More years of hurt....

Euro 2008 just won't be the same without the Three Lions.... It won't be the same without all the England hype, delusion, WAGS and general madness.... For all you fellow England fans out there, while there won't be any glorious victory this summer, and while it wasn't entirely prophetic, this pre-World Cup 2006 Wayne Rooney Song is still one of the best things on You Tube.



(if video fails to load click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlEe7eFXzm8&feature=related)

And is it really fair that the world will be deprived of the John Terry Euro 2008 Song?! (well, on second thought... words fail.)



(if video fails to load click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0L_uQcWHJ4&feature=related)

Stay tuned for my Euro 2008 predictions. I'll be rolling them out over the next few days. They should help you dominate your office pool*.

With England absent this summer I will be supporting the Czech Republic (finally free from the Group of Death!). As Rob Smyth of The Guardian notes in his Euro 2008 Preview, with the Dutch now playing pragmatically, the Czechs are the last practioners of entertaining, total football in Europe. Also, at last summer's U20 World Cup, the Czechs were entertaining, played hard and fair and had great fans. Kdo neskace, neni Cech, hop, hop hop!

[Sidenote -- have you seen the TSN Euro 2008 promo commercials? They are pretty fun and clever.]

* success unlikely

Your new summer drink

I call it a Croatian. Mainly because it is the signature drink of a Croatian friend. What is it, you ask? Malibu Rum and Tang. Don't laugh, it is actually very, very tasty. Best of all it is easy to make. Okay, okay, you are probably now saying "sure, agreed, but I've had that many times and I call it 'Malibu & Tang' what makes your version so special that is has a name?" To that I say, good point, but here's my very special wrinkle... you ready for it?... before you serve the drink you rim the glass with Tang crystals. Boom! Done. Game, set and match. Now you've got yourself a timeless classic. Now you've got yourself a Croatian.

I've found a small Hoegarden glass is perfect, although any highball glass would also work. 5oz of Tang to 1.5oz of Malibu sounds about right.

Note: Despite all seeming evidence to the contrary, no Croatians were consumed before or during this posting.

Real life Fight Club (of sorts) in New York City

Apparently last Friday afternoon there was a real "fight club" (of sorts) at Union Square in New York. I guess this is the new "in" thing, replacing the dearly departed knitting fad of some time ago. This is odd and makes for strangely compelling viewing. Almost as if it were an elaborate performance art piece writ large. And violent. And kind of moronic.

From the posting I read about it: "Hundreds of people stood in a big ring right there by the Shoe Mania, cheering and chanting. All kinds of people: old people, moms with strollers, skateboarding teens, foreign tourists throwing Euros around.

They could have been watching some awesome breakdancing group or an unusually good street magician. But instead, two shirtless guys were flopping around on the ground, grunting and grating one another’s faces across the cobblestones. One guy pinned the other and a shirtless ref called the match. Both fighters leapt up, gave each other the universally-approved one-armed bro-hug and left the ring together, laughing.

The rules were simple: find a partner, get in the ring. No face shots, tapping out ends the fight. No settling scores, just fighting for the fun of fighting. No experience or discernible skill required." Good times, people, good times.

I really hope they have a First Rule for their public fight club. That would be cool.

And when you are done reading about the Union Square fight club (I hope I didn't just name it?), make sure to click on the link about William Hundley's art project. Mr. Hundley is, apparently, a real artist living and working in Austin, Texas and this is his art. Really. I don't even know what to say but that might be my favourite picture of the year. For more of Mr. Hundley's art, you can visit his website. This probably doesn't even need to be said, but Austin's city slogan is "Keep Austin Weird".

New Vespa Museum Opens In Italy

If you’re headed to Italy this summer and have already done all the major tourist sites, or are suffering from tourist-fatigue, you might want to check out the new Vespa Museum in Ravenna. Who doesn't love the Vespa??

The Complete Bushisms

Slate's collection of Bushisms... so far. The bar has been set high for the next US President.

Life's too short to drink cheap wine. Cork'd can help you avoid making that mistake

Cork’d is a free service for reviewing, sharing and discovering wine. It offers a simple and easy way to review and share wine, making life easier for wine aficionados and drunks everywhere. You can use Cork’d to catalog, rate and review wines you’ve tasted. You can also keep track of wines you’d like to try and buy as well as subscribe to what your buddies have reviewed. At Cork'd you can:

• Catalog, rate, and review wines in your Wine Journal
• Find out what your buddies are tasting
• Discover and keep track of new wines you'd like to buy and try

Here's some additional value added extras you get with your free Cork'd membership:

• Wine Journal - Catalog, rate and review the wines you’ve tried.
• Wine Cellar - Your Wine Cellar is a list of bottles that you own, but haven’t tried yet.
• Shopping List - Keep track of wines you’d like to buy. You can instantly add wines from other member’s journal entries, or add your own from scratch.
• Drinking Buddies - You can add other Cork’d members as Drinking Buddies. By doing so, you’ll be alerted each time a buddy adds a new Wine Journal entry. You’ll be able to see what they’ve been tasting, what they thought and how they rated the wine.
• Recommendations - After you’ve reviewed a wine, you have the option of recommending it to any or all of your Drinking Buddies.

An NHL Classic

While watching the new 'Cup Raise' NHL commercial I saw a link to some of the old 'Out-of-work Goalie' commercials from the late 90s. This one was always my favourite. We Leafs fans have so little we have to take the good when we can.

New NHL Commercial

Wings. Pens. Saturday. 8pm. Let's get it on!

Buy this music, enjoy it and be happy

This was supposed to occur with more regularity but it hasn't happened since the January Music Review.... My bad. Here are some new and old music suggestions covering the February to May 2008 period.

10 new songs/albums I recommend you check out if you haven't already:

• Ready for the Floor - Hot Chip
• Out of Time - Jason Collett
• Rockferry - Duffy
• Change of Destination - Monade
• Blood's Too Rich (album) - Luke Doucet
• Consolers of the Lonely (album) - The Raconteurs
• We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives - Los Campesinos!
• Tiger Phone Card - Dengue Fever
• A-Punk - Vampire Weekend
• Cheap And Cheerful - The Kills

10 older songs rediscovered:

• To Get Me Through The Good Times - Echobelly
• Staying Out For The Summer - Dodgy
• A Design For Life - Manic Street Preachers
• Ladykillers - Lush
• I'm Sorry - Hothouse Flowers
• Cold Brains - Beck
• After the Gold Rush - Thom Yorke
• Bad Luck - Social Distortion
• Let's Shake - Teenage Head
• Living After Midnight - Judas Priest

[Sidenote: Britpop is back... at least on my iPod as you may have surmised from the above]

[Sidenote #2: I heard a demo of the new Oasis song - I Want To Live In A Dream In My Record Machine - on the Strombo Show yesterday and was pleasantly surprised. It was pretty trippy and, perhaps, most surprisingly, good. Apparently they will have a new album out this Fall.]

What's your something?

Who didn't dream of being on Let's Make A Deal and trading in their known prize for the chance of a better prize in the unknown box or behind curtain number 3? (The box! Take the box!!)

Well, the SomethingStore operates a business based on the allure of the unknown box. The SomethingStore is a new website that operates simply: They will send you something, an item selected randomly among many things from their inventory, for $10 (free shipping) and you will find out what your something is when you receive it. What's your something?

New Muxtape playlist

Here's my new Muxtape playlist. Its a grab bag of different types of music. Enjoy it while you work, watch golf, workout, surf the web, whatever. For more information on Muxtape see my April 2, 2008 post, Bringing back the Mixtape.

For now you can only upload MP3 files which restricts putting up any iTunes music unless you want to export songs as MP3 files and burn them to disc and then reload them.

A library of photographs at your fingertips

The Library of Congress now has a Flickr photostream. From their website:

The Library of Congress invites you to explore history visually by looking at interesting photos from our collections. Please add tags and comments, too! More words are needed to help more people find and use these pictures.

By way of background, Library of Congress staff often make digital versions of our popular image collections available online as quickly as possible by relying primarily on the identifying information that came with the original photos. That text can be incomplete and is even inaccurate at times. We welcome your contribution of names, descriptions, locations, tags, and also your general reactions.

The Library’s Prints and Photographs Division houses some 14 million items, ranging from historical photographs and architectural drawings to advertising labels and posters from all over the world. You can find more than one million pictures among the digitized collections in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog at the Library of Congress Web site. You might also enjoy the special presentations of photos also appear in American Memory and Exhibitions.

12 Funniest Fortune Cookies ever

These are pretty funny and come to you from Oddee, a blog on the oddities of the world. There is tons of bizarre and funny stuff at Oddee. If you are looking for weird and wacky tidbits of information Oddee could be just the ticket. On to the fortune cookies.

No GM, no Coach, no Captain... how can we lose?

I mentioned at the outset that rants about the Leafs would be kept to a minimum. So, in keeping to that promise I will not include today's rant here. Fortunately, there is a much more appropriate place for such feelings to be shared. Check out the Bleacher Report.

Died and gone to heaven? Perhaps not quite but....

In Strange Brew Bob Mackenzie said, "My brother used to say that drowning in beer would be like heaven, eh? But now he's not here, and I've got two soakers... and this isn't heaven, this sucks!" Well, instead of drowning in beer, what about bathing with beer?

Who among us hasn't dreamt of one day, in a kinder and gentler world, soaping up with some PBR suds? Well, believe it or not, now you can with The Poor Boy Beer Soap Bar (Vegan Friendly). The Vegan-friendliness is a nice touch in my book. My favourite part of the product description is when I read that the Pabst Blue Ribbon soap makes "a nice addition to the Anderson beer soap family." I think I'll go for the Guinness soap (note: a quick search revealed they actually have this).

The NFL and betting. You just had to know this was coming.

The NFL season is still months away but that doesn’t mean you can’t get your NFL gambling and Fantasy fixes… Now you can bet on which NFL player will get arrested next. You can even bet on what the next NFL player arrested will be for and whether there will be more arrests in the 2008-09 regular season or offseason. Place your bets.

Any given Sunday.

Tetris - The Movie

This is brilliant. Check out the trailer for Tetris - The Movie. Ah Tetris, the time I could have spent studying instead of playing you.... Thanks for the memories.

Time Out New York declares war on Hipsters

If you are like me you can appreciate a good feud. Particularly feuds played out in the media. Time Out New York lays a beat down on hipsters with "Why the hipster must die." Good stuff. And the hipsters, to their credit, respond.

And for your further reading pleasure, check out Time Out's historical timeline of the hipster: A Hipstory.

More primaries....

Are you as tired of the interminable Democratic primaries as I am? Do you remember when McCain wrapped up the Republican nomination 1,000 years ago (note: not an age joke)? Well, here's a little injection of humour and levity into the 2008 campaigns: McBain for President.

Pac Man Explained

Now I finally get it. http://gawker.com/5007724/pac+man-explained

The Dude Abides

The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers is a book due out in Spring 2009 by Chicago Sun-Times columnist Cathleen Falsani. It will examine the work of the Coen brothers and try to explain their raison-d'etre. Scary stuff. Good title, though.

And in additional Dude news, if you are going to be in Kentucky on July 11-12, be sure to check out the 7th Annual Lebowski Fest. WTF is Lebowski Fest, you ask? Well, according to the creators, "Lebowski Fest is a bowling event celebrating all things relating to the Coen Brothers 1998 film, The Big Lebowski. It can be likened to a Star Trek convention in a very loose sense. The event takes place at a bowling alley and includes unlimited bowling, costume, trivia, farthest traveled, and bowling contests, prizes, and what-have-you." So there you go. They take the festival on the road 2-3 times a year (e.g. to Vegas, LA, New York). There is also a book. And, of course, a MySpace page.

And in case you are in the dark about one of the greatest movies of all time, click here to learn more about The Big Lebowski.

Big new fancy pants trailers out for a couple of summer blockbusters

1. The new trailer is now out for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It certainly looks like they've managed to capture some of the old magic. The movie looks more promising from this trailer than from the first one.

2. The new Dark Knight trailer is also out and looks as cool as the last one. The Dark Knight has to be the must-see movie of the summer.

Sean Avery

The New Yorker weighs in on Sean Avery. And, in case you wanted to know, here's more information about Avery's internship for this summer at Vogue.

The latest news on The Dark Knight

The Harvey Dent character will feature more prominently in the new The Dark Knight trailer due out shortly.

As part of their ongoing viral marketing campaign there is a new shadow site promoting the movie: Operation Slipnot, which details the operations of the Gotham Police Department's Major Crime Unit.

Finally, there is also a new promo poster now out. In case the earlier promos didn't get it across, Gotham isn't a picnic.

Everyone's favourite Toronto street

Well, it is probably in your Top 5. The Torontoist profiles Palmerston Boulevard.