Mark Likes Music

No, he's not. But Downey was here as a 17 year old at Geva , during the 1982-83 season in Alms for the Middle Class . I'm pretty sure he hasn't been here since.

Bluenoser is now in the Oxford dictionary , and in this CBC.ca article Bill Davey is quoted providing   the usual etymology:  One referred to the early Nova Scotian sailors who would be out in the cold weather and supposedly their nose would get cold and turn blue and the other one refers to the early settlers who would eat a  lot of blue potatoes and herring.  But could the the term have a more religious bent? I looked up  bluenose in a couple of American dictionaries; both the American Heritage Dictionary  and Webster's define it as a person who is particularly puritanical, who sticks to a strict moral code. Is it possible that we Nova Scotians were known less for our seafaring toughness than for our self-righteous prudery? Yet another Canadian nickname mystery.

With humor and a trademark East Coast drawl, Stompin' Tom Connors , like no other, mythologized Canadian life. He was born in New Brunswick and raised in Prince Edward Island; his first "hit" (as the Globe and Mail put it) was an ode to a PEI's most famous export: Years later, he wrote a song about a couple from Newfoundland that dumped a truck load of shit in the middle of Toronto (something any good Atlantic Canadian dreams of doing): There were so many more songs, over so many years; he covered everything from a night out in northern Ontario  to KD Lang . A farewell note from Stompin' Tom is on the homepage of his website .

If Gary Webb were writing this post , that's the title he'd come up with. But he's not, so I'll just say that this awesome song is what the Vancouver Canucks are using to start their games :   Fans of the team picked the song by online poll. For some horrible reason Nickelback was in the mix: I think comparing these two songs really tells you everything about why Nickelback sucks.

It's hard to get just how famous Van Cliburn was back in the years after he won the first Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow (he got a ticker-tape parade in Manhattan, and his first album went platinum)--and what it meant to go into the heart of Soviet territory and show them how to play a signature work by their own legendary composer. His win was Paul Henderson's goal in the 1972 Summit Series, Rocky's pounding of Drago, Reagan's "tear down this wall." I wrote about his performance of Tchaikovsky's first concerto a few years back, and the best obituary I've seen today has been NPR's. Take some time and listen .

Back on February 21, Rochester's  Democrat and Chronicle published this letter to the editor by Gary Webb of Victor: A fine moment in Rochester Americans hockey history took place in the ’70s, when ownership ties were severed with the Vancouver Canucks. As a native Canadian, I am greatly offended by the use of the term “Canuck.” Forget about the Washington Redskins (Feb. 17 editorial, “Retire offensive sports mascots”); after all these years, why hasn’t Vancouver been required to change its extremely disrespectful, dehumanizing name? If I didn't know better, I'd say someone on the editorial staff really doesn't like Gary Webb. The hyperbolic tone and false equivalence (there's no way canuck is as offensive as redskins ), the revisionist historical nugget (did the Americans really break it off with its NHL parent in a fit of righteous indignation?), the vague self-identification as a "native Canadian" (born there or First Nations?), the accusatory rheto...

As recounted by Richard Ben Cramer in What it Takes , his book on the '88 presidential election, it was in the early morning hours of February 9, after a speech at the University of Rochester followed by four hours of questions, that Joe Biden collapsed in his hotel room out by the airport. Miraculously, he survived the night and made it out of Flour City; back in Wilmington, doctors found evidence of a brain aneurysm and rushed him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to operate . In May 1988, Biden was operated on for a second aneurysm . Check out this timeline from The New York Times for more.