HATTRICK EAVES!!!

This is the first time you've seen a post on this blog within six hours of a game since... probably since Trisha got out of college. There are two reasons for this:

1. This game was a circus festival of awesomosity.

• Patrick Eaves scored a freaking hat trick. I was pretty much expecting him to get the puck on his stick three feet from the empty net, with no one between him and it but air, and then go diving into the corner, but I'm glad he didn't. CURLY. FRIES.
• Babcock dropped the f-bomb on camera. Loud enough for the audio to pick it up.
• The Wings are now the top of the league. Where they should be.
  

2. I was already on the internet. This might be something some of you take for granted, but in our house, we have a dial-up connection, and we only have it on one computer. We have to schedule in a good five or ten minutes just to sign on and get our own blog loaded. And I don't normally go online during hockey games at home.

But today, there was something funky going on with the feed or the cameras - it looked like we were watching the game with frames missing. The game was back and forth enough that it was starting to make me ill, so instead of watching the Red Wings score seven goals, I listened to them doing it while I trolled auction sites for old pictures. Which means that not only do we have this timely (though short) post, but also the WHL trading card gallery of Horrible Hair:

Happy Wednesday.

So this has not only been a really great night for me personally, but also a highly productive one.

The Greatest Hockey Music Ever - Part V

I love Chris Osgood, so we're not discussing tonight's game right now. Instead, here's a little bit of holiday cheer for you to annoy your relatives with. It also happens to be one of my favorite Christmas songs. What that says about me... I'm not sure.

Johnny Bower is a certified badass. He won four Stanley Cups, two Vezina trophies, played all but a scant handful of his 552 games maskless, and when he was in high school, he successfully lied about his age to go overseas and start shooting Nazis.

No, really, I'm still young enough to serve...

He will always be cooler than you are. Only adding to this fact is his 1965 #29 hit on the Canadian charts:

Honky the Christmas Goose.

Recorded by Bower, his son “Little John”, and a choir of children (The Rinky-Dinks), this might just be the single greatest Christmas song in existence. The song tells the harrowing personal journey of Honky, who “got so fat that he was no use” (it never says how. Maybe he was a farm goose being fattened up for holiday dinner. This is already uplifting). Depressed about his bourgeoning weight, Honky begins to take out his frustrations by scaring the bejesus out of unsuspecting townsfolk. Tired of being chased down icy sidewalks by a mutantly rotund, out of control water fowl, holiday purchases scattering to the wind, the townsfolk roast and eat him with cranberry sauce and a walnut dressing Santa Claus rescues him because Rudolf is a useless, cross-eyed idiot who keeps running into Boeing jets.

HUR DUR...

I like this song because it shows us how fat people, like Honky and Santa Claus, can still contribute to society. So don’t worry about all that Christmas pie you’re eating, kids. Johnny Bower says it’s ok to be a porker.

And he knows how to get the ladies

Should you now wish to translate your new favorite song into a last-minute holiday gift, this site sells CD cases.

A Johnny Bower CD comes with the purchase of the case, but you're not actually ordering the CD. You're just ordering the case.

Stay classy, Chicago

The Wings won a game and it was awesome, and then they lost tonight's game and it was gross. I've got something more important to write about.

I can understand, and maybe even accept the "Detroit sucks" chants. That particular phrase has a long history of being chanted by the fans of the Wings' biggest rivals, and if I'm going to get all up in arms about it tonight, I'll have to write out retroactive diatribes on a quarter of the teams in the league.

What I'm upset about is what they did to Chelios.

He put on a Blackhawks jersey, stood up on a Blackhawks ice, in front of God and everybody, professing his Chicago-ness and his love for his hometown team, the team he spent nearly a decade with, and they booed him.

He was expecting it. He was planning for it. He said "let's let bygones be bygones" and waited for it to stop. It kept on. It got louder.

I joke a lot about Chicago fans being unclassy jerks, but I didn't think this was very funny. This went beyond unclassy. I'd actually like to hear what Mickey Redmond was saying about it off-camera, but Redmond's a gentleman and I'm a girl, so I doubt I'd get to hear it from him anyway.


What basis do I have to say this was unclassy? Let's take a look at what classy looks like:

• Last November, Lindsay and I were at a Wings game right in the middle of the vomitrocious stretch of three games (two back to back at home) where Detroit was held scoreless. Joe Louis Arena was hosting the Atlanta Thrashers. The crowd was silent when Slava Kozlov scored, but when Budd Lynch announced the goal over the loudspeaker, we clapped for him, because he was one of ours.
• I don't actually remember whether Wings fans booed Marian Hossa for going to the Blackhawks last season, but I don't remember them doing it. What I do remember was a thread on message board about whether booing was or was not appropriate in that situation, and the posters who yelled at the pro-booing individuals for unclassiness.
• Remember Bob Probert? He didn't end his career with Detroit. In fact, he spend quite a few years throwing punches as a member of the Chicago Blackhawks. But after he retired, if someone at Joe Louis Arena had tried to boo him? The guy next to him would have knocked his lights out. So probably would have Probert.
• This a a hockey blog, so I don't know how many of you even care about basketball, but there's some crossover with the Wings and Pistons fanbases, so I'm counting this as relevant for the sake of this argument. Chauncey Billups of the Detroit Pistons was traded to another team. His first game back at the Palace? The fans gave him a lengthy standing ovation.

We weren't all butterflies and roses to Fedorov the first few times he skated on Detroit ice someone else's jersey, but now I want him to come back for a ceremony at the Joe so the crowd can not boo him and I can add him to this list.

This isn't even about Wings fans being un-realistically classy. Trevor Linden was the heart and soul of the Vncouver Cnaucks; he wore the C, he gave them his best, and then he left. Vanouver didn't boo him in an Islanders jersey. They held up signs saying "Always a Canuck", and "Captain in our hearts". Earlier this season, when Modano, as a Red Wing,went back out on Dallas ice, the fans (and this is a crowd that at the end of the 2008 western conference finals chanted "Let's go Penguins" as the Red Wings awaited the presentation of the Campbell Bowl) didn't boo him. He was the heart and soul of the Dallas Stars, he wore the C, and the fans gave him the cheers he deserved.

Well, Chelios was the heart and soul of the Chicago Blackhawks. He was a hometown boy, one of their own, a fan of the team growing up, and he gave them the best years of his career. The Chicago River flows backwards through his veins. If you cut him, he'd bleed vaguely racist feathers and deep dish pizza (and then you'd be bleeding for making him bleed his own blood). But Chicago didn't care about that tonight -- they seemed much more interested in hurrying things along to screaming through the national anthem and singing the chorus of Chelsea Dagger on perpetual repeat. Chicago didn't care that he was out there on their ice, wearing their sweater, trying to talk about what an honor it was to have played for their organization -- he had been a Red Wing once, and I guess for them hating another team is more important than caring about your own.

By the third period. there were some fans in attendance attempting to turn the tide of the chanting from "Detroit Sucks' to Let's go Hawks"resulting in what sounded like "We Want Socks" (which everyone in my household found incredibly humorous). If those were the real fans, the ones who recognize what Chelios gave their organization and appreciated him for it, then my heart goes out to them. Maybe someday their compatriots will realize that there's more to being a Blackhawks fan than hating the Red Wings.

Loopholes, awesomness, and a little hockey karma

First of all, for the benefit of Lindsay, who I know won't stop pestering me about this until we're in our fifties unless I clear it up right away - when I said I'd write something about every game, I never said how soon after the game the writing would come. At any rate, I have a solid excuse for yesterday - the power went out due to a snow storm, and I spent most of the evening reading comic books by kerosene lamp (no joke - my dad collects them. Our house is brighter during blackouts than any other situation). So here's my make-up work:


To say that I wasn't expecting that game against Montreal would be the truth. It was preceded by a full hour of black and white footage breaking down a rivalry that had already been running full steam a good 300 years before the dinosaurs were water-skiing behind Noah's Ark.

Ted Lindsay angry. TED LINDSAY SMASH!

Is it telling of what time and separate conferences do to a rivalry that they had to go back to the pre-color days to get most of their footage? Probably. But that's sort of beside the point. CBC had this game so hyped up that they pushed Hockey Night In Canada ahead one day to give it national coverage. It seemed just about the perfect opportunity for the Wings to all eat giant, steaming bowls of stupid that morning and herp derp their way through another abysmal loss. They didn't. They won, and it was awesome.

So I was expecting some sort of karmic retribution on Saturday against the Devils - because the day before had been so awesome, because Chris Osgood was in net and there are clearly otherworldly forces conspiring against his surpassing 400 career wins, because I've trained myself to consistently expect the worst - but the worst thing that happened all night was that every goal and fight in the game happened while I was out of the room. Well actually I guess the worst things that happened all night happened to the Devils.

It's a reassuring thought, Santa

And then the Kings were in Detroit this evening.

With about sixteen left to play in the third, I wondered whether it would make me a bad Wings fan to abandon my television before the game was over to take a shower, but then I decided that personal hygiene is more important than subjecting myself to needless pain, and anyway, as Lindsay was quick to remind me, the game had been over since the middle of the second period.

If I had a dollar for of every picture I've saved of Brad Stuart and Jimmy Howard lying side by side, watching their tears freeze to the ice, I'd have enough to go out and buy a nice-looking scrapbook to keep them in.

This is the part where to make myself feel better about my team having lost, I usually post something like Jack Johnson playing baseball with Sidney Crosby, or Anze Kopitar's naked baby pictures, but my heart's not really in it tonight, which I think has less to do with bitterness over the loss and more to do with the fact that I'm falling asleep at my keyboard right now. Oh well. Maybe next game.

Go Wings.

"WTF Thursday" just doesn't have the same ring to it

Ok, nobody can blame me if I don't want to write about last night's game. I wouldn't blame anyone if they didn't want to read about it.

I don't know why I'm surprised every time the Red Wings have a miserable night against the Nashville Predators - it happens nearly every time, even when they eventually come out on top. I guess in some respects I should cut my losses - I didn't have to sit through two and a half periods with the game tied at zero, and, to my knowledge, none of the Red Wings skated off with a concussion that's going to last a year.

Uh, did I sort of promise a Nashville-themed WTF Wednesday and then totally not deliver?

I wish I could bring you something awesome to make up for that (and maybe some of you will find this way more awesomely wtf than I do - I've been hoarding so much hockey-related strangeness on my hard drive the last few years that I'm starting to get a warped view of what's weird and what's actually normal), but all I have is a reader-provided youtube of Taylor Swift plugging the team (even though we've got some sketchy evidence that she might actually back the Penguins) and this poorly done tattoo:

This should slightly upset me as a Red Wings fan, but instead I'm just laughing

Maybe I'd have more if I had the tolerance to research them better, but every time I think about that team, all my brain screams is "vomit vomit train whistles".

That was unpleasant

This blog has gotten some serious writer's block. Take a look at the difference between the post count from 2009 and what we're at so far in 2010, and you'll understand what I mean. As someone who managed to trick a college into letting her actually graduate with a writing degree, I know that the best cure for writer's block is copious amounts of alcohol, lack of sleep, and unlimited high speed internet writing through it even when you have nothing whatsoever to say, which is why for the next two weeks, I'm saying something about every game the Red Wings play, even if it's just three sentences about how [insert team name here] makes me want to throw my fist through a wall.

And judging how stress levels at my new job have been, there's going to be a lot of that.

I can't say I don't wish the Wings would have won that game, but maybe they need to lose a couple every once in a while to remind them to play a full 60 minutes, and I have to say that it's really, really nice after last season for a regulation loss to be a relatively rare occurrence.

I still don't know what was going on with Bertuzzi's no-goal, but whatever. I'm pretty sure I had my eyes closed for that entire replay, because I didn't see any reason to blow the whistle, and last I checked, refs weren't allowed to just arbitrarily stop play. Maybe he had a wedgie in his Toasty Tights and wanted a couple minutes to re-adjust.

I'll leave you with that mental image. Speaking of which - the next game's on Wednesday. I'll have to check and see if I have any Nashville-related wtf-ery lying around.