Since I was unable to spend the morning hours updating Wiki pages, I took in an extra-alarm fire on the 40-something hundred block of W. Who Cares Ave.  In this case, they say a woman who was squatting in an abandoned 3-story house had to jump from the top to escape a blaze that not only destroyed the building, but those on either side of it.  After a walk-around to snap whatever there was to snap, I ran into my news-photographer buddy in the back alley.  “Watch your step!”, he says.  With used needles everywhere, it was like spotting a rattlesnake.  I froze, wondering aloud: ‘what the hell are we doing here?’  Nobody needed to say: ‘taking pictures you won’t sell of a burning, abandoned drug house that nobody cares about.’  It just was.

The kidding around is pretty much over.  National Hockey League rosters are going to get diced-up like a salami in the coming weeks as teams look to settle into the second half.  Fun stuff.  It’s the time of year when assholes like myself make wild, unsubstantiated claims and predictions about trades and cuts and panic buttons (very much like the last installment of senseless blather in this space where I offer no choice but to send Carcillo away).  Not surprising that while I think he’s nothing more than a common goon, Carcillo’s been getting support from several avenues.  Coach Q, TV-man Eddie O and various, random followers of the team with zero credentials have all touted Car Bomb’s contribution to the organization.  They claim he’s great in the locker room and that the skill-players know that he will have their back when the shit goes down.  He also has a radio show on WGN.  Awesome.  I still say now that he’s been suspended nearly 10 times in his NHL career, his usefulness is limited.  I think he used up his short-leash.  Next stop is a cage.  With that, I’ll shut it about Carcillo.  I’m even boring myself.

Moving on to bigger and better ridiculousness, the Hawks will be looking to use up the rest of the cap space they have as we head into the All-Star break.  All 5 million of it.  So, while I might be excited to see these young new guys get off on the right foot, I can only assume there are a few fellas that don’t share my appreciation for a Jimmy Hayes or a Andrew Shaw.  Michael Frolik is one.  Marcus Kruger and Sami Lepisto, two more.  Proof?  What proof?  I don’t need proof or proper sources to talk like an idiot.  I smell it.  Something big is about to go down, and with a shitload of luck, it’ll involve the Calgary Flames.  The Flames are old, they’ve lost their last 3, they are 6 points clear of the playoffs and they’re out of money because of Jerome Iginla.  Since 2+2=5, maybe Iginla should be a Blackhawk?  I’ve suggested far stupider.

The Hawks got in late last night after swallowing a bitter pill in Philly.  Most of the team had the morning skate off in order to rest for tonight’s game against the Avs.

A recovering M Kruger getting a little one-on-one time

Ray Emery, Sami Lepisto, big John Scott and Steve Montador were also on hand

A handful of Avs chose European-style football in the hallway over the morning skate, with minimal success.  Notice the bean stuck in the mechanicals overhead

Putting an edge on Gabriel Landeskog’s skates

Why do you want that beer so bad?  “Cause he’s thirsty, dummy.”  -Little Enos Burdette

Oh, you missed this one, did you?  Here’s the long version:  Daniel Carcillo sucks at hockey and he played last night.

His “boarding” major cost 2 goals and hopefully 5 games.  Tom Gilbert’s injury status is unclear.  I think it’s safe to say, for about the 50th time, that this little experiment is over.  It was a dumb fucking idea to begin with, but I gave Bowman the benefit, as he seems smart.  That’s ova!  Eat the remainder of the $775,000 that this dude signed for and call it day.  Carcillo is way too risky at this point, with zero upside.  He has 2 goals and nine assists in 20-something games.  I don’t even care enough to look it up.  He also has two suspensions this year, and 5 in the last 3 years.  Hell, he missed the first two games of his Blackhawk career serving time from an incident in last season’s playoffs!

Little else needs to be said here.  As of this moment, this guy is ban from league play until the NHL can get a consult with some lawyers and maybe a psychiatrist.  Any less than 4 games is silly, but with the NHL knowing that Carcillo would have to sit after injuring himself anyway, I can see the league dropping a token message of 10 games.  It sounds like outrageous punishment, but he’s obviously a repeat-offender and injured anyway.  I say, jack it up.  Keep the suspensions coming.

Below is about how much hockey D Carcillo should be seeing over the next few weeks.

The team and factory are on the Maranello side of its border with Fiorano.  Ferrari’s private test track is in Fiorano, and is cleverly named Fiorano Circuit, or Pista di Fiorano.  There’s your ballgame.  Forget the lovely Ferrari museum or the bus ride around the factory campus.  You visit Maranello hoping to catch a glimpse of the Scuderia shaking down F1 cars.  There are no bleachers and there’s no viewing vista.  You climb a fence and sit in a tree…with the 50 other nutters that have been there since 8am.  It’s magnifico.

90 minutes northwest of Maranello puts us back in Milan.  20 minutes north of Milan, is Monza.  The Autodromo Nazionale Monza is a 85 year-old grand prix circuit built in the middle of a giant park, twice the size of Central Park.  Monza is, by far, the oldest venue on the current F1 schedule, and Ferrari’s home race.  While F1 continues its trend toward new, GP-specific super-circuits, the old track cut through the trees in the Villa Reale di Monza remains a fan-favorite.  Though she may find it challenging to admit, I think even Sue was able to recognize that the kidding around was pretty much over as Fernando Alonso came through the Ascari Chicane on his way to the grid to start the Italian GP.  It was as if Oprah just instructed her audience to look under their seats for the keys to their door prize, only the tearful screaming was coming from grown men.  The place went bat-shit crazy.  For good measure, Alonso yanked a rossa rabbit out of his ass at the start to take the lead into turn 1, as if to say: ‘Mike Anzaldi, you came all the way here from the States to see me race…here is my gift to you.’  Thanks man.  I’ll take mild cardiac-arrest in exchange for watching a single-seat Ferrari take the lead at Monza any time.

Alsonso heading through Ascari.

Felipe Massa.

Jensen Button in his sick whip, the McLaren MP4-26.

World Champ Sebastian Vettel under the old, banked oval.

World Championship winning Ferraris at Galleria Ferrari, Maranello.

New Maseratis awaiting delivery.

Testing a 458 Italia at Fiorano.

You got your Michelangelo Buonarroti, your Galileo Galilei, Botticelli, Brunelleschi, Machiavelli, Gucci.  Lot’s of cool names ending in “I”.  Hell, da Vinci started painting the Mona Lisa 500 years ago in Florence.  Plus, you have this oddly famous Cupid mime tickling the tourists.

Part of the above image has been obscured so as to protect the identity of this handbag shopper.

Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II.

I don’t speak the language, but the message here was clear.  The tall one in the short skirt thought the short one in the short skirt was being a bitch, period.

Prada appears to be making clothes for faceless white people.

Seeing that mainstream media is so heavily celebrating men who lead with their penises, I choose to recognize Italy’s Prime Minster, the Honorable Silvio Berlusconi.  This fuckin’ guy.  Now, I’m typically a big fan of all things Italian.  In fact, I’ve been happy to overlook a lot of really offensive happenings in Italy over the years just because it’s Italy.  The decades of political jackassery, the soccer match-fixing fiasco, the Catholic church.  Don’t even get me started on the 1984 Ferrari Testarossa.  But, Berlusconi takes the cannoli.  This guy was raging at sex parties and inviting hookers to go on jet rides around Europe.  He’s accused of bribery, tax fraud, hookering and general political corruption.  One of the hookers was 17, wink-wink, nod-nod.  Talk about style.  He’s like the honey badger of head’s of state.  “Berlusconi don’t care.  Berlusconi takes what he wants.”

Now that you have Italy on the brain, I’m going to hammer you with vacation snaps that in no way support anything I’ve written to this point.  That’s right.  Vacation snaps.  More than that, this is going to be a multi-part series of random things I pointed my camera at while vacationing 150 miles east of the south of France.  I would have never bothered, but I just read that the Italian Riviera/Liguria was hammered by rain and flooding before Halloween, causing death and destruction in the very places Sue and I returned to 10 years after being married.  How did I miss this?  Perhaps I need to go deeper into the interweb than NHL.com.  Anyway, Genova took it on the chin, as did the Cinque Terre, particularly Monterosso and Vernazza (two northern-most villages we visited in September).  If you’ve been, word.  If not, listen to what everyone keeps telling you about their experience, and go.  Well, maybe not now, but soon.

I’m as happy to share these as I was to snap them.  Today, its images from the coast.  Three more parts will follow: Milan, Florence and the Italian Grand Prix…duh.

A view from above Vernazza.

Vernazza, now drenched, but drying.

Santa Margarita (above and below).

Portofino.

But, hey-hey, it’s the off-season, so they suck a little less.  Today, the Ricketts-s’ss introduced that smart kid from Boston as the new Grand Poobah of the Chicago Cubs.  You know the Rickettses, right?  No, not the skin rash- which actually turns out to be ‘shingles.’  Rickets is way worse.  It involves bone pain.  No good there.  These Ricketts (I’m struggling the plural Ricketts) are the one-percenters who came up with TD Ameritrade, and then used 90% of their one-billion dollar worth to buy the Chicago Cubs.  They seem like nice people, though I don’t know why I say that.  It’s become hip to hate people who have a billion dollars, so I figure they must be on some sort of shit-list.  Maybe if you’re willing to throw money at a crappy-old baseball team in an attempt to bring a little summertime joy to the people, you should get a waiver excluding you from the list of asshole people who earn money.  There are loads of wealthy business-owners out there who employ most of the country to hate on, so leave the Rickettsers alone.  They’re giving back to the people.  Last season, unfortunately, most of what they gave were headaches and indigestion.  So there’s that.  But, hey-hey, it’s all rainbows now.  The 100-year nightmare is just about over now that they’ve hired Theo Epstein.  For over 100 years, nobody has been able to crack the code.  No formula has worked.  So many humans have been lost in this war, it’s unthinkable.  It’s a streak so vicious and cruel, it even ruined the life of a guy who just wants to wear some headphones and watch baseball.  A curse that’s that indiscriminate is dangerous business.  Just showing up at that godforsaken ball park could land you a life sentence, as it has Steve Bartman.  So, whatever voodoo the Jewish genius has up his sleeve better be potent.  This isn’t the 2002 Boston Red Sox he’s inheriting.  This Cubs team sucks it, badly.  But hey-hey, someone needs to be responsible for operations here.  Might as well be this guy.  For what it’s worth, the Cubs seem pretty excited about their new hire.  So much so that they had to limit attendance at the press conference to only those who had the tolerance to cover the full season this year.  So, while the bar mitzvah unfolded inside the United Club at Wrigley, the curse of the billy-goat proved it not only has longevity, but a sense of humor outside.  Yes, blame the billy-goat curse for the timely appearance of this dog-walking, Boston Red Sox fan who had the entire city to use as a Terrier-toliet, but chose the property on the north-east corner of Clark and Addison to have the hound take a dump.

Totally appropriate.

The National Hockey League is back in session, and the first week of orientation is already over.  What have we learned so far?  Well, Boston is still on vacation, Sid Crosby is still dizzy and Columbus still blows.  The Pens, Caps and Flyers are still good, while Vancouver and Detroit can still go suck it.  Which brings us to today.  The Chicago Blackhawks are back in the United Center tonight, and they’ve brought a wild card with them.

Dan Carcillo will see his first shift as a Blackhawk after serving a two-game suspension he earned in last season’s playoffs as a member of the Flyers.  Something about x-rated twittering and less-than-sporting behavior toward a ref.  So what, right?  Who hasn’t tweeted about sex and told a ref to go fuck himself?  Can he score goals?  Well, no, not really.  He had 4 goals and 2 assists last season.  Err.  Okay.  Oh, and he was a -14 with 127 penalty minutes.  Well then.

In other news, Viktor Stalberg was skating.  He’s good at hockey.  He’s been injured, and should be back soon, if not tonight.

Tonight’s opponent…all the way from Atlanta, the Winnipeg Manitoba Jets, deux.  The first Winnipeg Jets team is now the Phoenix Coyotes.  Which only goes to prove that in professional sports, nothing needs to make a damn bit of sense to be a good idea.  The old Winnipeg Jets were sold and moved out-of-town because of financial difficulties.  What exactly has changed in Winnipeg over the last 15 years for the better is unclear, but smart people are on the case, no doubt.

The new owners of the Jets, Part 2, are also the owners of the no-longer Manitoba Moose.  The Moose are out.  No more Moose.  The Moose are now the IceCaps, and now from St Johns, Newfoundland and Labrador.  All sounds pretty confusing to me, especially the part about the dogs.  But apparently, if you say St Johns, Newfoundland and Labrador, someone knows what the hell you’re talking about.

What’s it all mean?  It means Big Buff is in the hizz-ouse!  Yep, he’s out of jail following a drunken, late-night boating mission on a lovely August evening in Minnesota.  Brush that one off, Buff.  If you’re not drinking while on your boat, you’re just being lazy.  You were doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.

I can’t spell Buflin the way it’s supposed to be spelled, so Big Buff it is.  Big Buff is back at the UC for the first time since he scored 11 playoff goals as a Hawk and eventual Stanley Cup champion.  I happen to catch Buff sneaking a peek at the latest Stanley Cup banner that hangs from the rafters of the Hawks home rink.  We liked you, dude.  It’s just business.

Oh, hey, Forest Park is getting a shout-out tonight.  Young Tim Stapleton of the Jets was born 8 miles due west down Madison St before moving to Green Bay to play junior hockey.  Good call there.  Yeah, Fenwick is great and all, but they’re not churning out NHLers like the Green Bay Gamblers!