Monthly Archives: March 2011

Rod Phillips’ Retirement

The Voice Of The Edmonton Oilers

Tonight’s game against the Los Angeles Kings marks the end of an era for the Edmonton Oilers and their fan base as play-by-play great, Rod Phillips,  calls the game for the last time ever tonight on 630 CHED.

Rod’s career has spanned 3,542 games, 37 years and 5 Stanley Cup championships. Oilers writer, Robin Brownlee, details the monumental occasion on OilersNation.com in a far better way than I could.

I’ve been lucky to catch a few of “Rod’s Classics” this year, where Rod has returned behind the mic for ten games to do the play-by-play. Hearing Rod’s excitement and passion for the game takes me back to when the Oilers were in their hay day, chewing bubble gum and winning Stanley Cups (and they were all out of bubble gum in those days). I also wouldn’t discount his influence over my own ‘no holds barred’ vocal insanity while watching the Oilers play, even to this day.

Enjoy this game, Rod. Hats off to you.

It’s Do Or Die

That’s what time it is for the Prince of Stanley’s hockey team. Tomorrow night, they play a crucial game that will not only decide their path toward a gold medal but will also, more importantly, decide whether or not I have to wake up at an ungodly hour on Saturday morning.

If they win tomorrow night, then they will play in a game on Friday night to decide if they head to the gold medal game. If they lose tomorrow night, then they play at 7:45 am at the arena on the opposite side of the city, in the heart of Downs’ Castle.

I’m going to do the math on this one; if the game starts at 7:45 am, he needs to be there a half an hour earlier as a minimum… at 7:15 am. I’m going to have to give the standard one hour of travel time, meaning that we have to leave the house at 6:15 am. Providing an allowance for how much time I need to get the Prince awake and fed, tack on getting a coffee in there… multiply it by the crab factor (which is basically how cranky the Prince is going to be getting up that early) and you have a crazy early morning.

Hence why it’s a ‘do-or-die’ scenario. Because if he doesn’t win… I’m going to die.

Great Jeffs In History

Jeff Daniels

Fast, effective relief.

What can you say about Jeff Daniels? Well, if you take what Wikipedia says about him, you could say:

He has had a thriving film career, from his debut in 1981 in Ragtime, through State of Play in 2009. For his film work, he has received three Golden Globe Award nominations, including as Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Comedy/Musical for Woody Allen‘s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) (hence the name of his theatre company). He has also received nominations by the Screen Actors GuildSatellite Awards, and several for his work in The Squid and the Whale (London Critics Circle Awards, Independent Spirit Awards, Chlotrudis Awards and Gotham Awards).

However, what I would say about Jeff Daniels that makes him great is this scene from one of the greatest movies of all time, 1994’s Dumb and Dumber:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwcVJMvVWDA]

Update: Powerless

There have been some dark times as of late for The Empire and that’s almost a literal truth. We ran a considerable deficit on our energy billing until our account went well past due and was passed on to the Collections department who promptly interrupted our service.

Living in the dark

Rather than leave us in the dark and the cold, they placed a limiter on our power meter which prevented us from consuming too much electricity. This would prevent us from using any of our major appliances. Which, for the most part, wouldn’t stop us from living our lives… except that we couldn’t use our stove/oven, microwave, dishwasher and our washer/dryer combo.

I mean, it could have been worse. Having absolutely zero power would have been pretty shitty so luckily they only do this during the summer.

Anyway, I’ve been between updates for quite some time. It isn’t that I don’t have anything to write about, it’s just that inspiration hasn’t really taken hold and urged me to write about anything in particular. It seems that I’m not the only one, though:

Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.

via Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter – NYTimes.com.

I can understand it, I guess. With sites like Twitter rising in popularity, you can get by with a lot less inspiration than with a standard blog. About 140 characters worth of inspiration, actually. So I guess that’s what is maybe going on with the NJLE site. I mean, even the Queen doesn’t really give a flying fuck what I write about here. She doesn’t even read my uninspired tripe. Whatever. I’ve gotta do what I’ve gotta do.