russia

For your viewing pleasure—and hoping it doesn’t burn indelible marks into your retinas—I give you Don Cherry’s latest horrendous getup:

Also, one note: Don was exactly right in what he said about Canada’s 5-4 overtime loss to Russia in the IIHF men’s gold medal game. Canada took a delay of game penalty early in OT which lead to the power play on which Ilya Kovalchuk scored the game-winning goal for Russia. It is absolutely ridiculous to give teams a penalty when they toss the puck over the glass from their own zone, especially when they are simply trying to clear it and it rolls on the ice or takes a strange hop or something. I remember thinking this when the rule was introduced, and Don Cherry and I—gasp—agree here. If I were Team Canada and that had happened to Russia, I wouldn’t want to win that way. It’s an awful rule that needs to be seriously revisited. (Also, someone needs to take a look at the officiating in the IIHF tournament—there were several questionable calls and quite a lot of missed calls in this game and throughout the tournament, especially a blatant too-many-men call that should have gone against the Russians.)

But all this notwithstanding, the game was a classic, and congratulations to Russia on an historic gold medal. We’re still #1 going into the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. And Don Cherry is still #1 in horrible fashion choices.

There are several by-elections happening all over Canada today, including one in Vancouver Quadra. The riding is considered to be very safe Liberal territory, but party leader Stéphane Dion and deputy leader Michael Ignatieff (remember, the ones that the PM is suing) came out here to forestall fears that low turnout could harm elections results. The NDP candidate Rebecca Coad is a UBC student in philosophy; I met her some time ago, and she seemed pretty on the ball. The Green candidate, Dan Grice, is a UBC graduate in classical archaeology, which I think is fantastic. The Georgia Straight endorsed him, reasoning that they could not endorse the NDP candidate because of systemic problems with the NDP, the Conservative candidate didn’t even bother to show up to debates and meetings, and the riding is safe Liberal territory anyway, so people could be safe and vote their conscience to send a message to the Liberals about what issues they’d like to see on the party agenda. I think this is not a bad strategy, provided that it doesn’t skew the elections results, as Dion and the party leadership are obviously afraid of. Of course, if elections were held in accordance with an alternative system such as Single Transferable Vote, as I have argued, people could vote for the Green or NDP candidate to vote their conscience and send a message, and then mark the Liberal candidate as their second choice, thereby voting both ideologically and practically.

Anyway, I’ll have some updates later in the day about the results of the by-elections. Look for the Liberals to make a few pickups, especially in urban areas like Vancouver and Toronto, due to dissatisfaction with the current government. Meanwhile, a few interesting links:

• How do you prove you’re gay when applying for refugee status?
• Religious groups are trying to shut down a Russian television channel because they show programming that is ‘anti-religious, violent as well as promoting homosexuality’, such as South Park.
• The hilarious malapropisms of Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, such as ‘I deny the allegations and the allegators.’