Banking Magic

Ohhh the bank...always full of wonder. I always get the feeling that no matter what I am doing in the bank, the teller reacts like it has never been done before, and then proceeds to phone 9 other people in the building to see if it is indeed possible. There is a lot of head scratching and breathing through the teeth until finally money goes where it should and I am on my way...usually wondering if I have just deposited money, or in fact I have donated to the bank employee Christmas fund.

There is always that one trusty employee though that a guy has been to a few times and seems to get the hang of the forms and number crunching involved, and I try to stay loyal to that clerk...however, in this age of MBA's, some flea bag manager usually rotates the staff in the following order (which "Wharton Hyundai Ivy Princeton Yale Business College of Korea" has richly instilled in graduates in their "Secret American Business Tactics" class since 2005):
teller to loans officer to security guard to washroom cleaner to pamphlet straightener to fund manager, and then back again. Thus, the average bank customer has a better chance of playing pick up sticks with his anus than drawing a teller that actually knows what is going on.

Midnight Special

After hearing Paul Maurice describing Darcy Tucker as a "special player" 38 times in one interview, it started to get on my nerves. Maybe it's just me, but the use of the word "special" in hockey journalism is ridiculous. There are adjectives upon adjectives for describing people, and I would assume that writers / journalists would be able to crack open a thesaurus now and then to come up with ingenious expressions now and again rather than relying on a worn out word that has been stripped of all real meaning. As the saying goes though, many writers get unlimited mileage out of a limited vocabulary.

Here is a brief list of examples describing everyone from Gretzky to Nolan to some no name hack that played 3 games for the Devils back in 97.

• Bowman said. "You were a special player, and a special player in my heart."
• Ken Hitchcock, coach of the rival Philadelphia Flyers, hailed Lemieux as a "special player, special player, special talent."
• Orr did everything by himself with tremendous injuries and I believe he was the most special player to ever play…
• On Crosby “He’s truly a special player.”
• Gretzky truly is in his own category. Love him or hate him , you have to admit he was a special player
• "But we feel Owen Nolan is a special player."
• "I spent six years here that were very special, so I'm sure I had a little extra tonight,"
• "It's a special feeling when you come back to your former team.”
• "It is a pretty special feeling to know you have the community behind you,"
• Boucher has special night in Stars' 5-3 win

Come on now...I know that most players have the equivalent of a 6th grade Jethro Bodean education and coaches maybe a 9th grade education, but writers have supposedly gone to school to get what Mr. Valiaho called "The Dictionary Habit" back in grade 4.
Regardless of all this jive, it makes about as much sense listening to professional athletes talking as watching Leno and Letterman face off in a game of canasta against Larry King and Oprah while they all eat sunflower seeds.
Is there a sports cliche getting on your nerves? Post it up in the comments section and I will pass it along to Dave Hodge. He will throw pencils until something gets done about it.

A shot at some video

The Goat told me just how easy it is to get some vids on the blog, so here is a first attempt. What better way to kick it off than with Sakuraba kicking some ass...

Eggs and Darts

Yesterday kicked off with "Breakfast at Barry's" with the Barrister whipping up eggs benedict and pouring up a few spicy caesars to get a jump on the morning. He had a bit of clamato left over from a trip back to Canada, so he thought it would be a nice way get sharpened up for the darts tourney going on in the afternoon.

Lorne, Barry and I made it to 3 Alley right at 1pm, the start time for the event, but we could have shown up a few hours later as it was a slow haul getting through some of the preliminary rounds with only one dart board. Anyway, we shot a bit of pool, had a beverage, a snack, a chat, a few cigars, read the paper, took a siesta, shopped on ebay, solved a few sidoku puzzles, wrote and recited a couple of limericks, figured out our taxes, and thumbed through the underlined passages of War and Peace; then we waited.

Darts finally flew and we got some pretty decent games in. The Goat got short changed in doubles by being the odd man out and having to choose a partner from the lower division, who turned out to be not bad though. My partner was a wizard at bulls, so it gave us a bit of an edge on everyone right off the bat cuz he was pretty accurate at piercing one or two in the first couple of rounds. We squeaked through a rematch with Roddy and Colin and walked away with the cash.

Singles was a bit wilder. Colin and I met up for the third time of the day, but both of us got off to slow starts and chipped along until finally I got through. The Goat and I met up in round two and he was handing me a beating, but a sturdy 5 bull comeback took me into the finals where Roddy and I locked up in 01. He is a cricket master, so I wanted to stay away from that if possible, but in the end it didn't matter as he sent me on my way after we battled for the double out.

A quick steak at Hollywood's after and I was home for some shut eye. The only problem with going to bed so early is that I then wake up early, so I was up around 4am seeing what was on the tube...nothing, as you might expect. I am burnt out today...my class might not be up to par...oh well, I have given them all the knowledge I have already, so what more can they expect!

Well, I don't really want to get all political on here, but this is a little something that I read as I linked along several blogs which eventually brought me to wikipedia (ahhh, you know how that goes...next thing you know, 3 hours have gone by!)

"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

Any guesses who the "His" in the first sentence refers to? Roh? KJI?

Find the answer here! And don't blame me if your whole work day is then shot from surfing through wikipedia for hours...

VJ is Back. Watch out for flying debris.