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.

It is not hard to rip on the future of newspapers. If it is easy to kick someone while they’re down, it is even easier to punch them in the face while they lie on their deathbed. When it comes to fishwrap, I’ve done both. Sometimes gleefully. Sometimes while bemoaning the future of a world where free dailies and blogs halfheartedly attempt to duplicate the real work that newspapers do.

I also pick on the Toronto Star a lot. Once again, it’s easy. I worked there, I know the culture and I can still predict, with startling accuracy, the angle and lead they will use on any given story. That doesn’t make them a bad newspaper, just an easy target.

Regardless, I wanted to share this fantastic investigative piece by Kevin Donovan. It’s a all-too-rare reminder of what real investigative reporting can uncover. This wouldn’t happen in your favourite free daily — nowhere near enough staff, or space, to get it done. It wouldn’t happen online. Bloggers don’t have the credentials, the time to devote to the project or — for the most part — the years of experience required to navigate something like this.

It’s a good ol’ fashioned newspaper expose-a-crook yarn, and you should read it with your feet up, a big cup of coffee in your hand and then reflect on the fact that there are still a few good reasons we kill millions of trees every week.

Sex and chairty: James Arion profits from both

Job well done.

Apparently I’m not the only person having a lot of fun with the Blue Jays ridiculous start. Dude writing the headlines at TSN tonight is evidently enjoying the BJs’ offensive ejaculations, too:

Seriously, I love filthy headlines and the Blue Jays are awesome right now.

There’s something a heck of a lot of fun about rooting for a scrappy baseball team that surprises people when they’re supposed to suck. With the ruins of steroids everywhere and the culture of money that is the AL East, it’s one of the few truly feel-good endeavours left among the wasteland of professional baseball fandom

And given the incredibly depressing state of journalism right now, it’s always good to be reminded that sneaking some ribald innuendo into a headline is easier to do online, where there aren’t so many editors watching. And that it’s a pleasure that the death of a newspaper can’t take away.

So, ummm, Go Jays Go. But mostly, keep pounding them deep.

I love nature. Hell, I’m a farm boy at heart, no matter how antsy I might get after going more than 36 hours without being able to check my email. I could wax poetic for several paragraphs about the power of clear skies and green spaces and the sheer, absolute wonder that some of the world’s creatures can instill in just about anybody. Suffice to say that nature can be breathtaking in scope and awe-inspiring in its complexity. It’s one of the things in this world — along with whispered words of unconditional love, fresh Montreal bagels steaming in a brown paper bag and Pavel Datsyuk’s breakaway goals — that can move me to tears.

But … I also really love cities. I figured out a long time ago that I am addicted to being places where things are happening and to riding the kind of raw energy you can only find in places where too many people live too close together and things happen with a frenetic pace that suggests we are all trying to outrace some important galactic alarm clock that may emit a jarring buzz at any moment.

It’s one of the more troubling dichotomies in my life, actually. And if it wasn’t such a minor thing — I mean really, I like both of them in their own way, so it isn’t exactly bad — I’d probably worry about it a lot more. But all of this is merely a preamble towards a description of a trip to the capital of British Columbia, and why it’s a beautiful, noble and peaceful city … that I could never, ever inhabit for more than a week or two without losing my mind.

Cities shouldn’t be ashamed of what they are. They aren’t conservancies, they aren’t wildlife reserves and they aren’t small towns. They shouldn’t act like it. It demeans both the city and the truly idyllic towns and countrysides. If I was a little less offensive than I actually am, I’d feel bad about drawing a parallel about period actors dressing in blackface — do the real thing or don’t go there at all.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with providing parks or greenbelts or areas inside cities where nature can thrive. Cities shouldn’t be cold grids of grey stone, by any means. But they should still feel like cities. And Victoria, pretty as it is, doesn’t feel that way.

So maybe that’s why I spent the better part of a week trying to figure out if I liked it there or not. There’s a point that all growing towns eventually hit when they’ve outgrown the notion that they’re a “town”. Usually it happens when skyscrapers start going up, or a swell of developers moves in and begins to throw up condos like they’re hucking

darts at the sky. It doesn’t matter when it happens — for the record, once you have a big ol’ fucking legislature building with gilded radiators, you’re a city — but when it does, you’re simply not a small town anymore and you have to start keeping your grocery stores open later than 6 p.m. and you have to ensure that last call for the neighbourhood pub happens well after 11 p.m.

It is around this point when you also might want to begin expanding your public transportation system so that buses are reliable enough that people actually want to use them. It isn’t that buses in Victoria don’t go anywhere, it’s that they’re so infrequent as to be practically useless. I saw one bus all week with more than a dozen people on it — the one heading out to the university campus.

None of my British Columbian friends should take umbrage, by the way. Vancouver Island itself is staggeringly beautiful and I could easily settle down and live on Quadra Island for the rest of my life and I’m reasonably sure I’d be content, so long as I could get a satellite TV with the sports package and a reliable internet connection.

It’s not about the province, or the scenery or even the hippies, though they are so numerous in Victoria that someone  might consider allowing reasonable humans to bag and tag up to four of them a year, much the way the Quebec government allows farmers to cull the coyote population.

It’s about authenticity, and the way Victoria seems to eschew the more convenient aspects of city-hood in a misguided attempt to cast itself not as another city on the ocean, but as some sort of stoner’s Utopian dream of what a British Columbia city should feel like — lots of parks, lots of ocean, little need for police or other trappings of the metropolises … a slow life riding a vibe that’s dull but benignly friendly and won’t ever change much.

That’s fine for, you know, a place that doesn’t have 400,000 people and is the capital of the province. It’s not a bad thing to have a city that doesn’t cater to tourists and isn’t ashamed to be a little smaller and more low-key than those other Canadian cities that want more than anything to be considered along with the big boys. But surely there is a happy medium somewhere. I mean, by no means should I be able to spend a day walking around downtown and realize I’ve seen everything the travel brochure boasts about.

Museum? Check, all three exhibits. Legislature? Beautiful building, no politicians present. Harbour? Lots of boats, very pretty view. Chinatown? Saw all three blocks of it. Live music venues? I saw two of the three main ones (Sugar, and Hermann’s, the city’s jazz bar), and if I had been able to get tickets to the Talib Kweli show at Element, I would have managed to see the three best-known venues within a week.

Bookstores? Plentiful and wonderful, almost as plentiful as the fucking coffee shops. The aquarium? I stayed away after hearing depressing stories of a bunch of fish and a very depressed octopus. The Bug Zoo took about twenty minutes and Beacon Hill Park was a really pretty walk. But they do have baby goats for petting, and surprisingly you can spend about an hour doing that and not get bored.

Anyway, the point is that, when the locals tell you that one thing you absolutely have to do before you go is check out the local Value Village … and the best tourist attraction in town is a bunch of incredibly cute baby goats … I don’t even know what to think about Victoria as a “city”.

I feel like Victoria is a slacker teenager, and all of Canada’s other cities need to tell it to grow up and get a job somewhere.

And it would be all indignant, like “Duuuude, a job?! Stop being a slave to the machine. Why would I buy into your version of how the world should be, man? Buildings are just buildings, dude, and they’ll fall down one day. Like, everything man does ends in dust, bro. Don’t you see that these trees and these cute goats are like, so much more real than anything you’ve got in your ‘real’ cities?”

And also? Even in a hippie/stoner utopia, you’d definitely be able to find some munchies in your neighbourhood grocery store after 8 p.m. So get it together, Victoria. You’re like a beauty queen with a history of abuse — gorgeous, but something is definitely not right in there somewhere.

Aside from (sigh) Arkansas, Americans did some pretty decent shit on prop votes last night.

“Tonight’s results represent a sea change,” said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, which backed the Massachusetts and Michigan ballot proposals. “Voters have spectacularly rejected eight years of the most intense government war on marijuana since the days of ‘Reefer Madness.’”

Some nice votes on abortion and euthanasia, too.

Pretty good job all around. High five, USA.

Now if you could just get over the whole petrified-of-gay-marriage thing …

There’s surely going to be a final act in this damned play, so let’s get on with it already.

I understand too much about the nasty rules of life’s overarching narrative to believe that the third presidential debate is over, Barack Obama has a large enough lead to coast home and that Senator John McCain — who has sadly managed to turn himself into the villian of this piece — will not empty his bag of tricks in a last-ditch play to find at least one thing that can stem or reverse the tide.

These are important times and the muse of history demands a fitting conclusion. This story doesn’t end with a slow run up to an unsurprising vote while the world just kicks it and waits for an inevitable verdict. Can’t happen like that. Won’t happen like that. Good guys don’t triumph that easily, and if they do they don’t end up being the good guys.

So what happens now? When does the other shoe drop? What kind of shoe is it? When will the Republican masses get their long-awaited October surprise?

As it stands, here’s what you will be looking at for the next two-plus weeks: A McCain campaign hunting desperately for a silver bullet will be throwing anything and everything at the wall in the flailing hope that something, anything will stick to Obama.

If you want to get a true sense of what’s out there that might actually be considered as ammunition in the home stretch, you have to delve into the depths of the Republican strongholds.

I felt brave on a cold Tuesday morning, so I went there, and these — according to those who are desperate to bring about the downfall of Barack Obama — are the issues that need to be raised before America votes, Obama wins and the rest of the world breathes an enormous sigh of relief:

TREMENDOUS ISSUE NO. 1: Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Apparently Mr. Hussein is not an American citizen. Even though his birth certificate has been posted on factcheck.org, the Republican masses would like to see the “real” birth certificate. Which is not this one. This one is a fake. Why? Because it’s on factcheck.org, a biased website. So …. the angle of attack? Obama is NOT visiting his ailing grandmother in Hawaii. He has gone back there to help fake his own birth certificate (again, apparently) so that he can produce yet another birth certificate which will quiet all the people (meaning these Republicans) who were not satisfied with the first faked birth certificate. By the way, they are intimating in advance that the next one will be fake, too. If you would like to delve further into this theory, please check it out.

Obligatory retarded post on freerepublic.com about this theory: “I question the timing too. Sick grandma? When did he ever care about her before? He’s going over there to get his newly-forged copy of his birth certificate — it was too dangerous to have it FED-EXED. He’s going to crease it up in a letterfold and bring it
back in a book he took with him on the plane.” — More fun like that one, right here.

TREMENDOUS ISSUE NO. 2: OMG! And you thought Rev. Jeremiah Wright was bad. Wait until you hear about this dude that Obama talked to and mentioned in his book authored a book about having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl. And get this — this book is totally autobiographical, too. Not fictional at all. This dude is a sick and twisted pervert, the kind we stomp into the ground and leave bloody on the curb of life. His association with Barack Obama serves only to illustrate exactly how un-American and pro-sex-with-13-year-olds Barack Obama really is. If Obama was any kind of man, he would step up right now and categorically deny that he enjoys making sweet love to pubescent girls. But he won’t do that so we are left to guess. Was Obama trained in pro-kid-sex viewpoints by this man whom he has spoken to in the past? Or did he reach his pro-kid-sex stance on his own, through years of kid-fucking experience? A website named Confederate Yankee has all the information you need.

Bonus fun quote about this theory: (The headline on Free Republic says it all: “OBAMA SEX PERV SCANDAL”. But quotes are not hard to find, either) “I got the distinct feeling from something I read recently, that his grandfather was a pervert, too. He introduced (Obama) to this dirtbag and apparently, they all sat around drinking together. Someone else pointed out something interesting; that Davis states he molested a 13-year-old girl named Ann. They speculated this could be (Obama’s) mother and that this loser fathered (Obama) — they do look alot more alike than BO Sr. Apparently, Davis also lived in Kansas for a while.”

You can’t teach this kind of creativity, folks. But I’m more partial to this succint reply: “So, if true, we could end up with a Pedophile in Chief.”

Nice. Very nice. More like that here.

TREMENDOUS ISSUE NO. 3: This one is not crazy just disingenuous, and it will undoubtedly be used at the first sign of stagnating poll numbers for Obama. If I were a McCain adviser, I would certainly suggest they use it as soon as McCain has a good day in the polls.

The narrative goes thusly: Why can’t Barack Obama close the deal? Why do his supporters balk when the finish line is in sight? He rolled to a huge lead over Clinton before almost letting her come back to catch him (things didn’t quite happen exactly like that, but it’s close enough to drive the story). He built up a big lead during the summer, only to let john McCain close the gap after the convention. Now he’s built a nearly-insurmountable advantage, and his supporters are backing away? What is it about Obama that makes voters get cold feet at the last minute? Is it his arrogance in assuming he has already won? Is it laziness on the part of his campaign? Or is it something else — something voters can’t put their finger on, but intuitively understand: Electing Obama as President would be a big step in the wrong direction. Voters know this in their hearts, even if they are bombarded with “facts” from the “media” telling them that Obama is “the One”.

This is the line of attack I am expecting. I think it would resonate with independents, who are hopeful but are also a little afraid. It would certainly fire up the base and it also manages to inject, without being too blatant about it, the “otherness” that the Republicans must hope scares voters away from Obama at the last minute.

That, or a they’ll pull out a busted terror cell that was planning to attack America on the night of the election if Barack Obama was elected. That fits much more with the action-thriller of danger and International intrigue that could swing voters towards McCain in a time of fear.

Those are the sort of things I am waiting for. And I know that something wicked this way comes. The spider-sense is tingling. Historic shit like this doesn’t just happen in a cakewalk. And if it does happen that way, it shouldn’t. What are we going to tell our grandchildren we did in the three weeks leading up to an historic occasion? “Oh, we sat around and watched the poll numbers stay steady. Obama held a few rallies, McCain said some stuff and then we voted.”

Where’s the thrill of a narrow victory for the Forces of Good in that? I want my damned epic narrative arc — not an overdone denouement masquerading as the climax of an epic tale. If I wanted that I’d just watch The Return of the King on DVD.

(I just wanted to share the video)

Aaron Downey is a hockey player — a tough guy from the prairies who has carved out a career for himself in the NHL by being more than willing to fight anyone.

Sometimes it works out well for him.

Sometimes it really doesn’t.

But that’s not why I love Aaron Downey — though it is how I came across this clip. The best part starts at 1:08, but it’s all worth watching:

“I really take pride in philosophy. I’ve been reading for 12 years now. Books from Sigmund Freud to Plato to the great Norman Vincent Peale. I like books, you know? I like reading. I like self-development. I like enlightenment and spirituality. I think that one of the reasons we live is to kind of better ourselves every day. I got started back in 1995 … in the minor leagues with long bus trips. Just didn’t feel like staring out the window any more so I got into reading.”

That’s pretty awesome for an NHL tough guy. Aaron Downey, you just made my Monday a lot nicer.

(Keep watching after he talks about philosophy and you will hear Aaron Downey talk about yoga. Which is also kind of awesome.)

In our ceaseless quest to forcibly inject literature and poetry into the realm of professional sports, we are returning to the poignant haiku and the always-amusing limerick as a means of eloquently and succinctly previewing the coming season for every NHL team.

After all, if you can’t sum up a team’s potential in 17 syllables or a catchy rhyme scheme, then it’s not worth discussing. But we can, and we will, and we’ll do one division every couple of days for the next week or two.

We’ll begin with the NHL’s contribution to the ‘weakest division in sports’ debate: The Southeast Division

Last season:

1. Washington Capitals — 94 points
2. Carolina Hurricanes — 92 points
3. Florida Panthers — 85 points
4. Atlanta Thrashers — 75 points
5. Tampa Bay Lightning — 71 points

This season:

1. Washington Capitals
2. Carolina Hurricanes
3. Tampa Bay Lightning
4. Florida Panthers
5. Atlanta Thrashers

Washington Capitals

Ovie’s Russian friends

Make his winter happier

Ovechkin and Kozlov

Theodore still sucks

_______________

There was an ex-MVP ‘tender

Who tended to go on a bender

But he wouldn’t sip drinks,

he’d just fail at the rinks,

and be chained to the bench by December

Carolina Hurricanes

Now that Staal is signed

what more can we fret about?

Oh right, the defence

_______________

The Cup win is now three years gone

the fanbase is starting to yawn

‘Give us a contender,

or we might not remember

that hockey’s not played on a lawn.’

Tampa Bay Lightning

Franchise was remade

by ambitious millionaires

Not by hockey guys

_______________

A talented skater named Vinny

embarrassed his teammates at shinny,

to the point that they said,

while hanging their heads,

‘It’s clear now — he’s macro, we’re mini.’

Florida Panthers

Come to Florida!

Play some hockey and some golf!

Be home by April!

—————

It’s a tough life, being a Panther

and Bryan McCabe is not the answer

This ex-Leaf won’t aid

your team’s crusade

In fact, he’s a locker-room cancer

Atlanta Thrashers

Fall brings newborn hope

Hope that quickly disappears

when jerseys are donned

_______________

If a team plays in the ‘A’

and to see them nobody will pay,

do they even exist?

If they leave, are they missed?

Or can we just move them away?

Hockey in Atlanta, Georgia

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

… you can only hope to contain her.

This whole thing has now become a lolection.

I should quit the posts completely and devote my time to captioning pictures of Sarah Palin with “I can has veep nao?” and the like.

I could have spent the entire day at my computer, writing a new post every time I saw a Palin scandal, and I’d barely have time to keep up.

Remember when Hillary Clinton claimed the snipers were shooting at her? Aside from the gunfire, what’s the difference between saying that and claiming your refueling stopover was a trip to Ireland that counts as foreign policy experience?

From Politico today:

I wrote the other day that a Palin spokeswoman said trips to Germany, Kuwait and Ireland made up her foreign travel.

Two details worth clarifying:

The Ireland trip was a refueling stop on her trip to military installations in Germany and Kuwait, spokeswoman Maria Comella said.

Nice.

A couple of years ago, the overnight Montreal-Toronto bus that I was on stopped on a Reservation near Kingston, Ont. so that the driver could buy cheap smokes at 2 a.m.

I didn’t know had had experience in Native Affairs. That’s kind of cool.

Seriously?

As I type, in the last 36 hours we’ve found out that Sarah Palin’s daughter is pregnant with the child of a teen who admittedly doesn’t want kids; that Sarah believes the Iraq war is Godly; that she belonged (along with her husband) to an organization lobbying for Alaskan independence; that she ran a car wash into the ground in her younger days; that she has hired lawyers to protect her and her staff during a growing corruption probe; that she attempted to ban books from the library immediately after winning a mayoral election; that her own mother-in-law may not vote for her; that her staff tried to pass off a refueling stop as a “visit” to a country … and that she has a pastor just as crazy as Barack Obama’s.

Thirty. Six. Hours.

That’s why I’m writing this post. If Sarah Palin can get all that out there, I can at least update the blog twice.