That ice hockey stuff was meant to be in the Salon that was turned into a Saloon last night late.

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/06/08/australias-war-is-over-ii/

Just a thought. Coached a good baseball team at Indooroopilly SHS…we won the pennant years ago. Ya gotta invest.

I remember the Canada/Russia series of 72 like it was yesterday:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YzHG88B8Qo

So many French Canadians..w/ the American & other beaut Canadian players…takin’ on the Russkies…who were amazing.

When Paul Henderson took that pass off Phil Esposito & shoved it behind Tretiak…magic…no SETUP…here’s the Wiki view:

The Series was played at a time when only amateurs were allowed to play in the Olympic Games. The Soviet players, who had Olympic experience, were amateurs by strict definition only, as they were elite players playing hockey full-time in their native country. Some were given other titular professions (e.g. army soldiers playing full-time for the Central Red Army hockey team) to maintain amateur status for Olympic eligibility. Team Canada featured the country’s best professional NHLers, who by virtue of this status were ineligible for Olympic competition. For this reason, Canada had ceased competing in the IIHF World Championships and Winter Olympics after 1969.

The eight-game series consisted of four games in Canada, held in Montreal (Montreal Forum), Toronto (Maple Leaf Gardens), Winnipeg (Winnipeg Arena) and Vancouver (Pacific Coliseum) and four games in the Soviet Union, all of them held in Moscow at the (Luzhniki Ice Palace). The series was played at the height of the Cold War, and intense feelings of nationalism were aroused by the contest in both Canada and the Soviet Union. The series was of particular interest to Canadian residents due to the popular perception that Canada was the “birthplace of hockey,”.

The games showcased many great Russian players previously unknown in North America, such as Valery Kharlamov, Alexander Yakushev and Vladislav Tretiak against the stiffest competition they had ever faced, and they revealed the leadership of prolific scorer Phil Esposito and the quieter contributions of solid NHL veterans like Paul Henderson and Gary Bergman.

Canada’s Bobby Orr, the most dominant NHL player at the time, was named to the team but did not play because of a knee injury. Bobby Hull, another dominant player, was selected for the team by coach Harry Sinden, but was ruled ineligible to play because of his defection from the NHL to the rival World Hockey Association. Alan Eagleson, a player agent and the future head of the National Hockey League Players Association, was involved in forming the Canadian team. He was also considered to be responsible for the decision to exclude Hull and other WHA stars.

TV and radio coverage Hockey Canada produced telecasts in both English and French for Canadian audiences, sponsored by Labatt Breweries, with the cooperation of both CTV and CBC. The CTV television network won a bid to carry the English broadcasts, but their network only served Canada’s major markets. Therefore, all CTV stations carried the telecasts, and areas that did not have a CTV affiliate could view the game on their local CBC station.

For the four games in Canada, Hockey Canada produced a single video feed that was used for both English and French telecasts, as well as for Soviet television. For the four games in Moscow, Soviet state television produced the video feed that was used in Canada, as well.

On the radio, Bob Cole provided the English language play-by-play of the series.

Game 8
Heading into Game Eight, each team had three wins and three losses, with one tie. Only a win in Game Eight would deliver victory in the series. In Canada, the entire country just about shut down for the game on September 28, with many watching it at work or school.

(I had bloody chicken pox…on the 21st floor in those days…so forced to watch by myself…Henderson lived a few blocks from me…so eventually got his autograph…& Jacques Plante’s at a dinner thanx to Dad).

Team Canada took a number of questionable early penalties (which wasn’t surprising to Canadians, as they were the same referees who were accused of being biased in Game 6.) The game was delayed after a marginal call against Jean-Paul Parise, and emotions boiled over. Parise nearly swung his stick at the referee and got a match penalty. Sinden threw a chair on the ice. Despite the penalties, the score was 2-2 after the first period, but the Soviets pulled ahead 5-3 after two. Things looked grim for Team Canada. During the second intermission, goalie Ken Dryden was reported to have thought, “If we lose this one, I’ll be the most hated man in Canada.”

(My buddy & I went to a Montreal VS. Toronto game not long after & cheered goalie Dryden for his effort…he gave us the thumbs up…we were ecstatic as young lads. Also got tickets to Chicago Black Hawks at Maple Leaf Gardens… & enjoyed cheerin’ them on w/ my outfit given to me way back in 1971 at Disney World by a Dad sick as a dog, i remember the haunted house blew me away…but Dad puked, poor bugger afrer we rode spinnin’ teacups & we left before thre fireworks & Tinkerbell.

…for a few years I used to play cards by spinnin’ them against the wall..to win team players…& listen to late night games in bed.)

But the Canadians came out roaring in the third period, and Phil Esposito and Yvan Cournoyer scored to even it up. After Cournoyer’s goal, Alan Eagleson (seated across the ice from the Team Canada bench) caused a ruckus in the crowd because the goal light had not come on. As he was being subdued by the Soviet police, the Canadian players headed over, Peter Mahovlich actually going over the boards to confront police with his stick. Eagleson was freed and the players escorted him across the ice to the bench. In anger, he shoved his fist to the Soviet crowd, as a few other Canadian supporters also gave the finger to the Soviets.

At that point, with the score tied 5-5 and the series tied 3-3-1, a member of the Soviet delegation unexpectedly informed Canada that, if the score and the series remained tied, the Soviets would claim victory on goal differential.

Then, with just 34 seconds remaining in the game, Paul Henderson, in perhaps the most famous moment in Canadian sports history, scored for Canada, jamming in a rebound behind Soviet goaltender Vladislav Tretiak. This play is widely known as “the goal heard around the world” and was captured on film by cameraman Frank Lennon. The picture became one of Canada’s most famous photographs. Canada held on for the win in the game and thus the series.

Canadians erupted in celebration; it was truly a memorable moment for the country. In the Soviet Union, many people thought that their country would have won if the Canadians had not fractured the ankle of their best player; however Canada was without Bobby Orr, arguably their best player so neither team had its greatest talent on the ice.

(Oh yea!)

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against oblivions.”

We’ve already <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Laughter_and_Forgetting”forgotten, obviously.

I notice the Socceroos fans were being charged up to 20 times the going rate for tickets to the game against Iraq in Dubai last night. Not everybody is as quick to forget as us, I suspect.

“It’s a matter of ethics”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_HjiZ8r7Ek&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LKCHKOM4_I&feature=related

just a DUMB…ANIMAL?

An ANIMAL?

Imagine if that ANIMAL

asked YOU

“look into your heart?”

N’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkJIcFMN_pc

Let’s start thinkin’ about the FUTURE.

It’s up to you DAD. Or such.

“If I were running Al Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and pray as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats,”

And this was Obama’s bitch-slap into touch:

“I think it’s flattering that one of George Bush’s allies on the other side of the world started attacking me the day after I announced [my candidacy],” Senator Obama said.

“I would also note that we have close to 140,000 troops in Iraq and my understanding is Mr Howard has deployed 1,400.

“So if he is…to fight the good fight in Iraq, I would suggest that he calls up another 20,000 Australians and sends them to Iraq, otherwise it’s just a bunch of empty rhetoric.”

This is how far we have come, folks.

Agree…wholeheartedly.

The White House on Thursday backed off its repeated claim that “the entire world” had the same pre-war intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorists.
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“Maybe ‘entire world’ was probably a little bit too strong or too broad,” spokeswoman Dana Perino said as a key Senate committee charged President George W. Bush knowingly made false claims about Iraq before the US-led invasion.

“But, clearly, other governments that looked at the same intelligence that we had came to the same conclusions. I don’t think that’s in dispute,” the spokeswoman said.

The question for Australians is whether all members of our government were allowed to see ALL the intelligence “that we had” or just carefully selected (and carefully created) bits.

Certainly Andrew Wilkie saw quite a bit of contrary intelligence, but his efforts to highlight it were suppressed. Why? On whose orders?

This abyssmal nonsense from the White House only confirms the urgent need for a full Royal Commission into Iraq.

And today Dana Perino says “That dissent amongst experts within the intelligence community at some level did not reach the president.”

But today’s new Senate Report shows that actually a whole lot of dissent DID reach the President and yet still “the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence.”

All Bush had to do was read the reports on his desk! More at Think Progress.

“If the war was so illegal, immoral and generally heinous, why is the Rudd Government still contributing?

In the end, Australians should be proud that our contribution to Iraq has made that long-suffering country just a little bit better and the lives of its people just a little bit brighter.”

As our new Prime Minister, it is incumbent upon Kevin Rudd to pursue the War Crimes of the previous government. If he fails to do so, then he become complicit too. The media must now hold Rudd to account, as they failed to hold Howard to account.

More here if anyone is still interested.

The funniest thing about Sheridan these days is how he keeps co-opting Rudd into his world view. I cannot work out whether he is trying to suck up to the new Man, or gently cajole him down the Murdoch-prescribed path to Success(TM).

Sheridan spinning like a top…eh Gandhi? It just happens that the Labour party who took the British to war are way behind in the polls partially because some of the main war-mongers are still there. Including the fella who helped finance it. Bit of a super-hero these days…but is it all fiction? It would be interesting to see how Labor did w/ a new leader who takes a similar position to Obama on the Iraq invasion & talks tough diplomacy.