Ted Bird's blog
I'LL GIVE YOU TWO HITLERS AND A TOJO FOR AN EISENHOWER
www.lestweforgetcards.ca
HABS DRAFT CLOSE TO HOME
MOLSONS NOT EXACTLY JOHNNY-COME-LATELIES
WHAT I DID ON MY OTHER SPRING VACATION
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
HABS AND MARTIN: A CURIOUS AND UNEXPECTED PAIRING
WHAT I DID ON MY SPRING VACATION
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
BRING ON THE ICE GIRLS
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.










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