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.”

Liberal Member of Parliament and former NHL goaltender Ken Dryden agreed that the economy was the main motivating factor.

“The Canucks are masters at this game, and the rest of the league need to learn from them. The team did not even appear to be trying last season, and yet they sold out each and every game. They made millions releasing a new jersey, that continued the franchise’s history of having the ugliest shirt in the NHL and they’re going to do it again this year.”

“That sort of marketing is diabolical, and it’s the sort of thing that teams in Arizona, Florida and other parts of the lower states will need to learn from,” Dryden said.

Bettman stands by the league’s decision, “This isn’t just an award for selling the most prawn sandwiches to the luxury box crowd, it’s based on a dominating performance of hockey in the first game of the season.”

What will happen to the rest this season’s games has yet to been decided. For now they will continue while the league owners debate whether or not to award a second Stanley Cup. The City of Vancouver is making plans to hold the parade/riot to celebrate the victory. Local officials suggest that it will be held in conjunction with the Rogers Santa Clause Parade.

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.

“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.

Having such a compulsive need to see as many Matt Good live shows as I could, I had always been a strong believer in the need for him to release a live album.  One of the first things I had done when I had discovered the usefulness of Napster was to seek out bootlegged live songs.  The best of which were a handful of tracks that had been recorded in Germany, with only a little too much treble.

With all of my favorite artists I’ve always wanted a full Pearl Jam like live recording release.  These days all shows go through a mixing board of some kind, and attaching basic recording equipment to that would allow for a release of a live album for every concert performed. 

The Vancouver native didn’t go that far with his first live release, instead opting to focus on a single show at Toronto’s famed Massey Hall this past May [mg].  It’s traditional but Good’s promotion of the release almost exclusively through his website and iTunes could be the first step to a Radiohead / Nine Inch Nails like movement away from a traditional record label.  That the album is already at the top of the charts on the Canadian iTunes store and doing well in the States is  sign that maybe Good doesn’t need a label anymore.

I’ve spoken enough already about what I had hoped for, and what the future might hold.  The nitty gritty of a review should of course be about the record in question.  As it stands the album released on iTunes is just the first disc in a two disc set.  Recorded during Good’s return to full band touring after a few years of doing stripped down solo acoustic shows, the album focuses largely on his newer material with only “Hello Time Bomb” and “Load Me Up” surviving from the Matthew Good Band days.  (More MGB tracks will be on side two).

Having caught the Vancouver show on this tour, one of two of his shows I caught this year along with a cross boarder trip to Seattle for one of the acoustic dates, the tone is familiar.  Returning to a full band arrangement seems to have put a new burst of energy into some of the tracks, and while there’s a bit too much musical noodling at times we’re not talking about a Grateful Dead style jam session. 

Acoustic tracks will be part of the second disc, and were a large component of the In A Comabest of album from a few years ago, but I’d have almost preferred a release from one of his acoustic shows.  Still that’s complaining about what the album’s not, as opposed to focusing on what it is.  Good and backing band are tight and this is probably the closest we’ll ever get to the definitive live collection from his career.  It stands up well against other arstis’ live releases, and if it lacks the courage of Pearl Jam’s “release everything ever” philosophy then it’s worth noting that so does every other act in the world who aren’t Pearl Jam.

At the end of the day this disc isn’t going to convince anyone whose not already a Matthew Good fan to become one.  I think anyone cautious of really giving him a chance because of the radio hits like “Hello Time Bomb” should still check out his solo work like Hospital Music, but like a best of album this is mostly a repackaging of what’s come before.

It’s still a worthy purchase for any fan.  Anyone whose deep into his catalogue will have a few tracks they would have liked to have seen.  My all time favorite song of his is “Suburbia” and it’s nowhere to be seen, it’s also a fucking fantastic song live.  Thankfully it does have “Black Helicopter” his best track since.

I’m still going to see him live as long as he’s within driving distance, but to hold me over through the lean months when Matthew Good isn’t on the road I know have something to hold me over.  Matthew Good Live at Massey Hall is the methadone for my live concert habit.

All photos by Jeffery Simpson.

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.

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.

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.

At least unless the team has gone far more loopy than we all thought.

Unless they’re all on wacky pills at GM Place, and really it’s too early in the reason to call that one, the Canucks simply recognized as a team leader. He’ll be in charge of being the team’s dressing room leader, be responsible to organizing team social events and act as the representative between the team and the community.

So he’ll be doing fun runs and posing for pictures with babies.

He’ll also be the first one handed the Stanley Cup when his team wins it. That team won’t be the Canucks of course, but who knows where he’ll end up after this.

Vancouver has of course a lot of experience with an un-official Captain, since let’s face it the team never did the right thing to honour Trevor Linden with the ‘C’ after his return despite the fact that from most accounts he was the on and off ice leader during the end of last season.

But enough about the past. It’s time to be optimistic, and because of this decision I’m in a mood to upgrade my season prediction from missing the playoffs to almost making the playoffs. Now that’s what you call leadership.

Update: The CBC say everything I do with half the words and a third the venom [cbc].

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.”

And thus was born the link baiting list of Vancouver Top 20 most influential bloggers. A list that’s been run in other cities, and finally makes it up to Vancouver. Now the one thing that they’ve improved over previous cities is that NowPublic at least now gives outgoing links to the winners’ blogs whereas before the links just redirected to other pages on NowPublic and the bloggers were asked to sign in and edit their own NowPublic profile and thus by simply having a NowPublic account were counted as NowPublic contributors. In the Vancouver list they actually figured out the internet enough to realize that if you’re writing about someone you should probably link to them.

Which you might note is not what I’m doing, but that’s only because it’s tacky to link to link bait.

Now of course this is the internet, and egos are involved so the list instantly set off, well how would I say it, complaining about rank [mg], noting that the list misspelled their name [bh] which I think if you’re going to make a big fuss about honouring people you’d better at the very least spell their name right and of course celebrating [rr].

That’s not to say that the people on this list don’t deserve recognition. Unlike LA’s list there’s no total tools on the Vancouver blog scene, and everyone on this list that I’ve ever met and dealt with has always proven to be very kind and giving of their time. Two of them Rebecca Bollwitt [m604] and Travis Smith [hs] were founding bloggers here at Metroblogging Vancouver and both Darren Barefoot [db] and Alfred Hermida [rr] have been kind enough to speak with me for interviews in my freelance work.

The problem with the list is that it’s just a call for incoming links. As Sean Bonner, Metroblogging co-founder and member of LA’s list pointed out [mbla]:

There’s no question that a good number of people on that list have notable online presence but that’s very different than being influential. Having a few thousand people follow you on twitter because occasionally you say something amusing, or having a bunch of people listing you as a contact on flickr because you post interesting photos does not make you influential. These folks all do things online a lot, but does that mean they know what they are talking about? I’m on that list and that’s a total sham. Anyone who reads what I have to say knows I’m full of shit most of the time, so I’m certainly not influential. I’m not knocking anyone else on the list, they all have their own audience for sure, but if you look there’s not a lot of overlap in which audiences those are which might suggest NowPublic was trying to cast a wide net as it’s pretty safe to assume most of these folks might mention this “award” and link back to NowPublic, which again is obviously the point in the first place.

Now of course it’s easier for Bonner to point out the flaws with the list than it is me because the easy criticism is that I’m simply jealous that I didn’t make the list. Right, because I wanted NowPublic to give my name and contact information to their marketing company like they did in previous cities [sb] for future spamming. Though one has to ask where Sean Orr is on the list, since love him or hate him people read Sean Orr and the Morning Brew [br].

Me? Heck five people read my website and as much ballot stuffing as my mother would have done apparently influencing her is not a big deal. Metroblogging Vancouver isn’t me, isn’t mine and isn’t something that I should get credit for because it’s a team effort. No one person runs this site, or writes its content so to have been put on any sort of list for my work here would have been missing the point entirely. That NowPublic boils Rebecca’s blogging accomplishments down to sometimes being a blogger here, with no mention of her own blog apart from the outgoing link, is a clear sign that a lot of thought went into the list.

But of course that’s the way these lists are. I’ve made enough of them with and without editorial groups helping to know that it’s all just a bunch of hooey. It’s a bunch of people sitting in a room throwing names out, all for their own reasons. At least The Georgia Straight’s Best of List was voted on by readers [gs] and thus the public. (Disclaimer: I freelance for The Georgia Straight).

Again this is not to insult anyone on this list. As far as I’ve ever experienced they’re all incredibly nice people, and influence far more than just their mothers.

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.

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.

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.