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the very definition of “lose/lose”

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

I confess I didn’t do the math myself. I’d been wondering whose idea of good idea it’d been to go into the NHL’s wickedest conference with the goaltending tandem of Andrew Raycroft and Peter Budaj. (I also have some issues with building around guys who the Leafs don’t want.) But it took a Denvoid columnist to point out that the Avs wanted to be under the cap b/c the Nugs are so desperately over their own cap, paying mad luxury tax.

So now the Nugs have dumped Marcus Camby for…the right…to swap…a second. Round. Draft pick next year.

With the Clippers.

Let’s recap. The Nuggets need to dump some salary, so they jettison the MVP of the past 3 or 4 years to a team now capable of competing with them for the last playoff spot. The Nuggets now boast one center, a guy named Steven Hunter, who played 19 games last year, and zero other players taller than 6-9. (Nene’s listed at 6-11, but is actually 6-8.)

So the Nuggets are now considerably worse than they were, while, and I can’t emphasize this enough, improving their direct competitors for the final playoff spot, and still not actually getting under the cap. And the Avs are still treading water, riding a silver rocket straight to third.

Chris Collision
Filed in despair, utter despair, darkness descends, pretty much every team but the Avs can tongue my rectum, closely reasoned analysis, Collision | Comments (7)

if you really need them…

Sunday, July 13, 2008

I would respectfully like to dedicate this post to Sami Kapanen, who on the ice never tried less than his hardest, and in NHL2k3 was one hell of a player.

Since moving to California, I’ve had to enact and endure some changes. One such change is that I’m now involved in television production. One project is a relaunched A-Team. This isn’t the JefCanucklehead’s reimagineering of the squad, it’s just a cheapo syndicated update/knockoff. I’m pitching the season as a very formulaic collection of half-hour espisodes.

In each one, somebody does some evil, the victim seeks out the A-Team, they have a bit of insightful debate on the issue, then they go shoot up the place and B.A. gets to say something pithy. In the synopses below, each episode is reduced to:
Who Gets Shot Up (and why)
What B.A. has to say on the matter.

Please enjoy!

  • Kid hires the A-Team to shoot up his school.
    B.A.: Never let anyone get away with bullying you!

  • A-Team shoots up a small cell of Nazis, after they firebomb a church, killing seven.
    B.A.: Churches are an important institution within the black community!

  • A-Team shoots up a small brewery who won’t offer benefits to domestic partners.
    B.A.: Discrimination based on sexual orientation is wrong! And don’t even get me started on the fallacies underpinning state support of the institution of marriage!

  • A-Team shoots up an abortion clinic, after a little girl’s mom terminates the baby brother she always wanted.
    B.A.: Fathers have rights too!

  • A-Team shoots up the offices of a basketball team that breaks its lease and relocates after 39 years in the city.
    B.A.: Honor your damn’ contract!

  • A-Team shoots up Vatican City for their role in the AIDS epidemic in Africa.
    B.A.: Postively genocidal to ban condoms based on an abstract principle! Lives were at stake, and the science couldn’t be more clear! Condoms work!

  • A-Team shoots a college student who kept calling them the ASS-Team in the comments on their MySpace page, and kept editing their Wikipedia entry to the effect that they were the AssToMouth Team.
    B.A.: My position on cyber-bullying is similar to my position on bullying!

  • A-Team shoots up an Indian Casino.
    B.A.: Even though you have historically gotten the shaft, and I respect your plight, these casinos essentially levy a tax on the poor, further impoverishing the most vulnerable element of our society!

  • A-Team shoots up the offices of the Screen Actors Guild.
    B.A.: You’re giving unions a bad name!

  • A-Team shoots Brian Grant.
    B.A.: Coming out of Xavier, you said you’d sign with the Kings for a Dr. Pepper and a bag of Doritos! Then you held out through the first month of the regular season! you’re a liar, you’re a greedhead, and you’re a terrible nutritionist!

  • A-Team shoots Aerosmith.
    B.A.: When’s the last time you wrote even a halfway decent song? 1987!? Fuck you!

  • A-Team shoots up Monsanto Corp.
    B.A.: Stop putting corn derivatives in everything!

  • A-Team shoots up Tina Weymouth’s office.
    B.A.: You completely ruined the New Yorker!
    Face: I think you mean Tina Brown. This woman was the bass player for the Talking Heads.
    B.A. Shit!
    Murdoch: I know, right?
    B.A. Aw, man…I loved Remain in Light, you should know that. Please accept my sincerest apologies.

  • A-Team shoots up WalMart.
    B.A.: What a deadly and vicious cycle you’ve established! You sell cheap goods, but you pay your employees so poorly they can’t even afford to shop where they work! And to buy goods cheaply enough to sell them cheaply, you force production and distribution companies to pay their own employees poorly! Smaller companies can hardly compete with you, and even their employees suffer! It’s monstrous!

  • A-Team shoots al-Qaida
    B.A.: The Pentagon we’ll give you. Totally viable military target. But the World Trade Center? Not only had nothing to do with anything, it had already been bombed! Get original already, guys, buy a clue.

  • A-Team shoots up Israel.
    B.A.: You go ahead and show me in your little book where YHWH says ‘never give an inch‘. Show me! Your asinine saber-rattling and horror of compromise is going to start World War Three. Seriously. Which of your rabbis thinks that’s a good idea? You make me sad, tired.

  • A-Team shoots Cheney and Wolfowitz.
    B.A.: You have any idea how much it costs to fill up this van?

  • A-Team shoots up the oldest distillery of Jose Cuervo.
    B.A.: Tequila is actually pretty good! Why do you have to give it a bad name by bottling and selling turpentine?

  • A-Team shoot a random televangelist.
    B.A.: Your cynical exploitation of the poorest among us is despicable! Taking money from the lowest of the low to gild your mansions? Who do you think you are–the Catholic Church?

  • A-Team shoot this guy in a bar who kept insisting that, as a Lutheran, he was “pretty much the same as a Catholic”.
    B.A.: Hey, motherfucker, I’d like you to meet old buddy Martin Luther! Hey, Marty?
    Face (in disguise): Yeah?
    B.A.: What you think? This Lutheran a Catholic?
    Face: Begging your indulgence, B.A., I got 95 Theses, he gonna cry 96 Tears, and he gonna have at least 99 Problems in about 2 seconds!
    B.A.: Booyakah! Take this motherfucker to South Central!

  • A-Team shoot up General Motors.
    B.A.: So…you’re making a 40% margin on precisely those vehicles that are worst for our Mother the Earth? And you didn’t put any portion of those monies toward research of alternative fuels?

  • A-Team shoots Ben Stein.
    B.A.: You want intelligent design (so-called, in fact sic) taught in our schools? What, fool, do you not enjoy investing in American companies staffed by intelligent, well-educated workers?

    Bonus Episode!

  • A-Team kick the living hell out of Robert Projansky of Portland, OR, who wrote in the 30mar2k8 New York Times:

    Complaining about fan boorishness and misbehavior at Ranger games is like complaining that brothels treat women as sex objects. Who goes to see a sportsmanship-free game of everyday criminal and occassionally felonious violence, of which fistfighting is an integral part?

    Special guest–Jarome Iginla!

    B.A.: Whoo-ee! Jarome, two minutes for hitting that fool so hard!

Chris Collision
Filed in closely reasoned analysis, Collision | Comments (0)

happy birthday, Canada!!

Thursday, June 5, 2008

SMOKE POINT!

This is a huge series of novels, innovating the genre known as chefspionage. NYC’s hottest cook, brilliant, bisexual Alix Tarragon, and her tough-as-nails lesbian roommate Abby Toir cater to any reader with a taste for action! They’ve garnered–and garnished!–accolades like:
“More than just the pinot is noir in these hard-hitting yarns!”
“This series does for mystery-loving foodies what Don Pendelton’s Mack Bolan did for alcoholic, dress-wearing semi-literates!”
“Chefspionage never tasted so good!”

The following is a list of the ones I have accumulated:

  • Shallot Grave
  • Can’t Stand the Heat
  • With a Rolling Pin
  • Over Uneasy
  • Romeo Was Julienned
  • A Mincing Menace
  • Death Takes an Endive
  • The Chopping Black’s Chopping Block
  • The Butcher’s Knife, The Baker’s Life
  • Glazed and Confused
  • The Caper of Crepes with Capers
  • Shanking the Lamb
  • Hearse & Turf
  • Prep Cook, Punk Dishwasher
  • Actual, Literal Death by Chocolate
  • Table for None
  • Private Party–Where Somebody Gets Murdered
  • The Hungry Arayan and his Ghoulish Gulash (for teens)
  • Flapjacking Off (adults only)
  • Charity, Chastity, Prudence, Hope, Cilantro, and Murder: Why Joke Names for Your Six Daughters are a Bad Idea (They’ll Kill You)
  • One Spicy Meatball
  • Meet…Cleaver!!
  • The Squab Squabble
  • Braising Cain
  • Salt and Battery
  • Blood Boiling Over Easy
  • Tossing the Chef’s Salad (adults only)
  • Hollandaise in the Sun
Chris Collision
Filed in Smoke Point, Collision | Comments (0)

titles go here: a rope of sand

Thursday, June 5, 2008


on & on south of heaven…
OR
as the world spins in darkness, Kris Draper imagineers the downfall of all mankind…
AKA
another theory (and another season) shot to shit:
the Stanley Cup Finals are decadent and depraved…in all the wrong ways

Harlan Ellison paraphrases Mark Twain such that ‘if you believe human existence is any kind of direct manifestation of God’s will, then you are forced to the inescapable conclusion that God is a malign thug’. Last night’s…unpleasantness proves this point yet again. It’s been a rough stretch of postseason for an Avs man–for the last month, watching a hockey game has felt like staring into the Eye of Sauron, and I quake and tremble even to address matters this indirectly.

(Don’t pity me, though, Gentle Reader: reserve that poison for our own Canada, who hitched his fan-wagon this year to his hometown Canucks, then to the Capitals, finally to the Pens. If franchises had eyes, I imagine they’d see his fandom descending like a ring-shaped life preserver…made of stout, stern iron.)

In the sickening aftermath of the inevitable, I recieved communiques from all the far-flung CtC correspondants:
“Fuck.”
“Crap.”
“How long do you think the flight is, from Pittsburgh, back to the Death Star?”

Well, my friend, they have a connecting flight in Hell, to drop off McCarty, Holmstrom, and Ron Perlman, so they’ll be flying for quite a while…

-Chuk

Btw: this explains a lot.

Chris Collision
Filed in darkness descends, Chris Osgood is going to the Hall of Fame...think about, pretty much every team but the Avs can tongue my rectum, closely reasoned analysis, Collision | Comments (0)

it’s all just a vain parade

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Well, that’s just fucking great. The Avs rehire Granato, which might not seem like a catastrophe…it might not seem like a big deal at all. But it’s a telling sign of where exactly the Avs think they are, and how they think they should act. From my vantage point in the East Bay, I had a great view of Ron Wilson getting sacked for getting knocked out in the second round: Ratto’s commentary the next day was headlined “Wilson firing defensible”. The hilarity of that analysis aside, at least the Sharks think they’re a big-time team, and they’re trying to act in the way that big-time teams act.

Granato? He’s a human concession speech from upper management. Every second he’s on the bench, he’s visibly overmatched by his task, visibly freaked out and incredibly tense. Just exactly the guy you want helming the goddamned ship. (He’s got Crawford’s demeanor without Crawford’s results. This…is sub-optimal.)

More than just sucking at his job, Granato actually represents the entire city of Denver admitting it’s not a first-rank American city. For a minute there, Denver put on some airs, and actually got away with it! I mean, four championships between 1996 and 2001, a couple of splashy trades for the Nuggets, including the definitive player of his generation…the town was acting like it was New Fucking York.

And now, the Nuggets experiment has pretty officially failed, the Broncos have sucked–and sucked boringly–since Elway retired, and the Avs throw in the fucking towel not three MONTHS after getting the band back together. I mean, we know what happened last time Granato coached Sakic, Forsberg and Foote, and I can’t think that adding six years is going to make that a more successful equation.

Clearly the town is ready to settle for its actual status as a minor outpost on the high prairie. It’ll have second-tier sports teams that the locals can kinda get behind and that can get stomped in Christmas Day games, never make it out of the second round, have a bunch of numbers retired that nobody from out of town recognizes.

Congrats, rest of the Northwest. Now the real cultural heavy hitters can run the show, with Calgary and Minnesota duking it out with occasional flares of try from Vancouver. At least Edmonton is still stupid, boring, and irrelevant. You know, as inept as Vancouver is proving to be, the Avs might still be able to compete effectively for third!

Mmm…third. Kinda comforting, third.

Chris Collision
Filed in Idiots, pretty much every team but the Avs can tongue my rectum, closely reasoned analysis, Collision | Comments (0)

Thrashers lose another wrong guy.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

And who gives a shit?

-Chuk

Chris Collision
Filed in pretty much every team but the Avs can tongue my rectum, closely reasoned analysis, Collision | Comments (0)

Overlord, Underdog

Sunday, October 21, 2007

I’m getting sick of hearing about the Penguins-Capitals/Crosby-Ovechkin rivalry. Well, it’s not that I’m sick of hearing about it, it’s that I’m sick of the two separate, yet related, rivalries being treated as the same thing. Back in 2005, I declared what I thought to be the obvious:”Crosby is overrated. Ovechkin, that’s the guy.” Now, I may, possibly, have been a bit wrong on the Crosby side, but, Ovechkin is a fucking tank, with more natural goal scoring ability than anyone I have ever watched (possible exceptions: Pavel Bure (doesn’t count - dead to me) Wayne Gretzky (still think Ovechkin wins) Jaromir Jagr (loses on account of ever having that hair) Mario Lemieux (close one… Ovie)), and he has as many assists as he does goals. In terms of a personal rivalries it’s pretty close, probably gotta give it to Crosby though, as much as that fucking tears my balls off to say. Now on the team to team rivalry side, it is nowhere near as close, no matter how ESPN or TSN or whoever wants to portray it. The Penguins, in addition to Crosby, have Malkin, Staal, and Fleury (i.e. some of the best young players in hockey) and several seasoned vets. Now, as for the Caps, you’ve got Ovechkin, Semin (heh-heh), Backstrom, and a bunch of (sorry, Olie) fogies. Sure, they have some other young guys who might turn out, but none of them stand out yet Considering that Semin (heh-heh) is out, and Backstrom is not up to the level of Malkin or Staal (yet), and that the vets on the squad just don’t match up to the Pens vets, and, that, no matter how much I like Olie Kolzig, he is no Marc-Andre Fleury, you have yourself a one sided situation. Ovechkin is a straight up badass, no doubt. But under such lopsided circumstances, even he can’t put that team on his back and carry them over to the promised land (of fairly meaningless, regular season wins, over a manufactured rivalry. OK, all wins are meaningful, but it’s not the playoffs.). The Capitals have some work to do, and I hope, for Ovechkin’s, Semin’s (heh-heh), Backstrom’s and hockey in general’s sakes, that they get it done. The Ovechkin/Crosby rivalry? That’s real. Caps/Pens? Not yet.

jefcanuk
Filed in Crosby drools, Ovechkin rules, closely reasoned analysis, jefcanuk | Comments (1)

Atlanta Thrashers Fire the Wrong Guy. Surprise.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Okay. I admit it. I’m a Thrashers fan.

This may not go over well, as I’m supposed to be a Guy Who Knows Something About Hockey—and I DO know enough to be a little bit ashamed—but doggone it, I like the Thrashers. They were my home team for the three miserable years I spent in that horrible, humid, shitpile the world calls Atlanta, and now, in retrospect, with my NHL Centre Ice, and the more cosmopolitan worldview that comes from being able to cheer on anyone who stomps the Leafs or Wings, I STILL like to watch the world’s most defensively irresponsible team score pretty goal after pretty goal and get crushed anyway.

When I got the message from jefcanuck this morning that Atlanta Spirit, LLC had gone and fired coach Bob, I was of two minds about the whole thing. On one hand, my guys are in the basement—deep in the basement. On the other hand, they were much worse before Coach Bob rolled into town.

Could be that it wasn’t entirely Hartley’s fault?

Yeah, we rolled over in the first round and got raped by the Rangers, and played for shit along the way—but Hartley won us the Division title, and gave us a season over .500 with little-to-no goaltending, a half-decent defensive corps, and just one center worth his weight in used Tampax. That’s gotta count for something—especially when you take into consideration that the Thrasher’s megalomaniacal GM was dragging his dick through the sand all season, just waiting to fuck our guys for the foreseeable future.

Which brings us to the crux of the problem. Don Waddell is a hate criminal.

… and Hartley’s replacement as “interim coach” until they can find another sucker willing to take on a charity case. “Interim coach”. My ass.

Don Waddell is the idiot who let Marc Savard go cheap after a 98-point season, rested all of our goaltending hopes on an untested and fragile young goaltending prospect, sold the future of the Thrash for the short-lived and ill-fated rental of an (arguably) over-the-hill Keith Tkatchuk, built a solid foundation of nothing out of god-knows-what bullshit scouting reports to guarantee that there is Absolutely No Talent in the Thrashers system, and fired the coach that tried for five long years to pull his fat, flabby chestnuts out of the fire.

Hartley will survive. There’s another team out there for a cup-winning coach who almost managed to transform the Atlanta Thrashers from a trailer-park-escort-agency-on-ice into a cup contender.

If Waddell had a decent bone in his body, he’d be turning in his resignation 10 minutes ago—and if I wasn’t so goddamned lazy, I’d be burning his double-crossing ass in effigy.

So Fuck Him—I hope the Thrashers lose every game from now until he swallows a double-fistful of pills and joins Bill Wirtz on the Hale-Bopp Comet to hell.

Keep your head up.

pest
Filed in Idiots, The Pest, Rants | Comments (1)

Boul of Dicks

Friday, October 12, 2007

I am not at all shocked that Boulerice got 25 games for his crossfacecheck on Ryan Kesler. The way the league has been handing out suspensions lately, he was gonna get a big one. What I am surprised about is that I felt myself thinking it was too long. Every hockey fan who knows me knows that I am a raging homer (Pest and Collision insert ‘raging homo’ joke here) and that I will vilify every player who has wronged a Canuck, and give martyr status to any Canuck injured or slapped with a suspension. So, when Boulerice commits a suspension worthy offense against Kesler, it’s my time to shine, right? Well, yeah, a little, sure, take Boulerice out back behind GM place and shoot him in the face and all that. But, it’s a little half-hearted, knowing that Colin Campbell uses each of these stupid incidents to set tougher and tougher precedent so that, pretty fuckin’ soon, a good heads-up hip check will get you two years in the State Pen. Couple that with the fact that it’s the same number of games as Chris Simon got for slashing Ryan Hollweg in the face and only five more games than the much less fucked up Downie incident and you have one conflicted and confused Jefcanuk. I mean, fuck, if this is 25 games then the Simon slash is 30-35 and Downie is 5-10. How about a little consistency? But no, Campbell doesn’t care about consistency, he cares about handing out the longest suspensions he can get away with. He is Gary Bettman’s bulldog, pushing the players, teams and fans around, forcing them into a Family Fun Center NHL. Fuck that. I am glad Boulerice got 25 games, but I hate that it furthers a fucked up agenda.

jefcanuk
Filed in Uncategorized | Comments (4)

Tard Wrangling

Monday, October 8, 2007

Kevin Lowe is an idiot, and by that I mean ‘having a mental age of less than three years old and an intelligence quotient under 25′, but by that I also mean, he is Mike Milbury and Bobby Clarke, rolled into one hateful, weasly, asinine ‘man’. Sure, he fields a playoff worthy team nearly half the time (wow), and he pulled off renting Chris Pronger (who almost single handedly
won the Oilers a cup), but he is on the road to alienating fans, players, and other GM’s to such an extent that the aforementioned Mike and Bobby show will have to admit that they’ve been out jackassed and kneel at his feet sopping up the pearly goo of his ‘wisdom’. So, I am a little intrigued by the news that the Oilers have given Lowe a four year contract extension . I tend to think that after such a monumental collapse last season, that you would let Lowe sweat and see if all his fucking around with restricted free agents pays off. But no, the Edmonton Investor Group decided to lock that big brain up! Way to go, guys! Mark my words, the Oilers will be in Portland, Oregon at the end of those four years…

In other news, well known moron Sean Avery has been sidelined by well known pest, and my new hero, Chris Neil. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t root for guys to get hurt. Ever. But I do root for guys to get their comeuppance. Avery talks a lot of shit and, to see him get dropped makes me feel somewhat satisfied. Plus, now Avery can hurl all sorts of bullshit at minorities that work at New York area hospitals during his regular visits…

jefcanuk
Filed in Idiots, Kevin Lowe, jefcanuk | Comments (1)