Random Sports Thoughts:
• After going 13 games without a win, the Junior A Crushers have started a win streak of their own. So far, it’s just one game, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.
It’ll be interesting to see if they can build on that, but with tough games looming in the next six days - Summerside, Truro and Yarmouth in that order - that’ll be no small task. That said, if a team wants to start making serious noise, they’ve got to start beating opponents that on paper are better than you are. Maybe not all of them, just a couple of them. Or even one of them.
• “You know what?” I say to the wife, while on vacation and watching Judge Judy, as Charlie the budgie was voicing his usual early-afternoon squawks from his perch on the coffee table.
He does that, you know – Charlie just starts up for no apparent reason, usually around 12:30 p.m., and if anybody sitting near him doesn’t like the ear-bleeding noise, well, that’s really too bad, isn’t it?
If he had a little hammer, he’d pick it up with his strong beak and start smashing things with it, just for fun. We like that about him.
“If Judge Judy has presided over the O.J. Simpson trial,” I yell over whatever Charlie is saying, “he never would have been acquitted. She doesn’t put up with any nonsense in her courtroom.”
It’s true.
Judge Judy would have squashed the shenanigans of the defence lawyers and maintained control over the proceedings. Quite likely, Simpson would to this day be rotting in prison, a convicted double-murdering thug, as opposed to being an acquitted double-murdering thug.
• While the World Series was boring, featuring two teams almost nobody could cheer for (Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers), the best team won. The Red Sox were the class of Major League Baseball this year and didn’t slow down in the playoffs, dispatching the Dodgers in five games and doing it with relative ease. It’s not exactly easy, they just made it look that way.
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Non-Sports Thought of the Week
• It was just like old times at Westville council meeting: minor bickering between councillors, upset residents verbally jousting with the council, me thinking about the Browns firing another head coach and how that will affect our football season.
Now, it wasn’t nearly as bad as what you might have seen 15 years ago at a Westville council meeting, an era when, among other things, a couple of council members messed up the policing agreement with the Town of New Glasgow because they just had to act out in a public setting on a regular basis.
Coun. Lynn MacDonald (I’ve liked her forever) exchanged words with Coun. Lennie White (I don’t really know the guy) and she also had emotional words with a Westville resident when the group was discussing the idea of letting Pioneer Coal do some coal exploratory drilling in Westville.
But cooler heads prevailed and at least Mayor Roger MacKay was willing to loudly bang the gavel a couple of times, taking control of the mild unpleasantness and bringing everyone in line – and making MacDonald almost jump out of her chair in surprise – instead of letting the free-for-all continue unabated. Roger likes that gavel so much, the base is starting to splinter, but sometimes you need to bring the gavel down hard.
Kevin Adshade is writer with The News. His column appears each week.
