How the mighty have fallen.

WHY, PJ? WHY?

My gods, why are people hitching their wagons to Eklund? If it's not my buddy PredatorPaul agreeing to be the Preds reporter for that fraud, it's my favorite wisecracking fireplug blogging for him!

PJ, buddy--RUN WHILE THERE'S STILL TIME, MAN! Surely you can do better than Eklund the Fraudulent!

The quickest way to my heart...

...is to quote Sun Tzu to me.

And the whole martial thing is good, too.


Behold, the Paladin.

I geek out on the whole "gearing up for battle" stuff (and the mildly religious trappings do it for me too), though some of the more "old skool" fans may not dig on it much.

Chapter One (A New Season) starts here:

High-bandwidth version Low-bandwidth version

Watching that gives me goosebumps. Seriously.

And then we have last night's game agin the Thrashers--which I missed by dozing off in my computer chair FOR FIVE HOURS. When I woke up, it was 10:30, the game was over, Patrik Stefan was in the hospital after a collision with Erik Cole (I won't even call it a hit--from the way the Thrashers announcers described it, it sounded more like a collision), and Joe, Lord of Evil had carried the 'Canes to a 5-4 win. And Andrew Hutchinson assisted on all five Hurricanes goals--damn, if he can keep it up in the regular season I think we'll have a real find on our hands.

Preseason. Yay, preseason!

So I'm at Sunday's game agin the Panthers (which would have been a real sellout had it not been for those STHs that feel that they don't need to come to preseason games), and Martin Gerber has given up a second goal--when all of a sudden I hear the following from this woman about 5 feet away:

"This goalie sucks! We need to get rid of him right away."

Uhhh, exsqueeze me?

Let's review:

PRESEASON. ONE GAME. NO HELP FROM THE GUYS IN FRONT OF HIM.

I don't blame Gerbs one bit for two of those goals--but chucking him under the bus already, after ONE PRESEASON GAME? WTF?

Pavel Brendl--why did we make him a QO again? Some mental giant on a message board once said that he had to be good just because he was the 4th overall pick in the Draft in 99 (was it 99? Is it important?)--if that's the case, then I must be Agnetha Fältskog just cos I'm part Swedish.

After hearing ChuckandtheletterK and KAdams talk up Andrew Hutchinson during Friday's beatdown of Les Crapitals de Washington, I decided to pay him some close attention on Sunday--and I must say, I am impressed. Smooth skater, aggressive on the forecheck, and a vurra nice shot. I was also very impressed by resident lounge-lizard Mike Zigomanis. Dudeman's been all over the ice, pouncing on every potential scoring chance like Danny Markov on a Balshoi Piotr. I think he really wants to try sticking with the big club (and I admit, so far it's been nice watching him make fools out of the people that called him "a pure scrub" just because of one game where he didn't manage to do a whole lot).

Be interesting to see how the 'Canes fare against Atlanta on Wednesday, especially now that they have Peter Bondra (goddammit, why can't he go out of our damn conference?)