...to show for it.

The hard cap hurts in hockey. If a team does a good job drafting and developing players, they shouldn’t have to lose them outright because they can’t fit them under the cap. I don’t have a lot of ideas on this, but have some mechanism to encourage players to stick with their teams, and for teams to compete instead of…

I grew up in Québec and watched the Expos and played baseball all summer. All my friends did, we’d ride our bike to the diamond and play baseball all day, pickup games with two retired gentlemen who’d choose up sides and get us organized, and also little league, with uniforms and coaches and everything. And it wasn’t…

That’s the thing about restaurant work, during the dead time when you’re waiting for the rush or waiting for patrons to leave at the end of the shift so you can flip the restaurant and go home, you get to stand around with your crew and bitch and moan. Or, you go out to the pub/nightclub after work, and bitch and moan…

Yep. Good memories, cool staff, easy money, nice intro to the waiter gig. I worked at a busy downtown location, right near the two biggest movie houses in town, the two big competing multi-screens, and the shopping and bars, so really busy. We wore black pants and a white dress shirt, apron, leather shoes, so I got…

I started in restaurant work as a busser at Magic Pan, and we used to get tipped out from the waiters we supported, but the way it worked was you got a percentage of their sales, what they actually rang through the Squirrel/Remanco system, I think it was 2 or 1%. This way, we got tipped out on the work we did rather…

The regression from Reagan to W. to Trump is dumbfounding.  I was crestfallen when Reagan was elected, even as a kid.  I knew, I could see it would be bad for the world, that he was an empty suit who was at best a figurehead, a spokesmodel.  I was young and foolish and thought things could/would never be worse.

Don’t feel sorry for me. I don’t have a team anymore

I’ve posted on this before, but Jon Stewart had a rant in his standup comedy special, pre-The Daily Show, where he riffed on the notion that George W. was a good President, and better than Al Gore because he was the kind of guy who was just regular folks, the guy you’d want to have a beer with. “Don’t be like us, be…

It took me a minute there, scrolled down, then back up a couple times.

I used to feel sorry for you guys, refused to countenance these purloined Colts.

I was a subscriber to SI back then, and I vividly remember that article. Bob Irsay had prior been described as a drunk buffoon who’d been swindled into buying the Colts, and a perfectly acceptable reason for John Elway to refuse to play there, but this was much more scathing.

These are the kind of deep thoughts a nine-year-old would have. The thing is though, a child nowadays has something called the internet to research these weighty matters, it’s not like when I was growing up, and our encyclopedia set stopped before it got to Copernicus.

Another interesting aspect of this staff meal question was that, as a front-of-house worker, you were never to be seen eating while working, sneaking some food here and there, for whatever reason, in whatever fashion. It was big trouble if you got caught. The only exception was when the cooks/chefs would introduce a…

We’re experiencing serious comment drift here.

A guy on my hockey team used to work at a burger fast-food place, and says they were robbed twice, guys with guns and everything. So after they’d close the place down and the police would come, staff had to stay and give statements. Both times, the girls gathered in one corner and had a good cry together, while the…

One hotel I worked at, the Chef, normally an ogre of a man, would quality-control the staff meals, come down to the caf and eat a plate himself. He memorably prepared the staff meal one rainy October day, and at least once a week a sous-chef was in charge of the staff meal. They tried to outdo one another on the taste…

So many policies for so many restaurants, I can’t remember them all.

Jimmy Carter —> captain of a nuclear submarine

Try and maintain your calmness about that.