Cheap but Effective

Perhaps some of you saw Sportscentre's glowing story about Milt Stegall's 138th career touchdown, a CFL record. Which is impressive, even if the touchdown itself was a bit cheap. Stegall's Blue Bombers where playing the Hamilton Tigercats, perennially one of the worst teams in the league, this year being no exception.

The touchdown came on the fourth straight pass to Stegall, who had not scored since the season opener of June 28th. Now, I understand that the Bombers were anxious to get the distraction of the touchdown record of their backs. But if they would have been playing a quality team there is no way they'd have been able to get four straight completions to the same guy. The official spin is that its a great touchdown and a great achievement, etc., I think the Tigercats defense should take that as a wake-up call.

We could be heroes.

To say that the victors write history has become trite, but it really is true. One example is air aces. Who would you say has the most air-to-air kills of all time? If you said, say, Chuck Yeager, you'd be way wrong (7 kills), or Canadian hero Billy Bishop (72), or even one of the exceptions to the rule, Baron von Richthofen (73 confirmed, possibly as many as 100). Not even the top American ace Richard Bong (40). The correct answer is Erich Hartmann, who recorded 352 kills during the Second World War. Granted, many Luftwaffe pilots have a high number of kills, due to the Soviet habit of throwing massive numbers of poorly trained troops into battle to overwhelm a more skilled and better equipped enemy. Still, only two pilots have broken the 300 mark, and only 15 the 200 mark, according to one listing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_World_War_II_air_aces).

Think about it, if Hartmann had flown for the Allies, he would have had the skills to grab say, 50+ kills, which would put him at the top of WWII allied pilots. He would have been a hero. Instead, his unit surrendered to the 90th US Infantry, who sent him to Russia to spend 10 years in the gulag for war crimes, charges which were never proven and were officially dropped in 1997. After returning to Germany, Hartmann flew Sabres and Starfighters for West Germany, retiring in 1970 and dying of natural causes in 1993. Not bad for a man who was shot down 14 times and spent 10 years in a Soviet prison.

Herr Hartmann, I salute you.

Traffic

Saint John traffic has been driving me bananas lately. Actually, all summer, but we'll get to that later. Let me just mention that I'm from a town of 7 000 people with perhaps 6 lighted intersections (there are two new ones installed recently, but when I lived there it was about 6). I didn't have a car while in university and I'm just now getting used to city driving. Saint John is probably the worst place in the Maritimes to do this because it is an old city and there is no traffic pattern. The roads are basically just old wagon paths that have been widened and paved. The pavement has then been left to rot through and be heaved by the frost until it looks a bit like the surface of the moon. Which makes for a very rough ride and a lot of suspension repairs. And then they start digging them up. Not the heavily cratered ones, but where they need to get to a pipeline or some damn fool thing.

At the end of May, a section of Loch Lomond road in East Saint John was dug up along the westbound side. This not only interfered with a major intersection just down the street from the city's largest shopping centre, but also neatly cut off the fastest way for me to get home each afternoon. Even though the road is not closed completely, the traffic is backed up so badly that it is actually faster to take a detour 4 times as long in distance. That road is, of course, loaded with potholes. There are now areas of pink spray paint on that road which suggests that they are about to patch it. Which it needs, but the work on Loch Lomond is expected to continue until September. That is, both my main route and the detour are both going to be cut off for about 2 months. Roads being a bit sparse on the East end, which is very spread out, I will soon have to take an even longer detour.

This is all before I get tangled up with assholes in spotlessly cleaned full-size extended-cab never-been-used-to-do-work pickup trucks that think the roads belong to them because they drive a large and expensive status symbol. Or the many people that do not use their blinker when making a lane change. Or that run red lights while trying to sneak through on the last possible second of a yellow light (yellow means floor it, even if you're a good 50 feet from the intersection and could easily stop in time and therefore not cut across my nose). Nay, not even the people that stop an inch and a half from my bumper while I'm waiting for the light to change.

In fact, if I did not still owe so much money on my car, I would gladly run some of these people over just to stop them from causing an accident somewhere else.

And so what used to be the last 5 minutes of my 50 minute commute has turned into the last 20 minutes of my 65 minute ride into road rage. Cover your granny's ears if I go past at rush hour, because chances are I'm using each and every one of the 7 words you can't say on TV.

Jack is back! (and Meg, although it doesn't have the same ring to it)

I finally got around to listening to the new White Stripes album. Not surprisingly, this one is more like the earlier efforts since the last one, Get Behind Me Satan, was much more experimental. The good news is I allow each of my favorite bands to take a mulligan on the inevitable concept album which almost inevitably bombs. The sound the band finds this time is most similar to De Stijl, i.e. a little less raw and a little more pop-oriented without going completely mainstream, although I'm sure there is a single from Icky Thump which Much Music is duly running into the ground.

Movie Reviews: Two for One Sale

Ratatouille (G): Dreamworks rarely misses the net and Ratatouille is no exception. There has been a review floating around in the blogosphere that argues that the movie will flop commercially. The reasons given are varied. One sticking point is promotion, Dreamworks did very little to promote the film except to issue a teaser trailer only in theatres. Now, you can't go sticking a little plastic rat into everybody's happy meal, but promotion is not everything. In fact, movies that are heavily promoted tend to suck. Reference Shrek 3, Pirates 3, etc. Word of mouth works pretty well given global communications is available to massive numbers of people. Others comments have been just plain silly, such as the film not going over well because of its theme of gourmet cooking. In others words, we assume that the audience is stupid. Which is largely correct, however everyone's gotta eat. Cooking is not that hard of a subject to grasp. Anyway, the film is very well done and the animation is an improvement even over Finding Nemo. The sense of humour is very subtle and should keep the adults in the audience from getting bored. And since Dreamworks is not in the habit of doing sequels, the story actually gets a proper ending.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (PG-13). Since the Harry Potter series was designed from the outset to grow up along with its audience, this installment is darker and more adult than preceding films, hence the jump from PG to PG-13. The film is quite condensed from the book, but the losses are necessary as the book is much longer than previous installments. Things that take 30 pages in the book often get 30 seconds in the movie, if they appear at all. There are a couple of new characters introduced that don't get proper development, which is a shame and could cause problems for the final two films. I enjoyed it, warts and all, and am looking forward to seeing what they do with the Half-Blood Prince.

Endorsements gone mad

I think I may have figured out why the CBC has been routinely leaving CFL scores from its morning sports segment. First, most CFL games are aired by TSN (which is basically ESPN reformatted for Canada, for those of you outside of the True North). Second and perhaps more importantly, the CFL has a long-standing sponsorship deal with Wendy's. This year, a two patty bacon cheeseburger, the baconater, is the official hamburger of the CFL. Now what does any self respecting sports league involve itself in the marketing of something so ludicrously unhealthy that the players shouldn't even be eating them? Granted, you need a few fat guys to play on the lines, but that's more muscle then fat, kind of a sumo wrestler build. It is just possible that this sad state of affairs has made the CBC to embarrassed to talk about the CFL.

In other sports news, the Oilers have recently acquired a very good defenseman in Sheldon Souray, while the Senators have lost one in centre Mike Comrie, who was a pillar of the team down the stretch and in the playoffs last season. I sense two teams moving in opposite directions.

Paranoia as a way of life.

Here's a hot one. Rather than simply mothball F-14 Tomcats, or sell them to client countries since the last were pulled from US Navy service earlier this year, the Navy is spending $900 000 each to have them chopped up into 2x2 foot cubes at an air base in Arizona. Don't believe it? Check it out at http://www.aviation.com/ap_070702_f14scrapping.html.

Which is a pretty expensive proposition. Pulling some numbers from Wikipedia, 712 Tomcats where built, of which 79 were exported. That leaves 633, for a total disposal cost of around 569.7 million dollars. That is a lot just to throw something away, in fact I suspect it is more than Canada's entire military budget (for equipment, anyway).

The justification for all this is out of fear that if they where sold, they would be re-sold to countries such as Iran ("the wrong hands" as the article put it). Which is odd, since Iran already has them. The 79 that were exported went to Iran back when they were all buddy-buddy with the US. Yes, there was a time, not long ago, when the US arranged for the current Iranian dictatorship to come to power because it fit with the foreign policy needs of the day. About 50 Tomcats are still in Iranian service. So like most official government excuses, this one just doesn't add up. Oh, and the nuclear reactors that Iran has that everyone is so concerned about? American-designed PWRs.

D'oh Canada!

I often wonder what happened to this country. Now I'm thinking its just that people are getting less and less able to keep proper track of what's going on. Case in point: I was in the car this morning, listening to CBC Radio 1 on my way to work. When they wound their way around to the sports section of Information morning they talked about the U20 soccer tournament, a smattering of trades in the NHL, as well as a few other topics. But they missed the score in last night's CFL game between Montreal and Winnipeg (Winnipeg won 32-23, if you want to know). Shouldn't the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation provide full coverage of the Canadian Football League? Or is that just my logic? Or perhaps they realised it only after the show was over. Do'h!

Come on Darwin, we need some help down here!

Picture this if you will. Kid, maybe 16, riding down the street on his bike. With neither hand on the handlebars. And not wearing a helmet. While talking on a cell phone. Lord Almighty! I was driving the other way desperately hoping natural selection would come and take a swipe at this kid, because right there is a big detriment to the gene pool.

I'm sorry to report he's not the only person with missing chromosomes around here. I've had several high school-aged kids walk right out in front of me while I'm driving around, not bothering to so much as look before walking right into my path, a few being pulled back by friends with slightly more sense. Granted, hitting a pedestrian is normally ruled to be the driver's fault, but just because the law gives that protection doesn't mean you won't get hurt if you put yourself in harm's way. It's no good to be dead and right. It's also not fair to expect me to be responsible for the safety of these kids. Safety means everything, every day, every one of us. Otherwise we'll just mill around proving Darwin right.

Whose job is it anyway?

I was rather disappointed to learn, upon arriving back in the fog belt from a weekend trip to Nova Scotia, that the Oilers have again traded their captain. After unceremoniously dumping Ryan Smyth, the job eventually fell to the similarly-named Jason Smith, who was shown the revolving door yesterday. So apparently the powers that be in Edmonton prefer that their team be leaderless. You make me sad.

Incidentally, Ryan Smyth was picked up by Colorado, who also acquired Scott Hannan from San Jose. So that division just got a lot tougher and the Oilers are now more likely to get their asses kicked next season.