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yourgoodfriendraichel · 7 years

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Answer all the author asks >:) (if u want)

HUNKER DOWN MY FRIENDS AND LET ME LEARN YOU A THING ABOUT MY FAVORITE TOPIC: ME!

I like to pretend I am a writer, and so I will now tell you writerly things about myself. (Thank you writer buddy)

1) is there a story you’re holding off on writing for some reason?

- any story i’m “holding off writing” is because it is simply a terrible idea tornado in my brain and doesn’t have anything tangible enough to write down yet. This is debatably true of many, many things.

2) what work of yours, if any, are you the most embarrassed about existing?

- I’m a little embarrassed with my one self-insert fanfic I actually posted back when I was thirteen, but on the whole I’m not embarrassed about anything of mine existing, it’s part of my brain, though I am somewhat embarrassed about people knowing about it, or my really bad formatting and spelling stuff.

3) what order do you write in? front of book to back? chronological? favorite scenes first? something else?

- I write front-to-back, sort of, while taking the time to write favorite/fleshed out scenes as I come up with them. So, I aspire to write from the start of the book to the end, but sometimes I don’t have anything for the next scene, but I have this other scene that’s been in my head for a week, so I’ll go ahead and write that down.

(There are 22 more of these!)

4) favorite character you’ve written

- aaaaahhhh too many! I- I don’t have a favorite?! (Also a bunch of them are clearly related in my brain as being similar people in different worlds). Right now my baby is Lona, a princess magician who needs a damn hug. Everyone she loves keeps dying. She is also a strong, short child and can lift her lanky friend over her head. It’s amazing. And I swear she’s not as over-powered as she sounds.

5) character you were most surprised to end up writing

- I’m not sure? I don’t think I’ve written anyone surprising yet. I have a mentor figure in one story who’s dramatic backstory kind of snuck up on me? But no particular character has surprised me yet.

6) something you would go back and change in your writing that it’s too late/complicated to change now

- ??? I don’t know? I feel like I’d have to have something completed to do that... Oh, I may want to change things about my big long Gravity Falls future-fic, but going back through three different platforms to change it, and to expect people to read the changes, is stupid, so it shall remain mediocre for all time.

7) when asked, are you embarrassed or enthusiastic to tell people that you write?

- I’m definitely enthusiastic about writing, though I do have trouble getting up the guts to talk to people about my stories, which is absurd, because I love my stories, and having anyone else invested might help me stay motivated.

8) favorite genre to write

- I really don’t know. Poetry might actually be the most fun to write, since it has the least rules for me, and at most has rules on form. I don’t need no stinking outlines! I don’t need no stinking forethought! I just need feelings. (PS: this is not true of all poetry, this is just the kind of poetry I end up writing).

9) what, if anything, do you do for inspiration?

- music music music music music. And for fanfic/things that were once fanfic and now i have made them my own it’s always good to just bury my head in the source material sometimes. I also like making aesthetics and stuff for characters, but that’s less for inspiration, and more to get rid of some of that creative energy when I can’t think of what to do with the actual story.

10) write in silence or with background noise? with people or alone?

- Alone, with music. Or not, if I forget, but usually with music. That how I’m most productive, at any rate.

11) what aspect of your writing do you think has most improved since you started writing?

- Plotting. I still think it’s horrible, but I think I’m better at planning and plotting than I once was. Also just grammar and punctuation and the teachable stuff like that, obviously. I started writing at, like, ten.

12) your weaknesses as an author

- Plots, villains

13) your strengths as an author

- Ideas, dialogue

14) do you make playlists for your current wips?

- ABSOLUTELY. Everything has a playlist. EVERYTHING.

15) why did you start writing?

- I have told stories without writing them down my whole life, with toys and imaginary games. It was just a matter of having the time, skills, and motivation to actually write them down.

16) are there any characters who haunt you?

- I’m not exactly sure what ‘haunt’ implies. I do have my own brand of Mary Sue from the old days that I have a lingering love/hate relationship with. (She is wonderful, and a valuable part of my life as a writer, but WE MUST NEVER SPEAK HER NAME.)

17) if you could give your fledgling author self any advice, what would it be?

- Your typing will improve with practice, not with mavis beacon. Your stories are good, even if you never want to show anybody. Honestly, I think that’s probably a good call, but definitely don’t stop writing them.

18) were there any works you read that affected you so much that it influenced your writing style? what were they?

- Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, and The Kazam Chronicles/The Last Dragon Slayer by Jasper Fforde. Also two that are very important to me but may not have directly impacted my style: Peter Pan (by J.M. Barrie), and I, Robot (by Issac Asimov).

19) when it comes to more complicated narratives, how do you keep track of outlines, characters, development, timeline, ect.?

- HAHAHA It’s all in my head.

- Ok, I say that, but I have strange sketchy outlines at the top of my files, and logistical run-downs of magic systems and what-not. I totally keep notes. But weird notes, and most of it is still in my head.

20) do you write in long sit-down sessions or in little spurts?

- Oh spurts, for sure. When I hit a long stride it’s a magical day where the writer’s block wall didn’t show up for a blessedly long time!

21) what do you think when you read over your older work?

- This is who I was, and it lead to who I am, and oh many I remember how much I loved this character. This was great. But also no one else may look at it if it’s more than three or four years old.

22) are there any subjects that make you uncomfortable to write?

- Probably? Almost certainly? But none of the stories I’ve written have called for it yet, so IDK what to tell you.

23) any obscure life experiences that you feel have helped your writing?

- Having an english teacher that made me start writing work above my grade level even though I could barely get my work done. Any specific compliments I have ever received. I’m sure there are other things, but I can’t think of them right now.

24) have you ever become an expert on something you previously knew nothing about, in order to better a scene or a story?

- I have done a startling amount of math around the world, country, and state populations, as well as the size of various colleges, for a story about magical children. The logistics of the world are staggering, and keep me from having to figure out the actual plot. I’m not an expert, necessarily, but it is an interesting line of research.

25) copy/paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’re particularly proud of

- I used to have this sort of thing on the top of my head, but now I can’t think of anything for the life of me! How about this, it’s the corniest fucking thing, but I like it:

It all started in the student center. She appeared in the doorway of the lounge, expression intent and hair bright blue. The intensity of her whole existence jumbled the words in his mouth, and gave her the opportunity to speak.

God, it sounds like some stupid hipster man’s novel intro BUT I LIKE IT, DAMMIT. These two characters also sing disney songs at each other in the middle of the night and it’s cheesey but it’s CUTE. I am a giant sap.

#writing #Raichel Writes #crap no one cares about #flannelandsarcasm

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spamzineglasgow · 6 years

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(REVIEW) Strange Appetites: The Seductive Contemplation of Supermarket Poetics in Max Parnell’s _And no more being outdoors, And no more rain_

Text and illustrations by Maria Rose Sledmere (Review first appeared in Gilded Dirt issue #2, ‘Supermarket Verse’)

>In Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Jack Gladney meets his friend Murray at the supermarket and takes note of the items in his basket. Murray describes the unbranded, plain-packaged items with typically extravagant grandeur as ‘the last avant-garde. Bold new forms. The power to shock’. There’s a sparsity to Max Parnell’s pamphlet, And no more being outdoors, And no more rain that echoes this call of bold new forms. The plainness of language as language; as both material semiotics and evocative form. There’s everyday discourse stripped to its purer roots; a tone of childlike, sweeping sincerity (‘She loved the Western World’), contrasting with the ‘inscrutable meagreness’ of its subject: the meal deal.

>If material culture is a term we want to use, then Parnell practises it quite literally. He bought a selection of favourite meal deal items from a local Tesco Express, opened the packaging and slipped fragments of his poetry inside among the foodstuff, little white strips of text resting like sleepy insects upon a pasta salad or slices of apple. By some clever feat, he sealed the packaging up again and surreptitiously replaced the products on the shelves of the same supermarket, garnering undoubtedly a few bemused looks for so directly flaunting the rules of consumption in restocking the shelves from his bag. The result is a beautiful pamphlet, each spread a sparse balance of image and text--a gallery of raw, unedited photographs accompanied almost whimsically by a poem on the opposite page. The whimsy, however, does not undercut the compelling freshness of the language, its deceptive simplicity resonant with hidden depths of meaning, an implicit critique and celebration of contemporary supermarket consumption.

>The new sincerity and austerity often go hand-in-hand in the poems of writers whose work might be described as metamodern. Sam Riviere’s 81 Austerities reworks the casual quotidian of a New York poet to engage with the affective facets of contemporary Britain: a world overloaded with information; a world of pornography, abandoned picnics, knitwear and unlit cigarettes. A world of welfare cuts, jump-cuts and startling contrasts. The semiotics of consumer capitalism are somehow melted as each Riviere poem makes surreal juxtapositions of images, tricks of irony or incongruous reference, leading us somewhere unexpectedly profound: ‘this will probably sound cheesy and weird / but maybe we’re a couple of cartoons’ (‘What Do You Think About That’). Perhaps there is something about a childlike paucity of text that feels more sincere than an epic screed. Nevertheless, the self-awareness of such poetics grounds them in a certain wary irony, the ubiquitous awareness of self-presentation instilled in anyone raised on the internet.

>We might think of the supermarket meal deal (even as its supposed cheapness deceives us of value), as the poor man’s lunch (recalling that nostalgic phrase, the Po’ Boy’s Lunch, which is making its round of the hipster bars right now, harking back to the labourer’s working day of yore, or baby yuppies navigating through a pre-Starbucks universe). It’s perhaps the most everyday of supermarket purchases for some, representing the relinquishment of creative choice for a narrow decision between coronation chicken, egg cress or ham and cheese. The rule of the meal deal, of course, is that you get to pick three items: a sandwich/salad, a snack and a drink. Like a slot machine, you hope for the perfect combination. Many people stick to what works and eat the same thing every day, bearing their triplet of joy to yesterday’s identikit self-service checkout. Perhaps only some play the meta-game, listening to a hypnagogic James Ferraro number in their head as suitable soundtrack. Only when something is missing--out of stock already--is one forced to confront the meal deal as thing, to weigh up the relative value of different products. Parnell’s pamphlet takes this a step further, deconstructing the semiotics of product even as his poems supplement the food stuff with the trace of an art object.

>Food and paper, mixed together. You can peel the label off an apple and eat it just fine, but would you do the same with a strip of poem? Does Parnell’s sly, perhaps Situationist intervention in everyday commodity culture make the meal deal products inedible? As with Heidegger’s broken hammer, it is the object, the system’s failure, that reminds us that consumer goods are things in themselves. We confront them, suddenly, as present-at-hand. Imagine someone opening that pack of McCoys and finding their crisps coated in white paint with words stuck to them. You are forced to situate their presence in a manner beyond the normal. Foodstuffs no longer coexist as simple fuel--the ordinary objects that mark the time of day, the regulation of appetite. Their mode of being flashes before us and demands to be repaired, to be re-transformed back into the seamless product we expected. The point about meal deals is they are supposed to be the same on a daily basis; you know what you are getting when you peel away the plastic on your pasta salad.

>Forcing our attention back on the products as objects in themselves is one thing, but what to do next? Parnell’s poetry teases out the affective experiences of daily life in the encountering of things. Sometimes he addresses the supermarket itself, as if in the temple of some deity: ‘You say that everything is very interesting / “New improved flavour” / Yet it makes me feel very simple / (I hate all that crap) / But I am terribly hungry!’. This is a gesture that refutes the ideological hailing performed daily by advertising and branding, the kind that fits us into certain camps (the organically concerned, the cool kids, the Healthy). It admits the seduction of the object, the brand, even as it places its slogans under cool, sardonic erasure. We allow our bodily desires, ultimately, to purchase the product which temporarily will sate the appetite. But of course, being ‘terribly hungry’ is the perpetual state of consumer capitalism, from its constant arousal of insatiable desire to the literal starvation caused by global inequalities, or more localised austerity measures.

>It’s not all negative, however. The beauty of this pamphlet is its metamodern attentiveness to the joyful, affective experience of consumerism at the same time as ironically expressing the shallowness of such common exchanges of capital--the short lifespan of pleasure offered by such goods. Parnell’s poems defamiliarise everyday conventions and ritualistic practices, admitting a certain mystical quality to the products with which we structure our day—or, more specifically, our lunchtimes. There is an emphasis on the things themselves, from the checkout machines to the packet of sushi; Parnell’s poetics evince a very much objected-oriented ontology. These are poems without titles, poems to drift through; their mode of enframing is the image rather than the contrived and anthropocentric literary artifice of a title. The tone is sometimes exuberant, often urgent: ‘Quick! / I have in my hands / Only pennies… / And it were as if / The machines / Heaved a sigh.’ The supermarket experience is suddenly re-orientated from the perspective of the machines themselves, rather than the shoppers. I cannot help but think of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory here, as every item becomes its own actant in a complex system of relations. Yet often the relations taper away and the things themselves rise, shining, from darkness. Images deliberately obscure the thing itself: ‘I stare / Into the cauldron of hideousness’. Profundity mixes with certain emotional or bodily urges: ‘I wanna stay drunk’, ‘my tired red eyes’. These words aren’t just disembodied, clinical flarf collected from the dust of the empty shelves at the end of the day; they are lyric poems, whose vibrancy arises as much from the speaker’s voice as it does from the matter surrounding him.

>With subtle devastation, everyday encounters with objects become part of a broader emotional framework. ‘Secretly, I shall / go to drink / instant coffee / “Full Rich Taste!” / It’s drawing me in. / Is it the sole heat on earth? / I may freeze to death / Without her.’ Allured by the object, we are not sure if the ‘her’ refers to the coffee itself (anthropomorphism), or an actual woman--another lost ‘object’ in the speaker’s minimal stratosphere. The slippage from ‘it’ to ‘she’ casually equates love with the cheap physical comfort of an instant coffee, while allowing this equation to stand stark with the sadness of any impoverished supplement.

>Moreover, as Daniel Miller reminds us, shopping itself is a kind of ‘making love’. As he puts it, selecting the ingredients for something and choosing one’s food products involves negotiating various value-based implications: from the global resonance of ethical, organic and local to the more ambiguous questions of morality and sensibility; a ‘cosmology’ of daily actions in the public sphere. The ‘she’ of Parnell’s poems--who kookily thinks of ‘adding a little tomato paste’, whose presence is only a projection--is a ghostly thing, the rippling silhouette of desire that eludes the speaker. He is often standing alone, observing: ‘Everyone’s out eating’. We are reminded of our own individualised role as consumers, placed in the position of voyeur who gleans vague scraps of voyeuristic joy from the habits of others. Occasional bursts of frustrated statement--‘It’s so meaningless to eat!’--bring a generalised nihilism to the picture, comprising just one reaction to the sheer excess of signifiers on display when you start teasing apart meal deal semiotics.

>As a rearrangement of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, these poems bear the semblance of fleeting thoughts: the kind of fragmentary, stream-of-consciousness dialogue you might have with yourself while lingering over the meal deal counter on a daily basis. Like O’Hara, Parnell’s speaker is a casual observer whose lines are strewn with bursts of acute insight into the complex, affective relations that structure our everyday experience with material things. There’s an emphasis on time, on the compressed space of a lunch hour (if you are lucky enough to even get an hour; lunch breaks today aren’t quite the boozy extravagance they were in the days of Don Draper). The pamphlet ends with ‘One eats as one walks. / Back to work, I guess.’ The ‘I guess’ is not just the hipster idiom of conversational filler, but a genuine hesitation that leaves us pondering on the threshold of recreational and work time. Has the subject left work at all? Is our daily jaunt to the supermarket merely an offshoot of the work of daily capitalism, the implicit labour of consumer existence? Is the ‘I guess’ in fact a mournful hesitation, a longing for that brief jouissance of excessive choice that unfurled in the space of a moment? Parnell allows for both. Many of these items are reduced, discounted in price, thus implying the collection documents several moments of meal deal purchase across different times in the day. That sense of deferral, a riff on O’Hara’s idle browsing: ‘And the stores stayed open awful late…’.

> Sometimes reading And no more being outdoors, And no more rain feels a bit like looking over a series of old tweets made in the heat of a certain moment. Maybe they don’t make much sense anymore, but when you read them back in a sequence an emotional narrative unfolds. What does it mean to be ‘never […] mentally sober’? If the state we live in is one of constant arousal, wired to our screens and bleeps, flushed with sugar-fuelled brain fog, the supermarket perhaps offers the comforting stasis of quotidian repetition that the rhizomatically endless territory of the internet displaces. Often Parnell’s poetics feel meditative, even haiku-like; they are a deliberate, focused lingering on the object, the moment, the profound possibilities of relational connection both physical and symbolic in the exchange of capital. They restore a certain peace to our day, even as they preserve an unsettled sense of longing, of curiously surreal or impenetrable imagery, of desire misplaced in the webs of perception. Reality shifts. There is something of the Eliotic, confused flaneur in some of the poems; especially the first, with its anaphoric loop, ‘And no more rain’ drawing us endlessly to the supermarket as sheltering temple--the speaker’s ‘perilous steps’ uncannily erased even before we have settled inside. I’m reminded of T. S. Eliot’s ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, where the street lamps address the speaker with strange nostalgic poetry. Parnell’s speaker treads the laminate floors of the Tesco Express, held in a strip-lit version of Eliot’s ‘lunar synthesis’ as he leaves his identity at the door, ready and open to the world of signs.

>These are poems with a shelf-life, products destined for the trash at the whim of a consumer, or the directive of an employee or use-by date. Like snowflakes, they’ll melt into the generalised excreta of capitalism’s cold waste pile. There is a deliberate beauty here, a rift prised open between subject and object, consciousness and product. Ephemerality, the sense of drifting; disappearing in the condensed rhythms of desire’s abyss, its stunting concatenations of excess, the ‘And / And / And’. Parnell’s artefacts aren’t so much grandly apostrophised as they are collected, pondered over and recirculated into the feedback loops of capitalist relations. They’re found objects, certainly, but not appropriated into art objects. The poems are supplements which draw out the gaps, the secrets of the things in themselves, the strangeness. Here’s Ben Lerner’s narrator from 10:04 , speaking of the minimalist art of Donald Judd’s 100 aluminium boxes:

‘I believed in the things [Judd] wanted to get rid of—the internal compositional relations of a painting, nuances of form. His interest in modularity and industrial fabrication and his desire to overcome the distinction between art and life, an insistence on literal objects in real space—I felt I could get all those things by walking through a Costco’

>The hypermarket, Costco, does all the affective job of an art installation. It’s all about how we perceive things. Lerner’s narrator is able to position himself as this flaneur, open to the impressions objects and their spaces make upon him. Parnell does this too, though in a more condensed and fleeting manner. He subtly unfurls the nuances of form through close-up photographs and fragmentary, sensual details: the ‘glistening peanuts’ and ‘old and dirty’ angels. I can’t help but think of memes when I read these poems: like a meme they are deliberately recirculated into the public sphere, in a very material way. Like many memes there is a re-appropriation of advertising discourse which unpicks the shallow veneer of its message, while exposing the often surprising or even tragic ideological fault-lines within. These poems are compressed, easily digested; written in the tone of pondering over explaining. There are gaps to be filled.

>To use a Barthesian term, the Mythemes of contemporary culture are to be found in the supermarket aisle. A whole mythology of capitalism, identity and weird ontology is to be found if you peel back the packaging and wait for the magic. Happily, Parnell’s pamphlet does that for you, although its surreal array of intransitive words and objects deserves its own space: a metamodern exhibit of a bewildered contemporary whose structure of feeling is as strangely spiritual and sincere as it is ironic or blasé—an art object whose aura flickers with the persistent light of those late-night Tescos. In White Noise, Murray declares that he likes being in the supermarket, because ‘It’s all much clearer here. I can think and see’. In the aisles, with the cool tones of the refrigerators and the bright lighting, the ideologies underpinning the structures of daily life are ripe for the picking.

And no more being outdoors, And no more rain can be bought here for 4GBP.

#review

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flauntpage · 7 years

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Down Goes Brown Grab Bag: Trash Talking, Boring Senators and Cookie Phil

Welcome to Sean McIndoe's weekly grab bag, where he writes on a variety of NHL topics. You can follow him on Twitter. Check out the Biscuits podcast with Sean and Dave Lozo as they discuss the events of the week.

Three stars of comedy

The third star: Team Italy scores a goal at the World Championships—Um, guys? I don't think you're hockeying correctly.

The second star: Jared Boll is laughing with you, not at you—The Predators ended up getting the last laugh in game three, but Boll's reaction to seeing his team take the lead after he drew an instigator penalty was…interesting.

The first star: David Poile would like you to stop playing X-Man—Be sure to stick around for the update.

Outrage of the week

The issue: Ryan Johansen called out Ryan Kesler after game two, accusing the Ducks' agitator of dirty play, saying that "it sucks when you have to pull a stick out of your groin after every shift," and adding that Kesler's "family and friends watching him play, I don't know how you cheer for a guy like that." The outrage: He's not wrong. But he's not supposed to say it. Is it justified: This is the kind of thing that we typically see a few times every postseason. Things happen on the ice, tensions run high, and eventually the unthinkable happens: Somebody actually says something interesting.

At that point, everyone falls into one of two camps. The first is the old school, where you're shocked and offended that anyone would say anything ever. This is the side that believes that if you have a problem, you deal with it on the ice. A small handful of guys, like Jonathan Toews and Jaromir Jagr, have been given a hall pass to occasionally express an opinion, but everyone else is expected to stay down and stay quiet.

The other side thinks that guys like Johansen speaking their minds is great. Athletes in every other sports do it, and when they do it inevitably it sparks more interest among fans. Surely the hockey world, with its notoriously boring personalities and cliched sound bites, could use a little more post-game bad blood.

The problem with Johansen's mini-rant is that it landed pretty much right in the middle of the two sides. He said something beyond "get pucks in deep", so the old-timers are mad at him. But as far as trash talk attempts go, this one didn't really land. The bit about family and friends was a nice touch, but other than that, the whole thing sounded a lot more like a guy whining about not getting the calls than anything else.

The fact that Johansen said so little and still drew the ire of the traditionalists is pretty much all you need to know as to why we so rarely hear players say anything at all. If we're going to have this argument every few weeks, here's hoping the next guy to speak up actually goes full pipe bomb and makes it worth our while.

Obscure former player of the week

With the Vegas Golden Knights expansion draft just a few weeks away, it's fitting that we're being treated to a Western Conference final that features two relatively new teams in the Predators and Ducks. So today, let's bestow obscure player honors on a player that links those two teams and their expansion histories: Russian goaltender Mikhail Shtalenkov.

Shtalenkov became an international name in 1992, when he was the starting goalie on the gold-medal winning Unified Team at the Olympics. He was picked by the (then) Mighty Ducks a year later in the fifth round of their first ever entry draft, a few spots ahead of future all-star Miroslav Satan. Already 27 years old when he was drafted, he made his NHL debut that season, playing ten games for the Ducks. He'd see part-time duty with the team for the next four years, playing a career-high 40 games in 1997-98. He went back to the Olympics in 1998, winning silver as Russia's starter.

That same year, the NHL welcomed its 27th team when the Predators were born. Nashville took five goalies in that year's expansion draft, including Mike Richter (yes, really), and future starter Tomas Vokoun. They also took Shtalenkov, making him the first ever link between the Predators and Ducks.

Sadly, Shtalenkov wouldn't get to work on his Hockey Tonking, as he never played a game in Nashville. He was part of a five-player deal with the Oilers, where he'd share starting duties with Bob Essensa before another trade to Phoenix. He'd last 15 games as a Coyote before another trade, this time to Florida for Sean Burke. At the end of the 1999-2000 season, he headed back to Russia to finish his pro career.

Shtalenkov later went into coaching. A few years ago, he was briefly part of a weird news story in which he was apparently reported missing by his wife, but later turned out to be fine.

Debating the issues

This week's debate: The Ottawa Senators are two wins away from the Stanley Cup final. But are they a boring team?

In favor: Good lord, yes. Game one on Saturday was nearly unwatchable. Game two was only marginally better. Off the ice they make for a great story, but when it's time to play the games this team can be tear-your-eyes out dull.

Opposed: Well, hold on. You're just cherry-picking a few bad games. They sure weren't boring when they went out and blew the doors off the Penguins in the first period on Wednesday. And what about that 6-5 OT thriller against the Rangers? The Senators aren't boring all the time.

In favor: Sure, but "not boring all the time" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement. So sure, congratulations on having played one entertaining period in the first three games of the series. You're still boring.

Opposed: But there's more to an entertaining game than goals. Just about all of Ottawa's games during this run have been close, with seven of them going to overtime. Not to go all hockey hipster on you, but I'll take a tight 2-1 game over a sloppy 7-3 one any time. And besides, even if they are dull, who cares? They're winning. Like Bobby Ryan said earlier this week, "ratings be damned".

In favor: And he's right, from Ottawa's perspective. Nobody is blaming them for playing a system that works. This league has spent 20 years watching this style take over the game and never does anything about it, so good for the Senators if they can exploit that. They're even starting to embrace the whole "boring" thing, which is sort of cool. But none of that means that the rest of us want to watch.

Opposed: That's fair. But still, any team that has Erik Karlsson can't be all…

Senators fan: EXCUSE ME BUT I COULDN'T HELP BUT OVERHEAR YOU TALKING ABOUT MY TEAM SO I AM HERE TO YELL ABOUT THAT.

In favor: Whoa.

Opposed: Hey man, can you turn the volume down a little bit?

Senators fan: NO SIR I CANNOT AS OTTAWA FANS ARE VERY SCREECHY RIGHT NOW.

In favor: Yeah, we've all noticed. But do you really have to interrupt us in the middle of…

Senators fan: YOU HAVE SAID SOMETHING BAD ABOUT THE SENATORS AND I AM HERE TO THROW A TEMPER TANTRUM ABOUT IT.

Opposed: I'm not sure we even said anything all that bad.

In favor: Yeah, we all acknowledge they're a good team on a great Cinderella run. It's just that they're kind of boring sometimes, and most fans seem to prefer…

Senators fan: LEAVE MY WONDERFUL PERFECT TEAM ALONE OR I WILL HAVE TO FIGHT YOU.

Opposed: Dude, chill out. Your team is in the conference final. People are going to talk about them. You guys are going to need to be able to handle some occasional criticism.

In favor: Yeah, seriously. You Senator fans have generally been pretty cool over the years, but during this playoff run you've all gone super-sensitive about every little thing and it's getting kind of weird.

Opposed: Maybe just take a few deep breaths and see if that…

Senators fan: THE TORONTO MAPLE LEAFS HAVEN'T WON A STANLEY CUP SINCE 1967.

Opposed: Yes but… wait, what does that have to do with anything?

Senators fan: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BUT NO SENATORS FAN CAN GO MORE THAN FIVE SENTENCES WITHOUT MENTIONING IT OR WE DIE.

In favor: I always wondered what was up with that.

Senators fan: IF YOU DIDN'T VOTE ERIK KARLSSON FOR THE HART TROPHY YOU HATE PUPPIES.

Opposed: That's not true.

Senators fan: WE ARE CANADA'S TEAM NOW AND EVERYONE MUST LIKE US. THE PRIME MINISTER MADE A LAW.

In favor: That isn't how things work.

Senators fan: CHRIS NEIL FOR CONN SMYTHE. BOB COLE IS MEAN AND BAD. ALFIE DIDN'T MEAN TO SHOOT THAT PUCK AT NIEDERMAYER.

Opposed: Yeah, sure, we get it, but it's… wait, that was five sentences without bringing up the Leafs for no reason.

Senators fan: I… WAIT… I LOST COUNT AND … [explodes into fine mist, spraying stale Beaver Tail shrapnel everywhere]

Opposed: You have to admit, that last part was kind of exciting.

In favor: It really was.

The final verdict: This entire section is all Toronto's fault somehow.

Classic YouTube clip breakdown

Hey, speaking of the Maple Leafs…

One of the running themes of the Senators/Penguins series has been the budding rivalry between Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf, who mixed it up several times on Wednesday night. This is, of course, not the first time their paths have crossed. The two were the building blocks for Brian Burke's stint as GM in Toronto, and came to symbolize all the good and bad of that particular era. Eventually, both were traded away. But for several years, they were easily the two best known Toronto Maple Leafs in the world.

So today, let's travel back five years to watch as the two stars share a light-hearted bonding moment between teammates.

It's January 2012, and the NHL is in Ottawa for all-star weekend. Phaneuf and Kessel have both made the team, so they're in town to do a little pre-game promotion work. Standard stuff. I'm sure it will be fun.

Phaneuf is doing a sit-down, and our clip begins when he somehow hears Kessel approaching behind him. You're expecting me to make some sort of lazy "Phil Kessel is so fat you can hear him walking" joke, but I'm above that. There will be no weak and tired Kessel conditioning punchlines here.

"Oh, he's eating a cookie!" Um, OK, maybe Phaneuf didn't get the no-conditioning-jokes memo.

Phaneuf invites Kessel to join him for the interview, dropping a "You just interrupted it" in the process. Did that seem a little angry to you? It did to me. That Phaneuf is such a card, when he decides to playfully tease a teammate he really commits to the character.

"We better get you on the bike if you're going to keep eating these cookies, that's your fourth one today." See… playful? I think this is playful. Please tell me this is playful.

Kessel tries to claim that it's only his first cookie, at which point Phaneuf goes full-on dad mode while busting him with a detailed list of times and locations. I was fully expecting him to explain that he's not mad, just disappointed.

Anyway, now that Kessel's been thoroughly cookie-shamed by his friend(?), I'm sure we'll get to the friendly banter.

See, here we go. Kessel relates a funny story about being asked who'll choose the music for the all-star locker room. "I told them you." See, that's nice! "And I said you're the worst DJ in the league." Oh.

"Hey, you can go get your ipod," Phaneuf replies. "I know you're extremely cheap, but…"

OK, I'm going to just jump in right here. Do…. do Phaneuf and Kessel hate each other? I mean, do they legitimately want to fight right now? I think they might.

Just for context, Phaneuf being the Maple Leafs' locker room DJ was kind of a thing in Toronto for a while after Burke somehow used it as a way to praise his leadership skills. So this is Kessel coming in and just firing directly at the thermal exhaust port. These guys are not messing around.

By the way, can we give Kessel some credit for holding his own here? He's never been viewed as an especially intimidating guy, but he's pulling off a pretty decent "I'm going to stand right over you and keep eating my cookie and what are you going to do about it?" move here.

That face where you realize your fun sit-down is about to turn into a fist fight.

A flustered Phaneuf tries to resume the interview, but Kessel is still hovering semi-menacingly in the background. The interviewer asks if he'll be in the hardest shot competition, at which point Kessel comes storming back for more, asking if "You mean that muff of a shot?" I don't even know what that means, but it sounds bad.

At this point, Phaneuf calmly gets up, grabs Kessel in a headlock, drags him down the hallway and throws him down that escalator.

Wait, I'm being told I imagined that. What Phaneuf actually does is offer up a plaintive "Phil is all over me today. I don't know why… he's angry today". Which is probably the safe play. Would you want to mess with this guy?

I feel like we have to score that bout for Kessel. Phaneuf got the early takedown and landed some shots, but ran out of gas at the end and left himself open. I'm going split decision for Phil, but I'm willing to hear other viewpoints.

By the way, you may be wondering how we got this clip of the Maple Leafs' two most important players coming to within a few seconds of roundhouse kicking each other in the temple. Did some fan film it with their phone and upload it to social media? Is it security cam footage that the hotel didn't dispose of properly? Oh, no, it was uploaded by the official Maple Leafs YouTube account. And then they gave it this title:

The 2011-12 Maple Leafs missed the playoffs for the seventh straight season, in case you were wondering. No idea how that happened, with all that dressing room chemistry.

Epilogue: They eventually made up.

Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you'd like to see included in this column? Email Sean at [email protected] .

Down Goes Brown Grab Bag: Trash Talking, Boring Senators and Cookie Phil published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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