A FAN’S NOTES

Men’s Olympic Hockey

Is there any other Winter Games sport? Hockey, provided it’s played well, is the most exciting sport on Earth. Non-stop action, skill and violence at high speeds in a confined space. “Quicksilver ballet” is the slickest and most glib descriptor I’ve ever read about the game in any sportswriting; memory fails – I cannot cite its coiner. “Firewagon hockey” was the definitive hyperbolic phrase describing the style of “the Flying Frenchmen” – the Montreal Canadiens in those black and white radio days before I was born (although I can’t imagine “Rocket” Richard keeping up to Conner McDavid). Canada’s preliminary cruise through an admittedly weak 2026 Group A in Milano has been something akin to both to behold. There are words: elan, panache.

The New York City-based National Hockey League always chirps about growing what Canadian journalist Peter Gzowski called The Game of Our Lives. Because its involvement in marquee international events is intermittent, “growing the game” is marketing code for two strategies. In the United States the NHL is the perennial fourth league, possibly the fifth behind souped-up cars turning left, or NASCAR. While the US remains the league’s largest market, the 1980 Lake Placid “Miracle on Ice” probably did more to grow the sport’s audience (and participation) south of 49 than anything the NHL has ever done unwittingly or not. And peddling expensive official fan gear can be lucrative.

The debate whether professionals should be permitted to participate in an Olympiad is dead. When the NHL elects to participate in the Winter Games it encounters a paradox. Its macro product shines on the global stage while casting an awfully dark shadow over its micro North American product. When Canada plays Czechia or Slovakia plays Sweden in a February tournament, fans see what hockey can and should be. They will not see the same sport when Columbus plays Utah on an October Tuesday night even though ticket prices are comparable. A bloated league with an endless and meaningless regular season inadvertently lays bare its woeful shortcomings to its home audience.

It's important to differentiate a love for the game from a love for the NHL. The world’s best league does not embody the sport’s ideal. It has diluted the game. I believe most NHL fans are like me. They love one franchise, despise another and don’t care about the other 30. The last time I was in New York City, the Nashville Predators were visiting. I thought, “It might be fun to see a game in Madison Square Gardens and the Rangers have good uniforms.” And then I thought, “Why bother?” In Las Vegas the following winter I looked into Golden Knights tickets. The St. Louis Blues were in town. I thought, “St. Louis Blues: possibly the best marriage of a city and nickname in all of sports; still, why bother?” Twice a few hundred $US to the good. Admittedly, had one or both of those games included Montreal, I’m there; so there for the belt notch and the war story – I think.

The Milano quarterfinals get underway this morning. Hockey at this level is like an advertising shill. It doesn’t come around often. And accept no substitutes.            

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is still out there languishing in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still print. Collect the set while this exclusive offer still lasts! Accept no substitutes!

HUMAN WRECKAGE

The Second Disc Defense

A snippet of Crooked 9 domestic dialogue from November, 2025:

“Do you mind if we swing by Blackbyrd while we’re out doing errands today? You can wait in the car or circle the block. I’ll just run in.”

“What did you order?”

“Black and Blue; Stones album from ’76; I was still in high school, grade 10. A Stones release was big news then, big, important stuff.”

“Don’t we have it already?”

Oh, Ann. Oh, poor, poor Ann. Of course we do. We have the original vinyl pressing from 1976. And we have a digitized edition from the early 90s when Rolling Stones Records released the group’s entire post-London/Decca catalogue on CD under a new distribution deal with CBS. To my credit, I did not buy the Japanese SACD version I found at Velvet Records, a funky shop in Amsterdam, in the summer of ’24. Furthermore, time, the great revisionist (and Dirty Work 10 years later), has been kind to Black and Blue.

I said, “Yes.” And because there’s always a “but” I added: “It’s the second disc that interests me. There’s a couple of outtakes, cuts that didn’t make the album. They were auditioning guitarists at the time because Mick Taylor had just quit and so there’s a few studio jams with Jeff Beck and whoever.”

Blackbyrd Myoozik (the spelling of which irks me no end) is on Edmonton’s south side, convenient to us. There are other shops in town, but not many and not walkable except for Curmudgeon Records and Posters, farther up Whyte Avenue across the CPR railroad tracks, just past the A&W beside the European appliance store. When I’m in Blackbyrd I feel as if I’m in a community outreach centre, not a commercial establishment. I know two of its clerks, Mustafa and Nolan, well enough to pass the time of day with without out them squinting at their watches with gritty, heavy eyelids.

March, 2025: I wandered into Blackbyrd. Nolan asked me how I was enjoying the Nils Lofgren album. I said, “How did you know?” I hadn’t bought it. “Your neighbour (Ted, the American refugee) was in looking for a birthday present for you.” Nolan went on, “My recommendation; I thought you’d like it.”

Well, “Gee!” on so many levels. And Blackbyrd stocks Muster Point Project vinyl too.

The last week of January, 2026: Ann wondered over The Globe and Mail and between sips of coffee if I’d like to go to Blackbyrd later on, before noon. I said, “Hell, yes! Get out of my head.” Ann lives up there, but never trashes the place. And I understood her motivation for departing Crooked 9 property. Even as the sky blues and the days lengthen, January in Edmonton is an oppressive, cabin feverish commencement of a new year. Our weather apps suggested a sunny, decent day. There’s a Winners outlet in the old Chapters bookstore space, a half block from Blackbyrd. And we have a third grandchild on the way. We would split up on Whyte; divide and conquer – we’d both have at least an hour in our preferred stores.

The last time I was free to roam the racks of Blackbyrd I spent a couple of hundred dollars on music ranging from a Mose Allison compilation to a Sex Pistols live album – three complete poorly recorded shows from their disastrous and ultimately fatal American tour. I bought new pressings of Coney Island Baby and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle. My brother-in-law Al haunts me in Blackbyrd. He gave me his double of Pat Garret and Billy the Kid a few years ago: “It was on sale and I forgot I had it.” I was grateful; about the only Dylan album we didn’t have. When I saw him again a year later (we live in different provinces), he handed me another sealed copy. I said, “Don’t tell me you bought it a third time?” He answered my question with a panicky 1000-yard stare.

Music is a passion project; the artists who set me aflame in my late teens and twenties continue to reverberate. I’m self-aware of petrification; I am a fossil. But, man, the good old stuff still matters to me. It has never gone the way of childish things. And what I cannot discard in its various formats chews up valuable interior real estate. Accessible storage required provided it's relatively attractive. And I know my runway’s shrinking and after my dark crash, my survivors will likely view the record collection as debris for disposal. Fair enough.

Tuesday night I handed Ted a CD of Who Are You. “Double?” 

I said, “Sort of.” More like a triple. I continued, “If, God forbid, I end up living alone in a seniors’ assisted residence, I’ll have to cull the herd. There’ll be no space for everything. On the other hand, I’ll be able to play anything I like as loud as I like; everybody else will be deaf.”

Ted said, “I’m not sure, Geoff. Hearing aids have come a long way.”

Eh? Well. Gee. I suppose they have.

On this particular day in Blackbyrd, Nolan and I chatted about Springsteen’s folky “Streets of Minneapolis”, Cheap Trick, the Guess Who and the Doobie Brothers. I browsed the jazz, blues, Americana, punk and reggae sections, both vinyl and CD. The new Lucinda Williams album wasn’t in yet. I contemplated the box sets. A Kinks album I don’t have briefly intrigued me. I fondled a Joy Division CD, but felt no nostalgia toward the suicidal tendencies of my university days. Nothing sang to me even just to have for the sake of having it forever in its cellophane for indifferent future generations.

Blackbyrd is like Audreys Books, a local and specialized retail business that deserves to thrive in these times of Amazon Prime. My hour was winding down. Time was getting tight; I had to buy something, but not anything. Just when the rock racks’ alphabet was about to dumb down into emojis I stumbled across last year’s remastered reissue of Who Are You; the quartet’s final album with doomed drummer Keith Moon and the Who as a complete, fractious band and not a survivors’ brand. I was 18 when it was originally released (1978) and although I prefer its predecessor Who by Numbers (1975), my brand-new red vinyl copy was something of a landmark because rock’s jaded aristocracy wasn’t overly prolific back then; years between albums and subsequent supporting tours.

This 2025 Who Are You was no DELUXE EDITION like my Live at Leeds, but enhanced nonetheless. The bonus disc contained demos, outtakes and live rehearsals for a tour that never happened. Could be dross, could be gold for the aficionado and, boy, the expanded packaging sure looked fine.

I met up with Ann in Winners. She’d done very well on behalf of our grandchildren, energetically alive in the moment or en route. We stowed her packages in the back of the Honda. We smoked cigarettes by the car and proximate to a trash bin. Ann asked me, “Any luck? What did you get?” I told her. Ann said, “Hmm!”

This “Hmm!” is not the pensive “Hmm...” of thoughtful consideration. This “Hmm!” is criticism, condemnation delivered. Ann and I learned this haughty snort from my mother. We ape her. Mom was not a happy soul the last few years of her life. Sometimes mom’s “Hmm!” would be followed by an inarguable and emphatic “Bullshit!” Sometimes Ann and I spit that each other too. And then we laugh. It’s impossible to frown when we think about my mother.

We got into our car. Ann stared straight ahead over the top of the steering wheel. “Don’t we have that one already?”

I glanced out the passenger window and then glanced at her profile. Poor Ann. “But not with a second disc.”

Ann said, “Hmm...”

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is still out there languishing in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still print. Collect the set! Collect multiple editions!

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Ain’t that America

It ain’t no secret/No secret, my friend/You can get killed just for living/In your American skin – Bruce Springsteen, “American Skin (41 Shots)”

The threat of a seismic event is usually somewhat predictable. Pinpointing the actual, animating flashpoint is trickier. History, even as it unfurls, is ultimately a forensic pursuit. So many threads, so many factors leading to a decisive moment that could go either way: a footnoted riot or fully-fledged rebellion.

Minneapolis: man, it’s Mary Tyler Moore, Prince, the Replacements and maybe Twins baseball. In the spectrum between BlackLivesMatter and the White House, American citizens have been shot to death by men in uniform. Their crimes dystopian science fiction vague in that they were prevented with lethal force before the would-be “perps” could perpetrate.

Comedian Robin Williams once likened Canada to an apartment dweller living above a meth lab. Another country’s affairs aren’t generally my affair, but the United States of America is awfully close and awfully big. Not the elephant in the room so much as the elephant on the right side of the bed. Some of the spillover has been positive, from pop art and baseball to Muddy Waters. Much of it has been what gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson might describe as “bad craziness.” For instance, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith recently suggested she’d prefer Alberta’s independent judiciary to align more with her populist party’s values. This is a page torn from der Trumpenfuhrer’s playbook (which he hasn’t read). And there is a fifth column of support here in this province for joining the USA although American guns have yet to cascade over the border. 

Archaic documents are confounding talismans: revered as gospel while open to interpretation. The Second Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1791 reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Different versions of that sentence have been ratified by various state legislatures resulting in a tragi-comic cornucopia of capitalization and commas. Essentially, a collective right to defend, itself a human construct, has over time, been whittled down to an individual right. That individual right has in turn mushroomed into open-carry laws in many states and worse. Shoot first and God bless the National Rifle Association (NRA), the gold, or at least silver bullet, standard of political lobby groups.

An acquaintance of mine who taught in New York City’s education system told me he regularly conducted and participated in “shooter” drills. I said, “Like fire drills?” He said yes, adding he’d been shot at himself. The NRA’s and MAGA White House’s solution to this social scourge is arming teachers. A little training and a whole load of thoughts and prayers.

Operation Metro Surge is the name of the MAGA immigration clampdown in Minnesota. Its latest victim, Alex Pretti, shot to death in a one-sided scrum with ICE agents, was branded a “domestic terrorist” by the White House. Pretti worked as an ICU nurse in a veterans’ hospital. This calling suggests a streak of altruism, perhaps even a response to John F. Kennedy’s rhetoric: “…ask what you can do for your country.” Nobler than many. Pretti was also a licensed gun owner in an open-carry state. Now, it’s a bad idea to bring a knife to a gunfight. It’s probably an even worse idea to pack heat while protesting jittery, trigger-happy federal thugs. Especially as their previous trophy, Renee Good, shot in the head while attempting to turn away from an ICE dragnet, was dismissed by the Vice President of the United States (!) as a victim of an insidious progressive disease, some pathogen of liberal origin.

I paid for my university education with part-time wages from an A&P grocery store (yes, it was possible 45 years ago). The usual store detective whom shoplifters learned to recognize quickly enough had crapped out of the volunteer Canadian Forces. No police service would touch him. This fellow with his see-behind wraparound shades was Rambo on the soup and crackers aisle. Pure farce – except for the violence. I’d forgotten about that July trench coat guy until now. It strikes me that the US Department of Homeland Security is staffed with the skimmed cream of the dregs. Psychopathic failures welcome, please apply. The rancidness comes from the absolute top.

Pretti, like Good, an American citizen, exercised his constitutional rights to assemble and to bear arms. Nothing illegal. Yet the fault line between tragedy and comeuppance seems canyon-like, somehow worthy of absurd non-debate. J’accuse! Black and white and blame. This is the new American paradox, that and U.S. Immigration killing its own. Federal authorities will investigate themselves should they be so inclined, shamed into it. It’s no secret now what the apparatus of the State can and will do with impunity to anybody living down there in their American skin.

The Boss works weekends. A decent man speaks out. Rush released yesterday: "Streets of Minneapolis".     

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is still out there languishing in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still print. Collect the set while there's still time! Offer ends soon. Operators standing by.

EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

Mean Streets

Our American refugee neighbour Ted flew his family south of 49 for the Christmas holidays, however reluctantly. We look after one another’s properties. We are good friends. Ted has joined Stats Guy and me in the Tuesday Night Beer Club. It snowed on Christmas Eve. Heavily. I shovelled two properties, back and front and in between, and the stretch of public sidewalk linking our addresses, an explicit civic obligation. The snow came again on Boxing Day and kept falling for the next thirty-six hours. That amount is problematic to shift, disperse. Snowfalls like that never fail to remind me of Wallace Stegner’s brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Angle of Repose (1971). Should you be curious about life out west on both sides of the Medicine Line, read Stegner (I especially recommend Wolf Willow). Ted’s wife texted Ann: “We’ve been checking the weather in Edmonton. Has Geoff run out of swear words yet?”

Fuck, no, never. I can curse in both of Canada’s official languages. And I welcome the exercise, but maybe not the endless reps.

“Edmonton House,” a fur trading post, was established on the flats of the North Saskatchewan River in 1795. Winter came that year, just as it had for thousands of years prior to the colonial commercial initiative. And it kept coming. Winter came when Edmonton was incorporated as a city in 1904. When the province of Alberta was carved out of Prince Rupert’s Land and Edmonton designated its capital in 1905, winter came anyway. Winter has come ever since. It’s as reliable as sunset and sunrise, and full moons. And, curiously, it snows in wintertime.

Edmonton is a young city, even by Canadian standards. It came of age holding hands with the combustion engine. The automobile suggested Edmonton grow out instead of up because there’s a whole heck of a lot of space on the northern prairie. Its populace, now in excess of 1.1-million souls resides on some fantastically botched experimental alien ant farm – a big, very big, spread. Drivers need roads. Lots of them. And roads need to be like car tires in much warmer climes – all season, passable.

Collisions are inevitable. City council, often inert, sometimes inept and frequently nonsensically pro-active, works to rectify a century’s legacy of short-sighted and misguided urban planning. The addition of bike lanes and loosening of zoning and development regulations to encourage population density are inherently good things, attempts to undo unintended consequences dating from a different era. Contemporary retro-fitting and jury-rigging unzip their own duffle bags of gremlins. Bike lanes further constrain already congested arteries. Multifamily dwellings mean multiples of cars in neighbourhoods never designed to accommodate them.

And then it snows like a bastard. As it often will in Canada’s largest northernmost city. The snow abated 27 December, 2025. New Year’s Day brought freezing rain, icing on the cake. Saturday’s 17 January, 2026 Edmonton Journal front page headline: PLOW CREWS FACE THREATS. Verbal abuse of course and shovels as weapons. Alert readers will note the gap of 10 days between accumulation and clearing. Taxes imply a transaction; payers have a right to expect something in exchange for an arbitrary income skim. Efficient services, for instance. While local politics may be a springboard for those with greater ambitions, managing a city is an unglamorous grind. Banning plastic bags except for dog shit in dandelion dog parks is all very well, sort of a bullet point added to an incoherent mission statement affixed to the inaugural charter, but symbolic grandstanding doesn’t make snow evaporate.

Every Edmontonian knew the all-weather fat tire bicycle boys would be looked after first. Bike lane grooming requires a tiny, tank-tracked Bobcat only, not a giant Volvo grader. Those yellow machines, however late to the game, need space to do their jobs – hence parking bans (with generous notice). The gist of the Journal’s story was the breakdown of a tacit social contract. Citizens, already irate with the City’s service lag, were infuriated by its request for their cooperation to speed the tardy clean up. “Move your car, somewhere else, please.” “Fuck you.” Of course, in days like these, manners and civility are rare commodities. “Can we at least agree to talk about winter weather?” “Fuck you.”

The surface of the North Saskatchewan is always an intimidating and fearsome sight to behold once the spring melt commences. Its thick ice crust heaves into snaggled, jagged shards. Sometimes they’re as cloudy as an antique mirror. Sometimes they’re a shade of wedding dress white. Sometimes they’re grey and sometimes their sun dappled spectrum ranges from powder blue to royal purple. Ann and I never expected a view like this outside our front window.

Our street was graded Sunday, 18 January, 11 days after the storm. The snow on the road was alive during this period; it evolved. At first the ruts were like slot car tracks, the mound between them neatly scraped true by undercarriages. Wheeling in or out of them at the end of our driveway was a slippery and sliding hard turn requiring an unsafe rate of acceleration. Workaday traffic eventually compacted the snow into a slick highway. The sidewalks might as well have been ditches. The grader peeled the packed ice from the road as if it was citrus rind, right down to the asphalt. I admired the operator’s precision. I wondered too if operating heavy machinery while wearing earbuds might constitute some form of impairment before deciding the union man was everyman, just hearing what he wants to hear.

Windrows, those manmade banks of snow on the road and against the curb, are officially frowned upon in Edmonton because they narrow the width of a street and inhibit parking. Homeowners are exhorted to heave the snow from public sidewalks onto their front lawns instead of pushing it into the gutter. Springing ahead, the volume of meltwater is always a concern: better to top up the groundwater than overwhelm the sewer system.

The grader operator (sounds like a misheard lyric from Nick Lowe’s “Switchboard Susan”) left the Platonic ideal of windrows in his wake, left and right. Our street is now a one-and-a-half way and pedestrians sidle sideways like crabs – fitting in my case – the crabby part. He did his best at the foot of our driveway; I cleared the remaining chunks of ice by hand because our scooped snow shovel was inadequate for either pushing or cradling and heaving. I enjoyed the exercise.

A renowned winter city’s excuse for its inability to provide essential services was a tired cliché, the “perfect storm.” A perfect storm is the same thing as one of those “100-year events” that seem to occur on a weekly basis here, there and everywhere. I have it on good authority that Alvin Toffler, Faith Popcorn and Nicholas Negroponte were never once employed by the City of Edmonton. But you shouldn’t need a futurist to instruct the municipal council and the bureaucracy it oversees to plan ahead. With a little foresight, what cannot be prevented can at least be mitigated. Edmonton has no plans to collect or dispose of the shark’s teeth windrows. They, like January, the advent of a new year – all 41 days of it – are destined to overstay their welcome. 

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is still out there languishing in multiple formats. Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer. Of Course You Did is still print. Collect the set! "Alaska Highwayman" a song I co-wrote with the Muster Point Project is now on YouTube and available on Spotify and all those other streaming services.