Khl Playoffs open

And unlike last year, my details are sketchy, but I have the scores. Dinamo Riga stunned SKA St. Pete 2-0. Man, top seeds sure have it rough in Russia! My boys from Yaroslavl edged Atlant 2-1 behind Zybnek Irgl's winning goal. MVD knocked off Red Army 3-1, and Spartak had to go OT to nip Dynamo Moscow 4-3. GO LOKOMOTIV!

Butt-jobs gone wrong

Y'know, I was going to do a story on the resignation of dem. rep. Eric Massa and his joyous commentary on Obama's chief lickspittle, Rahm Emmanuel ("a son of the devil's spawn" was the best), but instead I've got to show you the absolute dumbest thing I've ever (with one exception) seen on a mainstream media news site.


NEWARK, N.J. — A black-market butt-enhancement "practitioner" is injecting New Jersey backsides with household caulk and other hazardous materials, according to New Jersey health officials who have alerted New York authorities to the rear and present danger.
Six Newark-area women in the last two months have been hospitalized with infections caused by injections of "a variety of unknown materials," said New Jersey Health Department epidemiologist Dr. Tina Tan.
Officials said they believe the injected mixture includes silicone, petroleum jelly and hardware-grade caulk.
After botched efforts to plump their rear ends like naturally well-endowed celebs such as Kim Kardashian, the victim's derrieres resembled "moonscapes" filled with lumps and craters, said a hospital source.
"According to hospital sources, the six women were all from the Dominican Republic. The injection "treatments" occurred in hotels around the Newark area, the hospital source said.

Yes, I also want a big butt. Fill me up with caulk, please and thank you. Would this not be great for the "what is it?" segment on Ask This Old House? Tommy, do you have to drill a new hole or go with the existing one?

___________________________________________

On a vastly different subject, My Yahoo baseball league had its automatic draft, and I must say I got the best fantasy team in any sport I've ever got online.

Kurt Suzuki
(Oak - C)
Mark Reynolds
(Ari - 1B,3B)
Asdrubal Cabrera
(Cle - 2B,SS)

Mark DeRosa
(SF - 1B,3B,OF)
Stephen Drew
(Ari - SS)

Nick Markakis
(Bal - OF)

Adam Dunn
(Was - 1B,OF)

Alfonso Soriano
(ChC - OF)

Elvis Andrus
(Tex - SS)
SSUtilBN
Jay Bruce
(Cin - OF)

Vernon Wells
(Tor - OF)

Colby Rasmus
(StL - OF)

Nick Swisher
(NYY - 1B,OF)
Tim Lincecum
(SF - SP)

Justin Verlander
(Det - SP)
Francisco Cordero
(Cin - RP)
Rafael Soriano
(TB - RP)

Chad Qualls
(Ari - RP)
Aaron Harang
(Cin - SP)

Scott Kazmir
(LAA - SP)
J.P. Howell
(TB - RP)
Rich Harden
(Tex - SP)

Jason Frasor
(Tor - RP

Now shall we kick butt, not caulk it!

KHL playoffs begin

The second season of the Russian Kontinental Hockey League is over, and the playoff matchups are now decided.

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First we have SKA St. Petersburg vs Dinamo Riga. SKA ("sports klub of the army") Finished 40-16 for 122 points. Their big name (i.e. Name that NHL fans know) is Alexy Yashin, and Canadian goalie Robert Esche led the league with 29 wins. Riga is basically the Latvian olympic team plus Czech forward Marcel Hossa, brother of Chicago Blackhawk Marian Hossa, and the league's goal leader with 35. The 8th seed in the east, they went 27-31 for 84 pts this year.







The second set features HC MVD Balashikha and CSKA, the former Red Army team. Both of these are basically Moscow teams in a league top heavy with Moscow area clubs. MVD was 31-25 for 102 pts, and CSKA, who finished 30-26, boasts one of six Americans in the KHL. His name is Nikos Dimitrakos and he scored 12 goals this year. CSKA are the Yankees of the KHL, having won 32 championships in the various Russian premier leagues, the last in 1989.






Third set features Atlant Mystischi and my favorites, Lokomotiv Yaroslavl. Atlant, the "Atlases", are yet another Moscow suburb team and boast league scoring leader Sergei Mozyakin who tallied 66 points. They had a 37-19 mark for 101 pts this season. Lokomotiv, last year's playoff runners-up, claim Slovak olympian Richard Zednik as their big name and former Carolina Hurricane Josef Vasicek as their big gun. Lokomotiv have won 3 Russian titles and went 31-26 this year for 96 pts.

The last of the east matchups is an old Moscow rivalry, Dynamo vs Spartak. Dynamo, a 9-time champion, went 33-23 this year for 101 pts and include Alexi Seminov and Finn Jiri Hudler. Spartak, who played the Komets and beat them 7-4 many years ago, are 4-time champs and went 32-24 for 92 pts.

The west kicks off with top seed Salavat Yulaev from the city of Ufa against Avtomobilist Ekaterinburg. Salavat won a second straight regular season title (they lost in the first round to Avangard Omsk) with 44-12 for 129, and have one one Russian championship. Viktor Kozlov, late of the Red Wings, is their most recognizable name. Avtomobilist replaced Khimik in the league this year and made it in on the season's last day, going a dismal but not suprising 22-34 for 64 pts.

Next up is Metallurg Magnitogorsk, a 3-time champ, vs Traktor Chelyabinsk. Magnitogorsk is lead by Detroit Hall of famer Sergei Federov and their goalie Vasily Koshechkin had a league-leading 8 shutouts. They came in at 40-16 for 115, third-best in the league behind SKA and Salavat Yulaev; Traktor limped home with a 21-35, tying Ekaterinburg with 64 pts.

The next matchup is two teams of snow leopards. AkBars of Kazan are last year's Gagarin cup champions, one of three Russian titles. They posted a 33-23 mark for 96 pts. Barys of Astana are one of the 3 non-Russian teams in the league(Dinamo Riga, Latvia and Dinamo Minsk, Belarus, are the others) are based in the capital of Kazakhstan. They struggled to a 26-30 mark this year, 79 pts, led by Josef Stumpel.

Finally KC's team, the Neftekhimik ("petrochemists") of Nizhnekamsk face the

team led by Jaromir Jagr, Avangard Omsk. Neftekhimik boasts the second of 2 Americans in the playoffs, defenseman Deron Quint. They went 31-25 for 93 pts this season. Avangard, in addition to Jagr, are known for being one of the teams in the brawl in Chekov where the two had three bench-clearing melees and over 700 minutes in penalties before 4 minutes were gone in the game. (Both teams were given 5-0 forfeit losses and several million rubles in fines as too many players were ejected to continue play.) They broke even at 28-28 for 90 pts.

Playoffs start this week.

just for fun

Saw this while cruising local tea party site, cracked me up.

Fragment of a darker poetry

In my spare time this week,actually just the last two nights, I've been working on a poetry cycle that is basically a little private therapy over a problem I'm not discussing and wouldn't be apparent even if I published the whole set. However, I thought I'd share one of those parts, a part that is different from the others in that A) where the others are designed to make sense only to me, this one is designed to make no sense whatsoever except in the once repeated tag line, and B) it has only tangentary involvement in the theme of the rest of the arc. So sit back; maestro, cue the music...

Friday nights full o' Mondays
we sit and wish on basement stars
one for luck, one for love, hold the lettuce
hold it here under my thumb
Tie your braids into long straight hair
I'll climb down the cleavage in your eyes
and you will know the meaning in my touch,
on the day the mimes are all struck dumb.

Golden gifts of baseball fortunes
lie in attic shoeboxes collecting dust
The child chewing Bazooka Joe
somehow grew up, and moved on
He left to you one last will and testimony
written on a ticket stub to last night's opera
did you understand the lady in the horned helmet
saying she's in love?

That's what I want to say to you,
but I don't know how.

(Doo-weee dough, ohhhh,
doo-weee dough, ohhhh)

I have a snakebit chocolate kiss on the bannister
I'm like graffiti that you won't write-
sometimes the blank wall, sometimes the old paint,
and sometimes the aerosol that's all leaked away
The sense of this, you don't make sense to me
You fit perfectly but I'm the wrong hole
squares and rounds, 'round the square in an echo
and I just feel so
out
of
town

That's what I want to say to you,
but I don't know how.

That's it, kids. let me know what you think.

update on yesterday's rants

Addendum and Correctum:
1. Apparently now both the boy and his little sister got their turns at the JFK mike over two days, Dec. 16-17. Of course, FAA had no problem until the recordings made their way from a ATC enthusiasts' site to the main stream. THEN it becomes a huge ordeal. Way to not quake in fear of public opinion, FAA.
Chris' take: same as yesterday.
2. Apparently I was in error in all the nasty things I said about that judge yesterday. Allow me to present Prosecuting Atty Paul J. Pfingst.

This is the gentleman who decided to give the child molester-cum-murderer a 6-year sentence in a plea deal. His reason? "the (13-year-old) victim needed to be spared further trauma". Yeah, right? She was beaten to a near-unrecognizable pulp. I tend to think that he has also the same other two reasons that Allen co. DA Karen Richards uses, to wit: A. "I/ my staff is too damn lazy to conduct an investigation that will lead to a sure conviction", and B. "Plea deals look just like convictions on my resume when I retire from the public dole and look for a cushy high-dollar job"( you can see how dear Mr. Pfingst did at Higgs, Fletcher, and Mack llp of San Diego's website. I wonder if that e-mail address listed is still open?) Many thanks to the locals who still hate his guts for steering me onto the righteous path.
Chris' take: Just cross out "Judge" and insert "prosecutor" in all pertinent spots in yesterday's post.
3. And of course, the only thing left for me to get wrong involves the coffee-and-donuts story. First, the original violation that was turned in- no doubt be a scheming competitor- was that they demonstrated a new model bbq grill a couple of weekends, with employees passing out samples of said demo, which is a no-no. It was in investigating this violation that the health dpt. found the heinous c&d scandal. It appears that you are required to have a stainless-steel three basin sink AND a full kitchen-prep area to turn on your Mr. Coffee and open a box of dunkin' donuts. Make sense to you? me, too. Of course, we would have known all this in the first place if the health dpt. official whom the reporter interviewed before the story saw print would have thought to tell the reporter about the bbq complaint which actually started it all. But, this official, apparently a former FAA rep, failed to consider the consequences of not getting ALL of your side of the story into the mix.
Chris' take: stupid is as stupid does, stupid is as stupid was.

Flying through stupidity

For your review, the OMG how horrible news story for today.

An air traffic controller at New York's Kennedy Airport was suspended for allowing his young son to radio instructions to several pilots.
The few quick exchanges between the elementary-school-aged child and jets waiting to take off from JFK, one of the nation's busiest airports, appeared to delight pilots at the time.
"I wish I could bring my kid to work," one said, wistfully.
But the Federal Aviation Administration suspended the controller and a supervisor Wednesday after recordings of the calls were posted on the Internet, then reported on by a Boston television station.
"This lapse in judgment not only violated FAA's own policies, but common sense standards for professional conduct. These kinds of distractions are totally unacceptable," FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt said in a statement. "This kind of behavior does not reflect the true caliber of our work force."

Chris' take? Bu77$#it.
This kid was harming nothing, and probably the fact his father was telling him what to say helped him concentrate even more. But some a$$#ole put it on the internet, and now it's right up there with the judge who ignored a Psychiatrist's advice and released a child molester who thanked him by going out and killing a 17-year-old. Where the hell was our internet poster when Judge I'm -so -much -smarter- than -you said that John Gardiner was fit to be released? They should have video of that moment playing while that s.o.b. judge delivers the eulogy at the funeral of the girl he helped murder.
This, on the other hand, was about as harmful as the coffee and donuts that the lanscaping shop in Camarillo, California was serving until some public minded citizen turned them in for not having a stainless steel prep area and ended a 30+ year courtesy to their more appreciative (and intelligent) customers. Suspending people over this? LUDICROUS. Offended? Look up the word and make sure you should be.
In the meantime, I'll give aviation credit where credit is truley due:



Capt. "Sully" Sullenburger, a hero in the truest meaning of the word, retired today from his job at USAir. At 59, I'm assuming that he probably salted enough away to retire on just in the last year. And you know what? God Bless Him! If Jeff Reed can get franchised for multimillions by the Steelers despite his pi$$-poor end of the season and drunken antics off (and I'm not doubting on) the field, then Sully deserves everything he's gotten AND everything Jeff Reed's gotten, and probably toss on T.O.'s one-and-done contract in Buffalo as well. God Bless Sully, and God bless little boys who go to work with their dads, and the dads that take them. As for cowardly internet posters, retarded idiots who report good people because THEY are retarded, and judges who think the greater good is served by seeing social value in unrepentant scum, you all are on yer own.

Animal update: another bunny (3), and our first raccoon.