As presumably even penguins in the Antarctic are now aware, on Sunday the Canadian Men’s hockey team lost to the US team for the first time since 1960; this day is now known as Black Sunday or, in the US, as the “Miracle on Ice” because that country ran out of ideas after inventing disco and they’ve just been stealing from the Japanese and the English ever since, and have to reuse old names.
This is what it looked like:
Seriously, that’s all you need to know about it, other than the one thing nobody knows: how much Brodeur took to throw the game.
And this is the smashingly effective Canadian Comeback:
Which means we don’t have to worry about things like this…
Have you ever, say, gone for dinner with some friends? To a Japanese restaurant? And one of the friends? Invited one of his friends, whom you didn’t know? And his friend? Turned out to be a bit of an ass? The kind of ass who wheels his bike into the restaurant and jams it between your knees? And then says, “Could you watch that for me? I’m too worried about it to leave it outside”?
Yeah. Me neither. And I’m over it anyway.
By the way, at the last the Critical Mass ride in Vancouver of which I heard details, they ran into a little old lady in a wheelchair. Who was crossing with the light.
The unbearable bikeness of being…bourgeois:
and a slightly edgier iteration of the mindset seen today on the Downtown Eastside:
Ladies and gentlemen, seek no further; we have our defining moment for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games:
For those of you too lazy to click the link, it’s hunky Dutch speedskater Sven Kramer coming off a gold-medal-winning performance to be greeted by an NBC reporter getting up in his grill and asking him the routine talking head questions like “where are you from” and “do you think you did well” and so on.
And he looks her in the eye and responds “Are you stupid?“
UPDATED because VANOC took down the first one, and this one is even longer, including her “how do you feel” and his “Ha, I feel pretty goooooood!”
I’m being tremendously lazy today because I spent far too much time trying to get iTunes to do what I want it to do, which is move certain songs off my CD drive onto my iPhone without erasing every song on my iPhone right now or forcing me to upload to the iPhone all the goddam ABBA and crap that’s on the hard drive, but Nooooooooooooo, Steve won’t have it.
Seriously, you KNOW you’ve put your stamp on a company when even their smallest products reproduce your pathologies in perfect detail.
Anyhoooooooo… Today, thanks to Sam Macmillan at 6S and Michael Allison at the Wilcox Group, I got to ride in the convoy of the Olympic Torch today, although I did not actually see the flame, which is neither here nor there but somewhere else, which is where it would be if it was, isn’t it?
Now, perhaps we need a little background…
I live on the Downtown Eastside, and the Olympics have, for literally the past 2 years, been a huge political shitstorm of Katrina-esque proportions. That the Olympics would take place regardless of how popular the No Olympics movement became was clear from the beginning and if there’s one thing my time working at Greenpeace taught me, it’s that by participating in useless protests that will never result in change, people bleed off their urge to act and, thus, prevent themselves from changing the world.
And I have a problem with that.
So, surrounded as I have been for the past 24 months by nonstop political sloganeering from all sides of the issue, essentially all of the mindshare I’ve given the Olympics has been equal-opportunity pushback, as in “WILL YOU ALL SHUT UP AND LEAVE ME ALONE? AND YOU!THERE! SUCK IT UP, THE OLYMPICS ARE GOING TO HAPPEN WHETHER YOU WHINE ABOUT IT IN PUBLIC OR NOT! AND YOU! THERE! MY WHOLE GODDAM COUNTRY IS A FREE SPEECH ZONE SO SUCK IT YOU’RE NOT IN BEIJING ANYMORE!” and equally pointed words to those effects.
Although it was cool when my boyBono said “No Olympics on Stolen Land” in the concert to which I didn’t buy a ticket to because I assumed, wrongly, that they’d be too expensive. Which they were not, and serves me right for not investigating, but oh well, such is the cost of pessimism.
So, as I remarked over at Trueslant, my ability to get past the politicking to connect emotionally with the actual sports and internationalism has been crippled (yes, deliberate word choice, suck it). Then again, apathy is a national characteristic, so maybe I’m just being a Good Canadian.
So, it was both nice and remarkable that, given all that backstory, Michael and Sam decided to pick me as one of the 2 bloggers to get a ride-along today (the other was the (in)famous John Chow) but they did (boy, I sure snookered them, didn’t I, and now I’m gonna hear from all the “billiards” PC-ists, aren’t I oh yes I am).
So, behold the live-tweeted timeline of a conversion. I’m really, truly grateful to them for inviting me along, because not even a cynic like me can resist seeing, say, 10,000 people in a single block in Deep Cove, all dressed in red and white and cheering their semifrozen faces off and freakin’ cowbelling like their lives depended on it.
Stuck in traffic behind #Olympic torch on The Reservation in North Van can’t see a darn thing
@JohnChow we will see you soon. Why didn’t they pick speedy runners? Even I can run this fast!
@busybeeblogger It IS fun, I’m really glad I got the chance
@jeremylim you can ask I guess. They picked me out of thinair as far as I know [in reply to the obvious “how do I get in on that ridealong action question]
@WoundedCrane are they fancy? [she said she wanted Swiss cowbells for her dogs; I thought maybe Swiss House had special commemorative cowbells, or at least commemorative cows]
@WoundedCrane deep cove [in response to “where are you that it’s raining?]
@jeremylim thanks you will get there [in response to “Nonsense. You’re highly prolific and very much loved. Wish I were the same so I could get in that van!”]
John chow says 300m is one Vegas block and I say 2 furlongs we all have diff frames of reference #van2010#olympics
@WilcoxPR thx 4 the rt. 10,000 ppl in deep cove on just 2 blocks [the PR agency behind the ride-along starts contributing to the convo]
Explaining the Raven pub to my carmates for #van2010 [specifically, their Stupid Hot Wings. Story goes; they have 5 levels of heat, and if you can eat the Stupid Hot Wings plate, your whole meal is free. Nobody’s ever won. Waitress says “why do you think they’re called STUPID hot?]
With just under three hours to go in our 24-hour blogathon, it’s critical to remember to stretch and move to maintain flexibility and alertness. Whether you have chosen Track A (alcoholic) or Track B (bore) routes to your Blogathon experience, at this point you should be capable of running through several of the following yoga poses as you are waiting for your post to upload.
cracked. I’m thirsty! 
raincoaster 