So, some time ago I promised you Saskatoon pics, so here you are! If you can't tell, I'd been playing with the "panorama" feature on the camera again.
Here's a look at the Saskatoon skyline from the place we were inhabiting for the weekend:
On the way back home, we made a quick stop at a little site about which I will write more later, and I took these photos there. And there you basically have eastern Alberta. 
As always, click to make big!
It's once again time to hand out the Scalies - the De Koboldorum Rebus awards given to our beloved Edmonton Oilers for services rendered during the hockey season just past! I tell ya, one of these years they're going to make the playoffs, and then it's going to be really hard to pick these. In the meantime, not so much.
Team MVP: I have, over the course of the last couple of months, heard and read a number of people performing variations on the theme of "if you had told me in September that the Oilers would finish dead last by a mile but nobody would be mad at Dustin Penner (pictured above), I would have laughed." The man's eerie similarities to Frank Mahovlich have been noted elsewhere, and this year we got to see the "thunderous power-forward" side of that equation, as opposed to the "guy in the coach's doghouse" side of previous years. Despite a mid-season slump, Penner became the second Oiler, after Wayne Gretzky, to lead the team in goals, assists, points, and +/- over a season, and although it must be said that he didn't have much competition, that's still pretty impressive. So yeah, this one's Penner's.
Best Rookie: , I think. While Dubnyk, in the way that rookie goaltenders do, probably contributed more than his share to the graying of his coach, there were nonetheless very promising signs towards the end of the season. He even managed to get himself an admittedly odd call-up to Team Canada for the World Championships, although he didn't see any action. The Oilers will probably have to decide between him and Jeff Drouin-Deslauriers this summer at some point, and the general consensus that I'm seeing is that they'll go with Dubnyk. The fact that he's 6'6" doesn't hurt him at all.
Most Under-Rated Player: It was Shawn Horcoff, my goodness. Yes, he had a terrible year. Yes, his +/- was one of the worst in the entire league. Yes, he's overpaid. But he was likely playing hurt, he's one of the few guys on the Oil who can reliably take a faceoff, he's by all accounts a classy guy, and his work ethic is legendary (this last is an important consideration given the large number of young guys likely to be kicking around training camp this fall). In a just world, Horcoff would be a shoo-in as the next Oilers' Captain. However, this is not a just world; this is a world where Shawn Horcoff was booed this past season by his own fans after picking up assists.
Most Improved Player: After some pondering, I think this one has to go to Gilbert Brule. The Blue-Jackets made him the poster boy for guys brought into the league too young, and this was past year was his first chance to really turn things around. He took advantage of it, with goal and point totals that were by far career bests. There's some question, of course, as to the role of luck in this renaissance (Brule's shooting percentage was suspiciously high), and thus as to whether he can keep it up, but in the meantime it was a nice job by the young man.
And thus another year of Scalies comes to a close. And now, we wish to take you back to a brighter time, the time of "a few games into the 2009-2010 NHL season," when the Oilers were more-or-less healthy, and did not despair even when down 4-1 in the second period. Watch, and enjoy (you can especially enjoy Penner's drive to the net at the 2:00 mark of the video. Remind yourself that that's an NHL defenceman trying to stop him. Even though Penner didn't score on the play, it's still impressive - truly Mahovlichian, in fact).
Ok, maybe not really "breaking," so much, since this story is a few days old, but to make an 8-years-long story short, Alberta finally got around to putting the grizzly bear on the Threatened List. Now we wait to see if the gov will in fact follow through, and start taking the necessary steps (restricting access, etc.) to actually protect the grizzly population. At least, in the meatime, the bears can't be hunted.
...because this is the internet, where cat pictures are de rigeur! Also because she's a cute cat.
Nefertiti in a box:
Nefertiti, ready for her close-up:
* Reads newspaper *
Hmm, so, let's see, what's up in the world these days? Well, everything seems to be going swimmingly in regards to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Why, the next attempt to contain the leak will probably only INCREASE the rate of flow from it by 20%!!!!!!!! Sucks to be you, things that live in, on, or by the Gulf! Fortunately, the head cheese of British Petroleum says that things aren't that bad at all, and we should all just settle down and not pay any attention to those horrible sciencey people, with their science and everything. Next up - hurricane season!
And... look over here! An attempt to lessen, in some minor and perhaps symbolic way, the suffering of the city of Gaza has been met with lethal force, thus providing the extremist wings of both sides of the Israel-Palestine debate with a prime chance to get up and scream at each other. At press time, Gaza itself remained more-or-less screwed.
On the local front, someone took it upon him/her/itself this past weekend to wander down to the zoo and wipe out the guinea pigs. "Why?" you ask? Nobody knows. However, I feel strongly that The Stealthy Dachshund's response has much merit to it.
Nothing for it, I guess, but to run a nice picture of a tulip, taken by me. Click to embiggen, as always!
Party-time in south-east London tonight, I would think! I'll post video when I can find it.
off to saskatchewan for weekend stop blogging unlikely until return stop will take pictures stop
And to think we said we'd never make a sequel... Anyway, since we last blogged on this topic, there's been a change in the awards, so there's a new entry in the list! That, and we forgot one.
First, to the change. Sadly, this season we bid "adieu" to the Lester B. Pearson Award, about which we blogged here, and which has been retired and replaced. You may recall that this was the award handed out, on behalf of the NHL Players' Association, to the player voted "most outstanding" by his peers. Now, we are generally against the replacing of the NHL awards, and we're against this one. Nonetheless, we can have no objections to the man chosen to be honoured by the replacement award, especially given that it's handed out by the NHLPA.
The Ted Lindsay Award: Ted Lindsay (pictured above bothering Jacques Plante) was a hell of a hockey player. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he made up one third of the "Production Line" in Detroit, alongside Gordie Howe and Sid Abel. How good was the line? Well, in the 49-50 season, Howe finished third in the NHL in scoring... behind Lindsay and Abel.
Despite his on-ice prowess, however, Lindsay is better-known for something he did away from the rink. In the mid-50s, he and Doug Harvey of the Canadiens launched an attempt to form first an association, and then a union, for NHL players. Lindsay's career suffered for it; the Norris family, who owned the Red Wings, ended up trading him to the then-moribund Chicago Black Hawks. However, the players duly got their union, and the men who today pull down millions to play the game, and actually have some say in where they play it, can thank Ted Lindsay for that.
The Ted Lindsay Award will be given, as the Pearson Award was, to the league's most outstanding player, as voted upon by the membership of Ted Lindsay's NHLPA.
The Roger Crozier Saving Grace Award: This is the one we forgot. The Roger Crozier Saving Grace Award is awarded by MBNA America (a bank, in case you didn't know) to the goalie who records the best save percentage over the course of the season.
Roger Crozier was a capable goalie for the Red Wings for most of the 1960s, when he twice led the league in shutouts. In 1970, he moved to the expansion Buffalo Sabres, and became their first ever starting goalie. Crozier played the rest of his career in Buffalo, apart from a very short (3 game) stint with the Capitals, and retired in 1977. After his retirement, he went to work for MBNA America, and the award that bears his name was donated by his employers after Crozier's death in 1996.
No Oiler has ever won the Roger Crozier Saving Grace Award.
I should point out here that there are a couple of other NHL awards; however, they're not named for figures from hockey's distant past, and I don't see much point in discussing them at any length. They are the NHL Lifetime Achievement Award (Current Holder: Jean Beliveau) and the ScotiaBank Fan Fave Award (Current Holder: Roberto Luongo).
In case you were wondering at all, that was an important and historic statement by the Speaker. To sum it up (the full transcript is here, Mr. Milliken ruled that Charles I Stephen Harper and his cabinet cannot refuse to do the bidding of Parliament, period, full stop. The notion that Parliament, not the executive branch, runs the show goes back a fair ways, probably at least to the above-alluded-to English Civil War, and it is really no exaggeration to say that, had the Speaker ruled differently, the Canadian political system would have been dramatically altered at a stroke. So, it was a big day for the country, and again, a hearty "well done" to Mr. Milliken.
Anyway, long day at work, so I'll wimp out at this point and let you go and read Dr. Dawg's excellent and detailed analysis of the situation!
Question: What do Cree, Dakota, Dene, Inuktitut, Michif, Ojibway and Oji-Cree have in common? Well, apart from, obviously, being Native American languages, they're about to be given official status in the province of Manitoba. Apparently, they will be recognized as Aboriginal Languages of Manitoba, and efforts will be made to preserve their use.
This is a very good and encouraging thing. Indigenous languages have become notoriously fragile things (the tsunami of 2005 irretrievably eradicated five languages in the Bay of Bengal alone), and any official intervention to forestall the loss of them is more than welcome.
So here's to Manitoba, and may we see the same sort of project undertaken in other provinces soon! Oh, and the comments section for the story linked in the first paragraph is every bit, and I mean 100%, as non-ignorant as you thought it would be.
UPDATE: The Calgary Herald story seems to have gone away. I've replaced it with something form the Winnipeg Sun.
First off, this is only funny because Sébastian Buemi wasn't hurt. Anyway, this is what the catastrophic failure, at 180 mph, of an F1 car's suspension looks like from the driver's point of view:
Saw a nice gentleman pottering around in the bookstore today wearing a blue boiler suit, which isn't terribly unusual since there's a lot of construction going on around campus, plus the building services people do drop by from time to time. What was unusual was that this particular character had accessorized his boiler suit with about eight cowboy hats, which he was wearing stacked up on his head. Well, one must have one's own look, I suppose...
The Oilers' 09-10 season summed up in one thrilling imageAnd thus endeth The Season In Which Everything That Could Go Wrong Did. Embarassing off-season shenanigans? Check. First game lost to big rivals thanks to comedy goaltanding moment? Check. Big-shooting defenseman injured early? Check. Most skilled player injured early? Check. Starting goalie injured early? Check. Just about everybody else injured? Or sick? Or both? Check. Big-shooting defenceman injured again? Check. Starting goalie injured and in jail? Check. Big shooting defenceman in hospital with life-threatening condition? Check. Promising new acquisition injured within about 0.000003 milliseconds of joining the team? Check. And so it went - trust me, we're barely scratching the surface of the awfulness here.
We'll get around to handing out Scalies a bit later, along with some less ranty discussion of what needs to be done. In the meantime, here's a sneak preview of two things that were NOT at fault for what happened to the Oil this season: A) The coaching. B) Dustin Penner. More, as I said, on that later.
In the meantime, at least we Oilers fans can relax a bit, knowing that, at least for the next few weeks, all eyes will be on the playoffs, and that we are relatively free from the danger of facepalm moments. Or not.
UPDATE! Oilers to big-shooting defenceman: "STFU." Quinn to big-shooting defenceman: "GTFO." And that last is actually just about verbatim.
Well, we've lost Malcolm McLaren, and at the young age of 64. I think it is safe to say that, for a guy who founded a band simply as a means of drumming up publicity for his clothing store and then had that band manage to hang around long enough to record exactly one studio album, he had a fairly thunderous impact on popular music.
And here is that band:
