The Bruins played last night against Los Angeles without Zdeno Chara.  Chara has a (we think) knee injury and missed his first game of the season.  The Bruins were so afraid of playing without their best defenseman that they sat their #1 goalie as well.  Oh, and they still beat the Kings 3-0.  They got Paille back from a mild concussion, but they were also without Gregory Campbell who broke his foot in the Columbus game.  The good news is Chara traveled with the team for tonight’s game in Ottawa.  The bad news is that GM Peter Chiarelli said this morning that the chances of him playing are only 50/50.

As for the Red Sox, they have finally made a couple of moves after looking like a bloated behemoth since the last season ended.  We’ve lost our GM, our manager, and our closer.  We have already replaced the GM and the manager (with a circus clown) and now we may have replaced the closer too.

According to ESPN they traded Jed Lowrie and Kyle Weiland to the black hole that is the Houston Astros for closer Mark Melancon.  Melancon had 20 saves for a team that only won 56 games.  I, along with about a billion other Sox fans, expected Josh Bard to step into the closer role, but the circus clown has stated that Bard will get a shot at starting this year.  I’m hoping they aren’t putting all of their 9th inning eggs into Melancon’s basket.  He might turn out fine, but there is a big difference between being a closer on an abysmal Houston team and being the closer in Boston.  We’ll have to wait and see.  I wish him all sorts of luck though.

I liked Jed Lowrie.  He was a decent player who could play anywhere in the field.  He was hurt a lot though.  He might have been the every day shortstop at one point were it not for injuries.  I’d like to say something about Kyle Weiland too, but I don’t know anything about him.

The Red Sox also affectively ended the Boston career of Jason Varitek this week by signing Kelly Shoppach.  Shoppach hit under .180 last year, in fact his season average was about the same as Varitek’s second half average so clearly it’s an upgrade.   Ummm… Either way, Jarrod Saltalamacchia will be the #1 catcher next year.  I sincerely hope Varitek is offered a coaching job somewhere in the organization.  As far as my non-baseball-talent-evaluating eyes can see he’s done as a player.  He can probably sign on somewhere and milk it for another year or two, but he can’t throw runners out anymore and he can’t hit anymore.  What he can do is run a pitching staff.  I would very much like to see him hired as a bullpen or pitching coach.  Maybe not for the big league club right away, but at least place him in the system somewhere so that he can learn the new ropes and be ready to come back to Boston in a couple of years.  Varitek is always going to be a hero around here, and I would consider it a shame if he went to another team.

Here are the highlights from last night’s Bruins win over the Kings.  The video comes from nhl.com

I want to save this off because the first Bruins goal is puck moving perfection. 

I was 15 minutes late to work today. Why? Because I spent 30 minutes in a traffic jam caused by this accident.

I feel conflicted. I very much hope that everyone involved in the accident is all right, but the main reason I hope for that is because I want to blame them for being dumbasses and making me late to work.

Santa’s gonna be mad at Robbie.

We started watching The Hangover 2 tonight. We still have 37 minutes to go, but I’ve seen enough to know that it contains the finest acting performance by a monkey in the history of Hollywood.

I only saw part of the Bruins game, but I watched enough to see Peverley’s goal in the first and it was a thing of beauty. I’ll post the highlights tomorrow. It was a cycling clinic.

There was a message on my Blogger dashboard this morning saying that I can link Blogger to Google+.  That way my posts here will show up there.  In order to do it I would need to replace my Blogger profile with my Google profile.  No big deal there.  The problem for me would be that the private blog would also be linked.  I don’t want that blog to be linked anywhere. 

I would assume that I would be able to chose which (if any) Google+ circle would see the Blogger posts… I would better be able to set that… but that brings me to why I didn’t do it.  I wouldn’t let any of my circles see those posts.  If people find this page then that’s fine.  I put a link on Facebook, and on Twitter, and yadda yadda yadda, but if they don’t find it that’s fine too.  I don’t want to push this page on friends three+ times a day.

I’ll keep my Blogger on Blogger and let Google+ keep it’s nose out of it.

Jen cooked a wonderful chicken cutlet dinner of her own creation tonight. It was excellent. The potato side dish, however, spent more than an hour in the oven and was still cold and raw.

This is happening with increasing regularity and is one of the reasons we started replacing appliances. The fridge/freezer was the top priority so we handled that first. We were hoping to get a little more life out of the oven, but tonight we admitted defeat and ordered a new stove.

Later, after watching two or three South Park Christmas episodes I set up my iTunes Match on our Apple TV and tested it out. It worked fine. Another iTunes Match success.

Major League Baseball… oh what are we going to do with you.

The National League’s newly crowned Most Valuable Player, Milwaukee Brewer Ryan Braun, has allegedly tested positive for using a banned substance.  Apparently the random drug test he took during the MLB playoffs this year found what I believe they are calling synthetic testosterone.  The story leaked to the press before the league had finished it’s investigation.  I guess the drill is, when a player flunks a drug screen he is notified and given the option of appealing the findings.  An arbitrator listens to his story and then decides whether or not the league mandated punishment should be dished out.  From what I heard on 98.5fm in Boston this morning, if the player is apologetic, or says it was an accident, or says they used something without realizing what it is, the arbitrator is still going to slap the huge suspension onto the player, so long as the medical evidence is there.

Braun is in the process of appealing the findings, but what is he going to say that is going to overturn the suspension?  It sounds like he has to prove the test was a false positive in order to get the results thrown out.  I sincerely doubt that will happen.  It sure looks like Braun is going to get slapped with the ass kicking (not in a good way) 50 game suspension for the first offense.

And this is the newly named MVP of the National League.  Milwaukee won their division last year for the first time in 239237123 years due to having two star players who carried them.  Ryan Braun and Prince Fielder.  The team could only afford to extend the contracts of one of those two and they chose to extend Braun.  Fielder is now a free agent and should be signing with some other team any day now.  So not only will the Brewers be Fielder-less next year, but they will also be Braun-less for the first 30% of the season.  What a ball buster this is for the fans. 

There is even talk by the baseball writers, the organization that chooses the league MVPs, of re-doing the voting for the National League so that they do not have to go through the humiliation of crowning a newly minted chemical cheater as their winner. 

The question is, was it worth it?  Ryan Braun will lose 50 games next year and have to endure being labeled a cheater for the rest of his career.  At the same time, according to ESPN, his contract runs through 2020 and it will pay him a total of $150 million.  I’m sure that type of money can build a really big wall around a huge mansion to keep the neighbors’ shouts of, “cheater” out of earshot.

The whole thing is just gross.

We met for the forth time tonight. It’s sickening how much fun playing in a band can be.

Being my usual nerd self I started a new blog just to keep track of the band. I’ll just summarize rehearsals and keep a record of the songs we try.

http://intheredintheblack.tumblr.com/