(Late) morning with Mr. Canoehead...

Stuff that should bounce off you like raisins off an Oldsmobile ...

Wondering how new Montreal Canadiens coach Jacques Martin will handle the insatiable Quebec media after being in a southern U.S. city and big-small-town Ottawa for so many years. Roy Mlakar won't be there to ride herd.

Hockey fans who complain "superstars get all the calls" in the NBA when the NHL did not suspend Penguins star Evgeni Malkin for starting a fight in the last five minutes of the game. Jeff Blair's suggested title for Colin Campbell: "NHL Vice-President and Director Of Figuring Out What’s A Cheap Shot." The greasiness was compounded by the fact the NHL announced Malkin was off the hook via a press release at 11:48 p.m. (literally, the 11th hour.)

Michael Vick being a contentious issue, while there is a barely a peep about current Atlanta Falcons player Quinn Ojinnaka being allowed to play in the NFL after he allegedly "spat at his bride, tossed her down some stairs and then threw her out of their Georgia home in the wee hours."

What Vick did was carried out over a number of years, but it's not as if striking a woman is completely random. Take it away, Bud Poliquin:

"What Vick, Ojinnaka's former Atlanta teammate, did to become a pariah will forever and properly be considered heinous. Training dogs to fight, and then executing those who don't win, is certainly reprehensible . . . and Vick has the shattered life, career and finances to prove it.

"But at the end of the day, shouldn't battering people be more prominently placed in the great photo of disgraces than any act of abusing (and, yes, killing) dogs? And isn't battering people made even more abominable when the alleged batterer is a 6-foot-5, 305-pound man, and the identified batteree is a woman of significantly less height and ballast?

The knowledge that HBO, which passed on Mad Men and Breaking Bad, has given Joe Buck his own show.



Conan O'Brien debuting tonight as host of The Tonight Show. The commitment NBC has made to Conan is truly amazing. They've given him the best lead-in that petty jealousies can buy.

(Lord, please forgive anyone whose reaction to seeing Jay Leno sign off last Friday night was to scream at the TV, "The show should have gone to Letterman in the first place!" The line of succession should have gone Carson-Letterman-Conan. It's a pain that never ends.

It's a sin to say that about Leno. Like Stewie Griffin once said, the fact is the man is out there every night with fresh material and he's charming.

Last but not least, having to be the guy who makes this joke: "Kingston Frontenacs defenceman Erik Gudbranson was taken in the Continental Hockey League draft today. Playing in Russia would be an easy switch since he's already in junior hockey's Siberia." So much for trying to quit making Frontenacs jokes.

(Kingston's own Taylor Hall was taken too. Three OHLers were taken and two had Kingston ties. Crazy.)

He's paid his debt, but there could be Bills in his future

In case you were wondering where any loose talk about the Buffaronto Bills signing Michael Vick sprang from (The Score's Tony Ambrogio mentioned the possibility during a report from the team's mini-camp), there was an item about on Pro Football Talk.

"The Bills want to win. Now. Whether it’s because owner Ralph Wilson is feeling a Leon Hess-style sense of urgency or whether coach Dick Jauron feels a Rich Kotite-style sense of urgency or a combination of both, the Bills are going all in.

"They offered receiver Terrell Owens $6.5 million guaranteed at a time when no one else was willing to pay him $6.50.

"And a league source tells us that the Bills made a very aggressive play for defensive end Jason Taylor immediately after Taylor was cut in March by the Redskins.

"... As to the potential backlash from signing Vick, consider the fans' reaction to the arrival of Terrell Owens.

He's already gotten the key to the freaking city."

Be that as it may, Vick is probably an even-money met to eventually return to the NFL. Even the New York Daily News is onside with letting him back into the league. The recently retired coach Tony Dungy, who is pretty non-threatening, has kind of become his advocate, taking up Vick's cause in the media with appearances on The Dan Patrick Show and an article in S.I.

Incidentally, on the subject of crimes and misdemeanours committed by NFL players (it would be nice if all those products of Domination Culture who run the 40-yard dash in 4.5 seconds and throw themselves around with reckless abandon were also wired to stay on the straight and narrow, but that ain't happening), the league is being reactive about the frequency of players arrested for ddrunk driving. A San Diego Union-Tribune story said earlier this month claimed there 73 players on NFL rosters who had been stopped for drunk driving. That's two players per team, about 4% of the league.

The league's efforts could be part of greater awareness that getting behind the wheel while impaired is such an anti-social act (remember the PSA which likened driving drunk to pointing a loaded gun at a room full of people?). The Ontario government recently increased the penalty for people who blow just .05, just below the legal limit of .08. It doesn't do any good to get sucked into a debate about what's worse, dog fighting or drunk driving (so just don't), but it's odd where the line gets drawn..

Anyway, getting back to Vick, the Jacksonville Jaguars said yesterday they are not interested in signing him. Of course, the other team with a feline-derived nickname, the Carolina Panthers, are more commonly known as the 'Cats. That meant ruling out the headline, "Dog killer won't play with Cats."

(So, so sorry. Going on about 3 hours' sleep.)

Related:
Keep An Eye on Buffalo As A Mike Vick Destination (Pro Football Talk, May 19)

Vick on the Vikes ... no not really

Chances are, your Saturday paper might pick up a wire story saying the Minnesota Vikings are a possible destination for Michael Vick if he is reinstated to the NFL. (Mike Florio has destroyed it, by the way.)

There is a theory Vick won't be reinstated by the judge and jury, NFL commish Roger Goodell, into he's too old to be much good to a NFL team. (Tough luck, there's always the Detroit Lions.) The NFL's rules against tampering also means teams have to hold their cards pretty close to their chests. The Vikings aren't saying much.

At the other end of spectrum, it's cliché to turn a convicted dogfighter into the people's choice, because who's got time for that? There seems to be a general consensus that people were quick to let the professional opportunists, namely the media whores at PETA, have the final word on Vick during the summer of 2007. Everything semi-sports related which has come after — Bernie Madoff, Alex Rodriguez, well, pretty much anything to do with the Yankees since the end of the 2008 baseball season — makes Vick seem like small beer.

Point being, let him back.

This is more amusing than anything else, but if you go to Google News for word on Vick, one link is to an article about a judge demanding the death by lethal injection of 127 does who belonged to an imprisoned dogfighter.

Led by Best Friends Animals Society, the coalition includes BAD RAP (Bay Area Doglovers Responsible About Pit Bulls), Animal Farm Foundation, Villalobos Rescue Center, and Downtown Dog Rescue.

Where's PETA on this? One hundred twenty-seven innocent animals being destroyed because their owner is a crook, you'd think they would be all over that. My point exactly.

PETA and Vick : Please say 'feeding two birds with one scone'

Getting one's back up over PETA demanding Michael Vick have some sort of brain scan before he returns to the NFL is a fastball right down the middle.

It's a chance to bash a terminal do-gooder organization and work out some guilt over the Sick Vick firestorm from two summers ago. That being said, the PETA folk is so far out of its element on this it's not even funny. The author at Pacifist Viking, over at his spin-off site, pretty much took the starch out of the self-aggrandizing so-called animal rights activists:

"If you don't think Vick is a good role model, that's fine: don't cheer for him. But professional football is about adults playing a game for our entertainment, not about athletes being role models to children about kindness toward animals."

That sounds reasonable enough. More long-time readers likely need no reminder that this site at least tried to keep Vick's high crimes and misdemeanors in perspective back in 2007, when people were not necessarily ready to listen. It didn't matter that even characters like Dog the Bounty Hunter were at least noting (paraphrasing), "what did the last 50 convicted dog-fighters get?

Vick probably will play in the NFL again. He's not even a cause celebre. Funny how it can turn around in 18 months.

Related:
It's PETA who needs a brain scan (FOXsports.com)
Previous:
Sticking up for Vick (July 18, 2007)
Bearing the Brunt, it feels like... (Aug. 28, 2007)

BARKLEY TAKES ON AMERICA...

Charles Barkley's riffing covers the full gamut of being amusing, topical and reminding us that CNN was once relevant. Question: How's he expecting to get elected governor of Alabama without the religious vote?

On a semi-tangentially related note: A suicide bomber in Afghanistan killed 80 people yesterday at a dog-fighting event, but at least Michael Vick wasn't involved.

BEARING THE BRUNT, IT FEELS LIKE...

So it goes: Globesports.com's Stephen Brunt waits until the Michael Vick dogfighting furore is dying down to write his all-things-considered column that concludes, "one of these days, we'll be wondering why he, unlike so many of his fallen peers, paid such an enormous price for his sins," and the general reaction is that it's a sensible take. Even the right-leaning Bloomberg News is kind of paying Vick a left-handed compliment, although it was in a comparison to the Bush White House, so that's really no kind of standard.

It's good to see Canada's National Newspaper people coming around on this some six weeks after trying to raise that question here six weeks ago and drawing mostly disagreement and scorn. People are coming around, that's good, but talk about ending up feeling like a bit of a lifelong loser. C'est la vie.

BENCHWARMERS' MINDS SOMETIMES TURN TO ANOTHER KIND OF "EXECUTION"

Wouldn't it be something if the media, along with gathering opinions from prominent African-American sports figures -- Stephon Marbury, for instance -- also sought out marginal white athletes at random and asked what they really think about Michael Vick's dogfighting conviction?

Thanks to the miracle of Facebook, it's not necessary, in one case. A couple Big Ten college football players from the University of Illinois, quarterback Jimmy Garza (top picture) and wideout Jack Eastman (second picture), have apparently been kind enough to start a group entitled All Those in Favor of Drowning Mike Vick and Then Electricuting Him! (That's their spelling.)

A Jimmy Garza is listed as "electricutioner" and a Jack Eastman is listed as "creator" of the group, which has almost 3,700 members as of this morning. Neither player is on the two-deep chart for Illinois, which has won only eight games across the past four seasons. Garza is stuck behind a talented African-American QB, Juice Williams, and Eastman plays a position typically dominated by black athletes in big-time U.S. college football. Evidently, the two guys whose path to success is blocked by black players also really, really despise Michael Vick, or think he's fodder for their sick so-called senses of humour. Funny how that worked out.

"Normally, I would be very much against any further mistreatment of animals. But I wouldn't mind seeing his dogs starved for a week, then let loose on Michael with his hands tied behind his back. We'll see how fast Michael Vick can really run."

Granted, these guys are benchwarmers, but they do represent a university and its values. (For the record, it would take something a lot more offensive to get this kind of article written about a CIS athlete. They are lower profile and most Canadians are too polite.)

It's one thing to get drunk on the odd weekend. What does it say about about developing qualities such as civility, expressing forgiveness and an ability to form an intelligent opinion - things that are part of being educated -- when you start a Facebook group that (at the least) jokes about Michael Vick being forcibly drowned, and no doubt help it spread like to thousands of likewise sick-minded people who need to get a life for Christmas? It doesn't say much, although it might say quite a bit to these two guys' African-American teammates.

These illiterati might say, "it's just for fun." But there's nothing about the words, "I wouldn't mind seeing his dogs starved for a week, then let loose on Michael with his hands tied behind his back," that suggests this is good old college humour.

No one's asking anyone to defend Vick, or forgive him, but joking about having him drowned? Get a grip. Oh, and anyone who thinks what happens on Facebook stays on Facebook has another think coming. It's right there smack dab in the middle of Reality.

It's just funny to see the ugly thoughts of young people are supposed to be getting an education out in the open like this. Sports thrives on control, especially college football. Thanks to a couple of, A-hole B-teamers, it's all out in the open. The Great American Football Machine has about as much chance vs. Facebook as Illinois does of winning the Big Ten this season.

(In case anyone has concerns about mistaken identity: The profile pic for the group's creator matches the one of Jack Eastman at CSTV. The "electricutioner's" profile picture depicts four young white men in jerseys that are Illinois' shade of blue. One wears No. 12, Garza's number, and the others wear Nos. 19, 16 and 14. A roster check matches those numbers to other quarterbacks, each of whom is white.)

Related:
Vancouver MP receives chilling threat on Facebook (globeandmail.com)

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.

THE STATE HAS LAST LICKS ON VICK

East Coast Bias has an important reminder about the Michael Vick plea that's supposed to go down. Any deal would only apply to U.S. federal charges -- the Commonwealth of Virginia apparently has "every intention of prosecuting (Vick's) case once his witnesses are freed up from the federal proceedings."

Bottom line, Vick screwed up royally, he pissed away his football career, and yet that doesn't fully excuse the element of the population which thinks it has a special claim on moral high ground.

UP AT 6: STICKING UP FOR VICK

What everyone who's camping out at the theatre to wait for the premiere of Underdog might have missed....

• Michael Vick, indicted for his alleged role in a dogfight ring, is a thug, sure, but please take a second to look past that "dogfighting, what an idiot!" spin and think about the big picture. Guys out of places such as Newport News, Virginia (aka "Badnews") such as Vick and Allen Iverson get it 10 times worse from the media than they should since they're straight up about not giving a damn about what is expected from common-sense white guys.
  
  Bottom line, Vick came up through a place that isn't exactly Rosedale, a place that's a punchline to suburbanites. He was put through a failed public education system, then a failed athletics-over-academics college system. Then people get PO'd when he isn't Tiger Woods. You like sports so much, learn to like the crazy bastards who are wired to play 'em.
• On the same day, Daunte Culpepper (pictured) gets released by the Dolphins. How pathetic is it for a Vikings fan (namely, this one) to wonder if there would be any way they would give a second chance to a QB who has completed 64% of his passes as a NFL starter? Frankly, how about Daunte as a backup to Tom Brady in New England?
• Do yourself a favour, visit Raptor Land, a newish blog dedicated to our favourite hoops team.
• Eric Gagné is close to his old self in Texas, writes Yahoo! Sports' Tim Brown. It's just not so noticeable when he's pitching for a last-place team in football country.
• Daily Norseman has a take on Detroit Lions president Matt Millen's latest ill-conceived personnel move that's really funny if you believe those Bud Light "Real Men of Genius" radio spots are the highest form of comedy.

That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.