Just about everyone who knows me knows that I am an atheist and that I've been one just about as long as I can remember. What they may not know, however, is that I'm a little bit arrogant about it. My wife, the Lovely Mrs. byoolin's trebuchet, noticed this early in our relationship and brought it to my attention.

"Just because you don't believe in God doesn't mean you're smarter than people who do," she said.

"But I am," I said, cleverly.

As you might well imagine, this line of discussion continues from time to time and remains unresolved.

Then again, it's hard not to feel superior when you've got people who think the pattern in the bird shit on their pickup truck is an image of the Virgin Mary and when "a steady stream of family, friends, neighbors and strangers has stopped by to pray" over it.

( Image Of Virgin Mary Appears In Bird Dropping On Area Family’s Truck )

First, let me say that even on good days, I miss the CBC - Mansbridge, Mercer, 22 Minutes, and that's just the TV. But you try watching hockey on American tv and things get really ugly - which leads me to this letter I've sent to NBC.

As a Canadian, Mike Milbury had me wanting to go into my tv set and beat Mr. Milbury with his own shoe. (For those of you too young to remember, or without the ability to ask former Bruins coach Bep Guidolin just what I am talking about, here's the video. Mike's at the top left of the frame at about the 38-second mark.)


***

During the second-period intermission of Saturday night's NBC broadcast of game five of the Stanley Cup finals, analyst Mike Milbury, a former NHL player with the Boston Bruins and coach and GM with both the Bruins and the Islanders, segued from a discussion of the game at hand to link it to the anniversary of D-Day. He paid tribute to the one-hundred-odd NHL players who served in the Second World War, and singled out by name Conn Smythe, Howie Meeker and Milt Schmidt.

He called them "great hockey players and great Americans."

Inspiring, except for the detail that none of them were Americans.

Conn Smythe was born in Toronto and served in the First World War, first as a member of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, where he earned the Military Cross, and then as a member of the Royal Flying Corps, spending the last year as a prisoner of war after his plane was shot down. In the Second World War, Smythe volunteered again, serving in the Canadian Army; he was badly wounded in July 1944.

Howie Meeker and Milt Schmidt were both born in Kitchener, Ontario, and both served in the Second World War with the Royal Canadian Air Force. Meeker was badly wounded by a grenade, while Schmidt, along with fellow Kraut Liners Woody Dumart and Bobby Bauer, missed three years of NHL hockey wihile serving with the RCAF.

Mr. Milbury is a knowledgeable hockey man and was a fearsome defenceman, but as an amateur historian he is at best badly misinformed. His mischaracterization of Messrs. Smythe, Meeker and Schmidt as Americans is an insult to them and to their services to hockey, to their Canadian military service, and to Canadians, not to mention to American hockey players who served and died in defence of their country, such as Hobey Baker, who died in the First World War, and Frank Brimsek, Schmidt's teammate and a World War II veteran of the Coast Guard.

Mr. Milbury should immediately apologize for his error.

News item: "Celine Dion Could Bid For Canadiens"

Everybody, listen up. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT.

Celine Dion will not buy the Montreal Canadiens.

BY ALL THAT IS HOLY AND THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL, I will collect bottles and cans from the ditches along the Interstates and turn them in for their deposits and buy the team myself before that will happen.

Maurice Richard, Georges Vezina, Howie Morenz and the entire pantheon of Les Glorieux will rise from their graves and descend upon her home in Florida if this were to come to pass. Jean Béliveau, Guy Lafleur, Ken Dryden and the Mahovlich brothers would fight hand-to-hand in the streets of Montreal. (Stéphane Richer, for his part, would hold onto the puck waaaaaay too long and not get a decent shot on goal, but never mind that.)

But, sacre calisse et corps d'Esprit santé, if Celine Dion buys les Habitants, we might as well start calling them Maple Leafs II.

I feel weak. I think I need to lie down.

Away in a manger,
no crib for a bed
I saw the Virgin Mary
Giving Jesus some head.

From the "what I know for sure" column on page 280 of the December 2008 issue of "O" magazine, which features as one of its cover stories an article entitled "Celebrating with more meaning (and less money)":

Our spending and greed for material things we think will define us have been forcibly put in check. We have a wake-up-call opportunity to get real and be real with each other by finding ways to show love, give love, be love without spending a lot of money. It's a chance for us to look beneath the surface, into the culture of excessive more, more, moreness that got us into this mess.

Total value of one of each of the 58 items featured in "the O list (Where to Buy It Guide)" on page 101 of the same issue, not including any monthly subscription fees: $4096.

My personal favourites were the pet camera ($99.95) and the brownies ($71 for 2 dozen).