Shocking Samuelsson-Esque Retorts From The Devils

APPLEBEES HOSTESS: “I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t eat here without pants. It’s a policy put in by the corporate heads.”
PAULIE: “Well they can go fuck themselves!”

***

OFFICIAL HOCKEY HALL OF FAME STATISTICIAN: “I’m afraid ‘plastic star’ is not an officially recognized award.”
ZACH: “You can go fuck yourself!”

***

GROCERY STORE BAGGER: “There are no more plastic bags. You’re going to have to take paper.”
LANGER: “You can go fuck yourself!”

***

ART STORE CLERK: “Nope, we don’t have block crayons. Only stick ones.”
TRAVIS: “You can go fudge yourself!”

***

ANDY GREENE: “Uh, there isn’t an all-star game this year. The NHL is participating in the Olympics instead.”
STAN FISCHLER & RICH CHERE: “They can go fuck themselves!”
ANDY GREENE: “Word.”

***

US BORDER GUARD: “ClarksonNation is not recognized by the United State of America. This ‘passport’ has booked you a one way ticket to the detention room, mister!”
CLARKSON: “You and your ‘real’ nation can go fuck yourselves! Er, I mean, here’s my real passport. No, no! Don’t deport me!”

***

MARTY: “I’m the all-time wins and shutouts leader! Go me!”
PATRICK ROY: “You can go fuck yourself.”
MARTY: “::Smirk::”

***

LOU: “And that completes our trade of Cam Janssen for Bryce Salvador.”
BLUES GM: “Aw, fuck me. Cam Janssen?!”

***

YANN DANIS: “Please, sir, I’d like to start.”
LEMAIRE: “Go fuck yourself.”

***

ANDREW PETERS: ::Breathes::
THE OOKIES: “You can go fuck yourself.”

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Really Important Stuff

– What is UO with that commercial for whichever car it is that has that man-sized hamster driving the car? We keep waiting for the payoff, or at least the explanation, but no. It’s just a man-sized hamster gazing into the car showroom, and then driving around in the car. Why? What’s the point? Do they want us to think of their vehicles as hamster wheels? Because that doesn’t seem like a great thing to be associating an automaker’s product with. Good thing we have no idea which automaker is responsible for the commercial. (Way to be a doubly effective commercial, hamster. We don’t understand you, and we don’t remember what you’re for.)

– Meanwhile, and perhaps more importantly, the armed forces of ClarksonNation are practicing all their finest parade formations, because their emperor-god is supposed to return to the lineup tomorrow! WOO HOOOO!

The only bad news there is that just across the border, all those ceremonial displays of military might from ClarksonNation are making the citizens of the young ZharkovNation nervous. They are mounting their own displays in response.

This could get ugly.

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Wishful Thinking

We would very much like to be able to post some kind of deep, insightful hockey commentary about the Devils here, but you know what keeps happening? Just when we’re ready to commit to making some statement about how great any given guy is doing this year, or how pleasantly surprised we’ve been by a player we’ve previously assumed sucks, or how we’ve just noticed some really subtle, brilliant thing about a specific Devil, that guy gets injured. Like, broken-bone injured (see: Paulie, Zubrus, Clarkson). Or exploded, separated shoulder (see: Pando). Or just disappeared (see: Oduya. Or rather, don’t. What the hell happened to him, anyway? Is he gone forever? Should we even bother expecting him to ever return?). So for the sake of the Devils continuing to be not-at-all-sucky, we’re just going to keep our yaps shut about how much we love a guy whose name rhymes with “Blandy Bleene”. And we’re not going to remark on how shockingly able the guys who’ve come from a place that rhymes with “Blowell” have been. And we’re really going to stop rambling on about how sorry we are that we ever disparaged the name that sounds like “Blacques Blemaire”.

Nope. All we’re going to say is that we love, love, love, love, love Andrew Peters. Boy oh boy do we hope nothing untoward happens to him.

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Wherein We Investigate Sestito Puente’s Connection To An International Cayenne-Smuggling Ring

We are, as you know, very serious investigative journalists here at IPB. We know that that a good story can be hiding just around the nearest bend, and we’ve got great noses for news. And so it was last night, after the humiliation of watching the Devils pathetically lose to the Stars while we were hanging out with a bunch of Stars fans, that we were the perfect targets for a scoop that seems to have come from out of nowhere.

In our immediate postgame fits of depression, we turned to a sure-fire pick-me-up to get our minds off the lousy game: the 2010 Seed Savers Exchange catalog. If you have ever looked at a seed catalog, you’ll understand — it’s so cheerful to gaze upon picture after picture of glorious vegetables and plants, and to make mental lists of all the seeds you’ll order in January, even though you’re selecting about six times as many plants as can fit in your garden space. It’s all sunshiney and imaginary and full of rainbow dreams and promise of a newer, better life. In short, the opposite of how we felt after watching that Devils game. A few pages into the catalog, all thoughts of hockey had slipped away.

But when you’re a hard-hitting journalist, you can’t ever fully turn off your hockey brain. And when we got to page 35, the fourth page of the pepper section, we caught the first scent of a huge story. Here’s what we saw:

Joe’s Long Cayenne

Extremely heavy sets of finger-thick, 10-12″ long peppers. Originally from Italy, heirloom from the Joe Sestito family of Troy, NY. Great for fresh eating or drying for hot pepper flakes. 65 days to green and 85 days to red from transplant. (Emphasis ours.)

Yeah, you heard that right: the Joe Sestito family of Troy, NY. As in the Sestito Puente family? We were on the job, and we weren’t going to let this story go.

First we hit up our usual sources to see if we could find any evidence of a connection. Several hours of questioning (read: looking up Tim Sestito on the roster on the Devils website) yielded this juicy tidbit: our very own Sestito Puente is from Rome, NY. That’s kind of like Troy, NY, but not quite. We were going to have to dig deeper, and it was going to take some creative thinking, because the Devils website wasn’t giving us anything else.

We’re not easily deterred when we’re on the hunt, and we deployed our Pulitzer-caliber skills to find out whether Rome and Troy are close to being the same thing. What we found out may surprise you. They are not. Our sources were reluctant to go on the record about this, but we wouldn’t let Google Maps off the hook that easily — in the end, we determined that Troy is 116 miles from Rome, and we even got driving directions. Yeah, we’re just that good.

Our sources were raising more questions than they were answering now, so it was time to go to our guy on the inside. This source is the one we keep for only the direst emergencies, because the only way we can get him to talk is to cash in on a some favors he owes us from those wild times in that lawless place that time. You know what we mean. We don’t want to cash in those chips for just anything, but this Sestito Puente-Cayenne seed connection was too good to let go. We called on our source. We don’t want to give anything away, but suffice to say, his name rhymes with “Bloogle”. What “Bloogle” told us was to follow a lead with a shady outfit called “Johnny’s Selected Seeds”, and believe you us — Johnny didn’t disappoint. In fact, he shocked us:

Product ID: 2344
Joe’s Long Cayenne
(Capsicum annuum)
Unbelievably long, slender Cayenne pepper.
It turns bright red for homemade hot sauce and dries well for ristras and delicious, dried hot pepper flakes. The 8-10″ long, thin-fleshed fruits taper to a skinny point. Joe Sestito of Troy, NY tells us that the original seeds for Joe’s Long came from Calabria, Italy, and were passed along to him by his brother who participates in an active Italian seed-sharing community in Toronto. (Emphasis ours.)

Passed along to Joe Sestito by his brother? Who participates in an active Italian seed-sharing community in Toronto??? Good God. What had we uncovered?

We’ve found our answer. This has to be the same Sestito family, because Tim Sestito plays hockey, they play hockey in Toronto, and these Cayenne lords are “swapping” their seeds in Toronto. We don’t think we’re jumping to conclusions when we suggest that young Tim’s hockey trips to Toronto as a child were probably a cover for this Cayenne trade. In fact, schoolboy Tim was probably the ideal Cayenne mule — all towheaded and lisping through those missing front teeth, and charming the border guards with his looking so adorable in his little-kid hockey gear. How many pepper plants have been brought into the country this way? Youth hockey is so much easier to traffic your international hot-pepper product through than the complex system of underground tunnels that the vege-banditos have traditionally used to get across the US-Canada border. The Sestito family is brilliant.

And we got the scoop.

To celebrate our awesomeness, we think we might just plant some of those Sestito Puente cayenne peppers this coming summer. We hope they taste like hockey.

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Surprise, Surprise

One of the really wonderful things about being a sports fan is that you never know what’s going to happen in any given season. Now that a reasonably substantial chunk of hockey has been played in the ’09-’10 season, it seems like we can start looking at the bigger picture and thinking about what have been the biggest surprises for us in the early going.

SURPRISE #1: We actually like what Jacques Lemaire has done with the Devils. We can be gracious and admit that we were wrong about him (so far). Now, we keep hearing that the non-Devils feeds of Devils games spend the better part of their time fixating angrily on how trappy the Devils are, and we’ve gleefully read through many a sour-grapes comment thread on opposing team blogs where the fans of the teams that are losing to the Devils bitch (to the point of giving the Devils all their marbles) to high heaven about the trap. But just how Stephen Colbert says he doesn’t see race, we don’t see the trap. Seriously. We never notice it. Not when the Devils are playing it. Not when the Devils’ opponents are playing it. We barely notice it when the announcers point it out during games. It’s so prevalent that we kind of just don’t care about it. We just care about the Devils not ossifying like they did at the end of Lemaire’s last go-round in New Jersey, and were terrified we’d see that right out of the gate this year. And what a pleasant surprise — they’re sassy! The defense (before they all got injured) jumps up into plays a billion times more often than they did under Sutter’s regime. The forwards still seem to go into the offensive zone, but they also know how to play in their defensive zone, unlike during Sutter’s regime. Hell, they even score into empty nets! We know we’ve already apologized to Lemaire in this space once, but we’re happy to do it again today. Are the Devils peaking too soon, and we’ll spend March and April wistfully recalling the heady days of the November Juggernaut? Probably, but that’s to be worried about in March and April. For now, we’re just going to keep luxuriating in the deliciousness of the sassy, injury-overcoming, pleasantly-surprising, youngster-heavy Devils.

SURPRISE #2: David Clarkson, Niklas Bergfors and Andy Greene. None of those guys are emperor-gods quite yet, but they are all definitely the regionally recognized demi-emperor-gods in outlying tropical-paradise islands. Like, AcornsNations Cruise Lines does a steady business sending the citizens of AcornNations on weeklong, all-inclusive tours of the AcornsNation Clarkson Islands and the such. Of course, Bergfors Islands better not get too comfortable as a PaulieMartinNation protectorate, because PaulieMartinNation is not afraid to abandon Bergfors Islands’ sorry ass if need be.

SURPRISE #3: During Thursday night’s open thread, IPB Irregular EJGRgunner made a startling discovery — the missing piece in getting Bergfors to ascend to emperor-god status is that he’s not the Swedish Chef. In unrelated Bergfors news, Jacques Lemaire told TG over at Fire & Ice that Bergfors had a crappy game because Zach Parise has superstar offensive talent but also works harder than anyone on playing defense so why can’t Bergfors. Thanks to our superior skills at investigative reporting and the press passes we received for being such professional Devils bloggers, we were able to procure video tape of the confrontation that followed between Bergfors and Zach’s representative.

SURPRISE #4: Tonight we were watching the Blue Jackets (our new Tranny Gentleman Callers, which is a surprise in and unto itself) playing the Ducks, and at one point RustyKlesla injured himself on a play that strongly resembled this:

This prompted the BJs announcers to launch into the “shocking, unheard-of number of injuries in the NHL” angle, in which they started gnashing their teeth and pulling out their hair over how injuries could possibly be taken out of the game. When thinking about solving the problem of injuries like RustyKlesla’s, we were surprised to realize that we know exactly how to fix the game:

1. Remove the banana peels from the trapezoid. Without the ability to obstruct those banana peels, defensemen are helpless to keep them from carpeting that area of the ice.
2. Replace the boards with haybales.
3. Replace the stanchions with pipe cleaners.
4. Replace the glass with that see-through bouncy castle window material.

These are changes that could be put into effect immediately, without altering the rulebook. If the GMs want to consider expanding on it, perhaps they can reach an agreement by the start of next season to just replace all the league’s rinks entirely with bouncy castles. We think this is a fantastic idea, and wonder why more people haven’t been talking about it.

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A Golden Opportunity For Wannabe Emperor-Gods

The one and only good thing to come out of Brent Sutter’s morbid obsession with rendering Jay Pandolfo obsolete last season was that PandoNation was forced to face directly into the void and answer some very difficult questions. Questions like, “In the absence of our benevolent emperor/god, whose nation should we become.” And the answer presented itself with a Mona Lisa smile and a whiff of macrame; so the corrupt ruling priest class of PandoNation calmly formed AcornsNation on the side. Just to be ready when the time comes. And now that the terrible news has come down from on high that Pando will be out for 4-6 weeks, AcornsNation is ready to step up (while PandoNation spends the next month and a half raging a holy war against RuppNation).

Sadly, though, PaulieMartinNation had no such back-up plans in place, and is now emperor-godless for the next 4-6 weeks as well. It’s time to start looking at contingency plans, and here Pookie, the head corrupt ruling priestess of PaulieMartinNation, will give her opinion of each of the candidates, extemporaneously, as each player’s name is read aloud to her:

Niclas Bergfors: Oof. He’s upgraded from “sell” to “don’t sell”, but he’s not emperor-god material. Emperor-gods must stay upright at all times. And a have a minimum of, like, 25 NHL games.

David Clarkson: He’s a tasty morsel! He’d look good in a toga. I think he has the godlike appearance that an emperor-god requires, but not the consistency. Also, I’d have to fight Frisby for ClarksonNation, and I’m not ready to wage an all-out war.

Matt Halischuk: Who? NO!

Jamie Langenbrunner: That’s not even funny.

Pierre-Luc Letourneau-Leblond: *Cracks up*

Rob Niedermayer: That’s just wrong on so many levels.

Zach Parise: *Heavy sigh* That’s a tough one. It seems like ZachPariseNation is a global superpower democracy. It’s no one’s Nation to own.

Egg Pelley: Well… he meets the 25 game requirement. Um. *Loooong pause* I don’t… My mind is strangely blown by the idea of EggNation.

Andrew Peters: No.

Ilkka Pikkarainen: There is no emperor-god in Lowell.

Brian Rolston: Please. I may be a Devils fan, but I have some self-respect. He is the single worst hockey player ever.

Travis Zajac: He’s taken! I don’t have the proper block crayons to fill out the citizenship forms for AcornsNation.

Dainius Zubrus: *Extremely long moment of contemplation* You know, I’d seriously consider him, but I don’t think there’s been a single moment when I’ve noticed him on the ice this season. I like my emperor-god to be visible to the human eye.

Mark Fraser: He’s foxy, but doesn’t meet the 25 game requirement.

Andy Greene: He’s not tall enough. *Pause* *Shifty eyes* You must be taller than… Andy Greene to be emperor-god. I mean, all of the statues we would erect of him would be miniature. We have massive bronze stores in PaulieMartinNation and we want to be able to use them.

Mike Mottau: *Hopeful* Isn’t he also injured?

Johnny Oduya: It would be a lateral, safe move. And he is putrid, so when Paulie comes back, if he’s also putrid, I would be able to view that as a normal baseline.

Bryce Salvador: Oooh! I didn’t even consider IronBoarNation! *Pause* Our money would kick ass. My one concern with him is that he blocks shots too much, which I hate. There would be a tough relationship then between me and my emperor-god. He’s a very strong choice. I daresay an Iron one.

Colin White: *Long, inscrutable silence* He’s like… *Longer, more inscrutable silence* I fell like he’s a little like Miracle Max. I feel like he’s kind of outside the emperor-god kingdom. If I want a really stay-at-home, never-try-anything-fancy d-guy, I’ll remember Miracle Whitey. But until then…

Martin Brodeur: If Zach is a global superpower democratic Nation, Marty is an intergalactic federation. Of starships. Also, I’d worry about the dormice population in PaulieMartinNation. They’re a protected species there.

Yann Danis: Why not just stick with Paulie then? What would be the difference?

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How We Spent Our Vacation: Day 2 — Hanging Out With The Devils

Boxworthy hanging out with Bernice the pigeon (or, as I just typed it, “Bernice the penguin”, which would have been pretty awesome) at Rockefeller Center. –Schn.

David Clarkson, spotted near Park Avenue. –Schn.

White, Greene, Martin, Zubrus, Parise, Egg, Maddog, and Rolston hang out in NYC. –Pk.

Sheldon Brookbank, Ken Daneyko, Scott Stevens, Colin White, Andy Greene, John Madden, and Brian Rolston, in hoity-toity roman numerals. –Schn.

Andrew Peters may suck at hockey, but he’s good at identifying street addresses. –Pk.

Marty. A very, very blurry Marty. –Pk.

We caught this building right after it attempted a wraparound. –Pk.

We saw Marty in the city and waved hello. –Pk.

Dano and Scotty keep 34th St clean. –Pk.

Applesauce! –Schn.

Zach, Zubrus, Paulie, Scottie and Dano, clockwise from the top. –Schn.

Travis showing off his Milford Academy education at work, as he blends in to this train departure board at Grand Central Station. –Schn.

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