Happy Hockey’s Back!

Well, it’s finally back! Yay! And with the new hockey season comes the dawning of the Captain Iron Boar Era, as well as the Acorns Forever Era. These are eras we think we like, but after the Brian Rolston Redux debacle, we try to temper our enthusiasm. You can understand, right, Gentle Reader?

Captain Iron Boar casts a long shadow of either awesomeness or injury-proneness. Being Devils fans, we’ll hope for the former but expect the latter.

Anyway, we’d be full of season preview thrills and chills or other deep and insightful blog content (HA!), but we’re actually not going to be around for opening night. We have tickets to a banjo concert. Yeah, hockey, you heard us. A banjo concert. We bought them months ago, when “January 19″ sounded a lot like “a Saturday night with nothing on television”. Happy about your stupid lockout now? So, while we’re rocking out with Bela Fleck, we hope the Devils are rocking out with starting their defense of their Eastern Conference crown (HA!).

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Her?

There is much tepid beigeness and mousy forgettablility throughout the cities of EggNation, as the streets have run yellow with yolk. So long, Egg. We’ll miss barely being able to remember you’re on the Devils roster. (Oh, and you too, Fraser.)

As for this Kurtis Foster person, we sort of don’t trust the name Kurtis. Curtis? Sure. Kurtis? Suspect. When we think of Kurtis Foster we think of two things: Adrian Foster and Kurt Rambis. Neither of those guys are good at hockey. The new Egg has a lot of ground to make up to win us over.

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From These Failing Playmobil Hands…

… V.E. Mats passes the torch.

Welcome, Victory Swedish Larsson!

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Bad Hockey News? Good Thing It’s Still Summer

We’ve been sort of hilariously insistent that summer is over for the last few weeks. It’s been cool and rainy here at stately IPB Manor, with predictions of the weather continuing on mildly this way for the foreseeable future, and we’ve got a pumpkin on one of our garden fenceposts, and the earliest leaves are starting to turn. It’s been lovely, especially now that there’s tennis on TV every night for us to get back into the whole “watching sports” thing instead of our summertime “watching Star Trek” routine. Hockey anticipation was building right along with the season shift… until this afternoon, when we read Gulitti’s report that Travis’s leg fell off and he’s out for, like, ever. The season hasn’t even started yet and it already sucks! We started to slip into a spiral of depression and gloom, until we remembered one important thing:

It’s not not summer yet! We don’t have to worry about Travis’s Achilles tendon, or the fact that no significant Devils injury has healed on the projected timetable that Lou tried to assure fans of in the last few years, or, as Boomer said, lament that at this rate we’ll never find out what the Travis/Zach/Kovalchuk line can do. No, we don’t need to spare any of that a second thought for a few more weeks yet, because it’s still August.

So we spent our evening toasting marshmallows and watching the bats wheeling overhead in the twilit sky. And that’s all this Devils blog has to say about hockey tonight.

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Shout Out! Shout Out! Civil War Sesquicentennial Shout Out!

Being really smart people, we do occasionally read actual books rather than just hockey blogs; one book one of us recently started the laborious process of plowing through is “Battle Cry of Freedom”. It seemed a reasonably non-hockey-themed undertaking to help fill the summer hours, so imagine our surprise when we discovered in its pages one of the most obvious IPB shout-outs ever. Smack-dab in the middle of a description of the Union army’s tactical advantages on the Mississippi was the story of the ironclad river boats known as…

…wait for it…

…Pook’s turtles.

We are not making this up.

This being a clear reference to us from beyond the grave, we felt we needed to enlist Boxworthy to do a little Civil War reenactment.

We’ve done exhaustive reading since our first discovery of the term “Pook’s Turtle” (by “exhaustive reading” we mean “googled it and read the wikipedia entry”), and we can say with some confidence that Boxworthy’s costume is utterly historically accurate. That is exactly what Pook’s Turtles looked like.

One of the benefits of having a highly detailed and historically accurate CivilWar ironclad river ship costume is that, when the sesquicentennial celebrations are over and all the armchair Civil War buffs lose interest in playing at dress-up with him, Boxworthy will be perfectly accoutered to join the ranks of Red Wings bloggers.

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Break Out The Cymballs!

Last night we had our traditional Draft Party at stately IPB Manor, with the togas and the dancing formations and the cymballs.

Last time we busted out this garb we got badly burned, but with a fourth-overall pick, there was no way this could go badly, right? Right! Look at what all our suffering from last season earned us!

Insert frenzied cymball crashing here.

Deploy cymballs! Let the bacchanalia commence! We have a new best player ever, and, if the thirty seconds of Pierre McGuire we were willing to listen to last night is any indication, he is going to give us many, many orgasms. (Our actual response to Pierre’s immediate, hysterical response to the Devils’ pick — Schnookie: “Pierre just came all over him! He must be awesome!” Pookie: “This is Pierre we’re talking about. I wouldn’t read much into it.”)

It’s probably not an overreaction to say that Adam Larsson is the Best Devil EVER.

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Life’s Not Fair

So, Brian Rafalski retired today. Hmph. We were really hoping he’d outlast Lidstrom, so the Wings would be stuck paying him $6 million a year for being solo Rafalski instead of complimentary-offensive-defenseman-to-a-first-ballot-hall-of-famer Rafalski, because we’re mean that way. Anyway, over lunch today Pookie made a horrible realization about the Devils’ vaunted champion rookie class of 2000: “Rafalski has retired. Madden’s sure to retire soon. Gomez is… Gomez. And we’re still stuck with Colin White. And it doesn’t seem like he’s going anywhere soon.” Yup. It’s hard being a Devils fan, isn’t it?

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