If you'd told me, when Cyle Larin was skying shots into the scoreboard at the Gold Cup, that he'd stake Canada to its first ever men's World Cup win, I wouldn't have believed you until you added that the World Cup has 128 teams, games are four quarters, and we're playing Qatar.
Here at last. Ken Dryden had been, officially, the greatest writer to win a Stanley Cup, but no longer. His masterpiece, The Game, is still worthwhile, and better than I remembered--but we see how things have moved on. https://t.co/UZjVUv96Bt
@markfurry@DICKS@Canes@StanleyCup Yep! Literally just hanging out at a local dive. No line, no parade, no PR. Just a handful of players and some random (happy!) normies who stumbled upon a memory. The best!
Almost every single person on Earth lives with rats. Only 5 million people out of 8 billion live rat free. They are the Albertans.
Alberta is the only significantly human-inhabited place on Earth that is rat free. It achieved this in the 1950s as rats invaded from the East, by introducing a rodent surveillance state, obliging every citizen of the province to report them and terminating any sightings with extreme prejudice. They laid 63,000 kg of arsenic across a 600-kilometre-long, 29-kilometre-wide Rat Control Zone along the province's Eastern border.
Back then, rats were so unfamiliar in Alberta that officials distributed preserved rat corpses to teach people what the enemy looked like. One pest-control officer held public meetings at which he ate warfarin-soaked oatmeal to show it was safe.
And it worked! They held rats off and numbers remained so low that the surveillance and eradication system could keep numbers at essentially zero for years, at extremely low costs – Alberta spends about 11 cents per resident on rat control measures, much less than neighbouring provinces that are infested.
Today, Albertans have grown so unfamiliar with rats that they frequently mistake squirrels, gophers, and other small animals for them: of 875 reported sightings in 2025, only 47 turned out to be actual rats. Pet rats are banned, vehicles entering Alberta are checked, and sightings are responded to with overwhelming force.
Could the rest of the world manage it? Probably not. The secret was to stop them before they could establish themselves. For the rest of us, we probably need gene drives. Read the story of how Alberta won the war on rats at Works in Progress now.
https://t.co/RZVjOXE2wz
The 2000s Oilogosphere was really more like the classic great university experience than any university I've ever been to. Being surrounded by young people coming up with ideas that would change their world, as if by the by on the way to their great success.
Congratulations to my friend Tyler Dellow. So you know, he was a *really* great hockey blogger, and his clear thinking that was captivating 20 years ago is easy to imagine making a huge difference to this championship.
"Love him or not, Dellow has earned a reputation as a smart, yet brash and opinionated hockey man. That package may yet work in another organization. It didn’t work in Edmonton." - No lies detected
Talk about seeing changes in one’s lifetime: a girl who watched Jayhawkers set fire to her family barn would see her son order the dropping of the atom bomb.
I know this is going to get mocked. I get why. I'm tempted to join in.
Devil's advocate: the year Sutter got fired in Calgary, the Flames were +12, had a 55 xGF% at 5v5, barely missed the playoffs thanks to terrible goaltending, and haven't looked anywhere near as good since.