u/upanddownforpar

very very frightening

one positive. the guys building across the street have stopped banging hammers.

"The question that needs to be asked at some point but rarely gets asked when there are either network or company mandates or the whims and desires of a superpowered producer or creator in this case of Ryan Murphy is, 'But why are we making this?' ... [You] can't do it solely because you want to tick the box of having that character represented or you want to try to push into television or have complimentary whatever. ... instead, it has been a bunch of years of really like back-assward kind of development of let's raid the library for potential IP exploitation, sorry, exploration."

Hi all - Local to Langley.

Our rescue dog is super sweet, but just can't handle being left home along for more than an hour or so. He isn't destructive, he just stresses out way too much and we don't like doing that to him.

So even for a date night we're paying $30 to $50 for a dog sitter to hang with him.

Surely there are other people in a similar situation, or you are forced to leave them home alone even though you know they are suffering.

So I'm looking to collect info from people that might want to form a dog sitting swap. For example, if you're looking to go out for a few hours or half a day, you drop your dog at our place to hang out with us and our dog, and vice versa.

Meet and greets first of course.

I'll be setting up a google spread sheet and a whatsapp group for people to connect with others.

And if this takes off I'll be doing things like setting up insurance, creating a points system for making sure people are supporting, not just taking.

If this is of interest to you or you know someone in the lower mainland that might be interested, shoot me a DM and I'll share the email address to reach out to get on the list.

Thanks!

For years, Vancouver Canucks fans got through the darkest days of the "Jet Black" Jim Benning era on one comforting thought: at least he gave us the Alien. No matter how many times Loui Eriksson missed an empty net, or how deeply the Oliver Ekman-Larsson buyout ate into the salary cap, fans could look at Elias Pettersson and say, "Well, Jim drafted a superstar."

But in Vancouver, even the draft wins come with a shelf life.

November 8, 2023: The Day the Revisionist History Started It started when Trevor Linden went on local radio to reveal what the tinfoil-hat segment of Canucks Twitter had suspected for years. According to Linden, Jim Benning did not actually want Pettersson. He wanted Cody Glass. Linden painted a picture of a scouting staff practically staging an intervention to stop their GM from making a franchise-altering mistake.

If Benning had just stayed quiet in retirement, the universe might have kept its balance. Pettersson was hovering near the top of the NHL scoring race at the time, still playing like an un-cursed, point-per-game savior.

But Benning could not help himself. Breaking his post-firing silence, he immediately reached out to a media contact to fire back:

"We were always going to draft Pettersson. The whole group liked Petey."

With those two sentences, he effectively doomed his final great legacy piece.

The Retroactive "Six-by-Six" Curse Benning does not possess the Midas touch. Instead, he carries a mystical force that retroactively turns any hockey player he claims ownership of into an overpaid, heavily criticized asset with a modified no-trade clause.

The moment Benning claimed credit for the 2017 draft pick, the cosmic gears shifted.

First came the physical decline. Almost immediately after the November media feud, Pettersson’s elite edge-work vanished. It was as if Benning’s love for heavy, meat-and-potatoes hockey suddenly weighed down Pettersson's skates. The agile wizard who used to dance around defensemen was replaced by a player who looked like he was constantly fighting the ice.

Then came the contract. In March 2024, Pettersson signed an eight-year, $92.8 million extension. Even though a new management group negotiated the deal, it felt like a classic Benning special: maximum term, a massive cap hit, and immediate fan panic.

By the time the next two seasons rolled around, the transformation was complete. The dynamic 100-point superstar had withered into a struggling, defensive-minded 50-point center. Pettersson had been colonized by the Benning era.

A Fitting End to the Legend of Jet Black Canucks fans love a good scapegoat, and there is comfort in knowing that everything can eventually be blamed on the old front office.

Did Pettersson develop knee tendonitis? Blame Benning’s bad karma. Did he lose his offensive confidence? That is just the spiritual weight of Jim's draft-day scouting reports catching up to him.

By trying to defend his legacy, Benning managed to break the last great player he left behind. It is a level of managerial destruction most executives can only dream of pulling off from a golf course in retirement.

Footnote: The Quinn Hughes Caveat

Of course, defenders of the old regime will point to the 2018 draft and yell, "But what about Quinn Hughes?"

Admittedly, Hughes was a home run. He won a Norris Trophy and became the captain. But you cannot outrun the Benning gravity well forever. By December 2025, with the franchise bottoming out, Hughes reportedly made it clear he would not sign an extension. This forced the Canucks to ship him off to the Minnesota Wild in a desperate blockbuster trade just to trigger another rebuild.

Even when Jim's draft picks turn out to be historically great, they still end up packing their bags.

You know when something big in life has happened and every morning for the next while when you wake up your groggy brain has to remember and process it again?

That's what the last couple mornings have been like with my routine disrupted.

Typically I wake up, half groggy, put one of my earbuds in and depending on when I wake up either fire up the 6:00 a.m. podcast, or turn the live feed on my phone. Then go walk the dog for 45 minutes while I listen to the Halbro show, and the rest of it while I start my work day.

And I won't even get into my lunch breaks without Jamie and Thomas.

The best way I can describe it is it feels a bit like that phantom limb experience. When your body still thinks that arm is there and the muscles contract to try to reach for something as a reflex.

I know this might all seem melodramatic but it was just an analogy that I felt like sharing.

Just paid $180 for 50mg (one dose and a quarter dose). Seemed excessive?

You can compound these options

$10M for every extra inch of height you either want to gain, or lose.

$10M for every 10 lbs of weight you want off, never to gain it back

$10M to never lose your hair or regrow it if you were already bald(ing)

$5M for 1 more year of life added to the end of your life.

$5M for an extra year of life for anyone else of your choosing (sick or old relative for example)

$5M for each extra inch of length of your unit (or your partners)

$5M for the eye color of your choice

$25M to bring back to life a deceased person for 10 years