Are the Montreal Canadiens a religion?

A professor at the Université de Montréal is going to start teaching a graduate class studying the Montreal Canadiens hockey club as religion.

Are the Montreal Canadiens a religion? Well, they do have a goalie nicknamed Jesus Price, and some have claimed that touching Rocket Richard's jersey has healed them.

If the Habs are a religion, then the Leafs are Scientologists.

KA’s hitting myself in the nuts

I occasionally write about kicking people in the nuts. What if you want to kick yourself in the nuts? Not easy. However, you can hit yourself in the junk very easily in other ways. Uncomfortably, that was the case for me last week.

The scene: rec floorhockey. We play in an elementary school gym, one featuring basketball nets with big pads mounted on the wall behind them to protect players attacking the basket from cracking their heads open. Very good things, those pads. Under normal circumstances.

However, under other circumstances, floorhockey circumstances, they are not so good. Say, you’re trying to carry the ball at speed around the back of the opponent’s net. The ball is bouncing, so you lift you stick up a bit and reach out to try to corral the ball that’s bouncing away from you. Just then, as your stick is outstretched, the blade of your stick embeds itself between the big pad and the wall it’s mounted on. The stick stops suddenly. And if you remember Newton, you’re inertia keeps you moving forward. Moving forward at high speed directly into the butt-end of your stick. A stick that happens to be firmly wedged in front of you and pointed directly at your groin. With only a millisecond of travel time between you and the stick, there is nothing you can do but take it right in the dingle-dangle and hope for the best.

A teammate said that it looked like I was doing a pole vault (hehe, POLE vault).

Everyone stopped and asked if I was alright. My wife, meanwhile, just shook her head in disgust and motioned for me to get off the floor lest I embarrass her further.

I was lucky; the butt-end of the stick missed the most vital bits by about 1 cm, so it could have been much worse. It hurt, but there should be no difficulties producing children.

However, what was bad was that the teammate who called it a pole vault also happens to work for my company. And she told everybody.

I might have to change jobs.

Sarah Palin: Hockey Goon; or, How Obama can avoid a trip to the penalty box

Sarah Palin worries me. She worries me because she’s a bible-thumping crazy who, if she attains power, will quite possibly take the world down in flames. She also worries me because, despite being a loud ignoramus, she’s been remarkably effective in drawing attention to herself and slandering Obama and Biden.

The hockey fan in me will now draw your attention to a new article on FiveThirtyEight.com explaining why she’s successful, not despite being a loud ignoramus, but because of it. You see, she’s not a hockey mom, she’s a hockey player: a 4th line agitator, a pest, a cheap-shot goon. And as agitators before her (eg, Sean Avery) have shown, she can be effective:

Watching Sarah Palin this week, and the reaction to her by both sides, and all the talk of hockey mommery, I realized that this is who she is. She skates into the corner, throws up an elbow, and the Democrats cry: "Foul!" Hey! She said Obama has never passed a major bill – this is an objective lie! Hey! She ridiculed community organizing the day after Service was the theme! Technically people should punish her by not voting for her over this infraction!

It’s whining, and whiners hit back second and go to the penalty box on top of it.

That’s right: the American public is like a hockey referee who hasn’t wised-up to the agitator’s antics. Palin can lie and slander all she wants; as long as she’s the agitator, any counterattack by Obama and Biden will come out looking bad.

In the old NHL, the way to handle a player like that would be to either send your goon out to pummel him into a fine paste or to do a nice two-handed ankle-breaking slash. Unfortunately, these options are no longer allowed - neither in the NHL nor in American politics.

The current solution in both venues is much trickier: you have to ignore them. Be it a punch to the head after the whistle or a blatant mischaracterization of your political history, you have to not respond to what they are doing and continue with your goals. Retaliate on the scoreboard, not on the ice.

For Obama and Biden, this means not giving the media a juicy retaliatory soundbites. The Dems have to keep on pushing their talking points and policies and avoid Palin’s distractions. They have to ensure the media presents them as all business while Palin is portrayed as a whiney hag. If they don’t, they’ll look haggier than the hag, and we’re all screwed.

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Note: This actually ties-in pretty well with the debates between creationists and evolutionists (I hate using this term; it should say 'rational people'). On talk.origins you’ll often find mentions of the Gish Gallop, a "format of most debates where the creationist is allowed to run on for 45 minutes or an hour, spewing forth torrents of error that the evolutionist hasn't a prayer of refuting in the format of a debate." The solution is the same: don’t bother defending yourself. Stick to what you’re there to debate and take down your opponent on your terms, not his.

Religion makes you decorate your house like a colourblind imbecile

We’re house hunting^* and have been witness to a bizarre variety of decorating options over the course of the ~10 houses we’ve seen so far. I’ve noticed a fascinating pattern of religious ornamentation. I’ve seen lots of Christian stuff, including crosses, crucifixes, inspirational posters, and East Orthodox icons. I’ve seen serious, old-fashioned Buddhas and jolly rotund Buddhas. I’ve seen the many arms of Vishnu (“hey, Ganesha, want a peanut?”). And, amazingly, despite the very limited sample size, some very definite trends have emerged that correlate religious expression with home fashion sense:

1) No Religious Ornamentation – This coincides strongly with the having the best home fashion: inviting colours, tasteful, well laid-out furniture, decent artwork. I can’t say for sure whether the current inhabitants actually live this well thought-out life of irreligion and good taste or if it’s just a ploy to sell the house better, ie. Obtain new furniture that you’ll return once you sell the house and clean the house to make it more presentable, ie. Hide your creepy religion. Regardless, these houses show very well.

2) One Dominant Religion on Display – This has always been one form of Christianity (no dominant Hindus yet). This coincides strongly with a more conservative approach to home décor. Sometimes it can be quite tasteful in a ‘granny’ sort of way. Mostly, it is just austere and cold, often keeping the unimaginative original carpet and paint. Typically the colours are drab or plain white. Crosses/crucifixes are obvious in the entrance and usually in the kitchen/dining area and in the bedrooms. There are usually bibles somewhere and maybe some fridge magnets, inspirational posters, even some artwork. Generally not too inviting.

2.5) Fascinatingly, there is a subset of this grouping: One dominant religion plus one wacky apostate – Twice I saw houses that looked like normal religious homes when I was suddenly floored by an incongruous room with a Buddha, Chinese calendars, incense, etc. Both times, this stuff was tucked away in the smallest, crappiest bedroom (actually a converted office room in one case and a cramped partially finished basement room in the other). I get a feeling the rest of the family is hiding these poor souls: tucked away in the darkest, lowest build-quality rooms to live their sinful lives in shame. Or I could just be building the story up in my mind. Either way, weird.

3) Religious Hodgepodge – These houses are living nightmares of décor. There are religious items of all sorts – Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, various Asian traditional religions – basically anything with some sort of catchy motif or trendy ‘religion of the day’ fad associated with it. There are typically woo books on the bookshelf. The paint is insane, usually bright and contrasting and not pale enough to be unobtrusive or dark enough to be soothing. For instance, one place kept the original burnt rose carpet and augmenting it with lime green walls. Furnishings are laid out in strange ways that interfere with movement. Furnishings are also hideously ugly, being of garish designs and colours that look like they are from a bad ‘80s science fiction show. They might have been trendy in the gawd-awful yuppieverse of the ‘80s, but did I mention all these houses were built in 2001 or later? Just atrocious. The basement of one had been converted into some sort of twisted dance club, complete with a superugly black and mirrored wet bar (of the aforementioned bad ‘80s science fiction variety - amazingly, it matched the master bedroom furniture), disco ball, and several miniature plasma lights instead of regular lightbulbs.

While correlation does not equal causation, I will go out on a limb and say that religion seems to impair your taste in some way, or that if your taste is impaired, you will choose to be religious. I will further say, in regards to the class #3 people out there: HOLY FUCK, WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU? HOW DOES YOUR HOME MAKE SENSE IN ANY WAY? WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE WATCHING TRADING SPACES: HOME EDITION, WERE YOU REALLY HOPPED UP ON A COCKTAIL OF ASSORTED HALLUCINOGENS AND WATCHING AMERICAN GLADIATORS? I MEAN, SERIOUSLY, WTF?!!!

Okay.

Other than that, I have discovered that in about 40% of homes, regardless of income or education, there will be some form of blatant hockey-related ornamentation not necessarily confined to the rooms of the children. This is Canada, after all.

^* There’s a chance I’ll even be close enough to walk to work, which would be very cool.

Left Below!

My wife and I were watching The Simpsons the other day. The episode, which worried me, was the one where Homer watches the movie Left Below, a parody of the Left Behind series. I was worried because my wife typically takes anything "end times" related way too seriously, gets flustered and worries about my soul, tells me that I must read Revelations, and generally ruins the fun of any of it. I was especially worried in this case because she takes the Left Behind movie in particular way too seriously; she hasn't even read Revelations herself and got all her apocalypse-related info from stupid Kirk Cameron.

(Hmm, Kirk Cameron. Now there's someone I'd like to kick in the nuts, and not for his assheaded fundiness, either. Growing Pains was pretty awful. Did you know that his sister, Candace Cameron, married former hockey star Val Bure? It's funny and sad at the same time; most NHLers marry models - or puck bunnies who look like models - but he comes all the way from Russia to end up with the pudgy girl from Full House who's the sister of a wacko fundamentalist who thinks bananas are proof of God. But I digress...)

Long story short, my wife didn't get worked up about the Simpsons episode at all and actually thought it was funny. Can it be that she's actually developing a sense of humour about religion?