johnzo

question for football knowing people: are those guys 100% interchangeable? do the Bombers have certain plays they'd only run with Oliveira on the field, and others they'll only run with Augustine? How much does Pierce's playcalling change based on who's in?

His RB #31 snuck out of the protection and was wide open right in front of him, the closest Bomber was five yards away and in a chase position. It was an easy first down, maybe even a TD. Masoli puts up some numbers and gets close in the end, but can't close it out. looked like a Grey Cup replay.

CFL on TSN hot takes: There were a lot of dire games in 2021 with zero scoring, bad offence, lots of mistakes, just awful football, and I really appreciate and respect how the panel didn't sugarcoat those bad games. I remember this one tripleheader of really shitty games and by the end the panel was punchy and resentful, just like I was. Rod Smith / Dunigan is the best combo in the booth. Dunigan is a superb color man and he and Smith have a good rhythm where they're both talking at the right times. Smith does a great job of leaving room for Dunigan's crazy uncle outbursts. Dustin Neilson is so much better than Rod Black that it's hard to know how good he actually is because he's still got that Not Rod Black halo on. Occasionally Suitor will show me something interesting, usually when he's breaking down a play or a coverage pre-snap. I don't pay much attention to him otherwise. When Milt makes a point I'm never sure if it's because he sincerely believes it or because he's playing a character who issues spicy hot takes like an internet rando. Kate Beirness is a decent host and I don't mind her vibe at all. she's not super funny but neither are 99% of the other people on TV. The panel is worth watching for the outfits. Whoever is dressing those guys is killing it. My wife and I have been scoring it for awhile now and Milt is slightly ahead of Matty, but Milt is also built like a model and you can dress him in ways you can't dress the others, so he's got a little bit of an advantage there.

Do you think it was Suitor's call to have the new zealand country dude in the booth for ten minutes during the third quarter? I suspect he was making the best of a boneheaded decision by his superiors.

if Rourke turns out to be one of those flash-in-the-pan QBs who disappear as soon as there's film on him... then man, that was one hell of a flash.

this would be so great. the CFL needs good news stories so bad right now.

after the colossal fuckup of the Iraq War I was so done with American militarism, with the way the USA fetishizes soldiers and weapons and their belief that somehow their bombs explode softer and gentlerbecause they come from the land of righteous christian freedom-loving. but man I would love to see NATO air power fully unleashed on those Russian mechanized columns. It would be over in an afternoon. Ukraine's highways would be bonfires. then, of course, a bunch of cities would also become bonfires, so it's better they don't.

Y'know what would make my bomber fan heart glow blue? Someday being able to add Collaros / Streveler to that list. Holloway / Barnes in Toronto was another good one. Maas / Ray had a great run as a tandem in 2005, with Maas coming off the bench to win the semi-final and final before Ray went start-to-finish and won the Grey Cup.

Ploen / Van Pelt is an all-time QB tandem. Both were super clutch, both won Grey Cups as the other's injury replacement. I wonder if we could have kept them both beyond 1960 if Uncle Sam hadn't called for Van Pelt? I don't think it was so easy for players to change teams then... What are the other all-time QB tandems? Wilkinson / Moon is the best one I can think of, and it'd be hard to top that. In the 1981 Grey Cup, the two Eskies QBs had nine Grey Cup rings between them. Unreal. Flutie / Garcia would be close except those guys didn't play together very long.

Man, I think about the life of a pro athlete ... working for months or years to rehab a significant injury, all the while the football world is moving on without them and an army of hungry kids is fighting to take their spot. The focus, discipline, and grit required to get through that is just mindboggling to me. Good luck, Stove, hope to see you back blowing up kitchens real soon (except for ours, of course)

movin' on up to Winnipeg!

My band is covering Hopes Go Astray. I get to introduce a bunch of Americans to the Northern Pikes. been listening to this live set a lot to get psyched for that. Saskatchewan does produce good things!

yeah, he went to the Concordes and had a Stegall-like season for a really terrible team.

In the 2021 election, the Libs won 32.62% of the popular vote and the NDP won 17.82%. Which adds up to 50.4%. A majority of Canadian voters voted in support of the current government. It's a small majority, but it is >50%.

Also this is pretty funny: https://www.thebeaverton.com/2022/03/conservatives-warn-liberal-ndp-deal-is-backdoor-socialism-handjob-democracy-and-salad-tossing-representation/ lol "over-the-jeans leftism"

reading the National Post about the power sharing deal, I see the repeated perpetual grievance that only a third of voters voted for the current government. NP always forgets the 15% of Canadians who voted for the NDP. The current Lib + NDP governing coalition received support from just a smidge over 50% of Canadians, which makes it more democratically "legitimate" than almost all Canadian majority governments of my lifetime -- the Chretien, Harper, and second Mulroney majorities were all at about 40% of the popular vote, and the only majority parliament in my lifetime that also had a voting majority was the 1984 Mulroney majority, which won 50.1%.

Related reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street (tldr: thousands of fascist blackshirts march under police escort in London in 1936 but are routed by a coalition of OG antifa. Great story.)

Tired: cancel culture Wired: divesting from companies whose values don't match your own.

man this guy did some great things for us. Comes back after being cut in 2016 and gets 100% dialed in with Nichols on that lethal endzone corner route in 2016 and 2017 -- for awhile those two were like Ricky Ray and Jason Tucker. Will always be a fan. He was a giant part of the 2016 breakthrough season that proved out the Canadian Mafia and gave them time to build the current juggernaut. Real pivotal player in a pivotal point in Bomber history. Wish we could've won him a ring. I think there's a dark timeline where we don't have Clarence Denmark waiting in the wings in 2016 ... Dressler can't do it alone ... the team doesn't break through ... Walters runs out of runway ... and now, in 2022 Mike O'Shea is back selling pharma and Jim Barker is the coach and GM of the Bombers.

ok, that's it Speedflex, you've lost me. Impossible Whoppers are delicious. being in the US now, I miss Harveys. I ate at Harveys all the time back in the nineties, it was the best chain hamburger in Canada by a mile. I had one a few years ago when I was visiting Ottawa and it wasn't as good as I remembered. but yeah, TB4E has it, mom and pop is where it's at when it comes to hamburgers.

I have read that the Nazis were greeted as liberators by Ukranians in 1941, and given how Stalin brutalized them, you can't really blame them. Alas, the warm welcome did not make the Nazis any less shitty -- the Ukranians were subhuman Slavs after all -- and Hitler's goons gleefully got down to the task of converting Ukraine into lebensraum and liquidating the population.

just to do some comparables, Canada spent $1B (< 1% of GDP) on its peacetime air force in 2020. In return for that we operate fewer than 100 CF-18s and about 300 other types (transport, helicopter, lift, patrol, training, etc. all things being equal (they're not, of course) you figure that if Putin is operating 10x the craft (3900 all types in a 2015 estimate) he's gotta be spending close to 10% of his GDP on his peacetime air force, before a single live bomb is dropped. And that's just his air force. And those planes rot if they're not kept up, you can't really defer maintenance on them, and aircrew require constant training.

yup. Ukraine was the graveyard for a lot of SS, Gestapo, and Wehrmacht. There's partisan warfare in the DNA there.

I wonder if they can even afford to fly their planes? Their GDP is smaller than Canada's but they're trying to operate a superpower-class military with hundreds / thousands of warplanes plus thousands of very expensive nukes (which need regular expensive maintenance or they become duds) plus a large fuel-hungry fleet of 1990s-vintage armored vehicles plus a two-ocean fleet. I wonder how long they will be able to sustain their invasion of Ukraine?

They are going to go on as they mean to, regardless of anything that happens at the UN. Why listen to them? What words could Russia offer that would justify their aggression, justify the Warsaw-style siege they're staging around Kyiv, the one that's going to be a ******* humanitarian catastrophe? **** them. they are speaking with guns. It seems extremely unlikely they will speak consequentially with their voices. never believe words, believe actions.