I used to be in a band called the Fluorescent Puppies... actually not, but I'm trying to kill time while I decide if this concept is cool, horrifying, or both. The above image is not created through Photoshop or using photography tricks. The dog really glows red. Using the red protein found in sea anemones, the "cloned beagle that glows could help researchers to model human disease...." Or, instead, we maybe don't need jack'o'lanterns on Halloween anymore.
I'm not one to take a bunch of pictures, but I really enjoy the medium, and I especially like what Erik Johansson does with digital manipulation. Check out the link under the above picture for about a dozen more.
Concerning the death of originality in the summer blockbuster movie season, snippets of a life lived in and around hockey and...
by special request...a special reading of a letter from Linus Torvalds explaining the penguin as the Linux logo as read by... Morgan Freeman!
I think Freddie Mercury would be proud of the time and dedication it must have taken to produce this - although he may have preferred some spandex be involved. Just goes to show how one can find music anywhere. It's a little bit hypnotic as well. I can't believe I just watched a tech junkyard create music for six minutes... I need help!
Perhaps the lamest Hanna Barbera show ever (and as much as I loved a lot of their stuff, they did have some stinkers). This show was kind of like Wild Kingdom cut with shots of B-actors in skins. And all this glory was narrated by Burgess Meredith, the Penguin in the original Batman series and Mickey from Rocky.
Another brilliant turn of Cookie Monster as Alistair Cookie on Monsterpiece Theatre doing "Conservations With My Father". Everything with Cookie Monster is an instant classic and here the blue fuzzball goes "green"... maybe he should be called eCookie Monster... "Me get you drift Pop!"
Never let it be said that the iPod touch cannot be used for a long form blog post. I said in a recent podcast that I never thought I'd be podcasting about hockey, but I'm Canadian, and after some 70 or so podcasts and a couple hundred blog entries, I think I'm entitled come playoff season. As I sit in a Montana's in Mississauga (restaurant chain for the uninitiated) I am watching the NHL playoffs on multiple TVs and recalling a few memorable times that hockey has influenced my life.
The only time I ever felt like a sports hero was at age seven when I scored an overtime goal on a breakaway and, for the first time in my life, intentionally lifted the puck off the ice for the winner. And while I enjoyed many other moments playing hockey, that moment ranked right up there.
A couple of decades later I had bit more of a surreal hockey moment when I spent the one semester if my post-secondary life in a university residence during Teachers' College. Sitting in our floor's TV lounge/common area, a group of us foul- mouthed Canadians in a US Teacher Ed. program (all guys in the room at the time mind you - and at a university that still bore the vestiges of a Franciscan monestary... save your Catholic jokes for later) learned that Mario Lemieux had been stricken with cancer in the prime of his career. In the five months I spent in that dorm, I never heard the place so quiet... eerily so. You wouldn't think that a collection of some of the most misogynist mouths I'd ever heard could be stunned into silence at the news of a hockey player's illness. No one spoke for several minutes, or at least until the next gratuitous sex-filled beer commercial anyway.
The last hockey memory comes in the form of a trip to Las Vegas. The moment itself was hardly earth-shattering, but did suffice in conveying a vast gulf between two culture. On the one occasion I've been to Vegas in October, I happened to be sitting in the MGM Sportsbook in front of a sea of television screens (a place I often refer to as Valhalla). That night was a major playoff game between the Red Sox and the Yankees and the room was full of fans in official MLB attire hootin' and hollerin' as their teams played what I'm sure was an amazing. My friend and I, however, sat at the far end of the room watching two small screen that were playing NHL games. It was the opening night of the regular season. The games were insignificant. I think Minnesota and the Ducks may have been involved. And we were in our glory.
There was a popular beer campaign a few years back that rifled off a dozen reasons to claim "I AM Canadian". And while I would never claim that Canadians have a sole claim on the game that I was raised with, I never watched one of those commercials without thinking, how many people could explain the following: Peter Puck, putting the biscuit in the basket, straddling the blue line, going roof, Savardian Spinnerama, neutral zone trap, or why 92 goals or 215 points in a season are feats of biblical proportions.
If you haven't seen the character of Gavin from the Kids in the Hall, do yourself a favor and check out this classic sketch at the Butcher Shop. As with most slightly bizarre humor, you'll probably either love or hate it, but that's what the blog's all about. If you like it, there are a ton more over on YouTube.
Cow's eyes, dog's heads, old phonebooks are ingedients in what? Gavin'll tell you.
I never thought I'd be podcasting about hockey, but next to the other six seasons: Winter, Spring, Construction, Summer, Fall, and TV Premiere, NHL Playoff Season is right up there in prompting a two month anticipation of great televised sports.
In as much as I believe that any product of a culture can help to define at least one piece of the culture that spawned it, hockey helps to define the entire Canadian culture for the past century.
