johnzo

I would kick into this for a memorial or as a tribute to a great CFL fan but wouldn't buy it for myself.

damn, I haven't thought about this in forever but at some point in 83-84 I wrote a letter to the "Thrill of A Lifetime" TV show (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrill_of_a_Lifetime) telling them I wanted to play QB for the Blue Bombers.

First bomber memory: my dad attends the 1982 Western Final. Bombers had Moon and company on the ropes, but Kennerd blew the game. Remember vividly my dad being angry about that when he comes home the following week, giving a variation of the modern "you had one job" speech. Second bomber memory: September 24th 1983. My first live game. A huge week in Bomber history, Dieter Brock has just been traded. Starter Nickie Hall gets hurt, Clements comes on in relief with like two days of practice and he looks pretty rough, but Willard Reaves ran wild and we pave the Riders 50-19. I remember wanting the Roughriders to score because I want to see the Flame more. (lol, just like @TrueBlue4ever) I had not figured things out yet, I was only eleven. The roar of the crowd was amazing. I'd never seen 25,000 people in one place before; I grew up in the deep deep sticks and Winnipeg was the big city to me. Came away a Bomber fan for life. Third bomber memory: October 1984. Bombers are cruising. I see them beat the Eskimos 30-11 and then somehow I get to go to practice the next week without paying or anything! I sat in the stands and watched the practice near a couple of teenage girls who were really really into Trevor Kennerd (?). I watch them practice a fake field goal with Cameron passing the ball. (They ran that play in BC the next week, it was a shitshow) After practice I get autographs from Clements (who seems grumpy and irritated, but my dad explained that he was working and probably had other things on his mind) and Reaves, who is cheerful and who tells me he's gonna get his 1800 in BC next week. Those autographs were in a cheap little steno notebook, I've laminated them and they are on my wall now and they were in my jacket pocket at the 2011 Grey Cup. Didn't help though. Later, David Shaw notices me hanging around and gets me to hold the locker room emergency exit door open for him so he can run to his car or something.

Been watching the canceled SyFy show "Vagrant Queen." it's a goofy lighthearted super derivative space opera made out of bits of Star Wars and Farscape and Buck Rogers ... but the Buck Rogers character is from Winnipeg, his ship is the called the Winnipeg or "peggy", the ship's robot is "Winnie B" and there's at least a couple of times when he goes on about the Bombers rule and the Roughriders suck. It's an okay show, nothing super special and probably too lighthearted for the people here. Can see why it was cancelled but the Winnipeg stuff was fun.

yeah, this is authoritarianism at its finest -- McConnell jams up the existing system and Trump rides to the rescue.

Springsteen has the same problem with Born in the USA. You listen to the chorus, it's a big rah-rah USA USA USA! anthem, but you listen to the verse ... it's not that.

Jamie Macoun is long retired but his spirit lives on in the Flames.

you can be absolutely certain that every last dollar that they appropriated for that border wall wound up in the construction. no grift there.

talking to my hockey friends in town, the Kraken are definitely going to be everyone's second favorite team .... most of the population of Seattle wasn't born here so the hockey fans already have deep loyalties to another team like I do. I like the logo. Was worried it would be some nineties cartoon nonsense with an angry octopus holding a hockey stick. especially like the colors. color schemes with multiple blues have always looked sharp to me, probably Argos brain damage, and we have four different blues! and that real minimal touch of red is sharp. looking forward to the Jets vs. Kraken western conference championship series!

holy crap the FBI arrested a state house speaker? damn!

ah yeah, I knew I wrote something specific about this before, this is from back in 2018:

but that was pretty much what every CFL kicker kicked in those days. my least favorite recent bomber is probably Dominic Picard during his second tour of duty. it's not personal or anything, for all I know he is a total quality dude, but in 2015 the man could. not. snap. the. football. His snaps were a wobbly slow arcs that almost never hit the QB in their hands. I wonder how much better our QBs would have been in 2015 if they'd been getting crisp snaps in the hands every time, and didn't have to take the fraction of a second to locate the ball before they got their eyes downfield. Drove me crazy, it was like we were starting every play on the wrong foot.

yup. the GOP yawns when cops kill people in cold blood, but if anyone dares to look crosswise at a statue honoring the leadership of an enemy nation they will lose their ******* minds. pro-life means something different to them, I guess

yup, my understanding is that the protests in Portland had dwindled, but then Trump's goons started snatching people off the street, and now they have an army of white moms out there meatshielding for the BLM folks.

ah, Portland. lived there for a year as a newlywed. loved the place, would still be there if things had unfolded slightly differently. Thousands were on the streets there last night encouraging the feds to go home.

you go back and look at Andrew Harris' best runs with the Blue, there is almost always a receiver and sometimes two or three busting their ass to spring him. what is the place for Duron Carter in this scenario?

yup, this is not bullshit. border patrol goons conducting abductions right off the street in Portland. Trump is talking about Seattle, Minneapolis next as part of the GOP's "cities are burning" narrative. Trump knows his base won't follow him into a foreign war, but they're sure as hell follow him into a much cheaper civil war.

that "abolish the suburbs" line is one they've been rolling out. it's basically war-on-christmas / war-on-cars stuff. If I were a Goya PR or marketing person, I don't know if I'd want the White House in my lane.

Do I want to die by slow strangulation or by lazy piranha? My main takeaway point was that the 2001-2009 GOP administration was a giant shitshow. It's a natural thing to be nostalgic about, because we made it through that shitty time (so long as "we" doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who were killed) and because GWB was someone who could actually read from a teleprompter, so he seems like a statesman compared to the 24/7 bedshitting racist uncle we have now. The thing that was really scary to me, as someone who was a brand new immigrant to the USA in 2003, was how the whole ******* country lost its mind after 9/11. 70% of Americans supported the Iraq invasion. America was cheering loudly as it carefully aimed an M-16 at its own wang. The GOP of today -- the heir to Bush's GOP -- is a proto-fascist minority party full of venal mobsters, televangelist crooks, and tiny Goebbels. Their prime directive is to loot the state. It's the USA they're ******* over. The wink at the Uighur genocide shows they don't really care about mass human liquidation, so long as the money is flowing in the right direction, which is basically how the USA has responded to most international genocides that it isn't directly responsible for, so no change there. But I think the damage they've done can be fixed, and I think that they have created energy for a counter-revolution that could do some real good. But I am an optimist.

The thing the GOP really aligns on is that the money keeps flowing upward. They are the Mammom party. School shootings? They enrich the NRA member companies! Not seeing a downside. Coronavirus? It's just the olds and the poors and the people of color who will get hit hardest by that. Keep those meatpackers out there in the line of fire, and no, they don't get PPE, that would cost money. You make minimum wage; buy your own N95 gear. Immigration? Let's take our underclass of workers and make them illegal so that they have fewer rights and recourse when their employers abuse them. Use the money saved on labor to buy back stocks. Less uppity labor and more money for us? Who could object to that? (when was the last time the management of a company that used undocumented labour did any time for that labour? the e-verify program gives the employers cover and downloads all the risk onto the employees) Abortion? If we outlawed it, we'd be out on our asses and the gravy train would stop. So let's keep those pro-life fires burning; it keeps the money flowing in from the marks. The one thing those choads managed to do when they had all the levers of government was pass a gigantic tax cut that went straight to the ownership class. Their priorities are clear; destroy the collective and loot the country.

I'm just stating a fact; the USA is way less aggressive (militarily speaking) under Trump than under Bush. No idea why that is. I suspect because Trump doesn't get enough kickbacks from Boeing and Lockheed to make it worth his time to bomb anyone. the one time Trump got off the chain with the military was because all those protesters in DC made him look like a scared little basement keyboard warrior and he took it personal. so unless ISIL bombs a Trump Tower somewhere we should hopefully be okay in terms of global military confrontations.

I am not a trump lurker but I will say one thing after reading the Bolton book: Trump was dumb to hire a lunatic like Bolton but he wasn't dumb enough to spray bombs over the Middle East like Bolton wanted. Trump -- despite his big talk -- doesn't appear to have a boner for a shooting war in the Middle East and that's one giant improvement over the last GOP administration. And would Bush have been competent with the coronavirus? Remember how those goofs completely bungled Hurricane Katrina? How the FEMA dude was a patronage appointment and how he did a heckuva job? Maybe Bush could've convinced America to wear a mask, though I agree that Trump is fresh high-pressure sewage contained in some kind of structurized human skin costume ... but the GOP as a whole is composed of devilmen, gentlemen criminals, Jim Bakker, and Mammon worshippers. That's been true for quite some time now and those devilmen and criminals did a great job grooming the USA for a tough-talking marshmallow like Trump.

I had exactly this speech ready for if I ever met Swervin' Mervyn. I guess there's a lot of people like us. I still regret I never got to give it to Don Matthews.

once upon a time I would've said Darian Durant. At hist best, that dude could make plays that no other CFL QB could make. As a fan of the game, watching him physically dominate DEs was pretty awesome. And his duels against AC are some all-time CFL classics. I was actually pretty stoked to hear we signed him! but then he was a dink and we got Streveller instead.

that corner route with Jason Tucker ... everyone knew it was coming, no one could stop it. The 2005 Grey Cup, him vs. Cavillo, is the greatest football game I've ever seen live.