I am thinking Montreal is 50-50 on this one with as good a chance as the Pens of coming out with the victory. The thing is that this team is really impossible to predict as there are few if any playoff parallels to draw.

Normally for a bubble team to make a deep playoff run knocking off top seeds a few of the following are required:

- A hot last 30 games of the season
- A big greasy lineup that can wear people out on the boards
- Some sort of superstar forward or D-man who leads the way

Well Montreal was the last placed team to make the playoffs, squeaking in on the last day of play, they are a short-statured and there really is no superstar (Crosby, Ovechkin, Lidstrom, Brodeur etc…) just a team of grinders all pushing in the same direction that bounce back like a punching bag as they are pummelled by bigger and more talented teams.

So really there is no saying.

However if the Gods have a sense of justice, then the Habs should advance tonight with another nervy 1-goal win that drives me to drink and scream at my TV and finally stampede out onto the roads to take in that most sweetest of Montreal moments – the savouring of victory.

¡Ojala!

Lone week should be sleeping week but strange and unwelcome insomnia is causing bed fear - i.e. the strange compulsion to do anything but go to the room of sleeping and the bed. I also have TV ennui which is the feeling that TV is a welcome way to empty brain of useful thinking. TV lurks on the wall like bed in the room - sort of alluring but kind of dirty too (I leave choice of apt metaphor to reader of blog).

Consequently I am surfing about looking at music blogs and listening to Myspace streaming music from my buddy Nicolas's band Long Voyage based in Leipzig Germany. Highly recommended lo-fi folk:

http://www.myspace.com/longvoyageband

I think being in front of a computer all day at work makes one a bit obsessive. In many ways I want to get rid of this laptop and go to bed or do something more apropos for a bachelor on a Friday night.

Actually I probably don't.

It is now 12:20 AM.

I believe it was James Bond who said that the world is not enough. But it's a good place to start.

Today marks the official globalisation of Friend of all the World with the digital release of 'Up these Branches' on Itunes, Emusic, Napster, Rhapsody and about 36 or so other download sites available across the globe.

So for those awaiting the release with baited breath, it be done.

Today marks the official web-launch of an album I've been working on for the last year and a half or so. The project started in the fall of 2008 with a core of tunes that came together over the year I lost my Dad and a few other from various places.

Slowly, over the last 2 years of tracking in my home-studio and mixing at a small studio here in Montreal, the 16 songs got whittled down to 9 tunes that sort of meshed together and conveyed the theme I was going for.

Apart from launching the new album, this blog also launches Friend of all the World, my new project and one which will hopefully be fruitful and offer a rich canvas upon which to put down a lot of ideas that have been circulating through my head on 4-track tapes, hand-held recorders, scraps of paper and an increasingly full external hard-drive.

I've decided to launch this album as a totally new project and not under the Robert Cole moniker for a few reasons. First and foremost was the goal of giving these songs some space, to let them breathe on their own without needing to adhere to me and my changing whims. I've always felt that a song was there before you came by it and will continue long after you've moved on or lost interest. Having a lone side-project creates a world where these and future songs can roam free and pursue their own courses.

My good friend Nicolas Huart has set up a web-site for the band at: www.friendofalltheworld.com where you can listen to 3-sample tracks and find a link to buy a copy of the full album on CD. This is the hardcover release so to speak. In a few weeks the album will be available on Itunes and just about any other (pay) digital download service you can name. So if, like me, you tend more to the digital download for reasons of reducing wastage and saving the poor planet then I would advise waiting a few weeks to get your digital copy. Buyers of the CD, however, get to appreciate the magnificent album artwork put together by my good friend and long-time design advisor Tim Andrews of Slide Designs.

If you still need convincing, check out the first (largely positive) review of the album More news on the project and an official off-line album launch to follow in the near future.

Quick edit on this one... I think I have been too discouraging of people buying the actual CD. It is really quite a nice little package and available for only $15 from my website. Also, for people in the Montreal area, I have 100 copies that I am selling so if you are local and want a copy, drop me a line.

Oh how cruely have I been disabused of this belief.

What started as a fever at week's beginning has ended as a fever at week's close, bookending a particularly tiring week of work up in Labrador City (look it up on a map) and Sept-Îles.

Now I sit and stew on the couch, unable to eat and sapped of my vital force in the hour leading up to Canada's (hopefully triumphant) final match against those hated Americans.

Woe!

New galleries up in the pictures section (only 2 months late...)

Woke up last night with a sweating sickness and thus have been convalescing on the couch all day taking the opportunity to catch up on a little winter Olympics. I think I've watched 4 or 5 hours of curling today which is the first time I've ever dedicated more than 20 minutes to watching the sport.

It sort of lures you in with its delicate intricacies - plans within plans, stones within stones. Plus Vic Rauter’s voice is strangely soothing.

Watching curling makes you feel Canadian and proud of it - in a way that watching olympic hockey is currently not doing.

Speaking of hockey, I spent the weekend down in the eastern townships on frozen Lake Memphramagog participating in the World Outdoor Hockey Championships. We finished the tourney with a .500 record 2-2-1 on the 3-days of hockey, so respectable but not enough to contend for les grande honores. Awesome tournament though and definitely something I could see becoming an annual event.

Tomorrow I’m off to Labrador for a few days then back to catch the tail end of the games. New galleries and a big announcement coming in the next few weeks so keep eyes on this space.

The Bob Gainey era officially ends in Montreal, not with a crash but with a whimper. A well-scripted press conference and bye bye Bob, welcome unimposing NHL veteran administrator with no significant successes to his name. History will record that Gainey retired from his post, but anyone who can read between the lines (as Gainey clearly did) knew that his time was up. Montreal had turned on him.

When Gainey was first hired 6 years ago it was the first time since Sam Pollock that the Habs had had a GM worthy of the name, someone who did not pander to the press or live in fear of their barbs, a man to be respected and looked up to by the players.

Over his tenure Bob brought respectability and calm to a position that had for too long been the domain of fools (or Houles as the case may be). But this is Montreal and this is what we demand: out with the old, in with the new. So now we get some second-rate mortician to take the reigns for a year or two before he also walks the plank into the pit of ineffectual Montreal GM’s.

And then the fools will return - led no-doubt by some Pierre McGuire-esque moron who caters to the changeable whims of 40,000 failed QMHL coaches turned demagogues who ply their trade in the newspapers and call-in shows of ‘la nation’ playing arm-chair GM for the brainless hordes who gather to their soap-boxes like flies to a bug-zapper.

Maybe, 20-years hence, when we run our next ‘future Patrick Roy’ out of town and begin our 7th rebuilding, someone intelligent will look back at yesterday’s press conference as a watershed moment when this city rose up and chose mediocrity. And maybe history will remember Bob as Mua'dib, a tragic hero who saw the future - the fanatics taking the helm of the team and steering it to Armageddon - but ultimately could do nothing to stop it.

Have a good retirement Bob.

Given the frequency of recent blogs, this may be the last for the next year or so.

Things have been full pace busy woth work, music, travelling for work and new baby. Christmas is proving a nice opportunity to take the foot of the pedal for a second and just be still for a few days.

New Year '10 offers another super fast paced year. At some point in the early portion of said year I should finally be putting out the fruits of the last year and a half of labour in the form of a 9-song LP which has now been mixed and mastered and is just waiting me pondering over the manner and form of release of the thing. Being a hobbyist, it seems both self-indulgent, not to mention somewhat brash to have a CD release party. I am sort of keen just to get it out there as a foundational piece on which to maybe build a little outlet for release of future material. Anyway, things to consider.

2010 will also witness the continuing growth of the little being who inhabits the front room of our house and fills my car with baby-maintenance equipment. Not much to say about the fatherhood experience just yet. It is still sort of new in the realm of the unknown and unknowable. On the whole she is a fine and noble beast who celebrates her 6 month birthday today, a fairly calm and observant little being - though I am told that with the increased mobility 2010 will bring come a whole set of novel and interesting challenges.

Anyways, to all a happy 2010 and on my side perhaps one or two blogs if and when I get around to it.

On the occasion of the Habs home-opener against the young gun Colorado Avalanche, I believe it is high time I look into the crystal ball and tempt the fates of prognostication on the new look Habs.

We all know the background (new coach, owner, 11 new players, bla bla bla) which I will not go into here at any length. We have had 5 road games to see the new look Has in action. The press is back in fury mode - Le Nouveau Départ and such phrases emblazoned in bold lettering atop a picture of a few tough and hungry looking new players.

The new habs, the new start.

Of course the only reason why it is a new start is that the first start did not go so well (team is currently on the heels of 3 straight loses including a 7-1 shellacking by the lowly Vancouver Canucks). The defense is looking porous as it always does when Andre Markov is absent. Goal is looking at best average and the offense is showing little of the aplomb needed to make up for deficiencies at the other 2 positions.

So where do I see these Habs? What is the potential? I should start by noting that, as it concerns the Habs, I am generally an unabashed optimist. I survived the Rejean Houle era by believing that Juha Lind and Sergei Zholtok (may God rest his soul) would lead us to the promised land. I believed that Pat Jablonski and Ron Tugnutt could rekindle the Roy magic. I believed that Ron Hainsey was to be the next coming of Larry Robinson.

I believed and I waited and believed and waited as draft pick after draft pick fizzled out (where are you Alexander Buturlin?); as goalie after goalie filled the pipes and watched their adversaries fill the net behind them and rotated out to let an another anonymous puffy haired dude take the reins; as coach after coach sat down before the promising lights and professed his boyhood dream fulfilled, the land of plenty glinting in his eyes only to be holding the same press conference a year and a half later at a sports bar in St-Eustache looking wired and haggard and trying to figure out why and where it all went wrong (then go on to a long and successful coaching stint somewhere beyond the hungry glare of the Montreal lights).

Yes, I am an optimist. In every pre-season prediction throughout this dark age we currently inhabit I had the Habs in the playoffs and throwing all they had into the pursuit for the coveted goblet.

But every year they bowed out. And every year it was painful.

- 4 game sweeps
- 3rd period collapses carrying over to series defeats
- Dominant Decembers fizzling in the February foibles and early April apologies

But now the slate is wiped clean, out with the old, in with the new. Out with the losers with 2 cups between 23 guys. In with the new proven winners!

So let us look at this new team as it stands today on October 15th:

Goal

Carey Price is leading a life in reverse. He was the future before he had a chance to be the present and he is in danger of quickly becoming the past if he can't seize the all too brief moment. He has the weight of the city on his shoulders. He sits in his locker room with the steely eyed Jacques Plante glaring down at him:

hin my day we spend da summer working in a quarry, we take frozen puck to da 'ead and get up to ask 'er to give us more

How do you match that? I'll give you a hint, it does not involve your nose...

Price has showed flashes of potential and flashes of utter inability. Montreal is the wrong place for this kid. Montreal plans to crush him.

Jaroslav Halak I believe could be a legitimate starter, not a hall of famer, but a solid goalie. He will never get the chance to groove his game here. Like a good turtle-neck wearing foot-solider, he will play his role and never realise his potential until he gets traded somewhere where there is no resident saviour-in-training.

Defense

Paul Mara is a depth defenseman, Hal Gill is a depth defenseman, Shawn Belle is a rookie defenseman with unknown potential, Josh Gorges is a top 4 defenseman with gusts to a top 2 owing to sheer will-power. The czeching line of Hamrlik and Spacek are a great second pairing. Are you seeing a pattern here? Without Markov, the Habs have no clear 1st pairing and a below average defense.

Offense

The first line is a good first line. I would say it is a top 20 first line in the NHL. Not bad, not great, capable of getting the job done and occasionally able to wow. But they are small, they get thrown around like rag-dolls and I really don't see how they can stand up to 82 games of pounding like that. The Second line has one of my sentimental favourites at centre in Thomas Plekanecs, a man who epitomises everything that is not the euro habs of 2008-2009 - discrete, humble, hard-working. But he has no supporting cast.

Without a young gun stepping into the lime-light, the second line is destined to suck. And I really don't see who will do this. Paccioretty is simply too young and too green. Latendresse is a bust (you read it here first) and Kostitsyn the elder is an even bigger bust (my God how we blew the 2003 draft, thinking about it gives me stomach ulcers). The third line is a third line, nothing more. The fourth line is a fourth line with limited to no scoring potential.

The long and the short? This team is not going to make the playoffs. In fact, the best result I could possibly hope for is that they lose a lot of games, dump salary at the trade deadline and finally get some proper draft picks into the system.

And yet despite this hope and realisation, I will watch most of the 82 games this year. I will cheer and bemoan and wail and gnash teeth and I will hope - hope beyond hope - that this is the year, tthat the long decade and a half of our discontent is over, that these are the guys to lead us to the promised land.

And then I will watch the Montreal winter grey their skins and the Montreal bar-sluts/succubi erode their competitive flame and when they are blurry-eyed and stuporous, I will watch the Montreal fans clamber high atop their band-wagon, rein-up and whip their media hoarde frothing at the mouth to jostle their way in for the kill.

I remember being a kid on the west island. When the summer ended I was happy for the coming of winter and when the winter ended, summer was a welcome change. The seasons came and went at the perfect pace. Now, winter drags on and on taking a heavy toll in the process.

So where did the love go?

I think it has something to do with losing the connection to the outside; which is no more than a slushy or slippery hell between metro and bus or home and grocery store. Gone are the simple joys of encasing yourself in a snowsuit and heading out into the bright white playground.

And yet the joys of winter are out there, out beyond in the island somewhere in the trees or above the tree line as in this movie I've been watching:

http://www.nfb.ca/film/cry_of_the_wild/

Side note: I just discovered that the NFB puts all its movies online full length for all to watch.

Awesome...

Anyways, this all links into urban living: the joys, the turmoil. The sustainability gurus speak of density, and I love walking out the door to get what I want.

And yet the city stifles and the clean air feels nice, but what the hell do you do for a living? I am homo urbansis, I have no skills that would be of any use in a small town.

But hell, I’d love to build and igloo and raise wolves…

Life drifts along at its usual sort of pace I suppose. Summer has ended (officially as of yesterday). Training camp started 2 weeks ago (I suppose I need to formulate my pre-season rant soon enough) and work has resumed a more active pace after a subdued summer.

Off to Halifax this weekend for some un-merited R&R with my two ladies and then back to a fairly busy fall split between bachelor parties, weddings and the odd meal.

On the musical front, I have found someone who is currently at work mixing the album. We will likely be doing some re-tracking of drums next week - first time tracking stuff in a real studio, so should be interesting - then finishing the mixing by thanksgiving. Then it is a matter of figuring out exactly what to do with the stuff once mixed and mastered.

I have some ideas, many ideas in fact - plans within plans - but care not to divulge all now.

Keep checking this space. I might post something new in 3 months.

They say that when you have kids - especially little defenceless ones - you develop instincts of vigilance to protect them from harm. Sadly, such is apparently not the case with me. I learned this morning waking up to Isabelle's voice and the acrid smell of smoke, which I had taken during an earlier bathroom wake-up for the odorous remnants of a fiery chicken marinade Isabelle had made last night, but was in fact the smell of a building on fire.

Now, in my defence, this odour is becoming only too familiar in our neighbourhood as 5 buildings have burnt in the last 2.5 years within 500 metres of our place (3 of them razed to the ground). This new one however was a little close for comfort as the flashing red lights that turned our living room into a make-shift disco attested. It was in fact a building a scant 4 houses up just on the corner of the alley that was in the process of burning through 4 stories.

I think I have seen only one other house fire in my life as a kid on the way back from a ski trip to Vermont and one car on fire in Lebanon NY a few years back. The memories of those events are still somewhat etched in my mind. Seeing a house that you walk by everyday engulfed in flames is a feeling, however, that is likely to make a more indelible mark.

Anyways, it was put out by around 6 AM. Realising that we would most likely not be evacuated (unlike the neighbouring building where 15 people were taken out) we surrendered to the profound need for sleep.

The beast, for her part, slept through the whole thing.

The reason for this nausea was an old fashioned piss-up at the wedding of my good friends Tim Haltigin and Melissa Trottier at which, though more reasonable than usual, I nonetheless tied one on. Now when you are a member of a parental unit charged with the care of an extremely small baby, sleep is sought as a precious commodity; snatched from the arms of babes so to speak. What this means for me presently is that when you go out till 1 AM drinking, you will pay many times over over the next few days as you struggle to regain some of the sleep while managing hangover and various life responsibilities (work, and sundry other chores and duties of life).

I am now at the bottom of the sleep chasm, trying to roll the rock of hangover up the hill of duty. The jungle is dense, and there are naked, painted babies in the branches shooting blow-darts. Some of the babies have dug pits to trap and waylay. Other babies have trained tigers to chase and terrify.

It is not entirely a good place to be.

Ultimately, I would assume, it forces you to willingly accept that the day of the great piss-up are numbered.

Isabelle too fought the good fight last night - though in a responsible modern parental fashion involving a ritual known as pumping and dumping. Nonetheless as the holder of the milk, she is more frequently set upon by tigers in the forest of the night. I have now relieved her, but she will sleep a scant 2 hours before the beast again summons her.

So as I rock the beast, I thought I would make a quick update on the old blog. I am struggling to keep this thing up to date as I struggle to maintain other aspects of my personal life, but the battling through the jungle obliges, and best laid plans are quickly sabotaged by traumatic bowel movements...

Most recently, we hosted Jacky and her boyfriend Guillaume for 10 days of: sell the boyfriend on the merits of Canada. On the whole it went pretty well as we plied him with new world wines and took him to the Canadian north for some canoeing - during which time we deployed, for the first time in my life, the tarp sail and created a sailing catamaran (loads of fun, but very difficult with a strong side wind).

Pics of all this have been duly uploaded in the gallery section.

Wedding last night was extremely impressive. My buddy Tim got the announcer from the Montreal Canadiens to do the head table introductions and I helped him put it together mixing the Cold Play loop underneath and adding a little reverb to get it as close as possible to the players introductions at the Bell Centre - clip below gives and example from the 07-08 playoffs (game 1 against Boston at which I was in attendance and was probably one of the most incredible starts to a hockey game I have ever witnessed).

I'll try to upload the clip from the wedding on to the site pending bride and groom's permission.

In other news, I am finally hunkering down this August to put the finishing touches on a recording project I have been working on.

What the final form will look like, and how/when it will be released are still up in the air, but I am keen to get this thing off my back as I have been working almost a year on it on and off. Anyways, keep your eye on this space for more details as August progresses into September.

Another early morning rising with the beast. This has been somewhat the recipe of late. Isabelle takes much of the middle of the night shift - feeding the beast and such - and when she finally awakens in the morning, I awaken to molify her, change her, manipulate her small arms and sing her bad hair-rock from the 70's and early 80's.

The morning wake-up is generally fairly painful as the beast is active and I am usually keen on sleeping and not being pawed out of bed by an over-tired wife-friend.

~

I think people look at newborns and think: what unbridled joy awaits me when I embark on this! Certainly, our newborn is cute and gurgly (see pics uploaded yesterday in picture section) and everybody who lays eyes on her finds her to be the perfect calm little treasure, the ideal baby - which she normlly is during the day. However, at night, an altogether different creature emerges which I call the beast.

This beast can scream for nearly 2 hours straight at a go. This beast had me walking bleary eyed through the park by hobos and drunk teenagers pushing a pram and stopping at park benches to reason with the demon that had possessed the supposedly tranquil perfect baby.

Reflecting on this, I think that having a newborn is like having a really hot bitchy girlfriend. Everyone looks at you and thinks: what a lucky bastard! But behind closed doors she claws your face and won't sleep with you and generally makes your life a living hell.

This is the true reality of having a newborn methinks.

Then again, she is back to sleeping now and making cute little noises. Aaah what a small angel...

I will try to get some 1st week pictures up today. Check the pics section.