On today's episode of "Family Feud":

With five of six items already revealed, the host returns to the man at the head of the family to his right.

JOHN O'HURLEY: Tell me something people think about when they hear the name 'Ellen DeGeneres".

MIKE, SUTTON FAMILY PATRIARCH: Doesn't like her country very much, I think.

JOHN O'HURLEY: Fuck you, asshole.*


* Technically, reply did not happen.

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.

I don't know about you, but I certainly feel safer knowing that I live in a country in which one now can carry a loaded and concealed .50 caliber semiautomatic pistol into a national park. My sense of personal security is further enhanced by my knowing that one may not carry a container of Cheez Whiz brand process cheese food onto a domestic flight originating from San Francisco International Airport.

Of course, the person whose Cheez Whiz brand process cheese food was confiscated earlier today at SFO is a Major in the National Guard and no doubt the Transportation Security Administration likes to keep its eyes on people like her. She could probably kill a man with that stuff. I shudder to think of the havoc she could wreak with a mesh bag full of those mini-Babybel cheeses.

I certainly feel safer knowing that the TSA's profiles of Threats To America include officers with 20 years of military service - including enlistments in the Marines, the Army and now the Guard - and their condiments. And I hope I never run into someone like that at Yosemite.

There's video floating around on the internet of a California Highway Patrol officer kicking a man in the head while the man is lying face-down on the grass waiting to be arrested. He'd jumped out of a car at the end of a high speed chase and made a run for it, then gave up without any further resistance. The video (I've linked to it after the cut) clearly shows the CHiP punting the guy in the noggin. It's just another fine example of the old mantra, "There's never a cop around when you need one, and when there is, odds are good the guy's a real piece of work."

But, as Arlo Guthrie once sang, this isn't a song about Alice.

The Huffington Post's piece about the incident includes a section for reader comments that, for me, is a perfect distillation of what the worst of the right-wing-nutbar community embodies (not conservatives or Republicans generally, I hope, but that specific subset that has done so much to make Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter and Savage so rich in the last few years).

Look at what our friend "ProudlyConservative42" had to say about the CHiP's George Blanda impression:



I'm especially grateful to see "ProudlyConservative42" suggesting that if only America were MORE LIKE North Korea or Iran things would be better, at least as far as crime goes. Is this why my father died in World War 2 defending the American Way Of Life*? So that guys like "ProudlyConservative42" could just throw away the Constitution and the Rule of Law, and instead emulate the Communists or the ayatollahs? This guy is so upset about All The Things That Are Wrong With America that he can't even see straight.

Which makes it very hard for him to aim his bile effectively.

*Certain dramatic details were changed to better illustrate my point. In real life, my father did not die in World War 2 defending the American Way Of Life. He was too young to serve, and also not an American, but that doesn't mean it couldn't have happened like I described it.


( Jon & Ponch never did this, but I'll bet Sgt. Getraer wasn't above administering a little Size 10 justice. )

I was at the local St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store about two weeks ago when I spotted a model kit of the Bluenose in the toy section. (For my non-Canadian and/or non-numismatist readers, the Bluenose was a famous Canadian schooner that owned International Fishermen's Trophy for seventeen years in the 1920s and 1930s and is depicted on the Canadian ten cent piece.)



It was obviously an old model kit - the box bore a 1957 copyright marking - and since it was taped shut I had no way of knowing the condition of the model inside. I figured it was worth the dollar the S.V.deP. wanted for me to find out.

When I got it home, I opened the box and there it was. Not the Bluenose. It wasn't even a model kit: it was just a box full of junk - pieces of model cars, some action figures, and a few random items. But that's not to say I didn't get something for my dollar.

( A strange motherlode: follow the link. )