Real Quick

• It's been a busy week and that's made blogging tough. A thousand apologies.
• Next week's going to be busy at until Thursday but I will try to get some Winter Classic and 2007 pick's up. I've been thinking those up big time.
• Christmas was good. I got good stuff and the stuff I gave others went over well. Smashingly well.
• Of particular interest, I got Led Zeppelin The Song Remains the Same on DVD, The Onion's Our Dumb World atlas, Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson by Jann Wenner and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein.
• I just polished of Eduardo Galleano's Soccer in Sun and Shadow and have dug into The Shock Doctrine, and JESUS H. CHRISTMAS is that thing a fucking humdinger. Naomi Klein had me 7 pages in and after 48 I am fucking shattered. I've known that we've been through the looking glass for a while now but the true extent is beyond our wildest imaginings. A full report will follow when I've finished it and put myself back together.
• Uraquayan author Eduardo Galleano's Soccer in Sun and Shadow was a treat. Beautiful prose vignettes about the world's game in all of it's glory (and squalor) that explode with poetic grace, potency and passion- passion for justice, fairness, beauty, and the (purity of the) game itself. In a bit of serendipity Galleano even gets quoted in the preface to The Shock Doctrine.
• With one of my numerous gift cards I picked up Led Zeppelin's third album on CD and now have every Zeppelin release on CD. Hot shit! Every damn studio album (including Coda), The Song Remains the Same soundtrack, The BBC Sessions and How The West Was Won. I've had most of that stuff on vinyl and wanted to get the CD's judiciously and as cheaply as possible, and now it is DONE.*
• I bought myself a vintage CCM replica Sabres jersey, the classic blue away jersey. I've earned it. What a beautiful fucking piece of apparel. I am beside myself.
• Tonight is the first game of the home and home series that culminates in the Winter Classic. Let's go Sabres!

* You throw in that Led Zeppelin Live DVD and The Song Remains the Same DVD and it is done. DONE.