Ted Bird's blog
I'LL GIVE YOU TWO HITLERS AND A TOJO FOR AN EISENHOWER
Mon, 2009-06-29 06:52.
Went to the Canadian War Museum over the weekend and bought some World War Two trading cards at the gift shop. No bubble gum, but awesome cards. You can purchase them online, as well as enter a friend or relative who's a veteran as part of permanent online tribute. Here's the link:www.lestweforgetcards.ca
HABS DRAFT CLOSE TO HOME
Mon, 2009-06-29 06:48.
As much as anyone might like to believe in the politicially correct notion that it doesn't matter whether the Canadiens coach speaks Chinese or their leading scorer is from Kablamistan as long as they win, the raucous reaction of the Bell Center crowd to the first round selection of Louis Leblanc at the NHL draft is proof that it does matter. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it is what it is, so why pretend otherwise?...Meanwhile, after addressing a pressing need by drafting a pair of six foot-two centers in the third and fourth rounds, the Canadiens couldn't resist honoring longstanding tradition in the fifth by taking undersized Quebec junior forward Gabriel Dumont, who at 5-9, 170 pounds has all the physical tools to be the next Serge Boisvert or (dare we dream?) the second coming of Stephan Lebeau...It's impossible for history to pass a verdict on something that didn't happen, but if the Canadiens don't acquire Vincent Lecavalier and posterity has any insight into an alternative universe, it might judge the unconsummated Lecavalier deal as the best trade the Habs never made...Lou Pinella and Milton Bradley deserve each other. After exchanging profanities and nearly coming to blows in the clubhouse tunnel last week in Chicago, the unremittingly belligerent Cubs manager and his emotionally unhinged outfielder should be set adrift in a life raft with nothing but a case of tequila and two sets of nunchuks.MOLSONS NOT EXACTLY JOHNNY-COME-LATELIES
Tue, 2009-06-23 09:33.
This isn't the first time the point's been made, but it bears repeating for every time someone with a distorted or revisionist sense of history laments that the Canadiens weren't sold to un Quebecois de souche. The Molsons have been here for nearly 250 years. How de souche do you have to be, exactly?...Nobody defies the stereotype of Canadian diffidence more or better than Larry Walker, who greeted his induction into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame with the same enthusiasm he would have demonstrated had he been enshrined in Cooperstown. Walker is and always has been fiercely loud and proud about his Canadian roots - a tradition he continued recently by borrowing from a Molson ad campaign tattooing his arm with a maple leaf and the words "I am." What's typically Canadian about Walker is that he's entirely comfortable with and even jokes about never getting his due recognition as one of the country's sports icons...Just our luck that the one year Formula One bypasses Montreal, the circuit undergoes its most dramatic changing of the guard in decades. Yesterday's results at the British Grand Prix represent the continuation of a dominant season for newcomer Brawn GP and erstwhile also-ran Red Bull, and an ongoing nightmare for longtime F1 powerhouses Ferrari and McLaren, who have no victories and exactly one podium finish between them in 2009. It's probably just as well for the local tifosi's self-esteem that there's no race here this year...So, now that the Canadiens have been sold to the Molsons instead of Quebecor, is it okay for Bob Gainey to make hockey decisions without running them past Pierre-Karl Peladeau? Just wondering.WHAT I DID ON MY OTHER SPRING VACATION
Mon, 2009-06-15 08:52.
On my other spring vacation, I went to a high school reunion in Fredericton. I haven't actually lived in Fredericton since I graduated in 1977, and I only knew about half the people at the reunion, but it's always interesting to see who amounted to what, which relationships held together and whether the braniacs became homeless drifters or the good-looking people got fat and ugly. Alas, no such luck. The place was lousy with attractive and successful doctors, lawyers, accountants, pharmacists, engineers and other well-heeled, educated professionals on cruise control to a comfortable retirement, if they're not already there. The best-looking and brightest couple at graduation, Rodney Black and Sandra Grant, are the best looking and most prosperous couple in 2009, having just sold their business so they can start travelling the world at 50. I wish I could say I'm envious, because that would represent emotional progress over bitter and resentful. It took nearly 35 years, but I finally got to meet the prettiest girl in high school. As a smitten teenager, I admired Pam Murray from afar from 1974-77 but she didn't even know I existed until two Saturdays ago. I don't think I made much of a first impression, because when I told Pam we were in the same French class in Grade 10, she said she didn't take French in Grade 10. I assured her that she most certainly did, or else I was hallucinating for an entire school year (which is entirely possible, given that it was the 1970s). She may have been a bit uncomfortable that I knew more about her past than she did, but at least I was creeping out a woman my own age for a change.
Unfortunately, my wife Danielle and 16 month old daughter Allison both came down with the flu while we were in Fredericton - Allie on the night of the reunion and Dan the next day. Talk about a barf-o-rama. The good news was it gave us an excuse not to visit family, although this being Allie's first trip to N.B., I did make a point of taking her to the cemetery where my father and grandparents are buried. There's a lot to be said for visiting deceased relatives - you don't have to bring a gift, the silence is never awkward and no one cares if you leave after five minutes.
We stopped in Quebec City on the way home and spent the night in the lap of luxury on the top floor of the magnificent Chateau Frontenac, where Dan announced that on future trips east, we're going to spend two nights in Fredericton and two nights in Quebec instead of three nights in Fredericton and one night in Quebec. Apparently, that extra night of throwing up in a room overlooking the St. John River would be much better spent throwing up with a sweeping view of Old Quebec.
I had a kick-ass lobster roll in Fredericton and Paris-worthy steak frits in Quebec, but the undisputed culinary highlight of the week was an impromptu visit to Lafleur's in Ville St. Pierre, where you can get hot dogs with cheese and bacon on them. You don't even have to special order - they're actually on the menu. We don't make a habit of eating at Lafleur's, but Dan had a hankering for poutine...a hankering she last got just before we found out she was pregnant with Allie. Stay tuned, because that's also what I did on my other spring vacation.
DRAPER NEEDS TO GET OVER IT
Mon, 2009-06-15 08:50.
Bitterness does not become Detroit's Kris Draper, whose allegation that Pittsburgh captain Sidney Crosby snubbed Red Wings counterpart Niklas Lidstrom in the aftermath of Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final diminishes Draper more than it does Crosby. So Crosby was a little late getting to the post-game handshake line. As a 21 year old celebrating his first Stanley Cup championship, he can be excused for being caught up in the moment. Of all people, a four-time champion like Draper should understand that Crosby was mentally and emotionally pre-occupied...Meanwhile, it's hoisting that Cup that continues to separate the likes of Crosby, Greztky, Messier and Lemieux from the Thorntons, Lindrosses, Sundins and Bures who have all the tools but lack the heart of a champion...I know they have a long and prolific history in motorsports, but I still can't wrap my head around Peugeot winning the 24 hours of Le Mans, because my first and everlasting impression of the brand was my mother's second hand 1964 Peugeot 404, which couldn't win the 24 hours of anything. It was dependable enough, but the 404 was only slightly faster than my CCM duo-matic bicycle, and was a stylistic forerunner to the Lada...If popular lore is to be believed, Babe Ruth was probably at least as bad a womanizer and a worse substance abuser than Alex Rodriguez, yet there was something relatable about the Babe than made him a fan favorite despite his personal shortcomings. Who can relate to A-Rod, besides maybe Charlie Sheen and Dennis Rodman?HABS AND MARTIN: A CURIOUS AND UNEXPECTED PAIRING
Tue, 2009-06-02 09:11.
There's no doubt about Jacques Martin's qualifications as a professional hockey coach. In fact, he's probably more qualified than anyone else whose name has surfaced since the Canadiens gave Guy Carbonneau the gate nearly three months ago. What's still a bit sketchy is Martin's motive for taking the job just a year and change after signing a four year contract extension as general manager of the Florida Panthers. If it's as simple as not being able to turn down the opportunity to coach hockey's most fabled franchise, that's a powerful testament to allure of a job that's chewed up and spit out a dog's breakfast of would-be Scotty Bowmans in the 30 years since Montreal fell off the map as the undisputed center of the hockey universe. The Canadiens aren't exactly a model of stability these days, either at the ownership level or in the dressing room, and for Martin to say, as he did yesterday, that he believes that there's a strong nucleus team for building a winning team borders on disingenuous, considering close to half the team is eligible for unrestricted free agency July 1st. Walking away from the long-term security and relative serenity and obscurity of a front office job in Florida to the unrelenting public scrutiny and unreasonable demands of life on hockey's front lines in Montreal is a curious career move for a guy whose ego seems to be well in check and who has nothing to prove, but Martin is apparently of the mind that it's better to risk failure than it is to regret not having taken on the challenge. Whatever his motivation, the Canadiens could have done a lot worse.
WHAT I DID ON MY SPRING VACATION
Mon, 2009-05-25 09:59.
On my spring vacation, I went to Calgary to visit my old friend Terry (who's doing great, BTW). There's a running gag among Calgarians about how you can count on the snow to fly during the May long weekend, but it's no joke. It not only snowed on the Saturday after we arrived, it snowed two of the five days during the week. Global warming my white, freckly ass.Terry lives in a community called Arbour Lake, so-named for its man-made lake that provides residents with year round recreational activities, including skating in the winter, fishing in the spring and fall and swimming in the summer. Not being ones to standing on ceremony, the Bird boys, Sam and Charlie, decided to go for a dip on a 10 degree day in May, and came out of the water blue, in tears and suffering from brain freeze equivalent to the physiological impact of guzzling a hundred slush puppies. If you're wondering where their parents were, one was napping and the other apparently assumed that as long as it wasn't snowing, the water must be fine.
Southern Alberta offers remarkable contrasts in the geographical lay of the land. Drive an hour east of Calgary and you're in Big Sky country: the open prairie, flatter than Suzie Huffman in Grade 7. An hour west of Calgary and you're amid the majesty of the Rocky Mountains (or Suzie Huffman in Grade 9, to pursue the inappropriate metaphor). We did the prairie drive out to the Alberta badlands to visit the Royal Tyrrell Museum, home to the world's most extensive collection of dinosaur fossils. We also visited the legendary hoodoos - tall, thin spires of eroded rock capped by a piece of harder stone that protects the base from the elements. To look at the tourism brochure, you'd think there'd be hoodoos are far as the eye can see, and you'd think wrong. There were four - count 'em - FOUR hoodoos. We actually drove past them and had to turn around. As we drove away, were weren't saying hoodoo - we were booing.
The undisputed highlight of the trip was two days and one night in the Rockies, staying at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel. I've been fortunate enough to travel fairly extensively and stay at a few nice properties in my day, but the Banff Springs is in a league of its own. It's quite literally a castle nestled in the heart of one of the world's most magnificent mountain ranges. In fact, having been to the Swiss Alps just two summers ago, my wife, Danielle and I decided that we preferred the Rockies, partly out of nationalistic bias but also because of the warmth of the people compared to the relative stoicism of the Swiss, who make fine chocolate and impeccable watches but aren't exactly the personification of bonhomie.
Seven days and three snowfalls after arriving, it was time to head for home. Sadly, our gamble in booking 15 month old Allison as a lap baby and plopping her into an empty seat to save airfare didn't pay off on the fully-booked return flight, which Danielle and I - okay, mostly Danielle - spent following Allie as she walked and crawled up and down the aisle, getting in the way of the increasingly annoyed flight director, but he had a choice: let the baby in the aisle, or listen to her scream for four hours. He wisely chose his own inconvenience over misery for all, thereby circumventing the wrath of Dan, not to mention a full-blown in-flight passenger mutiny and the endless paperwork that would have entailed.
And that's what I did on my spring vacation.
ELITE TEAMS PUT HABS TO SHAME
Mon, 2009-05-25 09:53.
Watching the Red Wings and Penguins steamroll their way to a second consecutive meeting in the Stanley Cup final is a cringeworthy exercise in retrospect on how ludicrously overrated the Canadiens were at the beginning of the season. There wasn't a player in the Montreal lineup this year who was remotely as good as the third or fourth best player on Pittsburgh or Detroit's fifth or sixth best, and when you get past the first two lines the comparisons become downright embarrassing. Not that it's any consolation, but even Chicago and Carolina have been little more than glorified punching bags for the Wings and Pens...It's a welcome departure from tiresome tradition that the Indianapolis 500 and Kentucky Derby still honor America but augment the national anthem by playing a more relevant number that the crowd actually embraces - "Back Home in Indiana" at the Brickyard and "My Old Kentucky Home" at the Derby. If other sporting events are looking to freshen up proceedings with an unofficial anthem, I'd like to suggest Foreigner's Cold as Ice for the Brier, Pink Floyd's Money for the Monaco Grand Prix, and the Rodeo Song for the Grey Cup, but only when it's played outdoors in Winnipeg, where it really is 40 below and they don't give a f#&*...Speaking of Monaco, the jet set reportedly paid lip service to the economic downtown by cutting back on extravagant spending at this year's race, but if cutting back means booking a one bedroom king at the Meridien Beach Plaza instead of the presidential suite at the Fairmont Monte Carlo and ordering filet mignon in the restaurant instead of room service lobster tails, I don't know whose grudging respect the glitterati earned besides each other's...If it's true that Alex Rodriguez and Kate Hudson have hooked up, I don't see it lasting very long, because A-Rod doesn't strike me as the type who settles for being the second prettiest in the relationship.
BRING ON THE ICE GIRLS
Thu, 2009-05-14 08:48.
We've been down this road before, but as a certain Hall of Fame sportswriter once said about Martin Rucinsky's appendage, "you can't see it all in one trip," so here we go again. The Canadiens need ice girls. Did you see those southern belles cheering on the Hurricanes last night in Raleigh, albeit to no avail? Carolina's Storm Squad is one of no fewer than 13 teams of ice girls in the NHL, and the phenomenon isn't restricted to expansion franchises in the southern and southwestern U.S. Calgary has the tube-topped, mini-skirted Big Country Ice Crew, and at least two Original Six teams, Boston and Chicago, have cheerleading teams that participate in various charity functions as well as entertain fans at the rink. There was a time when Montreal was considered - or considered itself - too sophisticated and steeped in hockey tradition for something as cheesy as ice girls, but over the past couple of seasons, Canadiens fans have demonstrated time and again that they are DE-volving rather than evolving, and they would surely embrace ice girls with the same amount of passion and enthusiasm that they demonstrate when they boo the American national anthem, smash storefront windows and overturn police cars and set them on fire. In fact, maybe if the Canadiens trained their ice girls as anger management counsellors and riot squad officers, they could kill three birds with one stone.
NICE HATS, NICE SAVES AND NICE NAMES
Mon, 2009-05-04 08:08.
Not that I've ever been an authority on either subject, but I now know more about hats than I do about horse racing, thanks to NBC's coverage of Saturday's Kentucky Derby, which was more about celebrities and their ridiculous headgear than it was about the race. Mind you, not even the keenest observer had an inkling that the Derby would be won by a 50-1 longshot who cost his owners about what you'd pay for a decent second hand car, and whose stunning victory in throughbred racing's signature event was roughly akin to a taxicab winning the Daytona 500...If you've never seen a better save than the one Washington's Simeon Varlamov made on Sidney Crosby in the Capitals win over Pittsburgh Saturday, you're not old enough to remember Ken Dryden of the Canadiens robbing Chicago's Jim Pappin in the 1971 Stanley Cup final. Like Crosby, Pappin was actually raising his stick in the air and celebrating when Dryden shot his leg shot out to stop a seemingly sure goal into a wide open net. Both saves were spectacular, but what made Dryden's better was that while Varlamov's stop was an act of sheer desperation, Dryden made it look routine...Memo to American play-by-play announcers: it's a puck, not a biscuit. Biscuits are what you feed your dog. It may be sparingly referred to as "frozen rubber," but it's never, EVER "the biscuit," just like you don't call a baseball "the potato" or a football "the watermelon"...I already knew it was pronounced Jonathan "Taves" and not "Toe-yews", but I only found out this weekend that Toews' Chicago Blackhawks teammate is Dustin "Buflin" and not "Bye-FYOOG-lin." I haven't been that out to lunch on a player's name since Milan Hej-duck.
Lottery results for Fri, Jul 03
