Happy players at the end of the game, originally uploaded by Stina Magga.

Vancouver - Metroblogging News Service

The Vancouver Canucks last night became the first team to win the Stanley Cup, one game into the National Hockey League season, after smashing the Calgary Flames at home by a score of 6-0. The victory was so decisive that league Commissioner Gary Bettman felt that playing the remaining 81 games of the regular season, and the playoffs was pointless.

“Having reviewed the tapes of the season starting games it’s clear that there is no other team that could compete with the Canucks on the ice,” Bettman said in a press conference this morning where the coveted cup was awarded by podcast recorded from Toronto.

Bettman pointed out that the Canucks have always enjoyed strong season ticket sales, and after years of suffering with little to no playoff success the league felt it was time that the Vancouver fans were honoured for their bandwagon jumping.

Some hockey commentators have argued that there is more behind the league’s decision than one strong on-ice showing. The rumour is that the awarding of the league title is a signal to other teams to follow the board room examples of the Vancouver club.

“We’re seeing a lot of teams with a great deal of debt,” pointed out CBC commentator Ron McLean, “with the credit crisis building in the states there’s a good chance that we’ll see the league losing a lot of the newer expansion teams. To shore up support for one of the bed rock Canadian franchises, and to reward the fiscal suaveness of the Canucks the league decided to award the cup.”

McLean’s co-commentator Don Cherry disagreed, “They’ve got the most Europeans. They’ve got twins. That’s some kind of Swedish wet dream. You know what the Swedes make good, cheap futon frames that you can assemble at home, not hockey players. Hockey is Canadian like beer and repressed emotions leading to domestic violence.  This Stanley Cup heist by the league is just the latest in Euro-coddling.  First they make the boys wear helmets, and you know good old boys from Kingston don’t play with helmets.  Then they make them use these fibershade metal sticks and now this, all because someone in Zurich wanted it.”

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Prime Minister Harper is in town doing the campaign thing.  I didn’t realize this until I tried to go home after work and found a man holding a very large sign that linked Harper with big oil.  I went up to my apartment and within three minutes someone had set off a very loud alarm across the street which continued on for about forty minutes, stopping only so that the same sound system could play “Amazing Grace”.

The protesters unfurled a banner, wore a polar bear costume and generally… well protested.  What they were on about, apart from the environment is good and Harper is bad, I’m not sure.  The news networks leapt all over them, so I’m sure their manifesto will be broadcast this evening just before the NHL pre-season scores.

Remind me to tell my Stephen Harper story later this week, the one where I had to interview him while drunk.  I was drunk, he presumably was sober.

Pictures of the protest, taken from my balcony, can be found here [fkr].  Please respect the Creative Commons do-dad if you want to use them.

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“Hello Time Bomb” was at the top of MuchMusic’s charts when I tried to request it during a phone in request hour back in Kelowna.  I was working an extra long shift at the Uptown Cinema Centre, and wanted to hear the new Matthew Good Band track.  The DJ at The Lizard, which at that point was what passed for the alternative rock station, had never heard of the song.  He offered to play “Crash” by The Dave Matthews Band.

The Matthew Good Band was fast becoming one of my favorite bands, and since they toured British Columbia a lot more than U2 and charged a lot less for tickets I ended up going to a lot of shows.  At that point I’d already seen them at EdgeFest in Edmonton and since then I’ve seen the band and Matthew Good solo nearly twenty times.  My first time at the Commodore Ballroom was to see one of the band’s five shows that they played over the holidays between the release of Beautiful Midnight and The Audio of Being.  I’ve been to Kamloops and Penticton far more than I’d like simply to catch a show.

So Tuesday’s release of Matthew Good’s Live At Massey Hall album was an obvious buy for me.

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Johnny Canuck, originally uploaded by miss604.

Over the past few years the Canucks have been using the slogan “We Are All Canucks”. Now I think we all understood that meant that each and every Vancouverite was a part of the Canucks “team”. You know the part of the team that has to pay to go to the games, and that the rest of the team likes to play pranks on such as tricking us into buying a new jersey every year [kk].

We’re kind of treated like the kid who shows up to Little League Baseball wearing a football helmet for extra protection.

The thing is though I think we’ve been reading the slogan wrong. I think over the past few years the Canucks have just been softening us up, preparing us for their real plan. First they hired a rookie GM, then they let Marcus Naslund go without even trying to resign him while making wild claims about signing Sundin and then they became the first team to name a goaltender a captain since 1948 despite an NHL rule against the practice.

Don’t you see the next step here? The next stage in this plan to revolutionize the National Hockey League, the sport of hockey and even sport itself?

Right now regular Canucks fans appear in ads alongside the team. The thing is though hockey players are expensive. They want millions of dollars to play a sport that most people who play actually have to pay to. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

We are all Canucks, because soon we’ll all be playing for the Canucks. Show up on game night with goalie equipment and you can play between the pipes. Have a pair of skates that fit you and were bought in the last six years? You’re a winger. And we’d pay for the privilage wouldn’t we. How much do you think the Canucks could auction off the right to take a face off against Sydney Crosby?

Kid with the football helmet, it’s your turn at bat.

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to celebrate their ten year birthday Google has put their oldest available search index online. Now for a limited time you can search their database that was active in 2001 [g01] as well as my hilariously ugly Matthew Good Band fansite and various student paper stuff [g01]. What will you find if you do? Well for starters you’ll find one of my first blogs [g01] as well as the fact that that other Jeffrey Simpson (a senior writer at The Globe and Mail) had a slightly larger web presence than I did, even though I kind of figure that he had no idea what the internet was at that point.

Give the search a try, and see what comes up. In 2001 for example there was no iPod. What a backwards age that must have been.

Vancouver comes up with not one of the very popular blogs that dot our digital landscape now, at least not on the first page. Who does show up? Well the Vancouver Grizzlies [g01]. The closest thing to the social networking sort of sites that we all laud now [mbv] is a now defunct page for the local chapter of IndyMedia.

These days you can’t throw a rock into the air without hitting someone trying to sell their SEO (search engine optimization) skills or a blogger fretting about Page Rank. 2001 seems so quaint and unspoiled, like an episode of Road to Avonlea.

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I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t think the Canucks have been making very good decisions lately. The off-season has had the sort of amateur blunders that make Newcastle United look like a properly organized football team. But that’s enough mixing sports, we’re here to talk about hockey and the Vancouver Canucks and how they’ve just gone an appointed goaltender Roberto Luongo as their captain.

Now of course there’s a rule against a goaltender being a captain in the NHL [wp] that’s based on that fact that since the primary on-ice role of the captain is to act as a liaison between the team and the officials during the game, and that it would be too time consuming for a goalie to rush out of his net to argue with the referee every time he wanted to argue said ref’s decision. So Luongo won’t technically be the captain, he won’t wear the ‘C’ or take part in any official face-offs say if the Queen were to stop by to drop the puck.

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On September 29th, 1888, The Vancouver World started printing, and 120 years later, The Vancouver Sun is still pumping out the news. I’m not a born Vancouverite, I converted ten years ago, so The Sun was a bit of a puzzle to me - in the rest of Canada (well, most of it), “The ____ Sun” is the tabloid press paper with a girl in a bikini on page 6. These were perceived as the fluffy paper, compared to whatever the rival paper was, which was almost always a broadsheet paper. So for example, there would be The Calgary Sun and The Calgary Herald - both fine papers, but was a bit lighter on the articles, heavier on the Brick ads and sports. In my opinion, anyhow. And that never stopped me from reading them both. And then I moved to Vancouver, and OOOoooh, the hilarity caused by my confusion. Actually, I don’t know where I was going with that - it didn’t take more than a week to rewire my brain to keep the two straight.

Man, that was actually a really boring digression. Anyhow, it’s the 120th anniversary of The Vancouver Sun, which is always of interest to me. I like to see how things change and how they don’t change. When the Royal Bank’s Cambie branch had their anniversary earlier in the year, it was amazing to see their photos of the corner of Broadway and Cambie, back when they were the only building of note. Big empty space where the Wendy’s would one day be.

As part of their celebrations, The Vancouver Sun pointed readers towards vancouverhistory.ca which is a treasure trove (2000+ pages, according to the Sun) of facts and photos about the city.

- Vancouver had Canada’s first gas-station.

- Vancouver named 8 city streets after famous golf-courses - Seigniory, Leaside, Uplands, Bonnacord, Scarboro, Bonnyvale, Brigadoon and Bobolink. I can find all but Seigniory on Google maps.

- The first Vancouver mayor who was actually born in Vancouver was hizzonor Bill Rathie, in 1962 (76 years after incorporation.)

- Whistler? Originally called London Mountain. The inspiration for the name it has now? A marmot.

- Marpole is apparently one of the oldest, settled areas in North America, with habitation evidence going back 3500 years. Also, they found 200 bodies in the midden (refuse dump) in 1930. I have no idea who made the dump and who dumped the bodies - Fail, Vancouver History! FAIL!

Anyhow, happy birthday Vancouver Sun. That Metro paper - she means nothing to me baby. Just a paper I met on the bus. You know you’re the only one for me.

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1) All you people lining up outside Anton’s on Hastings in Burnaby: stop it. Go next door to Bombay Bhel and enjoy some very nice tandoori dishes. The bane of tandoori is creating dry, stringy meat (the Indian equivalent of overcooking calamari), and they just don’t do that here. It’s moist and lovely and flavorful, just as it should be. The platters are good value, and there’s no wait.

2) It’s hardly a secret anymore, thanks to the Straight’s Best of Vancouver issue,, but Sweet Revenge on Main street is a lovely little room to eat dessert in. I had the pear bread pudding and would not recommend it (it was small, bland, and expensive), but my lovely bride had the zucotto, and it was a treat. We will go back.

Just, you know, not for the bread pudding.

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Maybe I shouldn’t be sarcastic with the title, maybe they do know the internet. I mean they at least know the fundamental fact that the best way to get traffic is to mention people by name. It’s the same thing we used to do in the student press, a front page picture of a rock band would only get picked up by fans of that band but a front page picture of a bunch of students would get picked up by the students, their friends and anyone who wanted to sleep with any of the students pictured.

It was circulation gold.

So when NowPublic, the people who don’t seem to understand Creative Commons licenses so spam you four times a week on Flickr asking to use your photos, the Vancouver Sun must have thought “Hey NowPublic is already repurposing all of our content as large block quotes and calling it ‘Citizen Journalism’ we might as well get involved in a link baiting scheme with them.”

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While it might not be as sexy as the election going on just an hour south of us, we’ve got our own federal election coming up and it’s a pretty important one.

While the election isn’t until October Elections Canada is out and about making sure everyone is registered to vote. I saw them at my local Urban Fare yesterday, and they’ll be there again today, so if you haven’t gotten your voter confirmation card in the mail head over to the Elections Canada website [ec] and see what you can find out about getting yourself on the voter list.

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Maybe I’m just a giant newspaper nerd, but I can’t help but think that the new distribution boxes that have been put out around some of Vancouver’s busiest streets are a great idea.  

So call me a distribution dork if you will but having one central box instead of a collection of run down boxes is a nice change.  The boxes have space for the free newspapers such as the free dailies like 24Hours and Metro which essentially just run wire service copy, The Georgia Straight and others with two pay slots for The Province and The Vancouver Sun.  The fact that there’s a space to put newspapers in for recycling is a great thing as well.

Ideally the project could be used as a reason to get rid of the free dailies street hawkers who stand around busy sidewalks blocking people’s way and trying to shove terribly typed tripe into people’s hands.  Ideally.  

Vancity Buzz (which looks less like vomit than it used to) had a post on the new boxes earlier this month [vcb].  The city apparently plans to deploy about fifty of the boxes around town, which is good news if it manages to cut down on litter and the wasted space of four or five newspaper boxes vying for attention on each and every corner.

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Apologies for not posting for a little while.  First The Georgia Straight said they’d pay me to write for them, and I was sort of shocked by the fact that there’s money to be made in this writing thing, so I started doing that [tgs][tgs].  It didn’t help us win best local blog [tgs] but being paid in actual money is even better.

I’d like to thank Tim, Ryan and Castewar for keeping things going during my downtime.  It’s really great to have authors contributing to the site, and though I’ll be doing the typical recruitment campaign shortly it’s nice to know that the blog is in a position where if I get busy it’s not laying fallow.

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Here at Metroblogging Vancouver we do a fair amount of food blogging [mbv], but we’re certainly not what you would term a food blog.  Increasingly though people who are in the know, meaning my fiancee Lydia [iatl], are telling me that there’s some pretty good local food blogs that I should be paying attention to.  I have to admit I was a bit skeptical, I like writing about food but from my (granted limited) experience of food journalism most of it’s lazy, repetitive and cliche.

Surprisingly though there are some really good Vancouver food blogs, and after the jump I’ll talk about two.

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Let’s face it this year has the potential to be a horrible hockey year for Vancouver. Pick up tickets to the WHL Giants because the Canucks have all the markings of a disaster about them as the year is about to begin. Making the playoffs will be unlikely in a competitive Western Conference where every team has strengthened while the Canucks have been throwing talent overboard as if hoping to right a sinking ship. The off-season has been a farce and there’s nothing to suggest that’s about to change.

How bad is it? You’ll find out after the jump.

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It’s a bittersweet concept - kind of a circle-of-life thing in Vancouver. Buy a bike, it gets stolen, the police retrieve it, sell it, second verse, same as the first.

Every year the Police hold their bike auction, where recovered bikes that have remained unclaimed for three months go on the block - so, when you consider it, on the one hand, it means someone lost a bike. On the other hand it could mean a bargain for someone looking to buy a bike cheap. You know, in case it gets stolen.

So, US cities auction off cigarette boats and Tony Montana mansions, we auction off bikes - to the tune of $200K per year, apparently. I say they start a crack Bike Theft squad with that money - when the crack team can’t afford to run anymore, we’ll know they’ve done their jobs.

However you may feel about it, the next auction takes place tomorrow. Previews were today I’m afraid, but you haven’t missed out yet.

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