ColbyCosh.com

Jeff Finger gets $14 million from the Leafs and Tart Cider is boarded up? No justice.

[NOTE: In all fairness, I am sort of willing to believe that a guy who's a healthy scratch in the West playoffs will end up as a second-pairing D in the East...]

I had a bonus column in Wednesday morning's Post about the U.S. Supreme Court's D.C. v. Heller decision. I'll be in my usual slot Friday with my take on Henry Morgentaler and the Order of Canada.

Jules Tygiel, the historian who attained immortality with 1983's Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy, died of cancer this past week at the age of 59. (Tygiel is discussed in my lumbering 2007 National Post feature on Robinson.) (þ: BJOL)

Good to see Sir Charles Barkley staying on the straight and narrow at the World Series of Poker. "I can't gamble, so I gotta drink," he told the Associated Press on Day 1B of the WSOP main event. It does sorta look like he's sticking to that resolution, bless him. (Check out the look he gives John-Robert Bellande at :51.)

Questions I've been asking out loud recently in columns, editorials, and weblog entries:

Calgary Flames general manager Darryl Sutter rolls out the welcome mat for new Flame Todd Bertuzzi yesterday:

Darryl Sutter scoffs at the notion that Todd Bertuzzi is not welcome in Calgary. One isolated incident -- his sucker-punch of Steve Moore in March, 2004 -- should not forever brand Bertuzzi a bad boy.
"That's a long time ago," the Flames general manager said Monday after signing the burly winger to a one-year deal worth US$1.95-million. "I had a traffic ticket three years ago. I hope there's three or four fans who can forget that I went through a red light."

I am hoping he didn't mean he ran a red light and broke somebody's neck. Is the Calgary hockey media covering for the boss on something?

(More 'Tooz talk available in this Battle of Alberta thread.)

For a pair of type designers, it must have required a Copernican leap of the imagination to ask the question "OK, is there anything good about Comic Sans?"

...actually, screw that, I kind of enjoy alarming people. Anyway, it appears that the brilliant Private Eye-influenced Fake Steve Jobs website is nearing the end of its run. Seems like kind of an odd decision, doesn't it? I mean, in a negligible amount of time, it rocketed Forbes tech writer Dan Lyons from obscurity to international fame, moving from satirical strength to satirical strength. Why dismantle the platform now?

Me, I keep thinking that it would certainly make it awkward for Lyons to continue if he had confidential information that pancreatic cancer survivor* Jobs had grown ill again and was facing a scary prognosis. But then, I don't have AAPL in my portfolio, and anyway it's not as though it's universally recognized as the most CEO-dependent equity on the planet, right?

*(three words you don't see right in a row like that very often)

It is wrong that I actually kind of like dark-horse HNIC theme candidate "Hockey Scores"?

(þ: CiO)

Until today I had been surprised that no one rose to the occasion more effectively—Jerry Seinfeld's piece in the NYT, for example, felt phoned-in. But Louis C.K.'s tribute is convincing and moving, the more so because it comes from a legit road warrior who has kept his live act at an extremely high level for many years.

See here for terms (and other nominees).

Worst well-regarded film: Psycho
Everybody talks about the shower scene; no one ever talks about the Encyclopedia Britannica Educational Filmstrips Inc. bit at the end where the psychiatrist spends about ten minutes explaining What We've Just Witnessed. Bears a superficial resemblance to real case histories of serial killers, but is in thrall to psychiatric notions since consigned to history's scrap heap. Ruined Janet Leigh's acting career, and inaugurated Hitchcock's rapid descent into torture pornography. What's up with the detour in the middle with Martin Balsam's character?

Most overhyped film: Citizen Kane
The pioneering work of the "tidy psychological explanations" school of filmmaking. A piece of nose-thumbing playground satire that opened technical doors someone else would have gotten around to soon enough.

Worst film to win a Best Picture Oscar: Kramer vs. Kramer
Contains, and exemplifies, the dirty little secret of the Baby Boomers: they despise and resent their own children because they believe history should have ground to a halt with them still at the centre of the universe.

Most disappointing film: Barton Fink
What's next in this mathematical series: Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing...? You say it's a Dada horror/comedy about Clifford Odets? C'mon, you have to be shittin' me. (Would be less disappointing now, simply because we've since learned that the Coen Brothers have to work this stuff out of their conjoined systems every so often and if we're patient they'll eventually deliver with a Fargo.)

Worst movie: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
Worst movie with good direction: Aronofsky's π (haven't seen The Fountain but it sounds like it would take this cake pretty easily)
Biggest unknown treasure: Quick Change (1990)

(þ: BoA)

Turns out the Big C did play at least some role in the demise of Fake Steve Jobs (but don't lose hope entirely):

NEXT PAGE: The program that [Alan] Moore says is, ''possibly the most stunning piece of television, full-stop." Hurrrrr, I wonder which Baltimore-based police-procedural-cum-Russian-novel that's going to be.

So Wisconsinite indie humorist/football writer Jeff Johnson finally melted down like a wheel of gruyère and gave his definitive statement on the whole Favre mess, and I think it's fairly convincing. I'll probably read something else tomorrow that changes my mind again, but maybe we all do need to be encouraged to stop assigning so much weight to "Doesn't Favre deserve more respect?", "Hasn't Aaron Rodgers waited long enough?", "Which guy do the young players like more?", "Isn't it about time we had a QB whose name is spelled like it sounds?", and other matters having little to do with the concept of a team winning football games.

Jul. 10: Quebec finally permits the sale of artificially coloured margarine.

Jul. 17: Shouldn't we have known something was wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?

Jul. 18: Why Paul McCartney in Quebec wasn't just a good idea, but a great one.

Jul. 22: Reflecting on the final conclusion of the Siskel & Ebert TV heritage.

Jul. 25: The hidden connection between Janet Jackson's right boob and George Carlin's seven dirty words.

Jul. 29: The focus is on Richard Branson's slick new superplane, but the road to space tourism may lie elsewhere.

Jul. 30: A joint editorial-board effort, with a medium-heavy contribution from me, on whether girls and boys are truly interchangeable when it comes to performance on standardized math tests.

Jul. 31: A note on Greenland and global warming.

The new guy was terrific in American Beauty, but does he know anything about hockey? Definitely a bold hire.