This is not the kind of irony you want in your life.
 

To recap. 1997:
 

2009: 
 

I don't know what else to say, except Jesus.

~

My sacrelige is feeble.  

Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the U.S. military by a Michigan company ... 

One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6, which reads: "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Don't get me wrong here. Flak jackets I could understand. Are army chaplains truly Constitutional? Worry about something else. Even to irreligious people, faith is something you can understand in a war. If I had to jump out of a plane, even not into combat, I'd probably cross myself.

"Light of the World" references on assault rifles are different.

The idea that Christians should wage war specifically to kill, to make the world more open for Jesus, is anathema to this country. And how many of these weapons have shot kids or the owner's friends by mistake? How pointlessly cruel is that blessing? Yet these are central beliefs of all the wrong people right now.

This sort of thing will make me an old lesbian.
 

Tom Waits - "Day After Tomorrow" video from Anti Records on Vimeo.

This week is sacrilicious.

2009 reminded us that towers can be built on sand, financed with positive thoughts, and still look great while they stand upright. Success is proof of concept, until it is not. People who have their shit so together it's unbelievable, should probably not be believed.

A lot of happy things are going down in the NHL. How likely are they to last? 

~

In Which We Win A Lot

Take a good hard look at this motherfucking chart.

In the last month, we have beaten Chicago, the #1 team in the league. We have beaten Pittsburgh, the defending champs. We broke two team curses by beating Atlanta for the first time in two years and St. Louis for the first time in eleven (!). We win on consecutive nights. We win 1-0. We win 5-2. We win on the road and we win dramatically at home. Buffalo is just walking up and down the street, smacking bitches.

Most importantly, for the first time in years, we're winning without Ryan Miller in net.

You can sit this one out. It's cool.

No really. We've been cycling through backup goalies every year, writing off games where we have to rest Miller. His greatness, plus the fact that he works in the odd Buffalo system (play as a 3rd defenseman, handle the puck, forget shutouts), made him irreplaceable. "Irreplaceable" is a bad word in hockey.
 

We're gonna need another Timmy.

Patrick Lalime. The 35 year old perpetual backup, on his way out of the sport. Not the guy you suddenly expect to grow a 3rd testicle in December, and start collecting shutouts. Not the guy who would say, be brought in to replace Miller, shut down the Penguins, and backstop the team to a 4-goal comeback. Not that guy until now.

Awesome. But if you watch the team, you see familiar seams in the armor. Yeah it's fun to go down 2-0 and 3-0 and make thrilling comebacks, but why do we bother taking it to the face for half the game? Why is the #2 team in the East outshot in the first period? Why does our 6 Million Dollar Import go whole weeks without scoring? 

Take any team that's made it to the final recently, and describe them with 10 adjectives. You know what word you won't find on that list? "Snuffleupagus."

Also, "streaky."

We're streaky. And everyone knows it.
 

A Bad Good Stat

Still, "streaky" might be better than "headless." Check out that #1 Chicago team again. They get better every year. Fast, young guys up front, violent old guys in the back, and lost Buffalo treasure Brian Campbell showing everyone how full-team rushes and power plays work.

Soupy Come Home! 

Plus, they have the best goal horn of all time. Whenever Chicago scores, there's a brief siren that fades into the chorus of Chelsea Dagger. The entire stadium dances. It's the greatest scoring incentive since money.

ESPN trumpets this week that Chicago has the "league-lowest shots against." Which is good. They have an aggressive d and fast forwards and solve problems in the neutral zone. But ...

They have no goaltender.

Yeah. Since the 'Bulin Wall departed northward, they've cycled in both their goalies as starters, and been satisfied with neither. There have been a whole mess of games like last week's against Anaheim, where 3 weak goals trickle in, but the Hawks make up for it by scoring 6.

This is a playoff disaster waiting to happen. When you have to take shots from a good team over and over in a series, a soft net will kill you. So in retrospect, that Shots Against stat might be an "A" in Baseball Philosophy of Gender. Great kid, but you still can't read.

And you look like a penis in a little hat.

Moving on.
 

We Outlasted Seal!

Yes it's true. The NHL Winter Classic makes more money each year. It has fights, overtime, BCS-level ratings, air force flyovers, and Denis Leary yelling "Sweet Caroline" at hockey fans during a snowstorm.

The whitest thing to happen. Ever.

And you know what, NBC is finally showing its hockey contract respect. It stopped following the Ice Bowl with eye-rolling holiday filler like Seal on Ice. They lined up some new programming, and following the Classic, fans can enjoy:
 

...

I hate everything.
 

Give My Kids More Ice TIme

The Olympic Roster is out! Hockey Jesus is starting, of course. In front of him ... half the human beings living in Central Michigan and Upstate New York.

Which begs the goddamn question: no (Syracuse) Tim Connolly? No (Detroit) Mike Grier? My favorite two players, from the #2 team, who play with your starting goaltender? There was no room for these fine motherfuckers? 

I would bitch about this more, but first, neither will get hurt in Vancouver, and both will rest for the playoff run. Second, let's line any group of mammals up against the Canadian list of Crosby, Heatley, Iginla, Toews, Neidermeyer, Pronger, Brodeur, Morrow ...

I just wet 'em again.

So! Lindy Ruff is coming back with a gold medal and new sunglasses, and my favorite line will get a month to write best-selling guides to waxing your scalp and sneaking past defenders.

Failure: it could be worse.
 

Legs, and the Biting Thereof.

Detroit can no longer play hockey, as it has no hockey players.

This follows on my prediction two years ago, that the only way to victory was to put them down like feral zombies of the ice. This team has had a great run, playing the AARP Swedish All-Stars in what was pretty much a conspiracy to dodge the salary cap. But you can only put so many brilliant, brittle pelvises on the ice before fortuna gives you a good rogering.

Ubermench Niklas Lidstrom and the AHL callups will do their best. Even in the face of hilarious defeat.
 

Keep bleeding! 

The big story this week is Purdue crapping out and dropping three in a row. I was perfectly content a week ago to give them the loss to Wisconsin, as no one goes undefeated. Ohio State's a quality team as well (and they crack the top 25 this week; beating the two best teams in your conference sort of demands that), but Northwestern lies in the dregs of the Big Ten and that loss (and current trend) are more than enough to drop them from first to third (bordering on fourth) seed.

~

This week, Pat Robertson expressed an opinion about the earthquake in Haiti.

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it ... They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon the third, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you will get us free from the French. True story. ... They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to god and out of this tragedy ...

Lots of people are writing about this. Including progressive Christians who make the fairly obvious point that Pat Robertson is an asshole, and this is not "good" or "my" or "loving" Christianity.

But, what has my left eyeball rolling around like a unicycle ridden by my thetans, is that this isn't any kind of Christianity. It's not a religion I've heard of. The world in Pat Robertson's head must have the silliest rules ever. I think he's a Calvinist Animist from the Conan universe. I think his god has been drinking.
 

1) Who the Fuck is "Haiti"?

There's this country of about nine million people, founded on oops-genocide 500 years ago, then re-founded as a slave market and molasses factory. ("Willy Wonka and Sauron had a farm...") After the uprising there were constant colonial and civil wars. Between different tribes, euros and mercenaries. The Island of Saint Domingue solidified into Haiti and the DR decades later.

In 1791, one group of rebels stabbed a goat.

In Pat Robertson's world, this act of barbecue means every single person who lives on that island, forever, is legally bound to Satan.

How do you get that kind of authority? In the Old Testament, even a King of Israel was punished personally. For the Nation to be corrupt, it had to be clear that they were all falling away. Even then, they were punished at the time. God never rang the doorbell 100 years later to say "HEY! GREAT GRANDSON OF COW FUCKER! EAT LIGHTNING!"

I wonder how many times Pat has used the word "Sodom." He can't possibly know what it means. 

Then Abraham approached [the LORD] and said: "Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. ... Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?
The LORD said, "If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake." ...
Then he said, "May the Lord not be angry, but let me speak just once more. What if only ten can be found there?"
He answered, "For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it."

Pat Robertson's god would call YHWH a pussy.

This is all assuming you throw out the New Testament. Because ...
 

2) Who the Fuck is "The Devil"? 

This guy is what you would call a composite character. Without Jesus and Revelations clarifying things, the Serpent of Eden is just a snake. The Vizier character in the Book of Job could possibly be squared with the snake as God's in-house provocateur. If you squint. Moloch and other foreign gods are completely alien to this. So Christ meeting the Adversary in the desert and the Apostles warning about Satan's universal nature and influence ... you need that to get a Devil.

But the Devil can not do what Pat Robertson requires of him.

Hell in the gospels is explicitly individual. As is deviancy from God. As is demonic possession. Christ warns people not to stand behind the beliefs of their family or tribe, because their own conscience will be examined by God and is vulnerable to temptation. No one's action can damn or save "their people."

Individual ethics rank right up their with "forgiveness and "renouncing wealth and nepotism," as things Pat Robertson rejects. But with those go his Devil.

So I'm not sure who Haiti's angry farmers would bargain with, at the price of someone's running water and children later.
 

3) How the Fuck Would "Haiti" "turn to God"? 

Original Sin doesn't work that way. Because that's the only basis for anyone being inherently guilty. And it doesn't work that way. First of all, it can't be recast by human action, on account of, and I'm quoting here, "a whirling firey sword."

It beats Paper.

A world where Haiti has its own separate relationship to God (inherited from one faction eight civil wars ago) is a world of several gods. If you can cross a border or be born into tribe X, and be governed by different rules for grace and punishment than someone else, then that arrangement, that separate face of god, is a new world. You are back to leaving dead animals at the treeline to appease Bob, the Hobgoblin.

Most pagans 2500 years ago didn't travel much. So they weren't globally aware of just how many gods there must be. Nor did they have the time or incentive to think about what it meant if every tribe claimed a father spirit, and every lake got it's own nyad. It is awareness of this that makes Robertson's world surreal. The only parallel, in tone, is to modern fiction. With his certainty about the relative rules, he's way more American Gods than Gilgamesh, and way more Conan than anything.

Conan: What gods do you pray to?  
Subotai: I pray to the Four Winds... and you?
Conan: To Crom... but I seldom pray to him, he doesn't listen.
Subotai: [chuckles] What good is he then?
Conan: He is strong! If I die, he will ask me, "What is the riddle of steel?" If I don't know it, he will cast me out of Valhalla and laugh at me. That's Crom, strong on his mountain!
Subotai: Ah, my god is greater.
Conan: [chuckles] Crom laughs at your four winds. He laughs from his mountain.
Subotai: My god is stronger. He is the everlasting sky! Your god lives underneath him.

Maybe President Preval should import, curse, and punch a camel in the face. I know he's busy trying to clear the roads for trucks carrying food and water, and to bury his dead relatives. But since leadership in Pat's universe revolves around bullshit, arbitrary rituals in the woods, It's clear he's falling down on the job.
 

5) Why the Fuck Did You Hug My Head? 
 

6) Does Morality Exist? 

In a world where someone 200 years ago bones a witch and you experience earthquakes, are there any ethics?

Best case scenario: moral choices can be made once, and god is easy to manipulate. Since he respects the borders we draw, and considers people born into certain sins depending on the politics of their grandfathers, I could save you all from sin right now.

We charter a boat, find an uninhabited island in the Pacific. Hell, we can even find one with some natives or Muslims or something in Indonesia. Kill them all, then quickly put their bodies on a raft and push them away. The island thus empty, we declare it a new country. Then all get together and yell JESUS FOREVER NO TAKEBACKS! Put our fingers on our noses, spin around three times. Boil a monkey. Whatever.

Presumably, centuries would pass. Our descendants would include as many decent people, saints, pedophiles and fuckwits as anywhere else. But a cushion of grace would deflect all bad weather, disease, crop cycles, and skin rashes. If the god we created by founding a new country has a Heaven, all those people would go to it.

I'd keep the whole thing under wraps, though. Knowing you're beyond failure -or that you can trump your way into grace- tends to go badly in practice.

In fact, you could say that collective punishment is very nihilist. The only way to stay sane is to be ignorant of it. If you know your own personal actions are meaningless in the eyes of god, and can rationally see the world as one big machine for fucking with you, I don't know if your world is better off than one that has free agency, but also bad weather.

I do know which one is easier to pronounce about on television.

...
 

Oh, and it was either The First Republic or Napoleon I, depending on who's counting. Though, way to slip and name the guy who backed the Confederacy. Most of us could name colonial French leaders all day and forget about him. Pat probably thinks the Scots rose up under George Wallace. His head is filled with tiny oiled potatoes. I'd like to dropkick him.

Goodnight.
 

TW (LW) Team (Record)
1 (2) Texas
2 (1) Kansas
3 (3) Purdue
4 (4) Duke
5 (6) Syracuse
6 (11) BYU
7 (7) Kentucky
8 (5) West Virginia
9 (8) Kansas State
10 (10) Wisconsin
11 (19) Tennessee
12 (12) Villanova
13 (16) Michigan State
14 (9) Georgetown
15 (15) Pittsburgh
16 (17) Temple
17 (NR) Baylor
18 (NR) Northern Iowa
19 (NR) Missouri

Yeah, so. I know I haven’t been writing for a while. Sorry about that. I totally meant to start the first, but you know how that goes. Other stuff got in the way. But I’m back. Sorta. In a way. I guess.

Holy goddamn hey.

Dutch and I cracked some jokes about this game while it was in production ... but I'm gonna play it.

Another week, another set of double workdays without internet, another realization that none of my content posted when I wanted it to.

I can neither read nor write.

And yet, things will appear now.

-Bizzo

1. Kansas (13-0)
2. Texas (13-0)
3. Purdue (13-0)
4. Duke (12-1)
5. West Virginia (11-1)
6. Syracuse (13-1)
7. Kentucky (15-0)
8. Kansas St. (13-1)
9. Georgetown (11-1)
10. Wisconsin (12-2)
11. BYU (14-1)
12. Villanova (12-1)
13. New Mexico (14-1)
14. Mississippi (11-2)
15. Pittsburgh (12-2)
16. Michigan St. (11-3)
17. Temple (11-3)
18. Wake Forest (11-2)
19. Tennessee (10-2)
20. California (9-4)
21. Georgia Tech (11-2)