The Barrister 

God help me for bothering to do this today. Pretty sure it's that asshole Dan Sterlace's fault, but whatever. I'm in too deep now. 

Today, unless you're a Sabres fan living under a rock that doesn't allow for decent wifi, you know there was a press conference with Ted Black and Darcy Regier. Awesome! I seem to remember they didn't have one of those last year! I bet those pros over at the Buffalo News were so excited and put on their nicest Burger King pants for the occasion. I bet they even decided not to be their usual turd burgling selves and act like adults for once. 

Or not. 

Oh mannnnnnnn, was this a terrible shit show. Everyone walked away from this looking like a terrible human being - Darcy, Mike Harrington, Jerry Sullivan, Paul Hamilton (though to be fair he waddled away looking like a walrus with terrible grammar, as per usual), Ted Black, some asshole from Channel 2 named Scott Brown and one or two guys named John, one whom I can only assume was Jon Vogl and the other who I learned was John Wawrow. Of course, the key players of Rusty Tromboning were to be expected, but fuck. The dipshittery was flying from every direction. Pretty sure I've interviewed inmates on Rikers facing murder charges evince more of a commitment to civility than I saw on display.

Oh, and they also talked about the terrible hockey team we inexplicably love. Good times.

What's the solution? Oh, I'm going to FJM this motherfucker. It's the only way we get right again.

HERE WE GOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

The Barrister

I don’t think my liver was really ready for that delightful mess of a game.

Defensive dominance? A special teams touchdown? Thrilling, last-minute interceptions? A 50/50 split of running and passing plays? Apologist buying round after round of preemptive victory shots, chased down by Lagunitas IPAs?

So. Much. Win.

As a new dad, and a Bills fan, I haven’t gotten many days or nights like that recently, and I’m not entirely sure I could handle it if one of my teams actually started to get good for once. I know the team is bad, and we’ll get to that, but fuck what a fun night. 

Which isn’t to say it wasn’t ugly.  After all, winning ugly – very ugly, mostly – appears to be the best we can reasonably expect from this enigma of a squad.  But, after putting together one of their most complete games of the year in Foxboro this past week, only to fall short when it mattered, the Bills took an early lead at home and cherished it like the rare commodity that it is. They ran the ball often relative to their track record, relied on their best player to get them the points they needed – albeit via field goals – and made sure not to disappoint a home crowd itching to get that primetime monkey off its back.

It honestly shouldn’t have worked, seeing as they’re a garbage team coached by a garbage Chan and owned by a garbage taint, but it’s not like the Universe doesn’t owe us a game like that every once in a while.  And even with the playoffs a supremely unlikely scenario for these Bills, a win is a win is a boy this team is not very good please god where is hockey?

Screw it.... On to the milquetoast takes!

The Grouch (guest contributor) 

One of the most unique attributes of the American culture, or any culture, really, is the way in which that culture deals with its most basic problems. Think about death for a second, and the many ways in which different places in the world handle that issue. The predominant American method, on the other hand, is a stridently Anglo-fied rendition which includes a whole mess of things from grief, to fundamental Christian religion, to economics. There are, as it goes, surely better means available to us.

This is the usual derivative, trash of a piece on the failings of, *sigh*, us as a people, but so it goes. At the more finite levels, our failings rear their ugly head in all manner of pithy domestic issues. Put broadly, it is, essentially, this: we are not particularly good at sorting out the many messes that entail any problem, and certainly no good at handling foresight.

My favorite phrase for this is that we are hopelessly addicted to building fire stations after the fire.