johnzo

Hey to get back on topic, I've got a solid yaretv stream through my VPN. Turned it on just in time to see Kevin Glenn's characteristic fourth-quarter pick. And yeah, there is a massive divide in the USA between the urban areas and the boonies. And Mark is right, the Puget Sound area is indeed a nightmare to drive in ... we have okay north-south routes but our east-west routes are all messed up by our many urban lakes and waterways and gnarly hills. They've beautiful to have but damn do they screw up traffic. Add to that a rapid transit system that only serves about 150K of our 3.5MM urban population, and then consider that 50 people are moving to King County every day (Amazon alone is hiring about 500 people a week). You wind up with the fourth-worst traffic in the USA.

WOOHOOO THE SEASON IS HERE!

Listening to the Montreal radio broadcast while I finish out the day at work ... those guys are not really high on the Als. They've got big questions at almost every position. "But they're playing Saskatchewan, so it doesn't matter," they said. ouch.

Not just keeping the sack totals low, but Harris really got his running game going after we bonded up the OL. He looked like a brand new back.

We coped last year just fine with Flanders. Wonder what the least damaging ratio change we can make is ... Coates in full time, maybe? Took a look at the Bomber roster and noticed that Richards is back on the active roster; also noticed they don't have an injury list published so I guess he's still hurt?

Love TE82. For a number of years, he was the only bright light in the Bomber offence. No matter what dud we trotted out behind center, Edwards was gonna make his plays. Imagine the numbers he would have put up if he'd had consistent QBs.

Yeah, I haven't done a road trip like that, but if you read Paul Theroux's Deep South you can get some idea.

I've only driven the West once. Drove from Thunder Bay to Vancouver, took about a week to do it. Anyway, my wife and I drove Kicking Horse Pass in fine weather with light traffic in my Mazda3, which corners pretty well for a compact sedan. I still white-knuckled the whole pass. Damn there are some gnarly stretches in there ... that hairpin turn west of Banff must have claimed more than a few vehicles over the years.

Look forward to this thread being closed every year. Shut er down and bring on the regular season!

I used to hang out with a Scottish exchange student when I was at Lakehead U .. he could not believe that our nearest big city was eight hours away. North America is so huge and empty once you get west of Sault Ste. Marie. I've driven the width of Ontario twice and it's astonishing how big this province is.

VPN = Virtual Private Network. When you have VPN software running on your computer, all of your network traffic is encrypted and routed to a computer somewhere else. That computer decrypts your traffic and forwards it onto the Internet, then encrypts the responses and forwards them back to you. This has two benefits: 1) your ISP can't tell what you're doing, so they can't snoop your user data and sell it, they can't filter or throttle or narc your torrents or streams, and they can't tell if you're a Chinese dissident looking up information on Falun Gong. VPNs are very popular in China and with business users who are travelling away from their home offices. 2) this is the good part for you and me: all your internet traffic appears to be coming from the country where your VPN server is located. My VPN server is in Rotterdam, so when I turn it on and connect to the CFL streaming site, what they see is a Dutchman who likes niche sports instead of me, the Canadian in America who doesn't want to pay for a cable subscription just for five months of ESPN a year. I use ExpressVPN (https://www.expressvpn.com) although I didn't shop around much so I don't know if it's the best. Getting it running wasn't too hard.

I was gonna post about how the Made In Canada plugin was working great for me because I was watching a TFC game on TS1 HD. Until I looked at the TSN schedule and saw there was no TFC game tonight. The TSN channel was just looping about ten seconds of the soccer game over and over. But it was soccer, so I couldn't tell.

I purchased a single game package for the Riders / Als season opener thru my VPN using my American credit card. Figures that the CFL wouldn't reject payment from cards in the countries they don't serve ... I bet a lot of people who use this service will be Canadian travellers. Fingers crossed -- I've wanted convenient CFL streams ever since TSN took the free replays off their website. The free streams from firstroweu and reddit got me through ok, but there was always the chance they'd conk out mid-game or stutter or be the wrong broadcast entirely and it was a pain in the ass to hunt up the good ones. So paying for a real streaming service is cool by me, especially since it comes with on-demand streaming of past games. I'll let you guys know how it works out.

I'll see if it'll work with my Dutch VPN this weekend... wonder if it will accept payment from a US credit card...

Some deja vu from https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/blogs/cfl-55-yard-line/tim-burke-says-could-blasted-game-bombers-promptly-010247983.html?pt=2/ (though to be fair, Burke is predicting that his Bombers will lose while Jones is excusing the loss as part of his master plan. gads, Burke was a terrible HC)

Not national news, but I just started working at Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' rocket company. https://www.blueorigin.com/ Step 1 for us is suborbital space tourism -- next year if all goes to plan. Step 2 is ??? but we're talking about "millions of people living and working in space." So I am pretty pumped, it's by far the coolest thing I've ever done.

These guys basically violate a bunch of classic pop songs / showtunes. Leaving on A Jet Plane, Don't Cry For Me Argentina, Seasons In The Sun, Science Fiction Double Feature, etc. Their cover of Rocket Man really cooks.

I downloaded that game from YouTube last year ... should re-upload it as a tribute... You guys remember what Philip Hunt did to Glenn in 2010? This was even more of an asswhupping, against the best team in the league.

I'll never forget the home game vs. the Lions in 1984 .... our D got on a tear and sacked Dewalt a bunch ... the Lions ended the first quarter with -50 net yards ... Mervyn Fernandez was owned by the Bomber secondary. The stadium was sold out and the crowd was losing its mind chanting BC SUCKS. That was one of the very few times we beat a Matthews / Dewalt BC team. Just like Calvillo and Trestman always had our number.

One of the greatest of all time. His 1980s Lions teams were juggernauts, complete teams with no weaknesses. They set the standard in the CFL West after the Edmonton dynasty faded. Also gotta give him props for being so frank about his anxiety disorder. Always impressed when a guy in a macho business like football can talk about their emotional illness.

Hell, you can add Printers in there, sure he turned to chicken **** but dude had an MOP season in 2004 and a decent season in 2005. Barker also has had a pretty good run in TO .. half the Eastern Division is starting Barker QBs. Funny how the Argos aren't one of them. Totally pulled a Vancouver Canucks there, turning two excellent prospects into zero excellent prospects.

yeah, there are a lot of scary people out their with violent beliefs and guns and a lot of angry hard-luck cases for them to recruit. It's easier than ever for them to find each other. Add to that a thriving industry of anti-government / anti-foreigner / anti-GLBT propaganda and you've got a fiery brew indeed. And my activist friends, the people who work with the cops, are telling me that there's considerable sympathy for the shitheads in LE. There's darkness out there. All I can do as a white guy is to stand up to oppose white shitheads. I feel like white supremacy is kind of a problem that white people need to own.

LeFevour always looks so awkward back there, but he makes plays.

This guy was at today's "anti-sharia" protest. The flag he's holding is a Christian Identity flag. The Christian Identity folks have ... novel ... ideas about how white people fit into biblical times. They're not down with the mixing of the races, or with the gays, and they have a special hatred for the Jews. Now if you read about CI, you'll see that this guy is clearly a loon (and a violent one, he was goading people to fight him.) One could think, maybe he's on the far edge of his movement and it's dirty pool to hold him up as representative. One of the "anti-sharia" pitches is that gay people and Jews have lots to fear from Muslim people and so liberals who aren't phobes or antisemetics ought to fight sharia too. But I think that if Act for America is so concerned about the gays, perhaps they might police shitheads like this out of their movement, because Christian Identity is not quite a gay-positive ethos.

That's my take on it.