No, it’s not about a girl, but it might as well be.  The Habs suffered a, yes, heartbreaking, loss last night to Tampa Bay.  Why was it so painful?  The Habs had rallied from a 2-1 goal deficit to lead the game 3-2 with only minutes to go in the third period.  Hang on to it, win the game (obviously), and make the series 2 games to 1 (in favour of the Lightning).  With 16 seconds to go, Tampa gets the puck off a faceoff in our zone and a few bounces of the puck later, and a Montreal defenceman who seemed content to just plain watch as the Tampa player in front of the net took a through the legs shot (it was a nice goal though.. grrr), the game is tied 3-3.  They go into overtime, and 60 seconds later, Tampa scored, and the game’s all over.  Even the mini-hockey party that was going on at my pad couldn’t lift my spirits, after we had been all happily yelling (OK, maybe it was just me) during the final few minutes of play.

The series is now 3-0 in favour of Tampa, and that’s quite the challenge for the Habs to overcome.  Again. 

It’s interesting talking to people about last night.  That is, people are reluctant to talk about it, because it’s so painful, but then we go ahead and start talking about it anyways and about all the plays we remember.  You know what?  It helps.  And one of the things that’s so great about Montreal is that the majority of the people you talk to were also watching, so you feel like one island-wide family suffering through the same thing.  We came back from a 3-1 deficit against Boston, and now we’re facing a 3-0 one.  No team has ever done it before, but no Habs team had ever come back from a 3-1 deficit either.  You know what though?  I hate stats.  They’re meaningless, since it all they do is try to predict the future, and the outcome is going to have much more to do with simply who wants it more. 

The Habs wanted it more last night - they outplayed/outshot/outclassed Tampa, but Tampa jumped on three mistakes and made the Habs pay for it.

4 games in a row for the series?  No prob.  Keep the faith.  Allez les Habitants!

I don’t fucking believe it.  Of course, I was in a semi-drunken stupor, but I do believe I saw the Habs suck royal ass tonight.  I’m going to really have to watch game 2 against the Tampa Bay Lightning where I can actually hear the announcers and see only one puck.  Those two or three I was trying to track gave me a headache.

So the night started off bad, but quickly turned better.  Being six people, and needing use of a 5-person car, I was duly volunteered to be the one to lie down across the laps of the back-seaters.  It makes perfect sense, since I’m the… tallest… one… there?

I couldn’t see anything, but I’m told it was a fun ride.  I was busy trying to flatten myself to not be seen.  Having to do this against three lovely ladies was not a problem.

We got to the joint, and there battle was joined.  Well not right away.  I (of course) had to get things started on the dance floor by going at it alone like an idiot until my friends stopped laughing and joined me.  Then the flood came.  There were strange asses and hair flying everywhere.  That’s not always a good thing.  Personally, I need a fair bit of room to get my groove on, and I was woefully lacking said room on the dance floor.  The solution, as far as I could make out, was to use one’s ass as a (I just wrote three words using only ‘a’ and ’s’) battering ram against other people’s asses to clear them out o’ MY space.  Of course, they thought that it was their space and assed me back.

So the war raged on. Much girly hair was flipped and smacked in faces, but that was worse for my shorter companions - most hair flips don’t reach my stratosphere layer.  There was also a slight problem with my assing - I encountered a girl with a very large ass, and understandably my groove area was being invaded.  To arms (asses)!  I gave her a good one, but horribly, my assing simply went unnoticed as she simply absorbed my hit with her own ass.  Truly, a master of the art!  I changed strategies - I went for the hip.  Luckily, more bone, less ass found there.  She relented, and I live to fight the fight another day.

Male on male assing (of which I was also a victim) is a little more territorial and competitive.  Guys (like me) ass other guys solely to jockey into position where they can show off their moves the best.  Understandably, this can pass the barrier of “oops that was just a mistake” to “Aight, let’s go Hombre!”  After the initial glaring eye lock, a shrug and a inaudible message accompanied by hand movements is usually necessary to diffuse the situation.  Anything else may result in severe assing, and nobody wants that.

I’ve now exposed even more people to my unique “style” of dancing.  People still tell me I’m good - but I dunno… I still have no idea what I’m doing.  I just try to follow some semblance of a beat.  I think I’ll try getting my groove on more often.  It would even be interesting to see what it’s like just going solo for once.  There would be a fine line between confident and creepy greasy lecher.

I’ll go for confident lecher.

my friend Chris, who used to be vehemently anti-blog (”…all people talk about is their boring lives!  This sounds racist.”) has turned coat and is now ranting the good rant over at gregg factor.

He finds me blogworthy.

I think I really like where I work.

This kind of scares me a little, since I’ll be leaving soon to try and further my so-called career.  But hey, at least for now, I’m rockin’ with the mushroom people.  No, they don’t look like smurfs.

After two days of anxious waiting, I finally got to start my experiment today, the one that will ultimately be the base of the scientific paper I’m going to write.  Yeah… that’s the ticket.

Anyways, the evil gods of Hockey also decided that today at noon, tickets to the Habs games went on sale.  Excited, I infected 10 other people with bright-eyed hockey fever, and we then proceeded to attempt logging into the website selling the tickets for about 4 hours - with no results.

It felt like the entire island of Montreal was trying to log into the site at the same time.  At one point I opened 15 browser windows, and I maniacally was clicking in each one, and systematically hitting F5 (refresh) for each window.  Repeat.  All my being was boiled down to me watching those spinning globes in the top right corner of the browser, making sure every one was still in motion.  Twitch of my eye.  Rocket look to the far right of the screen.  Aha!  Little bitch… *click* *F5* baddabing!  Next!

It didn’t fucking work.  Seeing how tech-nol-o-gy had failed us, we went all analog on it’s ass and took a car to the arena.

“Oh look, no one’s in line!  We’ll be out in no time!”

I should have realized.  If this was any other city, then this might make sense.  We were beating the work hour let-out, after all.  But it’s hockey-crazy mtl.  The cheapest ticket of the ones that were left was a cool $219.  Ah.

So: TV hockey party at my place.  You can adjust the rabbit ears.

So what, I’ve been quiet lately.  I’ve been… engrossed.  That tends to happen when hockey games are every other night, and your beloved team is fighting and crawling back inch by inch from a 3-1 series deficit.  But rejoice.

I said, REJOICE.  Why?  Well, Les Glorieux (that would be: The Habs) did it, goddam.  Boston B’s are toodleloo, and bring on Ole, Ole, Tampa Bay.  It was a great series!  Hmm.  Well, not for Boston.  Theodore showed his 2002 form of greatness, and every single player on the Habs gave it their all.. and Boston was left looking like chumps.  It’s unfortunate, though - they have some very talented players that I would love to have on the Habs’ side (*cough* Samsonov *cough*).

It’s been a truly great year for Canadian hockey teams.  Five out of the six existing Canadian teams made it to the playoffs, and the last one only barely didn’t make it.  Unfortunately, four of those teams had to face each other in the first round, automatically eliminating half of them.  The positive in this is that Canadian teams are guaranteed to make it to the second round, even *shudder* the Toronto Maple Leafs.

A lot had been made about the Montreal fans booing the American national anthem when it was sung at the games played here in the series.  I have a lot of beef with this issue, but it’s not what you think.  I just can’t stand it that people are getting upset over this.  It’s just so stupid.  The majority of the players are not from the country their team is from.  An argument could be made - “It’s for the fans”.  Fine.  But they’re not in Montreal.  And I can also tell you right now that the major reason there was booing had much more to do with the anthem simply being the other team’s song.  You come to our city to play our hockey team, we don’t like you.  We want to do everything we can to demoralize you and get under your skin.  Well it worked for the fans watching their TV sets anyways.  Enuff said.

I’m damn proud of us Montreal fans - out of all the arenas for all the hockey teams in North America, Montreal’s is the only one that’s consistently sold out for every game, and during the playoffs, I know no louder or passionate fans.  There were reports from the Boston dressing room that the building was shaking, shaking, just from the cheering of the fans.  Imagine - sitting there trying to go over the period, and the walls are vibrating.  And, totally unlike other cities, we don’t shut up when we’re down.  We don’t know how.  We’re a demanding bunch, but our players love us - they want to show us what they’re got.  And even all the way in Boston, they were hearing us.