By Schnookie, Week 7
November 26, 2004
Sharks 6
Stars 2
The Stars were optimistic they might actually get some offense out of Jason Arnott tonight, as he appeared healthy just before the start of the game. However, during the elaborate player introductions, he was incapacitated by what can only be described as a freak shark attack. The shark that did the attacking: the giant, red-eyed, steam-belching head the San Jose players skate out of in their home arena. The freakishness: the game was in Dallas. No one was quite sure how Arnott managed it, but the Stars trainer said resignedly, “If anyone can get bitten by a giant papier mache shark head while it’s hanging from the ceiling in another arena, it’s Arnie.” The Sharks got six goals from six different players, while the Stars got both of their goals from Mike Modano, who skated 50 minutes in the hopes that he might get some overtime pay. After the game, Modano finally admitted the cause of his financial difficulties (after a year of bizarre public disclosures that he is financially insolvent, and yes, he’d like to use that as his excuse for playing so poorly, but no, he won’t talk about it any more than that) – he invested all of his money into the Marty Turco’s Vezina Trophies Museum.
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IPB Puzzles… Some More
Posted in Insightful Non-Hockey Commentary on July 7, 2007 | 1 Comment »
We have complained in this space over the last few weeks that Saturday puzzles were getting soft, that the “bitch mother of all puzzles” had lost her teeth. But this week we think we’ve found the source of our problem: we’re just too focused on it. Time used to be that, as we crept into the final 100 mL of our bottle of wine, we’d look up from the grid and drunkenly expound on some vital issue or another, or let ourselves get lost in whatever DVD we’d put on in the background (more often than not “Master and Commander”). But now the competition is just too fierce. We daren’t look up to complain about Scott Burnside’s dismissal of the free agent signings the Devils have made this summer because what if neither of the other two denizens of stately IPB Manor are willing to stop working on their puzzles long enough to discuss it? It’s always a competition, people.
And in the competition tonight, all was right in the world. Schnookie kicked ass, Pookie finished several minutes later, and Boomer lagged far, far behind. But it was a good puzzle, just the kind we like best (although a little more snarl from it would have been welcome), where there aren’t any obscure names or county seats. Every clue was one a solver could eventually suss out. (That said, Schnookie was disappointed that, on her first swing through the clues, she was able to fill in a lot of letters. We all prefer a Saturday where the first go-round yields a few three-letter answers and “S”s in the plurals; that happened in yesterday’s puzzle, but not tonight’s.)
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