[BRIEF NOTE] Remind me

From The Globe and Mail article, "Naslund attacks Moore's lawsuit":

Vancouver Canucks captain Markus Naslund says Steve Moore's lawsuit against Todd Bertuzzi and others in the Vancouver organization is a money grab by a player who isn't good enough to earn a lucrative living at hockey.

"He's suing everyone so he can make money," Naslund told the Vancouver Sun from Sweden. "I've got no respect for him at all.

"Even talking to his teammates, it seems evident he doesn't have a lot of support in hockey."

Naslund plays for Modo in the Swedish league with Peter Forsberg and Dan Hinote, Moore's Colorado Avalanche teammates last season.

Moore, now an unrestricted free agent after playing 57 games as a National Hockey League rookie last season, is suing Bertuzzi and Brad May, coach Marc Crawford, former general manager Brian Burke and the hockey club for unspecified damages. Moore claims the defendants conspired to injure him.

He has been unable to play since Bertuzzi sucker-punched him during a game in Vancouver on March 8. Moore suffered cracked vertebrae and a concussion, from which he continues to suffer.

"This is just a guy who's trying to hit a home run [financially]," Naslund said. "Someone who wasn't good enough to play. I'm not saying what [Bertuzzi did] was right. But if it was me, I'd be doing everything I could to get back and play and show everyone the character I have . . . instead of trying to sue everyone."

Remind me, please, why I'm supposed to care about the possible collapse of the NHL. Also, while you're at it, how modern-day hockey teams are readily distinguishable from street gangs on skates.

[BRIEF NOTE] Popular Musics

This morning, on CBC Radio 1's program Sounds Like Canada, Kelly Ryan interviewed at length Ottawan expatriates Peter Kiesewalter and Tyley Ross, founders of the East Village Opera Company. This group has gained some recognition for its rephrasing of operas in a modern popular-music format, including Verdi's Rigoletto; Sounds like Canada played a rather bizarrely catchy rock/dance version of "La donna è mobile".

Kiesewalter and Ross argued that if Verdi and Mozart were writing music now, they'd be writing in the idioms of modern popular music, that opera was to the 19th century what rock and roll is to the 21st. This makes a certain degree of intuitive sense to me, though I can't comment conclusively on how correct it is. I wonder if I've go to the EVOC's show on the 26th?

[BRIEF NOTE] Left Behind

David Adesnik at Oxblog has recently posted about his experiences reading the first volume of the immensely popular Left Behind series (1, 2), and links to Fred Clark's critical fisking of the first 71 pages of said volume.

Adesnik and Clark are both right to point out a mean-spiritedness, an anti-intellectualism, a poverty of good writing, common to the books in the series. Myself, all that I can add is that, working for the PEI library system, I always found myself squicked when I handled the children's books written for an affiliated series, describing the struggles of God-fearing children against an anti-Christ-controlled school system and the adult allies of Satan.

[NON BLOG] Tech Support

I'm rather frustrated to find that even after I followed people's advice and downloaded Mozilla Thunderbird, I still can't connect to my Sympatico in-box through that second program.