The Vig

With the exception of the Betty White/Abe Vigoda ad for Snickers, this year’s Super Bowl ads sucked.  All of them.   Well maybe the Tebow ad, which was much better and much less political than anyone expected, shouldn’t be lumped in there, but the rest of them?  Yuck.

The Letterman ad goes into it’s own category.  First, it wasn’t a corporate ad.  It was a CBS house ad, not something created by corporate nitwits.  Second, it was Dave.  Third, it featured Dave’s longtime late-night nemesis Jay Leno.  Their feud, for lack of a better term, goes back almost 20 years now.  Is it all over?  Just like that?  Dave absolutely killed Leno last month during the whole Conan debacle.  And he did so gleefully, I might add.  What in the hell happened?

I sat stunned for a few seconds after the thing aired.  I seriously couldn’t believe everyone was in one room.  I originally thought it had been done as a split-screen thing, like Michael and LaToya at the “We Are the World” sessions.  Not true.

The spot was shot last Tuesday afternoon, under the strictest of secrecy which involved both Mr. Leno and Ms. Winfrey flying in surreptitiously to New York, and arriving incognito at the theater, while Mr. Letterman was in the midst of taping his show for that night. It also involved Jay wearing a disguise: hooded sweatshirt, glasses and faux mustache. If you happened to be on Broadway between 53rd and 54th street last Tuesday about 4:15, you might have seen a man fitting that description slip into the theater by a small entrance under the marquee.

This could only happen because Dave made it happen.  From the outside it almost looks like a Michael-Fredo reunion with Dave as Michael and Jay as Fredo.  Only Leno never got clipped for betraying the family.

The family, you say?  I just finished reading I’m Dying Up Here by William Knoedelseder.  It’s the story of the 1979 comedians strike against the Comedy Store.  ESPN’s Bill Simmons mentioned the book on his Sports Guy podcast last month while talking Conan with the San Francisco Chronicle’s Tim Goodman.  Long story short, in the mid-to-late-seventies, the path to comic stardom went through Johnny Carson and the path to Carson went through the Comedy Store.  While at first comics were happy to work for free in exchange for the opportunity to be seen by entertainment executives, they eventually saw themselves as cheap labor for an establishment which was making loads of money.  They wanted a cut…the Store’s owner Mitzi Shore didn’t want to give it to them…so they struck.

As the story builds, you see names of folks who got their start at the Comedy Store and went on to bigger things.  Names like Robin Williams, Richard Lewis, Andy Kaufman, Elayne Boosler, and Gallagher.  You read about how Kaufman negotiated his Taxi contract so he would only have to be on the set one day a week.  How comics would watch Mork and Mindy in horror as Robin Williams stole borrowed bits from them.  And how Dave transitioned from comic to emcee, the role he was born to play.

For the most part, these folks were all blood brothers and sisters, particularly coming out of the strike experience of 1979.  They’ve all been tremendous boosters of one another’s work.  That’s why, for example, you’ll see Jimmie Walker still pop-up on Letterman a few times a year.  Tom Dreesen too.  And that’s why the Leno-Letterman schism hurt so much in ‘93.  They’d all spent so much time scratching and clawing their way to the top while still looking out for one-another, it was shocking to see Leno come in and take the job Dave had been groomed for for so long.

According to Knoedelseder, prior to last Tuesday, there was one previous moment when Leno and Letterman could have been in the same room.  It was 2003 when  their mutual friend and Comedy Store veteran George Miller passed away.  Leno showed up for the memorial service but Letterman, who was battling shingles at the time, did not.  It was only because he was so ill that he didn’t show.

So is it over?  My initial reaction says probably not.  But there’s a little bit of a thaw there.  It’s nice to see.  It would be an awful thing if they took this thing all the way to their graves.

The O says Luca Sbisa will be in uniform for the Hawks next Friday.  That means he’ll be in the line-up next Saturday against Seattle in the Rose Garden.  Here I thought we wouldn’t see him until after the Olympics.

Get your tickets now, kids.  The Winterhawks season just got really interesting.

I attended my first Winterhawks game in months tonight.  As Dylan B pointed out many times, there’s been a lot of changes while I was gone.  Wish I still had my media packet so I could go through all of them real quick.  Needless to say, there were some guys on the ice tonight that I don’t think I’d ever seen.  Guys with names like Doyle and Swenson and Pouliot(!).  And…well…that’s about it, isn’t it?

I told Dylan seeing the guys in white play so well was taking some getting used to.  The passing was especially noticeable.  No longer are guys panicking while trying to get the puck out of the defensive zone.  Passes leave sticks now with purpose and end up on the tape of teammates instead of flying into space.  And those teammates are found at full speed, charging up-ice.  I tell you, it’s a thing of beauty.  A distracting thing of beauty.  There were only a few players I really noticed on the ice tonight, and really not for any particular reason.  I’ll get to that in a moment.

The only real down note of the whole evening was attendance.  The official number was 1807.  I would guess there were half that.  As Dylan and I pondered the fate of the 50-50 game, he mentioned perhaps the Hawks were making up the difference to the player education fund.  I then mentioned Gallacher wasn’t running a charity out there.  Then, pondering the attendance, I said maybe he is.  Maybe they’re making it up on Fridays and Saturdays, but wow.  Dylan remarked he remembered when midweek games like this would have twice the attendance.  I do too.

Thoughts:

Carruth: The goaltenders each earned two of tonight’s three stars of the game.  An inspired choice, if you ask me.  Inspired by what, I don’t know.  But that’s one man’s opinion.  Carruth, I believe, is the kid they brought up to spell Curtis when he went down and Mucha wasn’t in town?  Or maybe it was Hamilton?  Like I said, I’ve been away too long.  The point is, he looked fine and stayed out of trouble.  But the #2 star?  I dunno about that.

Gabriel: “Quit picking on my Ollie!” exclaimed the lady in front of me during the second period.  Indeed.  With goals in three of the last four games, the guy is on fire.  I’m probably the only one who still thinks of him as Scott’s younger brother.  Unfair?  Absolutely.  I need to move on.

Pouliot: With the number 51 on his back, he’s going to get noticed when he hits the ice.  You know who he is.  And his play backs it up.  He’s gonna be fun to watch.

Jordan: I was waaaay too distracted with my iPhone tonight to be paying that close of attention.  Either that or Jordan has suddenly gone into stealth mode on the ice.  I used to notice him every shift he was out there.  Perhaps there’s too much other stuff happening now that I’m not always looking to be entertained by Employee 19 21 55.  He delivered a hit in the second period that had me scrambling to email his sister, a regular visitor to this site.  He remains both of our favorite player.

I watched almost all of the McGwire interview on the MLB Network yesterday.  He had me right up until he said he used “small doses” of steroids.  I don’t believe that for a moment.  I do, however, buy most of the rest of his story.  That is to say, I do believe he believes he could have accomplished everything he did without the juice.  That he believes he was using simply for therapeutic purposes.  I’ll have to go back and look, but I don’t think he was doing his therapy under any sort of medical supervision, but whatever.  I take vitamins every morning in the belief they make my body perform better.  Does it?  Who knows.  McGwire probably thought of steroids in the same way.

What annoys me about this whole thing is we’re leaving entry into the Hall of Fame up to the Baseball Writers Association of America.  Basically once you’re in the association for ten years, you get a ballot.  And you keep getting one whether you still cover games or not.  This is how Canzano stays on their mailing list despite my suspicion that you can count the number of actual games he’s attended in the last twelve months on one hand.  Still he gets to vote and then preen on his radio show, as he did yesterday, that he’ll “never, ever, ever, ever, ever vote for McGwire”.  Why?  Not because of anything he did on the field.  And not even because McGwire admitted he did steroids.  But because McGwire still stands behind the fig leaf that he was only doing it for therapeutic purposes.  For this, Canzano holds back his vote.

Same holds true for Chicago’s Jay Marrioti, who famously turned in a blank ballot this year.  The main subject of any Marrioti column or television appearance is Jay Marrioti.  Nothing else.  He turned in a blank ballot in a transparent “look at me!” ploy for publicity.  Nothing else.  ”I can’t judge any of these guys!” he claims.  Yet there’s no doubt he’s signed off on plenty of guys in the past who’ve done amphetamines or worse.  Why do they get a pass from Jay?  Who knows.

Look.  Jackassery is a long and proud tradition within the ranks of sportswriters.  Writers have held grudges against players for years and vice-versa.  And McGwire is hardly the first player to fall victim to some writers’ self-serving crap.  That said, times have changed.  We no longer only suffer jackass writers in the silence of our morning coffee.  Now they’re on our TVs, in our radios, and clogging up the Intertron.  And as they’ve branched out, their bravado has increased.  And the bravado is starting to spill over into institutions like the Hall of Fame.  It’s got to end.

The Football Hall of Fame, I think, has it close to right.  They have a panel of very serious people who meet and debate various nominees, then they come down annually with their stone tablets and announce that year’s class of inductees.  These are guys who study and know the game inside and out.  And guys who take their responsibilities seriously.  Yes, even Peter King takes his vote seriously.  What’s more, those guys see their positions as an honor, not as a soapbox.  It’s time the Baseball Hall of Fame divorces itself from the BBWAA and gets serious about who they allow to vote.

Imagine for a moment you’re Blazer GM Kevin Pritchard.  The phone rings.  It’s Spurs GM RC Buford and has he got a deal for you.  He’ll send you the retiring Tim Duncan (remember…we’re imagining) in exchange for Batum, Fernandez, and Bayless.  AND, because he’s in such a good mood, Buford will even swap first round picks with you, giving the Blazers a chance to get into the next draft’s lottery.

The downside of this scenario is you’re only renting Duncan for a half a season and you’re giving up a couple of “future” prospects to get the deal done.  On the plus-side, you’re getting a future hall-of-famer who can still play and who might be able to lead this team to a championship this season.  If you’re Kevin Pritchard, what do you do?

I know what the real Kevin Pritchard would do.  He’d crap his pants.  And then say no.  He loves his guys and he (along with his owner) doesn’t want to make another mistake along the lines of the Jermaine O’Neal deal.  So he stands pat.

Winterhawks (one word) GM Mike Johnston has a lot of the same problems Pritchard has.  He’s got some serious young talent that a lot of folks would no doubt like to have.  After years of neglect under previous ownership, the Hawks are revitalized and once again a force in the Western Hockey League.  It seems strange to say it, but I think it’s true.  The Hawks are on the move.  And they’ll only be better next season.

So after declaring last week that he’d likely stand-pat at this weekends trade deadline, Johnston went out and made a move that even got Dylan B. excited.   The Winterhawks traded 17-year-old defenseman Daniel Johnston, 18-year-old forward Jacob Berglund and their first round pick in the 2010 Import Draft to Lethbridge for 19-year-old defenseman Luca Sbisa, Lethbridge’s first round pick in the 2010 CHL Import Draft and a fifth round pick in the 2011 WHL Bantam Draft.  Ummm….wow.

Why wow?  Try this on for size.  In the WHL, youth is king.  A team’s roster is made-up of mainly 17-to-19-year-olds, with a few 16s thrown in.  A team may have no more than three 20-year-olds.  So in general, you don’t give up younger players for older ones, unless you’re making a playoff run.  So there’s that.

What makes this even more daring is the fact that Sbisa will only be available to play in six regular season games for the Hawks.  That’s it.  Why?  Because he’s on the Swiss Olympic team and he’ll be playing with them in Vancouver next month.  There’s a chance he could be back as a 20 next season, but given the fact hes a first-round pick of the Philadelphia Flyers, he’ll likely be playing there next season and not here.

So the Hawks get six games and the playoffs in exchange for some of its youth.  Ballsy.  This is the sort of stuff we were promised under the previous regime but never came to pass.  It’s also the sort of move we keep waiting for Pritchard to make, but he hasn’t yet.

I’ve been away from the Hawks for far too long this season.  As you’ve read, I’ve had some other stuff going on.  This ends when they return home on the 20th.  You might want to wander down to the Rose Quarter and check them out yourself.  I’m telling you.  Something big is coming.

I need to go clothes shopping.

A friend of mine told me before Christmas that I was the only person he knew who had a good 2009.  Looking back, I think he’s right.  The funny thing about truly life-changing events is I don’t think you know they’re that momentous until you’ve gone through them and look back.  At least that’s how I feel.  The Summer of Bean has NOTHING on what actually happened.

I’ve known for years that I’m addicted to food.  I couldn’t stop eating.  Even after this happened, I stopped off at Muchas Gracias afterward for a burrito.  I was talking to a friend of mine about it a couple of weeks ago.  I mentioned it takes a serious time commitment to take in the calories required to get to 370 pounds and maintain it.  Forget about the money.  Forget about the food.  It takes time.  Daily.  I wondered for years why I never left the house.  Now I know.  It was because I was eating.

A friend emailed me out of the blue in July and told me about this program he’s been visiting which deals with food addiction.  I stopped in for the first time in July and haven’t stopped going since.  I’m down about 75 pounds.  A day at a time, as they say.  Now you know why you haven’t seen me at Whiffies or celebrating Tomato Pie Day for a while.

A month or so later I was chatting with my housemate’s girlfriend.  She’s in the mortgage business.  We were discussing the $8,000 first-time-homebuyer’s tax-credit.  I was starting to get the itch to leave Vancouver and get back south of the river.  That commute over the Interstate Bridge, even though it was only a half-hour or so, was becoming a real downer for me.  I felt isolated up there.  Friends and family were all a twenty-minute drive away at least.

I’d been looking into renting a place in Portland or maybe down in Lake Oswego.  The more I looked though, the more I thought it made no sense to keep renting.  Not at those prices.  So I asked my friend what it might take to buy a place.

To my surprise, she came back the next day with a pre-qualification letter.  The guy who, until recently, could never pay his bills on time was suddenly able to buy a freaking house!  Or, at the time, condo.

I immediately called another friend of mine who I’d known for years and asked him to help me out.

Sidebar: This is a story about friends, old and new.  The old ones, some of whom I hadn’t seen in months or even years, were happy to help however they could.  The new ones really don’t know me from Adam, but are equally willing to give.  It is, as the kids say, amazing.  End Sidebar.

After several weeks of looking we finally found my new home in Powellhurst-Gilbert.  It wasn’t my first choice, but now that I’m here, I don’t think I’d have it any other way.  My commute to work isn’t any shorter than the one was to Vancouver, but my life commute, to coin a phrase, is much shorter.  Friends who were a half-hour or more away, are now just up the street.  Family is a lot closer too and boy do they like that.  It’s growing on me.

So that’s my last six months or so.  Crazy, right?  If you would have told me at the beginning of July that I’d be closing out December down 70 pounds and in a house of my own, I would have called you crazy.  But here I am.  I really feel like I’ve won the lottery.  That’s what I tell my friends.  All of them.

No doubt you’ve seen those shows on TV or read stories of people who win some huge sum of money only to throw it all away.  Their stories are nearly all the same.  The issue is people never take time to figure out who they are with their newfound wealth.  Their lives have changed suddenly in ways that they can’t handle.  You see it with folks who’ve lost weight too.  Despite what the mirror or their friends might say, they still see themselves as that fat person.  They never take time to adjust.  And before they know it, they’re right back in their same old habits.

So that’s what I’m working on: figuring out who this new Bean is.  And thats what I hope to be writing about from here on.  Things that I’m doing to create this new life.  Posts may or may not be frequent.  I haven’t figured that out.  I do know they’re going to be focused on the positive.

Thanks, as always, for your patronage.  Let’s make 2010 one for the scrap book.

I got the news yesterday as I sat at Big Al’s watching Matt Leinart play his way out of the NFL; the Winterhawks had traded away the guy Mike Williamson once called the team’s biggest leader.  Were it not for the fact a goaltender cannot wear the captain’s C, Kurtis Mucha likely would have been a third year captain this season.  Of this I have no doubt.

Like Dylan B., I was initially shocked by how little the team got in return for him.  I was also shocked at what a crappy team he’d been sent to.  As soon as I read Steve Brandon’s article, the whole thing made a lot more sense to me.

Here are some facts Hawks fans need to take to heart:

1. The Portland Winterhawks aren’t going to win a championship this season.  They will consider the season a fortunate success if they get through the first-round of the playoffs.
2. The Western Hockey League is a developmental league.  That is to say, the primary purpose of each organization is to prepare players for the next level of hockey.  Players, especially players with skill, should seek every opportunity to maximize and showcase their skills.
3. Teams in the Wertern Hockey League who are building toward a championship in two or three seasons understand ice time is precious, especially for younger players who are developing.  Older players can only clog things up.

Let’s be honest.  We all love Mucha.  He poured his heart and soul out for an organization that had no business asking anything from him.  But for whatever reason he stuck it out.  I have no idea why.  Yes, things are finally headed in the right direction here, and that’s a fantastic thing.  That said, as fantastic as he is, this year’s Winterhawks team isn’t going anywhere with him.  Understanding that, the team needs to free up his position in order to develop a younger net minder with the hope that in two years he can be the guy to bring home a championship.  Will that be Carruth?  Hamilton?  Someone else?  Who knows.  The point is the team needs to start down that path now.

Does it smart for Mucha?  Yes.  I think he wanted to finish what he started in Portland, and  I don’t blame him one bit.  The simple fact is he wasn’t going to play here as much as he needs to.  He needs to develop and he wasn’t going to be able to here.  Maybe he can in Kamloops.  Perhaps he’ll get traded to a contender beyond that.  There are opportunities out there.  There aren’t any in Portland.

Listening to Dwight Jaynes on The Game yesterday, I learned Daryl Hall has been doing a really cool Internet project for over two years now.  I was a HUGE Hall and Oates fan back in the 80s.  Somewhere around here I have a ticket signed by John Oates from the show I saw back in 1989 or so.  Needless to say, Im a downloading fool this morning.

A similar project I didn’t know existed until Friday is Beck’s Record Club.  Another cool concept.  Basically Beck gets together with some friends and records a tribute album in a day.  The most recent installment involves (I heart) Wilco and Skip Spence’s Oar.

I’m sure there’s lots of other stuff out there just like this, but there are only so many hours in the day.  Meantime, I have an appointment at the library to pick up the complete Moby Grape.  Drives to work should be a little more fun for the next few weeks.