Best and Worst of 2010 - football

Best and Worst of 2010. Football is played on the pitch, so only football moments make both of these. The Cabinda attack, the various outbursts of racist idiocy in the stands, the farcical 2018/2022 campaigns and the farcical 2018/2022 decisions, while obviously far more horrible moments for football and the world football community than any mere match, I will omit. As I will omit the literally endless moan from Ferguson, Wenger, Mourinho, Benitez, Redknapp and their ilk that makes football coverage so depressing.

Best of 2010

1. Watford 3 QPR 1 on my own TV screen. Deeeeeeeeeelightful. Tore em apart.

2. Uruguay-Ghana in the World Cup quarterfinal. Some of the best football I have ever seen at a World Cup, a match that had everything. Too bad about the penalties.

3. Blackpool 4 Wigan 0. If I hadn't been watching it I wouldn't have believed it. This was heel-on-the-throat football.

4. Matty Burrows scoring that goal in the 92nd minute of a 0-0 game for Glentoran. Holy. Frig.

5. New Zealand 1 Italy 1. I enjoyed this 100x more than I "should" have, which is why I so often tell the beautiful-gamers to go suck eggs.

Worst of 2010.

1. Canada 0 Peru 2 at BMO Field, Toronto. Gets the #1 position because I was there in person. What a nightmare. Match was a lot fun with good friends and the Voyageurs crew, so not really a terrible memory overall, but the worst footballing moment of the year by a long way.

2. Every moment of England's shambolic World Cup campaign.

3. The Netherlands, an excellent side of good players, eschewing football to kick lumps out of Spain in the World Cup Final. Gets extra demerits for the grand stage.

4. The whole of a frankly dire African Cup of Nations tournament that never fired at all. A sad retrenchment for a tournament that had been moving from strength to strength.

5. This one's for everyone who tackled with two feet this year. Note to referees - you can't do this without leaving your feet. It's impossible (try it sometime). It's therefore always, always dangerous play.

120% of Americans have an opinion about mumble mumble gurble

Nice math there, Fox News.

I Am Honoured

To have received Godd Till's "TRUE HERO OF FREEDOM AWARD".

I shall cherish it all my days.

Pat Burns 1952-2010

[Note: I wrote this for publication, elsewhere, a couple of months ago. Things fell through and got difficult, and I meant to just put it up myself and never got around to it, and then Pat passed away, today, before I could publish this. Which was indolent and stupid of me, but oh well. We beat ourselves up for these things, perhaps unnecessarily. I just wanted to say thanks, and I was too sluttish and lazy to do it before it was too late. Sigh. So it goes.]

Take me to the logical starting point...

On June 1, 1988, Pat Burns was named head coach of the Montreal Canadiens. He was 36 years old, and many fans had never heard of him at all.

Not everyone now remembers the time before the Senators returned to Ottawa. In those years, Ottawa was a hotbed of junior hockey, one of the best junior hockey cities in the country (yes, even including the West). With two major junior teams in two leagues and several thriving Tier II teams, the wintertime Citizen was packed with junior hockey talk and sometimes not much else.

This is where Pat Burns learned his trade, as coach of the Hull Olympiques in the Q, bringing along players like Lucky Luc Robitaille, Stephane Matteau, and Benoit Brunet; very nearly winning the 1986 Memorial Cup but losing the final to Guelph. And it was in those copies of the Citizen, read on March Breaks and Christmas vacations with my mom in Ottawa, that I first became aware of Pat Burns.

After leaving Hull, Burns went to Sherbrooke for a year to coach the AHL Canadiens, no doubt helped by the fact that he was basically a local (Stanstead, the town where Burns is from and Magog, where he lives today, form a tight little triangle with Sherbrooke, which is about 40 minutes up Autoroute 55 from Stanstead).

Less than a year later, he was appointed to the most uncompromising job in hockey, bar Viktor Tikhonov’s.

To call it a meteoric rise is to laughably underestimate the situation. Burns was 36 years old. Few thought he was ready. Thankfully there was a distraction.

Everyone wanted to talk about one thing. Pat Burns was a former cop.

Former cop became, immediately, one of the touchstone tropes in Canadian sportswriting. It would endure. For fifteen years. Pat Burns, former Gatineau cop. It was how he was defined. And he looked the part, and fit the part, and played the part, in both official languages. He had that cop’s spreading middle, from riding in a cop car, meals on the run, late-night paperwork. He had a cop’s direct way of talking. He had a dramatic and luxuriant cop moustache, except when he didn’t, and when he didn’t you remembered his upper lip as the place that moustache used to be. He had a cop’s incipient jowls. He had a cop’s focus on security. He had an 80s cop’s high, brushed-back hair, receding notably but not ridiculously at the temples. He had a cop’s hair-trigger temper. He had a cop’s charm-you smile. He had a cop’s Irish name, and a cop’s Irish face, like a red fist when he was chewing out a referee.

If he hadn’t shown up on La Soiree du Hockey as the head coach of the Canadiens, you’d have utterly believed him on Lance et Compte and He Shoots, He Scores as a wearied but bulldog detective investigating one of Pierre Lambert’s teammates mixed up in a gently scary drug operation with two brown-skinned, jheri-curled Colombians.

And it would have worked. Because, oddly unlike how these things work in the real world, Pat Burns really was a cop. Gatineau at the time, and today, is a suburb but also a bit of a party town - home to some rough bars and a few rough customers, but mostly a lot of teenagers coming over the river to drink. Burns’s handling of teenaged junior hockey players was probably not a lot different from his handling of teenaged weekend revelers.

In other words, he wasn’t acting. This guy was for real.


He commanded authority, instead of demanding it

Pat Burns’s stereotypical cop body has been obliterated by cancer. Liver cancer. Bowel cancer. Now, lung cancer. Last week, I saw a recent press photo at the opening of the Pat Burns Arena in Stanstead. It showed Fuck-You-Come-Here-And-Say-That Pat Burns with the face of a bird - with a bird’s narrow, suspicious head and a bird’s infinitely sad round eyes.

Fuck, Pat, what has happened to you?

I am not going to talk about his courage, not going to talk about his indomitability, not going to talk about fight and pain tolerance and hockey and toughness and fight. I am not keen to address the issue of mortality at all. Pat Burns became the head coach of the Montreal Canadiens at 36. Today, I am 37. Soon, no doubt sooner than I imagine, I will be 38.

This makes me feel bad. Because Pat Burns, we all know, is dying. And I don’t want to die.


What we don’t talk about when we don’t talk about hockey

I knew Pat Burns was a former cop when he was appointed, because it came up all the time when he coached the Olympiques as well (in addition to the always-insisted-on fact of his impeccable bilingualism). What I didn’t appreciate, but would come to understand very soon, was that there was a strict implication from that.

It meant that Pat Burns was working-class.

Middle class people, I already had a sense, did not become cops. They don’t. They didn’t, they don’t, they probably won’t, although what “middle class” will mean in 20 years, Lord only knows. Cop work - with its danger, its boredom, its hours and its spirit-sapping bath in the spleen of the underclass - is inherently upwardly mobile. It feeds aspirations. It is one of the bridges (once plentiful in Canada, now painfully few) for the sons and daughters of the working class to reach the middle.

We love to talk about hockey in Canada. We hate talking about class. That, no doubt, is part of what many have identified in Canada as our “middle class standard”, what has proved so successful at creating our comfortable, genteel, pleasurable society. Middle class people don’t talk about class, so we as a people don’t talk about it much. But hockey is one of those areas that pervades Canadian culture from side to side and top to bottom, and so you can use it like a lens to see class in our culture, clear as day.

And Pat Burns was a working-class coach.

So now, because we don’t talk about it, I have to talk about class and hockey. What’s a working-class coach? Roughly speaking, she or he believes in three things.

You build everything from the bottom up, from your goalmouth out. A team, a roster, a game, a plan, a set of skills.

Everybody has to pull their own weight.

You don’t faff around trying to make a moose into a swan. Let swans be swans.

None of this gets into technique, tactics, or even much into strategy. It doesn’t get into the details of hockey. On those, every coach is different, and everything we once knew seems to be wrong anyway. A working-class approach is predicated on two principles - the deck is always stacked against you, and there is (literally) no time to lose.

Working class means not having meaningful second chances. It means having to produce now, because you don't have a fallback. It means playing junior a thousand miles from home and trying to get enough high school in just to stay eligible. It means playing a whole camp and asking for just a Red Wings jacket because it doesn't occur to you that you might be worth more. And then not even getting the jacket.

Working class hockey was long the backbone of the country's hockey greatness. It meant names like Esposito, Mikita, Gretzky, Lafleur, Richard, Morenz. Names that, no matter how famous, would always bear the stamp of hyphenated Canadians. Working class doesn't just mean lunch bucket players although it means lunch bucket moms and dads. But it does mean being grateful for what you have and coming to the rink early and being willing to fight like hell for whatever you got from the game. It's Gzowski's description of Gretzky alone on a rink until the caretaker gives the third final warning and the lights turn off. It's Dryden's description of Lafleur flipping the same lights on himself and skating circles in the unsteady gloaming of warming floods, the concrete walls blasting back the puckthud against unsprung boards.

Of course, it means something else too. It means Stan Jonathan, Rejean Houle, George Armstrong, Wendel Clark. Heart and soul guy. Energy guy. Tough nosed guy. Pat Burns guy.

We like to tell ourselves a bit of a lie about success in our lives, that success comes from hard work, responsibility, teamwork, grit. And we tell ourselves that the successful people in our lives, the middle classes, those who enjoy the fruits of prosperity, exemplify those values.

Of course they don't, or don't always. What they share is opportunities; sometimes one that has been grabbed onto greedily and clung to desperately, like a sixth defenseman spot or a job on the force; more often the endless stream of opportunities that come to the connected, the educated, the well-spoken, those of fortunate birth or circumstsance.

In hockey, though, those public virtues are much closer to the mark of success. Not always, but surprisingly often. They are the Pat Burns virtues, those that a hockey team with just enough talent but enough collective will can grab for themselves, as a way out of the competitive hurly-burly. Hard work, responsibility, teamwork, grit. Call them, for want of a better word, the Doug Gilmour values. And it is no surprise that Doug Gilmour went from being a very good hockey player to being a national symbol of public virtue, while playing hockey for Pat Burns.

We don't necessarily share those values, we don't even necessarily privilege them. But we do celebrate them. And if you are working-class, they are a way out.


What he did

Pat Burns took a good hockey team and made them instantly into a great hockey team. He did it with conscious eyes on those public virtues that lift a team, and so leveraged a superstar goaltender. I don't think I want to say any more than that. He stood up for personal responsibility, and protected his men. And he was smarter than the guys he stood next to.

Montreal's distant hockey past rings loud with the upper-class, middle-class, amateur spirit, but the Canadiens specifically are the working man's team. Mental toughness and professionalism. That line again, of working-class heroes. Morenz. Richard. Lafleur. That is Burns's line. It was also Scotty Bowman's, another working class Quebecker. That line, hard work and the indomitable desire to presevere, made flesh, becomes the will to survive. The will to push through. The will to keep the puck from going in your net.

Pat Burns took that first Canadiens team by the scruff of the neck and led them to 115 points. Except for Tom Johnson in Espo’s 76-goal season, no one had done that before as a rookie coach. Only Todd McLellan - wind-aided through “overtime loss” inflation - has done it since. They lost an epic Stanley Cup final to a brilliant Calgary Flames team. And, bizarrely, management began to slowly pick the team apart.


The end is only the beginning, except when the story stays the same

Burns’s tenure in Montreal, shot through with success but not Cups, didn’t end in triumph. The Canadiens took a shellacking in the press for their second-round playoff exit in 1992 after gritting their way to 93 points and an Adams Division championship. Many of the young players on a shockingly young team, including John Leclair and Mathieu Schneider, had been cruelly exposed in a whitewash by the Bruins.

On May 31, 1992, Pat Burns resigned as head coach of the Montreal Canadiens. A combative press conference followed in which members of the local media levelled the accusation that Burns’s resignation had been forced. Pat Burns fired back “prove it”. He remained, to the end, his own man, and damned sure he wanted you to know it. He was 40 years old, and in what many saw as a betrayal he was headed to Toronto to take over as the head coach of the Leafs, a town with an even more ambivalent relationship to working-class hockey but a team that was crying out for the discipline and good sense that Burns would bring to them.

Jacques Demers would take the Habs players that Burns had so painstakingly built from youths and win the Stanley Cup with them, improbably and rather wonderfully, the next year. Having flown that team to the sun, he would then sink it under the waves, laden with hubris, wax and feathers.

It is Burns’s place, sandwiched between two other francophone coaches with Stanley Cups on their resumes, in the long, cold shadow of Scotty Bowman, that denies him some part of the recognition that he is due as the last coach to preside over a Canadiens team of enduring quality. The style may also be a factor; a Burns team never was dull to watch (not even in New Jersey, amazingly) but Burns’s Habs were in no way the firewagon teams of Scotty Bowman, or even of Bob Berry, or the pint-sized sprites of Demers.

I’ll let others talk about what Burns went on to do elsewhere. Suffice it to say that, until cancer started to eat him from the inside six years ago, Pat Burns’s reputation in Montreal and in Quebec slumbered.


”I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.”

Another comfortable lie we tell ourselves is that cancer is no respecter of class or race or creed. This isn't quite right; our whole society swings into action against cancer for you if you have the right speech, birth and income. And of course the dirty cancerous jobs, the dirty cancerous neighborhoods, and the dirty cancerous lifestyles follow the working class around like a malignant web of unsloughable tissue. But one thing remains, in the final analysis, both universal and unshakeably true. Cancer kills you dead, no matter how lucky you have otherwise been. Dead, indeed, is fucking dead.

Pat Burns and I don't share much except a love of the frenzied tussle of a 2-1 hockey game. But I respect the man as a hockey coach, and I feel close to him because he led my favorite team when my passion was at its height, my first years in Montreal, lining up to pay $10 and stand in a cloud of Craven 'A' in the concourse of the old Forum. Let's just say we breathed some of the same smoke, moments I am grateful for.

So yeah, I grew up (hockeywise) with the man, and to see him like this and say Fuck, Pat, what has happened to you? gives me chills. It makes me sad, but mostly it's an intimation of mortality I could do without. I don't want him not to die because I love the guy; I don't want him to die because I still want to pretend that I share something with him. And if he gets cancer and dies, the fear makes me want to cut the tie loose.

Pat Burns says he hopes that some promising young player can take his first steps to greatness in the new arena that bears his name, in that working-class, hanging-on border-country town, Stanstead. I hope so too. As a country, we need those towns. We need those rinks. We need those players. And we still need Pat Burns.

Intro to Constitutional Law

“This was one of the most undemocratic acts that we have ever seen in the Parliament of Canada,” NDP Leader Jack Layton said at a press conference Wednesday morning.

“To take power that doesn’t rightfully belong to them to kill a bill that has been adopted by a majority of the House of Commons representing a majority of Canadians is as wrong as it gets when it comes to democracy in this country.”

See, in Canada we have two Constitutions. The old one, made up of the Constitution Act, 1867 and the Constitution Act, 1982 with their consequent amendments, and Jack Layton’s Magical Fairy Constitution, which is the one in which the Senate doesn’t exist and there is instead a Chamber of Socialist Awesomeness made up of 17 wise old rainbow-colored unicorns that piss maple syrup.

I'm my favourite writer, part 2

"Still on the Royals/Twins series, Joe Randa grabbed the 12th hit for the Royals last night (an 8th-inning single off Johan Santana) and in doing so won a dozen Krispy Kremes for each of the 21,851 fans in attendance. Apparently over 2,000,000 Krispy Kremes have been won so far this year, which equals 52,863 pounds of fat, or 26.4 tons. If that shortening were laid end to end in standard 1-pound boxes, it would stretch 4.58 miles, or circle the bases over 67 times. Put another way, you could build a wall around the infield 15 feet high. There are 520,000,000 calories in those donuts (assuming everyone gets the chocolate iced), which is sufficient energy to drive a 2,000-pound truck for 152 miles or to launch the severed heads of the entire starting lineup of the Royals into earth orbit."

I'm my favourite writer

"Todd Hundley is going to need until August to get better; he needs surgery to correct a disc problem in his back that gives him lower-body pain when he throws. That's the human body for you; your back is injured, so your legs hurt when you use your arm. At this point, the Dodgers have to be tempted to send Hundley to the wrecker's yard and strip him for spare parts when Paul LoDuca wears out from overuse."

Puffery (from the Tybalt archives)

NOTE: I do continue to read Infinite Jest. On page 202 currently. Unfortunately, I currently find myself unable to write about it, for reasons I will explain in a big post that I will have up soon.

Instead, I am going to bring you Greatest Hits of my personal archive, which I have been putting together assiduously.

The first piece is a piece from January of 2003. It remains perhaps more true now than ever. Except I like the NFL once more, I just ignore the hype.

Puffery

I can't remember the last time I approached a Super Bowl Sunday without caring. As a longtime sports fanatic, last year I realized that I had oversaturated my life with sports and needed to cut back. For me, the obvious choice was to give up the NFL, and I've never looked back. As the sport with the sparsest amount of action of any that I know, and the worst broadcasters outside darts, the NFL had become an overblown joke to me.

Clearly, not everyone agrees, as it is phenomenally successful. This piece of overblown puffery from ABC News illustrates the point nicely. But why the messianic tone, asserting that football will crush all those who dare to oppose her? It has everything to do with the fact that ABC is broadcasting the Super Bowl tonight.

The piece demonstrates something about the sports media, and media in general, far more insidious than the popularity of the NFL. Nothing even approaching real analysis goes on in the newsrooms of the main media sources today. With the cross-linking and conglomerate ownership of media outlets, more and more of our mainstream media promote its own products and trash those of everyone else. Sports properties are no different.

Remember when you see another Toronto Star or Sun article trashing the Jays as "irrelevant", and as an inferior product, you are seeing one media conglomerate addressing one of its major rivals. When the Chicago Cubs fail to sign their first-round pick, it's described in the Chicago Tribune as a "snub" by the player instead of a failure of the team... because they are talking about a team they own; the Cubs themselves can do no wrong. Yankees fans who have their cable service with the wrong monopoly are denied Yankee games, because one cable giant is trying to fleece another into overpaying for the privilege of carrying their in-house TV channel. Radio and TV talk show host Jim Rome might criticize L.A. Dodger players, but never had a bad word to say for the badly mismanaged team, who were owned by his employer, Fox. Instead of actual journalists, newspapers and TV are increasingly hiring ex-P.R. flacks to provide content, like Richard Griffin. "Spin" has hit the sports pages, in a big way.

Remember to be critical of the news sources you read, even where it's just sports that are concerned. Corporate media reflects corporate interests, as they must; those who run businesses do not have the legal latitude to run them any other way. All I'm saying is that too much Richard Griffin will rot your brain... and that's a sentiment I think we can all get behind.

Enjoy the Super Bowl. 58 days until Opening Day.

TCoE Reads Infinite Jest - #4

Currently (as of yesterday) on page: 92

Footnotes read yesterday: 15

I have tried to write these reflections on today's reading five, six, seven different ways. None has worked. Usually when I blog or write a quick piece, I just dive in and begin and somehow shove and hobble my way around to all the points I wanted to hit. Frustratingly, each time I dive into this, I end up bringing up things I want to talk about... but not now.

So I will wait.

Today (well, tomorrow, because I intended to finish this on November 5, Guy Fawkes Night, but failed as spectacularly in my own way as Fawkes did) I will throw in the towel and just give you my favorite moments of today's reading. Little sweet rounded Timbits of text, fresh from the reading fryer.

"Katherine Ann" Gompert. [Her Christian names are the same as someone very near and dear to me. Shivering.]

"not always unless carefully titrated pleasant". Beautiful locution, if you are me, which most people are not.

"I wasn't trying to hurt myself. I was trying to kill myself."

"Momentumizers"

"they have given you ridiculous tits, and now they point differently"

the footnoted translation of "te occidere possunt sed te edere non possunt nefas est"

"Hope springs eternal"

"fluttery and slack" [a beautiful turn of phrase, that sentence]

"not merely unattractive but inducing something like sexual despair"

One final cavil. Why is Wallace's French so thrashingly helpless? Is this some sort of wink that I don't get? It must be. I mean "fauteuils de rollents"? That is horrid. Are these snippets of German equally helpless, and I just don't realize it because I have next to no German? But then his Québecois English is also way off the mark, not so much barking up the wrong tree as digging a bone-hole to Indonesia.

TCoE Reads Infinite Jest - #3

(Note: this entry was composed after yesterday's readings. Another entry will be written tonight for today's readings.)

Currently on page: 66

Footnote read today: 23

A slog today. Not without rewards. I have now passed the point where I seem to have abandoned the book; or at least the point where I abandoned it in spirit. The footnotes come fast and thick; the discussions of Hal's drug regimen and those of his classmates have some spectacularly good ones, discussions of drugs that put me in mind of Carleton University's magnificent psychologist Brian Little whose work on personality affects me deeply. Brian's discussion of personality types, basal neurochemistry, and drugs tends towards coffee/wine/beer examples but Wallace's typologies are essentially parallel.

I know that I am past the point where I checked out last time because there are insights that are coming thick and fast that I know I didn't have before; the work definitely takes place in the nearish future (nearish, within a generation anyway, to 1996) because the discussions of chronology in the (yes, interminable) filmography footnote indicate it quite clearly. Now, of course, the ruminations on the shape of future tech are only going to irritate me. It is ever thus with the near future.

Wallace is topping himself now with the Wallacery, writing in the second person which is something I always find vein-bustingly annoying. However, I am much more in tune with the comedy of the book than I thought I would be. That filmography is interminable, but it's a send-up with real bile and spirit. I enjoyed it immensely. The self-poke, also, I appreciate.

I'm glad Orin is back, at the end of today's reading.

One final housekeeping note. Godd Till (way to bork your site, by the way) suggests that I rename this series "A Jesty Questy". This is a name so transcendently awful, and yet totally cheese-platter irresistible. I shall adopt it as the label for the series though not as the title for the posts. But I am likely to refer to the "Jesty Questy" during the posts themselves. I already think of it thus.

TCoE Reads Infinite Jest - #2

Currently on page: 49

Footnotes read today: 1

Today I reached the point where Infinite Jest begins to become seriously schizophrenic in tone.

I must note, here, that this isn't my first attempt at reading the book. I read a decent-sized chunk while staying with a friend, some years ago. My intention at the time was to borrow the book and finish it after my stay, but having gotten some way in I decided to give it up as a bad job, because I found the book irritating. Actually, I think I was not too far short of where I am now; I thought it was 100 pages but it seems to be somewhat less.

Well, this time I am not irritated, pleasingly enough. We've been through a number of internal narratives now, the story seeming to jump around between first and third person narration but always focusing on the lived experience of one person or other. I am finding the book much more interesting; determined to finish on deadline but taking the book only as a purely leisurely pursuit, I am free to hate it and mock it and I find that neither applies.

What I didn't remember about the book from my first reading, that is most obvious this time, is the puzzlers' delight of figuring out the temporal locus of the narrative. There is just enough (and I mean just enough) gibberus technologicus that it makes this interesting; putting oneself back into the mindset of the mid-90s is the most fun part of this. I still don't know if this is in the entertainingly-near future, or the exotically-nomenclatured present.

The best parts of today's reading were, easily, Orin's tales of bug horror, and the midnight conversation of Hal and Booboo. I have a stepbrother but not a "real" brother (I do have a sister) and I always look on my sons' relationship with a smidgen of envy. There was a breath of that in Hal and Booboo.

In fact, everything else today was a bit of a snooze. One cavil : no NFL team would ever trade a punter.

TCoE Reads Infinite Jest - #1

I am reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace and blogging my reflections here. Expect to see me once a day for the next month or two. I am sworn to finish by December 25th.

Page read to: 24.

Footnotes read today: 1.

In addition to the first 23 pages, I also read the blurbs, the foreword by Dave Eggers (which I enjoyed although perhaps it was a bit too Eggersly ravely for my taste) and even the publishing information page which has a great little nugget for those who have read the book (or not) but missed that page.

The book begins with a very good, near exceptional, set piece about tennis prodigy (and otherwise prodigy) Hal Incandenza. It is marvelous. Even if you have absolutely no intention of ever reading the entire book - and I will stop here and note that Infinite Jest is 1,079 pages long, inspiring awe and derision in equal measure - you should read the first 17 pages. There is no sense talking about this, other than suggesting that you read it. Right away, you can tell you are dealing with a heavy hitter of an author, because he words real damn good.

From there, I am halfway through the story of the (to now still unnamed) man preparing for his marijuana vacation and his doom. It's obsessive and self-absorbed in what I have come to know from his other writing as Wallacery. I think I am supposed to feel uncomfortable although I do not.

More tomorrow, and indeed every day until sometime in December.

Tea

Tea, you see, is drunk by ass-kickers and empire builders. Coffee is for sitting around gossiping. Seriously, you want a manly drink? The Chinese invented civilization. Drinking tea. The Russians built an empire from the Elbe to the Pacific - fuelled entirely on tea. How did the first great corporate empire fall? The second great corporate empire found a way to beat them - in the tea trade. Tea builds greatness.

You know what Genghis Khan's favorite pick-me-up was? The blood of his enemies, mixed with fermented mare's milk. You know what was second? MOTHERFUCKING TEA. Tamurlane would have thrown a scalding hot coffee right back in your goddamn face and demanded tea. He ruled half of Asia and built pyramids of skulls. Tea is for conquest. Coffee is for secretaries. The unconquerable Afghans, the toughest people on Earth? They didn't get that way on coffee. They prefer their tea.

The Mughals conquered India and ruled it for centuries on a 50/50 mix of tea and greed. The English put *them* under the jackboot. How? UPPING THE FUCKING TEA QUOTIENT. Tea drinking cultures create things like railroads. Coffee-drinking cultures create things like ass-hugging trousers. Tea fuelled the creators of modern economics. Coffee-drinkers and their coffee-houses gave us deconstructionism and surrender. Look, you want to have something typed? Hire a coffee drinker. But if you need to get something done, and don't care if a few faces get busted up along the way, then you better hire some tea drinkers. And then sit back, and drink a cup of tea.

Voltaire drank 50 cups of coffee a day. He got his ass exiled to motherfucking Switzerland. Tea-drinking George Washington fought the mighty British Empire with a piddling band of townies. Cecil Rhodes? Bossed half of Africa with an iron fist? Tea. In this world, my friends, coffee drinkers pay tax and tribute to their tea-drinking masters. That is just how it is. When the revolution comes, you will drink tea. And you will praise its qualities.

I hope it was all worth it

Incredible... nearly 92 years after the Armistice, Germany will make its final payment of World War I reparations this weekend.

In Tune With The Zeitgeist, or its English-language equivalent

Let no one pretend that professional xenophobe and serial treason accuser Gilles Rhéaume does not have his finger pressing directly on the pulse of English Canada (no wonder I was feeling a bit faint, I think he was impinging my carotid artery).

Here is Gilles being quoted by the Toronto Sun on the new Macleans "hey, Bonhomme is just French for 'Goodfella', right?" cover, the one that is lightin' the kiddies up like a house afire.

hardline Quebec sovereigntist Gilles Rheaume [sic] said the cover was an affront rarely seen in what he dubbed the "long history of francophobia" in English media.

"It's like putting on the front page of (Quebec news weekly) L'Actualite a picture of the Queen of England dressed as a prostitute," he sniffed.

Finally, someone who understands the extent to which the Queen of fucking England is a beloved symbol of all things English Canadian! I'm sure that the first thing a reasonable Anglophone would do in this situation would be to scream "Anglophobia!" instead of, you know, laughing their ass off.

Wait for the punchline

OK, first you have to watch the commercial. I know, it's a minute long and it's boring and dumb as hell, but just watch the godforsaken thing.

The punchline?

ALL Dodge Challengers are built in Brampton, Ontario.

My wife, she is a Kotoko fan

David Goldblatt, the author of the transcendent and genre-changing book The Ball Is Round, is currently marking the World Cup with a brilliant series of documentaries for the BBC World Service called The Power and the Passion.

In light of Ghana's luminescent 2-1 win over the United States today at the Mundial, the third instalment in the series becomes an absolute must-listen, even if you don't much like soccer. Part Three (download from the link) wraps itself around a visit to the Ghanaian "derby" match between Asante Kotoko from the northern city of Kumasi, and Hearts of Oak from the capital, Accra. It is much-needed background to an unfolding news story.

Now I am a longtime (though distant) supporter of Hearts of Oak, so some of the story was familiar to me, but the way Goldblatt captures a rivalry that is one of the most intense in the world, and relates it to the reality of Ghana itself, is superb.

Parts one and two, about the Milan derby (Milan vs. Inter) and the Cairo derby (Al-Ahly vs. Zamalek) were very fine. (Grab them at the series website linked above). This one was unbelievably engrossing and good (plus the music in the stands is terrific). With Ghana's quarterfinal versus Uruguay looming as a game between two enterprising teams playing great team football, it is required listening.

Well Looky Here! (No not that rock, the other one)

Looks like the campaign to restore Charles Murray to decent society by his employer the American "Enterprise" Institute (I suppose that trying to re-establish fake-scientific racism to respectability does show some enterprise) is gaining even more traction. First it was homo nafficus himself, Mark Steyn, as first noted here a scant fortnight ago to the public dismay of Steyn and his canine platoon of crotch-sniffing angerbags (thanks for the comments and e-mails, guys).

And now Ann Coulter is throwing her shoes gamely (gamily?) into the ring, invoking Murray as the (wrongly) maligned object of tohubohu and brouhaha at a liberal (-ish, we're talking about Elana Kagan here) New York dinner table.

I think Coulter (for all her apparent experience of New York liberal dinner tables) is selling her scorned target a bit short. Surely the topic of what the hell is wrong with the shvartzes has crossed the lips of a liberal New Yorker on more than an occasional basis?

But to step away from unnecessary and unfair religio-cultural mudsplattering for a moment, exactly what the hell is going on here? Two of the unshameliest flingers of red meat in the wonkosphere are bejewelling Chuckles "Galton's Bulldog" Murray with their humid attention. I sense a public (e)mission afoot!

We'll keep an eye on this, and thanks to a correspondent for the hot tip.

A Reader Writes

Scorn for Macleans is pouring in from all sides but this one I couldn't resist sharing...

Okay Chief...

Maclean's recently announced the results of a Parliamentarian Of The Year poll, apparently filled out by MPs or other equally-clueless morons, and Angry John Baird was named the winner--erroneously, one hopes. Maclean's did not conduct the survey themselves, but any publication that aligns itself with something that praises that man for any kind of parliamentary goodness isn't worth any of my time anymore.

As It Happens absolutely *destroyed* Baird the day this was announced, in a Canadian way, doing the old "playing the wrong footage" trick (you can guess what kind of footage they played). It was beautiful in its savagery.

But your Steyn objection is far better, and far more deserving of scorn.

The archive, by the way, I found here, and the Baird piece is at 23:30. It might be more easily explained if it's understood that the rules of order provide that only a member of a committee may raise a point of order to the chair.

Me and My Girl

(This was the piece that motivated me to fire up this old flivver of a blog once more, I wrote it last month on my trip to Ottawa).

FH Varley, Vera, oil on canvas, 1931

I probably first saw her about 22 or 23 years ago and since that day she has always been my girl.

I think the reason I keep coming back (and I am sitting in front of her now and regarding her with that deep tenderness that comes with owning art or a woman in your heart) is that she has changes of moods. And she challenges me. She can look passionate. Bored. Questioning. Loving. Fierce. Tender.

Because she changes her mood to suit mine (or to antagonize it) I often wonder if she was a lover - I think she was a model but I know nothing about her - but as times goes wearily on away from her, I realize as I come back to her that she is Varley's Mona Lisa - a canvas full of clash and colour and strife and light and magic (so not the Mona Lisa) that remains a blank canvas (so the Mona Lisa). She is a lovely girl - or a woman - without an expressionon her face. Every expression on her face. Her mouth is closed, saying maybe out loud.

I have always suspected that I keep coming back to her, and keep her coming back to me, because I get a blank canvas on which I can project myself, and of course nothing loves me so much as myself. And there's nothing I love so much as me. OR maybe there is nothing so much I love as this painting, this sexy Euro-chick in a raincoat with a green face and blue eyebrows and an impossible neck and a lopsided face and a come-hither look full of challenge and disregard. I love her hair and lips. At least her hair is brown, I guess. Her face is green; it could easily have been orange.

IS that her raincoat? You'd think she was homeless. Are those her shoulders? She must be Russian. Ukrainian. Latvian. Belarussian. Czech. Vancouver. I love the sound of "Vancouver".

She is smiling. She is not smiling. She is smiling at me. She is smiling at Varley. She is smiling because she got fucked last night and you won't get to tonight. She's not actually smiling at all, but that's a minor detail. I do think it's morning - light green is for mornings. Dark green, leafy green, is afternoons. Morning is the tulips I saw today - the color of fake lime anything and wrinkling purple yellow.

This wicker chair is uncomfortable but it's what I can steal for the other Gallery rooms to sit and stare. She used to sit over there, in a smaller alcove room down the hall. Now she's got more traffic, and she gets to look at... (looks behind him, relieving his back from the wood bar of the chair) a Fortin picture of a hillside town and Lilias Torrance Newton's picture of herself. Lil is a pretty girl in a healthy, blonde, hiking-and-biking sort of way. She stares at my girl - positively stares right across the wide gallery floor. She doesn't like her. My girl isn't healthy, isn't blonde, has her blouse collar askew and wouldn't hike if you asked. She is unhealthy and thin and totally not my type and enchanting. Heart-lifting. So are a lot of women but because she is paint and cloth and dust and ashes and just woke up, my girl doesn't mind if you stare. I like to stare, probably always will.

Heart-lifting? Heart-eating seems more likely.

She's still the most beautiful thing have ever seen, first time. 22, 23 years and I remember her stealing the words from my windpipe. I wonder if she's had her coffee this morning. Her lipstick is fresh. I wonder if she waits for me. I wonder if it's raining. It must be raining.

Just another day for me and my girl.

And so it begins again...

With an open-mouthed double-take at the audacity of professional poop-disturber Mark Steyn, over at the grande dame of the fussy Canadian middle class, Macleans. I'll ignore the nonsensical analysis that our famously panty-twisted American friend is providing and instead focus on one paragraph that made my jaw hit the floor and me scramble for Google...

“The Europe that protects” may, indeed, protect you from the vicissitudes of fate but it also disconnects you from the primary impulses of life. “It drains too much of the life from life,” said Charles Murray last year. “And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors—even more to the lives of janitors—as it does to the lives of CEOs.”

I realize that there's nothing so shocking in this rather tame swipe at the comforts of European life (other than the sheer audacity of a "fellow" at a think tank criticizing others for being disconnected from life). But let's look at the tape again, folks:

“The Europe that protects” may, indeed, protect you from the vicissitudes of fate but it also disconnects you from the primary impulses of life. “It drains too much of the life from life,” said Charles Murray last year. “And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors—even more to the lives of janitors—as it does to the lives of CEOs.”

Does the name ring a Bell?

If not, it should, because Charles Murray is an odious and deranged fruitcake whose only claim to fame is having co-written The Bell Curve, the foremost work of "scientific" racism of the last two decades. (He's still at it, incidentally, publishing his worthless "findings" about race and IQ tests all over the less salubrious organs of the U.S. media).

Murray wrote a book, based on "research" that was later demonstrated to be totally fraudulent, stating in bald terms that blacks and Hispanics were inferior by nature and that this was responsible for their lagging social and economic achievement. Its primary practical suggestion was that persons of disadvantaged social backgrounds be discouraged from having children. It was, as Steven Fraser memorably put it, "a chilly synthesis of the work of disreputable race theorists and eccentric eugenicists".

The work has been thoroughly and entirely debunked by a vast group of researchers, thinkers and academics from Steven Jay Gould to Thomas Sowell.

Steyn, of course, with his many friends on the racist right, would doubtlessly have no problem with this sort of work, but I'm sure most of us would feel differently.

There are many, from the Wall Street Journal to his scattershot employer the American Enterprise Institute, who have been counting on the public forgetting Murray's eternal shame, so he could be rehabilitated as a seller of political misdirection. Let's have none of it. I don't know who edits Steyn at Macleans - (s)he'd need to have a strong stomach to digest his egregious taste in show tunes alone - but overlooking the approving quotation of one of racism's best and truest academic friends is an oversight that sullies the whole publication.

For shame.

(LATE UPDATE : Received some comments to the effect that I'm unfairly crying racism and that Murray has not been debunked. I encourage readers to weigh the evidence and make up their own minds. Neither, in my considered view, is correct.)