IPB Flirts With The Nobel Prize In Literature

Now that the NHL has handed us a thousand-day break between the a pair of uncompelling conference finals and a Stanley Cup Final about which we are suppressing yawns, we’re confronted with a great challenge as bloggers. What in the hell are we supposed to write about? Well, we can be every bit as lazy as the NHL schedulers, so we’re going with our “In Case Of Emergency, Break Glass” post for the playoffs. We meant to write about this before the start of the season, because, well… it’s much more “opening day” pertinent than “interminable break between playoff rounds” pertinent. You see, every Opening Night since we’ve been fans, we’ve had a traditional champagne toast, using a passage from Halldor Laxness’s Independent People. (Before you get all impressed at how literate we are, Gentle Reader, we feel compelled to point out that while Pookie loved this book, Schnookie couldn’t get more than four pages into it.) This year we kind of lost focus, as we got a bit distracted by making Black Velvets rather than keeping the toast as the centerpiece of it all.

And look how that turned out. This season blew. So in hope of at least being able to spur the Hockey Gods to give us a good SCF, let’s give the toast a try now.

And when later in life he thought of those days and of the face that reigned over them, then he felt that he too, no less than the blue mountains, had been fortunate enough to experience the holiness of religious contemplation. His being had rested full of adoration for the glory which unifies all distances in such beauty and sorrow that one no longer wishes for anything — in unconquerable adversity, in unquenchable longing, he felt that life had nevertheless been worth living.

(Did it work? Is hockey once again making us feel life’s worth living again?)