Pro Puzzle 1

It’s Monday afternoon, you just ate lunch and you’re feeling lethargic. You need something to boost your spirits and I’ve got just the thing: Ice Age.

Sorry, I’m not talking about having a Rogers Arena viewing party of those amazingly good animated movies with Manny, Sid and Diego (and Scrat of course), I’m referring to Ice Age: The Official Magazine of the Vancouver Canucks.

You never know what you’ll find on the free table in the Canucks employee lunchroom and I recently stumbled upon a stack of Ice Age magazines from 1995. I flipped a few open and was mesmerized, an issue from November 3, 1995, featuring Corey Hirsch, was especially mesmerizing. I’d scan the entire issue for you if I had time, but I’ve got a lot of Facebooking things to do, so here’s a Pro Puzzle crossword to brighten your day.

First person to post a link to their finished puzzle wins Fort Nucks Bragging Rights (FNBR), which can be redeemed at the end of the summer for pride.

The 20 finalists

A few weeks ago I asked you, our lovely fans, to submit what you thought the top moments of the season were for the Vancouver Canucks. There were some exceptional responses and in the end the Top 20 Moments (Part 1 I Part 2) were chosen from the list and rearranged counting down from 20 to 1.

And now we’ve got 20 finalists for a Canucks team-signed flag and they are…

Karen Friesen, Ann-Kathrin Thiele, Bridget Womelduff, Muhammad Faateh Malik, Zachary Wyder, Matt Hastings, Kaeleigh Evans, Tinder Brar, Jeffrey Blayne Tommy, Lori Mustvedt-Garson, David Lobakgo, Lee Renée Siu, Allison Wright, Tina Berkenpas, Andrew Schroeder, Greg Dion, Karl Hohensee, Krystal Soong, Emma Tyler and Sal Sagev.

I’ll come clean right now and admit that Sal Sagev doesn’t exist. No one suggested Andrew Ebbett scoring the game-winner in his first game back from a broken collarbone as a moment, and I thought it was significant, so Sal Sagev was born. It’s Las Vegas backwards.

So the finalists each had a 1 in 19 chance of winning, you can thank Sal for that.

I wanted to determine a winner in the most creative way possible and my first thought was to buy 20 turtles, one linked to each contestant, and have a turtle race. I was told to tone it down a bit, so I thought having a wind-up toy race would be pretty cool. I went to two toy stores this morning and couldn’t find anything, so the toy race was cancelled.

On to Plan C: oh, right, I didn’t have a Plan C. So my officemate Mike and I set up a bracket with the 20 finalists (we included Sal Sagev to keep it even) and we spun quarters to determine the winner. Here’s the breakdown of how things went, the final round was Lori vs. Tinder vs. Emma in a three quarter battle royale and Emma Tyler (yes, spun by me) outlasted Lori and Tinder. (Thanks, I realize I have the worst writing ever…)

Thanks for everyone who submitted entries and congrats to Emma!

Hi everybody, Alex Burrows here. I’m in Helsinki, Finland for the World Championships and I thought it might be fun to keep a blog during my time here.

My writing resume will double with this blog, the only other time I’ve done something like this was when I wrote a blog for Canucks.com, but that was a long time ago. Disco might have still been popular.

Anyways, welcome to Finland, as I’m sure you noticed, it’s cold here. I packed for the occasion thankfully and am now adjusted to the weather. What I’m struggling to adjust to is the 10 hour time difference from here to Vancouver. We landed in Helsinki on Wednesday after a few days spent practicing and bonding in Zurich, so we haven’t been here too long. I’m hoping to feel more at home Friday.

It’s Thursday night for me and we play our first game tomorrow against Zdeno Chara and Team Slovakia. I can’t tell you how excited I am to put a Team Canada jersey on and hit the ice. Dream come true.

I practiced with Eberle and Nugent-Hopkins today, so I think we’ll play together tomorrow. Should be interesting. Lots of nickname possibilities for us ha ha. I’m focused on playing a solid 2-way game with a lot of the forecheck, and providing net presence. I’m also hoping to play a big role on the PK.

It’s odd coming together with NHL rivals like this, but there’s no hard feelings or grudges, we’re all here to win Gold for Canada. One guy I’ll get to know well is Marc-Édouard Vlasic, the only other player from Quebec. We’re roommates.

That’s about all I’ve got right now, hope to have you cheering on Team Canada tomorrow!

Have a good rest of your day. Bedtime for me now.

Burr

*Photo credit to Jeff Vinnick, who is at the World Championships shooting for the IIHF.

LUUUUUUU

The base of the Roger Neilson statue outside Rogers Arena is taking on a life of its own. A few weeks ago three framed photos of Rick Rypien, Luc Bourdon and Pavol Demitra were placed below Roger’s epic towel powerness, and this morning the three posters above were found.

It may be the summer and Roberto Luongo’s future may be in question, but it’s clear true Canucks fans support him no matter what.

Top 20 moments: the Great Ones

The bosses just realized I haven’t done a lick of work since Vancouver’s season ended, so they told me to do something. Challenge accepted.

To kickoff every off-season I make a list of the top moments of the year, then the Canucks.com team debates them and ranks them, before we post them. I’ve never reached out to you, our super dee duper fans, before, so I’d like to give that a try.

What were the Top 20 Moments of the Canucks 2011-12 season? And I’m not talking about this goal or that save, I want the Great Ones. Leave your moment as a comment below and if I use it, you’ll be entered into a draw for a Canucks team signed flag, a biiiiig one.

All good? Any questions? No? Good, it’s time for my afternoon nap it’s time to get some more work done.

…?

So…what do I blog about on the blog now that I don’t have any blogs to blog on the blog?

We could talk about hockey, but nahhhhh, basketball playoffs anyone? Maybe later. Baseball…how about them Expos?!? The NFL draft was last weekend…zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

I’m not sure what to say, so I won’t say anything at all. We did just add commenting to the Fort Nucks though, that’s exciting - like finding out Elvis had a twin exciting. Feel free to now leave me comments, I’m more than open to suggestions on what to blog about.

Annnnnnnnd comment!

Oh and does this confused cartoon guy ever look like a young Gary Busey or what!

Thank you fans!

There’s not much to say right now, it’s still too fresh, but we’ll start with a nice hearty thank you for your unparallelled support all season.

Moko the Canucks fan

If you haven’t checked out ThisIsWhatWeLiveFor.com yet, you are truly missing out. It’s the biggest, bestest, baddest collection of Vancouver Canucks fan media around, and without it, we may have never heard from Moko, the African Grey, who is a HUGE Canucks fan.

Don’t forget to tag your media with #TIWWLF to have it included at ThisIsWhatWeLiveFor.com.

Volleyballin’

I received an interesting email from a Canucks fan named Erin yesterday, she’s trying hard to convince her non-hockey fan of a roommate to cheer for the Vancouver Canucks and she had a couple of questions.

One query in particular caught my attention and the answer may be part of the reason the Canucks are clawing their way back into the Western Conference Quarter-Final.

From Erin: Yesterday Kevin Bieksa tweeted, “Good re-group day today for the boys! Lots of team bonding….Got these guys right where we want them!!” Do you know what they would do on their day off? Obviously Booth and Rome ate breakfast together, but do you know what anyone else did? My roommate thought they should go to Disney Land or the beach.

Disneyland wasn’t in the plans, but time at the beach certainly was.

Canucks head coach Alain Vigneault gave his team this past Monday off to clear their heads and the players took him up on that.

Hockey, and the most epic comeback in franchise history, were not the focus; Roberto Luongo and Alex Burrows rented bikes and made their way through Venice Beach, Mason Raymond and Kevin Bieksa did some shopping, and a group of Canucks, 10 to be exact, made their way down to the beach to play an intense game of volleyball.

I wasn’t there, neither was photographer Jeff Vinnick, so there are no photos of the guys kicking up sand, but according to Keith Ballard, it was quite the show.

The guys split up into two teams of five and played with only one rule: underhand serves only – Ballard joked the rules was put in place because of his lethal overhand serve. Turns out Dan Hamhuis can hang up his skates anytime because he’s basically a professional volleyball player, although he did later admit to having a court at his home in Smithers, BC.

Ballard said the guys bonded and had a lot of laughs, especially at the different approaches to volleyball from the North Americans compared to the Swedish players. When a ball came flying over the net, Ballard and others reacted by diving into the sand to bump it up, while the Swedes, when faced with the same dilemma, kicked a foot out to save the ball.

Interesting.

This, of course, has nothing to do with anything, other than it’s good to know the Canucks didn’t spent the days between Games 3 and 4 moping in their rooms. They moved on, bonded, and it certainly showed Wednesday as Vancouver rallied for a 3-1 win to stay alive.

No word on if a volleyball game is scheduled prior to Game 5, Kits beach may not be ready for all the underhand madness.