.

I am not trying to be overtly nationalistic here or anything, but this unparalleled idiocy only reinforces the differences between Canada and the United States.

When our last real Prime Minister of any length, Jean Chretien, was leaving office, decided he was going to create a whole bunch of new national parks and other green stuff — because he likes wilderness, he probably felt guilty for being a typical politician for most of his time in office and because … fuck it, he could.

As America suffers through the last throes of the Bush insurgency, the administration seeks to push through something that “would accomplish through regulations what conservative Republicans have been unable to achieve in Congress: ending some environmental reviews that developers and other federal agencies blame for delays and cost increases on many projects.”

But you Americans should all vote for John McCain because Barack Obama is scary, untested, a celebrity and “dif’rent lookin’”

You get what you fucking pay for. Or rather, the developers get what they pay for. The animals don’t have any money, so they get fuck all.

Maybe the American animals can come live in Chretien’s national parks.

Oh wait … we’re not so good these days about accepting people who deserted that fucking mess down there.

But wait … “a new administration could freeze any pending regulations or reverse them, a process that could take months.”

"Help me, Secret Muslim Presidential Candidate; you're my only hope."

See? even the Bald Fucking American Eagles need Obama to be President.

Look, I need to do something to justify my creeping sense of impending doom, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to walk around telling everyone the sky is falling like Chicken Little with a goatee and glasses.

So to help relieve the gloom, I figured … fuck it, if the ship really is going down, I want to at least be on the record as having called it.

Here, born of a strange feeling that we’ve crested the hill of civilization and are now beginning the slow roll down the other side, is the first in a series of links chronicling why we’re fucked, how you can tell we’re fucked and just how fucked we are. Or, more realistically, here’s a collection of stuff that will make you sigh heavily and ponder human stupidity.

The answer … pretty damn fucked. To quote the divisive, America-hating ex-pastor of the first African-American presidential candidate: Our chickens are coming home to roost.

And those chickens, apparently, really hate little fucking boy scouts.

• Boy Scouts dived under picnic tables and were buried under a collapsed chimney when a deadly tornado hit their camp in western Iowa, survivors said Thursday morning. I was a boy scout, and we knew enough to “Be Prepared”. Of course, when I was a boy scout, we were ‘prepared’ to play basketball, learn how to tie knots and maybe get a field trip to Centre Island in the summer. We certainly weren’t ‘prepared’ to go camping in a tornado, for fucks sake. (For the record, “the 2008 tornado season is the deadliest in a decade and on pace to be the deadliest ever recorded in the United States”.) Yay … global warming!
• According to reports (one of which will soon be published in Time magazine) the war for the freedom of the Internet is about to be lost — “by 2012 ISP’s all over the globe will reduce Internet access to a TV-like subscription model, only offering access to a small standard amount of commercial sites and require extra fees for every other site you visit”. If you watch the video report in that link, you will note that they at least had the decency to deliver this horrible, freedom-stifling news to me via a woman with a very nice rack. So … thumbs way down for curbing my freedom of expression, but thumbs up for low-cut, v-neck shirts!
• Speaking of cleavage … we’re running out of strippers in Ontario. Now we’re gonna have to import them. A lack of strippers combined with censorship on the Internet … that’s not a winning combination for lonely men.
• Holy Shit. Why don’t you just kick me in the nuts, strangle my dog and be done with it?! On top of the Internet … and the strippers … this ridiculous weather is now threatening B.C.’s pot crop. Seriously guys, you wonder where this feeling of impending doom comes from?
• Meanwhile, the best trial ever is about to wrap up, meaning that I will no longer be able to distract myself from all this depressing news by reading about R. Kelly’s “Duffel Bag Of Homemade Porn” and how, “Wherever he was at, the bag would follow him.” (If you have not followed any of the R Kelly trial, I feel sorry for you. I would pay money for courtroom tapes of this stuff. If these links have been getting you down, read the article, you’ll feel less depressed.)
• Also, because America is totally not racist anymore now that a half-black man is running for the presidency, we can assume that coverage will be fair and balanced, right? Or not. You see, I thought I watched Barack Obama giving “props” to his “wife” after winning the democratic party nomination, but really I was watching him give a “terrorist fist jab” to his “baby mama”. Yay … Fox News!
• And lest I forget my hometown, kids are shooting kids again, in broad daylight, on a busy street, about two blocks away from where I lived in relative peace for about a year. I used to walk past that bench every day on my way to work. Damn, am I glad I’m not a crime reporter anymore. By the way, this story will be forgotten in 36 hours unless that kid dies.

You see … this is where the feeling of impending doom comes from. And that was cathartic. Hopefully, you are now as depressed as I am, and could use some cheering up.

I got that covered, too. Or rather, Steven Colbert does, after purchasing the American license to our beloved “Hockey Night In Canada” theme song and vowing to use it while doing un-Canadian things … “like punching beavers in the face!”

Enjoy: