Jean-Sebastien Giguere
It just crossed my mind why Jean-Sebastien Giguere is a great fit for the Leafs. Experience. Obvious, I know. But here’s why.
The Leafs have been playing all season with two young aspiring netminders who have had an incredibly inconsistent season. Wilson had the Leafs defense working hard to keep the puck from reaching the net. (In fact, the defense was practically forbidden from entering the attack zone.)
Unfortunately the puck always eventually gets through.
And when it did, all it would take would be a sharp shooter or a good rebound to put the puck in the net.
Now that Giguere is there that same hard-working defensive mentality is there, but when the offense reach the net, they aren’t facing a rookie. They’re facing a Venza-winning Stanley Cup goaltender who is ready for both the first shot and the second shot.
Now Giguere has 60 saves in back-to-back shut-outs.
Everyone talks about how much they dislike Stephen Harper but few people take the initiative to do anything about it.
Someone created a Facebook Page for this onion ring and their social experiment is to determine if this onion ring can conjure up more supporters than Stephen Harper
I am proud to say that an onion ring has more fans on Facebook than Stephen Harper does. As I write this there are 30,136 people who are fans of Stephen Harper. There are 73,600 fans of this onion.
A few years ago my friend Joe Coffey and I sat down to eat some fries from the Ziggies van in Churchill Square and a mountain of ketchup packets.
When we were applying the ketchup we exchanged our annoyances with the design of standard ketchup packets.
Firstly, the packets never contains the right amount of ketchup. You always find yourself opening multiple packets.
Second, they always make a mess. You have to squeeze the ketchup through the rip in the corner. It’s hard not to get ketchup on your fingers.
We thought surely there must be a better design.
The biggest problem is affordability. Restaurants are not going to pay extra for a ketchup packet that is larger and cleaner. The current design is very efficient.
Joe and I thought of many options but narrowed it down to one perfect design. We shared it with a few people in the industry and it garnered a little excitement.
Unfortunately it ended there. We didn’t persue it any further.
Recently Heinz released a new ketchup packet design. It’s more or less the same design Joe and I created with some minor differences. Here is their new design:
To read more, check out Heinz Ketchup Packet Makeover
A nine year old child has given premature birth via c-section in China this week.
There was no comment as to the conception of the child.
It may not be the world record, the record was set by a girl in Peru, but it’s not far off.
From NuttyNewswire: 9 Year-Old Girl Gives Birth in China
| To Toronto | To Calgary |
|---|---|
| Fredrik Sjostrom (F) Keith Aulie (D) Dion Phaneuf (D) |
Matt Stajan (F) Niklas Hagman (F) Jamal Mayers (F) Ian White (D) |
| To Toronto | To Anaheim |
| Jean-Sebastien Giguere (G) | Jason Blake (F) Vesa Toskala (G) |
Early in the season Burke made a trade that many Leafs fans were excited about but that created much discontent. Phil Kessel for a first and second round draft pick in 2010 and a first round draft pick in 2011.
Many people felt it was too much to sacrifice, but I disagreed. The Leafs have an extremely youthful team, Wilson says “the youngest team in the league”. The average age is 26.5 years old (as of today’s trade) compared to the league average of approximately 28 years of age. In other words, the Leafs are not disparate for youth.
Additionally the point of a team picking up an early draft pick is the chance that a perspective player will become a star. The Leafs have traded the chance to obtain a star for an actual goal-scoring stud.
Sounds great to me.
Today Burke made some welcomed announcements. Two big trades that resulted in the movement of ten players with Calgary and Anaheim.
The Leafs have lost four of their offensemen in exchange for a stronger back end. While I am not sure what Burke’s plans are to fill in the forward lines after this trade (perhaps make room for Bozak, Hanson, or Kadri) I’m impressed with the defensive mix up.
It has been said that Burke led the Ducks to a Stanley Cup victory by building from the netminder out. In Anaheim he built a team with Giguere, Beauchemin, Niedermayer and Pronger.
Now he is doing much the same thing in Toronto. Giguere is a Stanley Cup championship goaltender who, if he cannot offer wins, he can offer mentorship to Jonas Gustavsson. Despite Gustavsson’s losing record he has exhibited incredible potential.
Giguere has not been doing well in Anaheim, but he did not want to play there and even threatened retirement unless he was given more action. He will certainly get that in Toronto.
In terms of the blueline, the Leafs now have Karbele, Phaneuf, Komisarek, and Beauchemin as well as World Junior champion Keith Aulie. With any luck it will be more challenging for opponents to put the puck in their net.
In terms of their offense, the Leafs never really had talented goal-scorers anyways. What they had was Ron Wilson’s shoot-and-get-as-many-rebounds-as-you-can dirty style of scoring, which is brilliant when you don’t have the talent to put it in the net.
To top it off, the Leafs can now make a push for the playoffs. While getting a slot may be near impossible, they have nothing to lose in terms of draft picks as their first and second pick for next season goes to Boston.
I am sure that Burke is now formulating a plan to get stronger skaters to meet Kessel at the front lines, but until then we will have to see how this current mix-up will affect the Leafs ability to win games.
CBS has announced that How I Met Your Mother will “suit up” for a sixth season.
I have only started watching recently but I am already on season three and I can’t get enough of this show.
From Buddy TV: CBS Picks Up ‘How I Met Your Mother’ for Season 6
Anytime it’s snowing in St. John’s and the roads are in hard shape I always hear people say “I’m not taking the highway” referring to Pitts Memorial Drive.
Everytime I hear this I feel like defending the highway in poor driving weather.
The “Arterial” as it is called is part of the Governement of Newfoundland and Labrador’s highway infrastructure and thus it’s snowclearing is managed by the provincial government. Compared to the City of St. John’s those roads are immaculate in the snow.
Additionally the highway swurves around the turns of the hills on the southern side of St. John’s and is surrounded on both sides by thick coniferous vegetation which prevents virtually any blowing snow.
To top it off this is a popular highway where there is a lot of traffic. Even when the plows cannot keep up on the accumulation of snow the flow of traffic keeps the roads clear.
When it comes to driving in poor winter conditions I am confident there is no safer road to drive on. Outer Ring Road is a completely different story.
The Association for the Arts in Mount Pearl, AAMP, is currently accepting short films from local artists for their annual Frosty Film Festival. Here is the announcement:
On February 7th the Association for the Arts in Mount Pearl will be hosting the 5th annual Frosty Film Festival and I’m hoping to make this the biggest and best year yet. I’m reaching out to a few of my favorite artistic people to look for some help.
AAMP is all about giving local artists opportunities and while we try to have a few bigger names in our line up, we like to put a focus on first time filmmakers.
So, primarily I’m looking for any local film makers who you may know that have a short film that they would like played. If you do, please pass my name on to them and we can work on getting their film shown.
For info on AAMP, you can go to AAMP.ca or you can reach me at info@aamp.ca.
Also, if any of you have any ideas or suggestions on what we could do to increase knowledge of the event and, of course, attendance I’d love to hear about it.
Thanks for helping and I hope to hear from you soon!
Angela
To learn more check out the Frosty Film Festival section on the AAMP website.