With the fate of General Motors in doubt [nyt] the Vancouver Canucks’ home ice may soon be needing a new sponsor, or at least a new name.  Here are a few ideas for what we may be calling GM Place next season.

1. Money Mart Place: In this economy Money Mart might be the only business with cash to spare. 
2. Fat City Arena: See this eariler Vancouver Five for explanation [mbv].
3. Rogers Place: There was a well fairly decent rumour that Rogers tried to buy the naming rights to BC Place, but the city would not let them change the roof’s colour to Rogers’ red.  But hey they need to do something with all that iPhone money.
4. Happy Planet Juice Centre: I think the founder of that company might have some pull with city council [wp].  Plus wouldn’t that just please the pants off the rest of Canada who see us all as hippies anyway?
5. Trevor Linden Memorial Rink: In the future when Trevor Linden signle handedly fixes the economy before leading the negotiations that see our alien invaders surrender, we’ll be quite happy to name the Canucks’ home ice after him.

With yet another day of fresh snow covering Vancouver’s streets Vancouver Metblogs brings you a handy guide to stop fighting the snow and give into its seductive white squishy-self. Below are five practical ways to get through this most white of Christmases.

1. Pretend that you’re paying an even more inflated price for rent and are actually up in your suite in Whistler.  Hell pretend it’s 2010 and you’re going to watch Americans and Russians battle it out to see who can ski down a mountain fast enough.  People from all around the world are going to pay through the nose to experience this kind of winter, and you’re getting it for free so stop being ungrateful.
2. Fly to Florida for the next month.  I mean as much as they like to pass themselves off as winter warriors all of Quebec is closed until March since they’ve all fled down south.
3. Stuff a space heater down your pants now that you finally have a non-sexual excuse.
4. Boxing Day it’s the Canucks versus the Oilers at GM Place.  I’m not sure who I’m cheering for yet, but it’s a last chance to see the Canucks before the team is either elevated or Borked by the arrival of Sundin.
5. Stay in and read Metroblogging Vancouver.  Oh who am I kidding, stay in and drink.

Let’s face it, most teams after missing the playoffs would spend the off-season making the team stronger, and building on the strengths that they did have.  Replace the GM?  Sure.  Replace the GM with your star player’s agent?  Okay, sure, kind of icky and incestuous but okay.  Make your star’s agent the GM and then lose the star to free agency?  That’s fucking top notch dinkwallet behaviour.

So here it is, five reasons why 2008-2009 will be a year to forget for the Vancouver Canucks.

1. No Trevor Linden: he may not have been the on-ice force that the Canucks needed these last few years but he was the sort of leader who could help shape the attitude of a team, and bring in the wins.  His retirement is an unquantifiable blow to the team.
2. Mike Gillis:  Let’s face it even if bringing in Mats Sundin would have been a good move, making the move so public was only going to lead to heartache.  Not talking about players until they’re actually signed would be a good first move.  Talking about how awesome you are is generally a good way to look like a putz.  Look at the Canucks official news site and you’ll see that nearly half the stories are about who the team would like to have signed signed [vc].  It’s even more pathetic than my list of women I’d like to have slept with.  (Though with names like Anne Hathaway & Rachael Leigh Cook on the list, who’d call that pathetic?)
3. Roberto Luongo only plays one position: Cloning isn’t legal and Luongo isn’t going to score us goals.  He’s our best goalie, possibly ever, but let’s face it we need an offense.  Of course suggestions that we trade him for a goal scorer are insane, I mean shit doesn’t anyone remember the history of the last five years?  Goalies can win games too, and you need one in the playoffs.
4. Everyone else in the West is actually good: If you’re going to making lots of mistakes, it’s always good to be in a division where everyone else are making mistakes.  The West is too focused and too difficult for the Canucks to continue to be run like a Punch and Judy show. 
5. We drafted twins: Seriously identical Swedish twins and after years of having them we still haven’t come up with any crazy twin-centric plays.  Any other team would be having them change jerseys, call each other by different names and secrelty switching one of them with the goalie to build some kind of Might Ducks style play.  Maybe we should have hired Emilio Estevez for our GM.

Apple 3G iPhone in Hong Kong, originally uploaded by Lawrence Wii.

Five reasons to fear the coming of the iPhone 3G:

1. Your iPhone is totally going to be lame now, loser.
2. Watching There Will Be Blood and driving may actually prove to be more dangerous than cell phone talking and driving.
3. Ted Rogers will soon have enough money to finish his doomsday device which he is calling, as per his usual naming methodology, Rogers Destrocto Beam.
4. Canada gets the “Jesus Phone” that means America now gets Jesus. The end times are near.
5. While trying to play the new Maroon 5 song you accidentally call your mother on her birthday. A three hour conversation filled with guilt and accusations results, teaching you never to try to listen to Maroon 5 again.
6. Bonus: You actually listen to Maroon 5.

There’s a few things that I’m tired of hearing about around town. Be warned these five things are on notice.

5) The Hollow Tree in Stanley Park [gm]:  It’s a tree, it was killed by God.  That’s the way nature works.  If it was torn down to put up a Starbucks, yeah then we can have some sort of fit about that.  It’s not a metaphor, it’s a damn tree.  Get over it.

4) The dollar: I get it, it’s crazy that our dollar is so strong against the American one.  Yet it’s been like that for months now.  You can also add any story about how Product X is so much cheaper in the US now because of the dollars’ values.  We all get it.  It’s boring now.

3) The Canucks: Let’s just ignore the losers and hopefully they’ll all return to Sweden and never come back.  Instead let’s talk about (soon-to-be) former Canuck Trevor Linden [bb] whose far more interesting.  Though keep it to a minimum, he’s getting pretty close to going on the list to.  Remember he’s a hockey player, he only walks on frozen water.  For a team that actually wins something try the Whitecaps [wcfc].

2) How the Olympics are destroying everything: People were homeless before we won the Olympics and they’d still be homeless afterwards.  Let’s be honest we as a society don’t give a shit about the problem of the homeless, and if 2010 was not going to be in Vancouver all the money spent on the Olympics would not instead have been used to feed and clothe those who need it.  The money probably would have been spent on magic beans, ferries that we’ll never use or a space program.  The Olympics make an easy target because it’s billions spent on things like watching men in superhero costumes slide down a frozen tube in a piece of fiberglass, but they’re nowhere near the root cause of the problem.  Show some intelligence and try to find that root instead of just raging against the wrong machine.

1) How the Olympics are really going to revitalize the city:  Right because the thing holding back Richmond from becoming a world class suburb was the fact that it didn’t have a giant speed skating rink. 

With city council about to spend half a million dollars on new software that will cut down on gang violence and after hours bar incidents [cbc].  While software might stop people being drunk assholes, World of Warcraft stopped me from having a social life for about six months, it’s hardly going to cut down on gang activity at places that aren’t clubs or bars where most of the shootings have occurred.

Here are five other things we could be spending our money on:

5. Turning Robson Street into a Pedestrian Mall ::The Fremont Street Experience is one of the major tourist draws in Las Vegas [wp].  What would be better for the Olympic tourists than being able to experience the same thing on Robson Street?  Granted it would cost more than half a million, but boy would the tourists love it. 

4. Robots, Zombies, Pirates, Ninjas, and Sad Feist ::What just randomly using those words isn’t funny as of itself?  Dammit.  Ah well, at least our SEO went up like 2000%.

3. Destroy Beyond Robson :: Let’s face it Beyond Robson [br] is not only unpatriotic they’re probably all some sort of communists.  I’d say they’re zombies or pirates on top of that, but I’ve already been to that comedy well once today.  Either way I’m sure City Council would be far happier if they bought BR and put someone really really really excited about Vancouver in charge.  Someone uncritical who doesn’t really notice the homeless issue.  Someone like Kent Hurl [tv]. 

2. Buy the Cancuks a goal scorer :: Years, and years go by and we always are short a goal scorer once we get in the playoffs.  Why they figured it would be different this year I have no idea, unless the plan was simply not making the playoffs in which case we’re on track.

1. Inter-dimensional portal technology ::I was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and there’s an episode at the start of the third season where she runs away from home and lives in LA where an evil demon dimension is grabbing homeless and directionless youth off the streets of LA and using them as slave labour in their demon dimension.  I would bet good money that Sam Sullivan is trying to find an evil Wiccan right now to start teleporting the Downtown East Side residents to said dimension.  Sound far fetched?  Well now explain how Mayor Wilkins Sullivan got elected again [wp]?

Well that ended up being far more super nerdy than I had hoped.

With the Strait of Georgia could be possibly being renamed Salish Sea [cbc] here’s a few more possible name changes.

5) Downtown East Side renamed Kamloops: in the rest of the province the main method of dealing with the homeless is to “encourage” them to move along to Vancouver.  Instead of trying to solve the problem the city could just make it another town’s problem.  Passing the buck will surely solve the problem.

4) Mayor Sam Sullivan renamed Former Mayor Sam Sullivan: Mandatory Sullivan bashing, check!

3) Vancouver renamed Fat City: An idea stolen from Hunter S. Thompson’s attempt to have Aspen renamed the same thing to scare off investors.  Perhaps with the world a bit more vulgar than it was in Thompson’s day we could substitute Fat for a four letter curse word.  Ideally this would leave the beautiful Vancouver to the people who live here, and not to property speculators who drive up housing costs without actually living here.

2) Canucks renamed to Winnipeg Jets: Let’s face it they lose and we turn on them like a drunk on an empty bottle of beer, always expecting more.  Winnipeg would appreciate the team, and like the Grizzlies we’d learn how to live without them.  Plus maybe we as a city are just cursed.

1) Cambie Street renamed to Kamloops: I was being sarcastic when I said that if we ignore the DTES homeless problem it would just go away.  The problem of Cambie Street merchants being inconvienced by the construction along the busy road is a problem that we can ignore and it will go away.   Eventually all the businesses there will be closed, which is great because maybe then we can build some new condos.  As you know housing demand in Fat City is high.

The CBC [cbc] informed me that the city was celebrating the completion of the Canada Line tunnel today, bringing the most patriotic Skytrain line that much closer to completion.  Here’s five more things that we’re celebrating today.  Please insert sarcastic quotes where appropriate.

5)The Canucks loss to the Blackhawks [cbc]: Face it we’re not a city that’s comfortable with a winning NHL team, and so these overtime losses are making us feel safe.  When the team’s winning we start getting into debates with each other on the Skytrain and in line at the movies about ontology.  Now we no longer have to worry about Anselm and his arguments.

4)The Olympics are coming: Why did we have a two year pre-Olympic celebration and not a two year minus one month pre-Olympic celebration?  Is it just me or do the rest of you feel your very neutrons vibrating with eager anticipation?  If I get much more excited I might dissipate.

3)More Pickton [vs]: I have to pick the first season up on DVD before watching next year’s.

2) Conrad Black is going to jail [gs]: Happy days.  No sarcastic quotation marks needed here.

1) The Canucks again [exn]: They might not be able to beat an NHL team, but boy they can wipe the floor with the Hives.

Northern Voice 2008

Originally uploaded by Retrocactus.

Northern Voice [nv] is up and going and all of Vancouver’s coolest bloggers are there. Are you? No neither am I, but I suppose that’s what we get for not registering, paying money or attempting to attend. So with all due respect to the confernece, which we’ve been pimping for awhile now, here are five excuse for why you weren’t at Northern Voice. I’ll be using all five.

5) You don’t have one of those New Media Web 2.0 Social Media Twitter Media Facebook Techcouver Media jobs: I mean who can afford to take a three day weekend in this economy? I’ll tell you who, rich people. Or people who had better career councilors than me. Mine suggested the army, or seal clubbing. I end up disapointing everyone and ending up in the amoral world of sales.

4) This internet thing is just a fad: I didn’t go to a conference on Tickle Me Elmo when that’s all that people were talking about. I’m sure we’re all going to get over this and go onto the next new thing, which presumably will be fuzzy and smell like peaches.

3) Your Macbook Air hasn’t arrived: Some one is going to be there with their eeePC and your Air is still in the clutches of FedEx. If you had shown up with your lame old G4 Powerbook everyone would call you a n00b or something. It’d be almost as bad as that time you accidently called Councilor Troi, Doctor Crusher at the Star Trek convention.

2) You’re bed ridden: Scurvey is a good excuse for missing anything. As is SARS or Bird Flu. Don’t worry you can follow it from bed [m604].

1) You’ve got a bug up your nose like I have [mbv]: I’ll admit it I get annoyed when people talk like some how bloggers are going to replace mainstream media. Sure I’ll agree that the news is increasingly going to move online, but time and time again it seems proven that you can’t just Wiki and crowd source everything. Sometimes you actually need to pay trained people to do work and write stories. Otherwise whose going to put the stories on CBC.ca that NowPublic links to?

With the Jim Pattison Group buying up Guinness World Records [ts] one has to wonder why Pattison wants to add that to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not franchise to his list of holdings. Does he just want to corner the market on freaks? Here are five possible reasons for his purchase.

5) The man with six foot long fingernails willing to work shifts less than four hours [mbv].

4) Jimmy wants to get his own score at Donkey Kong into the Guinness Book of World Records [wp] but can’t get past 673 points.

3) Pattison has a thing for Elaine Davidson the world’s most pierced woman [gbwr].

2) There is a theory that if one were to drink the blood of the world’s oldest man it would grant immortality. Guinness has that man’s home address.

1) It’s all part of the coverup of the assasination of Guinness Book of World Records founder Ross McWhirter [wp], the world thinks it’s was the Irish Republican Army but the truth will be buried along with Jim Pattison.