Say what you want about the Theory of Relativity, but the smartest thing Albert Einstein ever did was buying five identical suits. By doing this, the story goes, he never had to worry about what to wear to work ever again, thus freeing up extra brainpower for contemplating the mysteries of the universe. (Of course, this number — five — does leave open the question of what he wore on the two other days of the week. One assumes that he wore something versatile like jeans on the weekend, or just sat around in his underwear.)

This is perhaps why members of advanced races are often depicted in science fiction as wearing identical jumpsuits, usually shiny ones — it’s how they got to be advanced races in the first place. Besides being more utilitarian (a good jumpsuit will serve you well whether you’re changing a car’s transmission or disco dancing in a Parisian nightclub), identical jumpsuits also evoke an advanced, egalitarian society whose members are freed from class boundaries and the fascism of fashion snobbery, much as school uniforms are meant to do today. (The reflectivity of the shiny jumpsuits is possibly meant to ward off the deadly radiation pervasive in a technologically advanced civilization, but probably mostly designed to look futuristic; a friend of the author once suggested that the breakthrough moment leading to this utopian future will inevitably come when someone looks down and exclaims, “Oh my god! Why is my clothing so matte?”)

Convincing everyone to settle on a single outfit is probably beyond the capabilities of our current system of democracy, of course. But for each person to choose one single standard outfit for everyday use would still bring us benefit even though we don’t yet live in a utopia, nor are we yet as advanced a race as we’d hope to be. Indeed it would help precisely because we’re no utopia, and because we’re all too painfully conscious of race. It can help us be more politically correct in a society whose members often go to great length not to describe each other by our more obvious characteristics, even where such omission is absurd, such as in a crime report where news writers gingerly avoid any mention of a suspect’s ethnicity even though the vague description offered instead hardly serves the public interest. Or perhaps you’ve had someone described to you by various descriptors such as “petite”, “black hair”, or “lovely almond-shaped eyes” before eventually asking whether the lady being described was Asian, only to be met with a frown and a grudging admission that this was technically accurate, but you still shouldn’t say it. If everyone simply picks one permanent outfit and goes with it, such matters are largely avoided. Instead of referring to a particular person as “black” (and entering a potential minefield, as the term “African-American” is preferred by many white speakers even when the person being described is of Caribbean heritage or is not an American citizen), you can just say, “the guy who always wears the t-shirt with the Atari symbol on it.” Problem solved.

Moreover, what society loses in egalitarianism if we choose our own individual signature outfits rather than going the identical jumpsuit route, its members gain in the ability to create an iconic look for themselves. Many pop culture icons indeed became iconic through just this means. Most artists, authors, and restaurateurs are mainly known through the work they produce, for instance, but the image of Andy Warhol springs readily to mind in his trademark black turtleneck, and both Mark Twain and Colonel Sanders are known for their white suits and string ties. Interestingly, Twain and Warhol were both known for their unruly white hair, and Twain and Sanders differ mainly in the facial hair they affected. On one hand, it would seem that placing oneself within strict sartorial boundaries is often accompanied by the increased appearance of choosing personal grooming to suit one’s idiosyncrasies. On the other hand, it’s patently obvious that Einstein looked that way because he couldn’t have cared less about how he looked, which is why he bought five identical suits in the first place. It’s ironic that a scientist who so completely disregarded his personal appearance is, not counting Stephen Hawking and Batman, the only scientist most people can readily picture.

But we should count Stephen Hawking, since his wheelchair essentially functions as his signature outfit, a point that will be underscored if he ever trades it in for a robotic exoskeleton. And we should count Batman, and Superman too. Both of them wore the same thing all the time and achieved an iconic appearance that almost certainly aided them in their crimefighting efforts. Superman’s outfit was simply recycled out of his baby blankets, thanks to his frugal Kansan upbringing, but Batman specifically became a creature of the night to terrify criminals, whom he termed a cowardly, suspicious lot. Whether they are or not, he surely saved himself a lot of unnecessary time and effort once word got around Gotham’s criminal underworld that they could save themselves a lot of broken bones by just giving up easily if they saw a guy dressed as a giant bat.

One might think that this is very well and good for Superman and Batman. After all, the operative word is man. Men are happy to wear the same thing day after day. But what about women? Well, what about them? Wonder Woman wore the same bold, primary colours as Superman, for instance. Of course, in her civilian guise as Diana Prince, she wasn’t even a civilian at all, but a member of the military, so she wore the same thing all the time then too. And as an Amazon, a member of a female-dominated society on a Greek island, she’s basically a capital-L Lesbian (or Lesbosian — the name is a matter of contention), so it’s perhaps a little surprising she didn’t simply fight crime in a flannel shirt. So perhaps Wonder Woman isn’t the most typical female example.

Still, the benefits are obvious, and while it might be an attractive idea to most women to make their one and only outfit the ever-versatile little black dress, if you always dress the part, picking a colour scheme of one or two bold hues and perhaps even sporting a custom insignia on your chest, people will surely look upon you or contemplate your potential for superheroism — or supervillainy. That’s surely a greater boost to the self-esteem than the temporary lift gained from whatever new purchase will likely be hanging forgotten in the back of your closet a year from now. Take Matthew Lesko, the guy from the “free money” infomercials with the question marks all over his suit. In a regular suit, he’s basically a bargain-basement Sam Waterston. Slap punctuation all over that suit, though, and it looks like the Riddler just got promoted to the corner office.

Even if you stick with a more diverse wardrobe, picking them to fit a central theme still makes for good personal branding. Jane Mansfield’s most obvious assets were arguably her many racks of pink outfits (although that would be, granted, a poor argument in light of her magnificent bosoms). Laverne Defazio from the situation comedy Laverne and Shirley always wore a large cursive monogram of her first initial on her own bosom, and it’s surely no coincidence she got top billing. Merely picking a general theme for your wardrobe doesn’t afford all the benefits of choosing one trademark outfit, but it’s a decent compromise.

If you do choose the one signature look, don’t worry about people thinking that you’re just too poor or filthy to change your clothing (although if you are, it makes it harder for people to tell when you’re recycling your laundry than if you wear a few different outfits over and over). They’ll just assume, and probably rightly so, that you have a closet full of identical outfits. Richie Rich, for example, wore the same black jacket, white shirt, blue shorts, and red bowtie every day of his life, and no one ever took him for a hobo, unless, of course, he was specifically posing as a hobo in that particular story. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that, like most cartoon millionaires, he affected a dollar-sign motif in his accessories (see also: Scrooge McDuck, Ted “The Million-Dollar Man” DiBiase). You might want to consider incorporating similar symbols of prosperity into your own trademark uniform. For instance, a male who wants to suggest virility can use the Mars symbol (the circle with the erect little arrow pointing jauntily to the upper right), or a man who wants to suggest that he is Michael Jordan can use the Nike swoosh.

You also shouldn’t worry about being stuck with just the one look. There’s nothing to stop you from making a dramatic rebranding of yourself when the time is right to shake things up. The rarity of such a change causes people’s reactions to go from “Is that a new outfit?” to “Wow! New outfit!” Comic book publishers know the publicity value of such a move which is how they can boost newsstand sales by making a media event out of something as simple as putting Superman in a new costume for a while. Just don’t shake things up too often, or the tactic will lose its impact. Also be prepared for harsh reactions from people who liked things they way they were before; you might want to stay away from internet message boards for a while. And be prepared to return to your original look once the publicity stunt has run its course, thus letting people know that all’s right with the world again. A nice benefit of this is that during your time in the new outfit, you can act grossly out of character, and when you return to your classic style, people will just think of the whole thing as a character reboot. This can be enormously useful if there’s anything you’d like to retcon out of your personal history, be it a regrettable one-night stand, drunken tirade to the boss at the company picnic, or child pornography bust.

And finally, the most obvious single benefit of picking one permanent outfit is that it lets you take whatever makes you look best, and lets you run with it. Overweight? Go with black. Too skinny? Vertical stripes. Visibly stupid? A mortarboard cap and graduation gown are the way to go. But whatever you choose, wisely picking a single signature outfit and sticking with it brings a host of benefits, and it doesn’t take an Einstein to realize that.

Let me tell you about the mother of a stubbing I gave my toe. But at least there was a silver lining. I mean that literally. A couple of years ago, I sheared too far to the right while walking through a  doorway and accidentally penalty-kicked the doorframe beside it, splitting the nail of my big toe badly. The worst part was that I couldn’t sleep after that. It wasn’t the pain keeping me awake, but the bedsheet continually snagging the jagged edge. At best, it was a distraction; at worst, it presented the danger of a further tear.

I come from a tradition of self-medicating whose tricks of the trade include Krazy Gluing minor lacerations closed,  and my solution here was similar: I trimmed a small piece of duct tape to the precise dimensions of my toenail, creating a protective patch. I just left this on until the nail grew out, which took most of a summer. Because I did a neat job of it, it simply looked to any casual observer who saw me in sandals as though I’d glammed it up a little by painting that nail with silver polish. And that, readers, is how I became a cyborg.

Technically, that’s true. You don’t need to have a subprocessor implanted in your brain to qualify, or to be able to shoot a laser out of a bionic eye. You don’t even need a Jarvik-7 artificial heart or a carbon-fibre prosthetic leg. If you’ve augmented your body with any technology, you’re technically more human than human, whether you’re wearing false teeth, eyeglasses, or, arguably, even a wristwatch. So, by upgrading my body with the greatest technology of all — duct tape — I became a cyborg, albeit one with a limp.

And I’m one again. While helping unload my girlfriend’s luggage from a taxi two nights ago, I mangled my big toe under the casters of a 60-pound suitcase as a I dragged it to the curb, and not long after ward, she made a tender moment considerably more tender when she accidentally kicked the jagged nail and split it further. (Her somewhat unsympathetic reaction: “Hey, at least you have something to blog about.”)

So, I cleaned up the blood and used my experience to fashion another fake nail. This time, the only duct tape on hand was black, so I’m not just a cyborg — I’m a goth cyborg. If anybody needs me, I’ll just be over here reading Phillip K. Dick novels and listening to old Bauhaus records.

It’s become a leitmotif of this site that the KFC around the corner from my house is possibly the worst-run franchise ever. Why continue to patronize them? Because when you’re playing just one more turn of Civilization IV, and then one turn more, and suddenly the stomach is rumbling, the grocery store is closed, and the cupboards are empty, little choice remains.

This time, while waiting for my order, I noticed a sign that read “Vegetable Chicken Burger.” I’m no vegetarian — I would hardly be at KFC if I were — but I was curious. Is this simply a vegetable burger that tastes like chicken? If so, can they call it a “Vegetable Chicken Burger” if there’s no actual chicken in it? Shouldn’t they be legally required to call it “Vegetable Burger That Tastes Like Chicken”? Or is it just a chicken burger that comes with vegetables on it, as seemed to be indicated by the photo of the golden-coloured breaded patty with the lettuce and tomato perched atop it? If so, how is this any different from KFC’s normal burgers that come with lettuce and tomato?

So I asked the employee behind the counter, “What’s in this ‘Vegetable Chicken Burger’ anyway?” It was the one who looks mentally handicapped and sounds kind of like a honking goose when she talks, so I didn’t expect much.

She turned and craned her head to look at the sign. After a pause, she answered, “Vegetable meat.”

Vegetable meat. This raises more questions than it answers: What cut of the vegetable is that from? Is it white or dark? Is it prime vegetable meat or a lower grade? Are these free-range vegetables or grown in cages? Are they slaughtered humanely or under protest by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Vegetables?

“So, is that soy, or what?” I asked. She shrugged. I wasn’t surprised she didn’t know. I guess I’ll just look it up on the corporate website.

There was a young guy on the subway today with long hair that was obviously meticulously brushed forward to achieve a messy look. I wanted to slap him until it was neat. This isn’t really fair of me, I know. He was really just minding his own business — well, he was spending an inordinate amount of time minding his hair, actually. But his stupid hair probably doesn’t really show what kind of a man he is inside. (Unless he’s completely stuffed with hair, of course.) I imagined a crisis taking place and him proving his mettle by unexpectedly being the first to spring into action, and after that, I felt better disposed toward him. There clearly are more deserving people to hate on the subway than this fine young hero.

Take the guy who was just in front of me as I boarded at Yonge and Bloor, one of the TTC’s busiest stations. As soon as he boarded the train, he simply stopped dead immediately inside the doorway, oblivious to the fact that everyone behind him consequently had to carefully pick their way around him. As he leaned against the doorway, lost in his thoughtlessness, I was tempted to wait until I heard the chime of the doors closing and then blindside him from behind with a hard crosscheck, knocking him sprawling back out on the platform as the doors closed and the train pulled away, with me waving goodbye from the window. This is not a hero. If there were a crisis, he wouldn’t spring into action. He’d remain in his own little bubble of solipsism.

So would the guy I saw the other day, who was sitting in the middle of an otherwise empty three-seat transverse bench as a mother and daughter boarded. He looked up at them, but made no effort to move to one side or the other to allow them to sit together. After a pause, they sat down on either side of him and gamely tried to hold a conversation over him as he nodded back into his stupid reverie, and they switched seats as soon as two adjacent seats opened up. I was hard-pressed not to rouse him by bouncing his head off the wall behind him several times.

Of course, brutally assaulting my fellow passengers would probably be a worse breach of transit etiquette than whatever discourteous acts (or hairstyles) I’d be punishing. As you may know, I take transit etiquette very seriously. Too few people seem to these days, exhibiting a blend of rudeness and ignorance that make our daily travel a travail. So it is with great delight that I discovered the likeminded San Franciscans at Muni Manners, who have dedicated themselves to the Sisyphean task of improving the manners of their fellow travellers. While the site may be inspired by the particular transit frustrations of their hometown, their lessons are universal, and for that, I salute them.

P.S. The same day I saw that third guy, I also saw a tubby bearded guy go walking by outside the stopped subway car in full musketeer regalia — high boots, cape, long-feathered hat. And a big longsword. I was actually on my way back from fencing practice, and if I hadn’t been too busy gawking at him as he suppressed a smirk and the rest of the subway car studiously ignored him, I might have thought to pull a foil out of my bag and brandish it at him from the open doorway, challenging him to a duel. No way could he have passed that up. We’d have parried and lunged up and down the subway platform until transit constables arrived, whereupon we’d have immediately teamed up against our common foe, our naked steel against their collapsible batons and pepper spray.

I found a $20 bill in my pants pocket today, but then I locked myself out of my house and had to break back in through a window. Then I thought I saw Dan Aykroyd on the subway, but it turned out it was just a tall, fat guy. Even steven.

My luck would be evenly split between good and bad if it weren’t for the following, which actually started last week, but my trip today to clean up after last week’s errors was fruitless, since it turned out that no one was there to meet me. So a simple errand will require three separate trips in the end.

My fencing club practices in space provided by no less than three churches around town, two of which are within easy walking distance of my home. We just quit using one for the summer because we can get extra time at one of the other ones, where the gym is bigger. Because I live so conveniently close, I was volunteered to drop off the keys and payment for the last few months during the church’s office hours. That was last month. Last week, I finally got around to going over to do it. They didn’t even realize we’d finished up yet, so no worries about my taking my time.

The nice German-accented older lady in the office took our extra sets of keys and the cheque. Then she gazed intently at the cheque. “This says 10/06/2008,” she said. “We are now just into the seventh month.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” I said. “I’m a couple of weeks late bringing it over.”

“No,” she said. “This is dated for October.” I looked at the cheque. Sure enough, the space allotted for the date was preformatted in the MM/DD/YYYY scheme. Above these letters had been written 10./06/2008 rather than 06/10/2008, making it predated to October 6 rather than June 10.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I said. I didn’t want to blaspheme in a church, and being that I’m Pete, I like expressions that revolve around my well-being. she didn’t want to hold on to the cheque for three months to cash it, so I agreed to have our club president correct the date and initial it and then I’d bring it back. (Neither of us considered fixing the date and forging the initials; we were in a church after all, and I believe that falls under “bearing false witness”.) We briefly debated whether I should keep the keys until I came back; she argued that once I’d returned the keys, I could simply skip out on the payment, while I argued that there was nothing to prevent me from simply skipping town with the payment and the keys, and the church would hardly be better off then. My viewpoint prevailed, and I left the keys, promising to return with the corrected cheque. I did that today, and no one was there, so I’ll have to go back again.

People, can we please get together and settle on a date format so we can avoid similar misunderstandings in the future? This MM/DD/YYYY thing is nonsense, although at least we’re using four digits for the year now, thanks to the Y2K panic. I’m a fan of the ISO 8601 standard, which calls for YYYY-MM-DD. I figured the German lady would be too, since she’s European and the International Organization for Standardization is all metric or whatever, but she’s a proponent of just writing out the name of the month. That does avoid confusion, but assuming we have to go with a strictly numerical format for the sake of the computers, let’s go with YYYY-MM-DD.

It goes from biggest to smallest, just as we write out the time. Sure, we may say things like “a quarter after ten,” but when we write it out, it’s always 10:15, not 15:10. That’s unless we add the seconds too, of course; then it’s 10:15:00. If you’re timing a race or something and want to use tenths, or hundredths, or thousandths of seconds, it works the same way — biggest to smallest.

When you write out the year alone, it works this way too. 2008 — 2 millennia, zero centuries, zero decades, 8 years. Biggest to smallest. Write out the date and time together, and it just makes sense to go from the largest units down to the smallest: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.

It just makes sense. It would eliminate confusion and endless unnecessary trips back and forth on my part because people are getting tripped up by what ought to be a simple matter. For Pete’s sake, can we agree on this?

[00:56] Peter: You do have a flair for unnecessary dramatics, if you will.

[00:57] Susan: That’s how I live my life. Don’t try to change me, baby.

[00:58] Peter: I wouldn’t dream of it. The world needs its drama queens, and you’re better qualified than most. What with the degree in drama. And the royal blood. (You do have royal blood, right?)

[01:00] Susan: Someone way back in my bloodline must have been seduced by some kind of lord. Lords got around more, back in the day

[01:00] Peter: It helps that they were always drunk as lords.

[01:02] Susan: Well, they wouldn’t want their lordships revoked, would they?

[01:06] Peter: Speaking of which, have you ever heard of the 17th century rakehells called the Merry Gang? Drunkest. Lords. Ever.

[01:10] Peter: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article588410.ece

[01:10] Peter: From one of Rochester’s poems:

‘I rise at eleven, I dine about two,
I get drunk before seven, and the next thing I do,
I send for my whore, when for fear of a clap,
I spend in her hand, and spew in her lap;
There we quarrel and scold till I fall fast asleep’ -
…
‘I storm and I roar, and I fall in a rage,
And missing my whore, I bugger my page:
Then, crop-sick, all morning, I rail at my men,
And in bed I lie yawning till eleven again.’

[01:11] Peter: He claimed to have been continually drunk for five straight years. That’s the gold standard.

[01:11] Susan: Wow. I want to see the man’s liver.

[01:12] Peter: “Surrounded by doctors, clerics, his mother, his wife and children, he died in the summer of 1680, aged 33. In 1979, after rumours that manuscripts were buried in his family vault, his coffin was opened. Inside a lead box was a casket that had contained his heart and entrails, ensuring that he could not rise from the dead.” So, find that box.

[01:12] Peter: At 34, I’ve officially outlived not only John Belushi and Chris Farley, but also the Earl of Rochester.

[01:14] Susan: I’d only be impressed about you out-living him if you’d also been drunk on a five year binge once

[01:15] Peter: Well, I spent that long at university. That would have been my best chance. I did get drunk enough to bugger a page once, though. Unfortunately it was Steven Page from the Barenaked Ladies.

[01:18] Susan: I hardly think that counts. Pages had unfortunate haircuts and fetched things. Page has a fantastic baritone and a lyrical soul.

[01:19] Peter: And an asshole like the Chicago Loop, after I finished with him.

[01:20] Susan: I’m judging myself for laughing at that.

[01:22] Peter: I fucked him so hard it affected his lyrical content for three albums.

[01:22] Susan: So, Everything to Everyone through The Barenaked Ladies Are Men?

[01:23] Peter: It was like from Stunt through to Everything to Everyone. They had to do the holiday album just as a palate cleanser.

[01:24] Susan: Hey, I loved Maroon!

[01:24] Peter: That album is completely about ass-blasting.

[01:24] Peter: So you must love that too.

[01:25] Peter: It’s pretty damned sick of him to write a song called “Baby Seat” about sodomy.

[01:25] Peter: What the hell, Steven Page?

[01:27] Susan: GodDAMNit, now I’m going to end up listening to that album and scrutinizing it for references to sodomy. Thanks a lot.

[01:29] Peter: It would have made a hell of a master’s thesis.

Susan is the author of the blog Unnecessary Dramatics.

All right, listen up, you. I know you’re arguably the greatest Toronto Maple Leaf in history, if not on the ice, then at least on paper. You’re first all-time in goals and points scored in the long history of the franchise, after all. You’re a model of consistency, good for at least 70 points a season. And the way you scored your 500th career goal as a shorthanded overtime game-winner to complete a hat trick? Simply legendary. And that’s to say nothing of the stats I’ve personally racked up with you in the EA series of NHL video games.

No doubt about it, you’re a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame. Sure, you may not have won a Stanley Cup, but that really can’t be held against you when it’s time for the voting. For one thing, it’s a team award, not an individual one, and some of those years, you hardly had a team around you. There’s not a lot you can do with Jonas Hoglund and Garry Valk on your wing, after all. Plus, it’s a lot harder to win the Cup in a 30-team NHL with league-enforced parity. It’s not like the days of the Original Six, when only three of those teams were any good anyway. There’s like 10 times the competition now. You’ve never really had a fair shot at hoisting the Cup.

Except, you have. You had a chance to win it this past season, in fact. We had a plan. The Leafs were sadly out of contention, for the third year in a row, and you were coming to the end of your contract. As team captain, you’d grudgingly accept a trade to the Detroit Red Wings at the deadline for the good of the organization in return for a good prospect or two and a late first-round draft pick. They wanted you. And you’d have liked it there. There’s lots of fellow Swedes. And you’d look pretty good with the winged wheel on your chest. Then, when you became an unrestricted free agent, we’d have resigned you to a much-improved Leafs lineup, and you could’ve run out the clock on your playing days here and retired a Leaf, just as you always said you wanted to.

And it totally would have worked too. The Red Wings won the Cup last season. You could have lived out your dream of being the first European captain to win the Stanley Cup. Well, vicariously of course. Nicklas Lidstrom now holds that honour. But you’re the longest-serving European captain and his old national teammate — with Peter Forsberg, you guys are the so-called three crowns of Swedish hockey. I bet he’d have handed you the Cup to be the second to hoist it. Maybe he’d have even let you hoist it first, like Joe Sakic did when he handed it to Ray Bourque. Remember that, when Bourque, a career Boston Bruin, was traded to the Colorado Avalanche to finally win his one and only Cup? They didn’t resent that back in Beantown. They were so happy for him they threw him his very own Stanley Cup parade, in fact. I guarantee we’d have done that for you too. We love parades in Toronto. We start planning them every time we win a playoff round, or even two games in a row.

But you hemmed and you hawed or a while before eventually deciding not to bite. You said you’d never believed in the concept of a rental player. Believe it or not, but they do exist. Lots of people don’t believe in the concept of evolution either, but that doesn’t stop it from being a scientific certainty. You yourself are concrete proof of a missing link between Homo sapiens and the Red Skull from the Captain America series of comics, for instance. (Seriously, if they make another movie, go out for the part. It wouldn’t exactly take a Rick Baker makeup job.)

We grudgingly accepted your decision not to grudgingly make a hard decision. You said you wanted to retire a Maple Leaf and that was that. Again, though, we’d have been happy to resign you. We love bringing back old Leafs for nostalgia’s sake. Look at Doug Gilmour. He got a career-ending knee injury on his very first shift back, but we’re just happy he got to retire a Leaf. We just brought back Curtis Joseph too. Hell, septuagenarian Cliff Fletcher is back too. You may remember him as the general manager who originally brought you here in a trade for fan-favorite Wendel Clark (who also came back later, of course.) And just look at how many times we’ve brought back Yanic Perreault. We squandered Brendan Bell and a second-rounder to bring Perreault back for all of 17 games in his third stint with the team. Don’t worry about Bell, though. We’ll probably bring him back when he’s 35, and overpay to do it.

But now you’ve backed off this line about wanting to retire a Leaf. In a way, it’s understandable. Fletcher seemed visibly furious by his failure to trade you and the rest of the so-called Muskoka Five at the deadline, and he seems dead-set on busting up the gang now. He’s already bought out Darcy Tucker, and I don’t know what he’s planning to do about Bryan McCabe’s refusal to waive his no-movement clause, but he’s obviously bent on running him out of town too. Brendan Shanahan’s a free agent now; maybe he’ll sign him specifically to sleep with McCabe’s wife. Or maybe he’ll just lock himself in a room and yell at him like a crazy old man until McCabe gets sick of it.

Now you’ve made noises about wanting to test the free-agent market, so Fletcher made arrangements with the Montreal Canadiens to have the rights to discuss a contract with you. Montreal seemed like somewhere you might want to go. The team’s a contender. The city is lovely. But you dithered endlessly about that until the deadline ran out. By that time, we’d obviously gotten attached to the idea of receiving Mikhail Grabovski in compensation. We got rid of a similar asset in Kyle Wellwood, after all. And now we had to trade more assets to get Grabovski instead of getting him in return for losing you, which we now will probably do anyway. You wouldn’t sign in Montreal. You wouldn’t sign anywhere. Vancouver offered you a two-year, $20-million-dollar contract to come play with those nice Swedish twins they’ve got, which would have made you the highest-paid player in the league. Don’t you know it’s every man’s dream to play with Swedish twins? But you just sent out a letter saying thanks, but no thanks to all your suitors and that you were flattered by the attention but wouldn’t be making a decision about your foreseeable future in, well, in the foreseeable future.

I swear, the last time I saw a Scandinavian so racked by indecision, it was in the play Hamlet. I wouldn’t be surprised to see you hold aloft the skull of Börje Salming and launch into an existential soliloquy. I guess Börje would be a little surprised to see this, though, since he’s not dead.

To sign, or not to sign? There’s really no question. It’s not like you’re slowing down. You’re still as good as you ever were. You can clearly still handle the grind, so if you’re signing somewhere, it ought to be before the season starts. You can’t take half the year off like Teemu Selanne and Scott Neidermayer did last year; that would contradict your statements about the importance of being part of a team from the beginning, right from training camp. And you’d better sign soon before everybody’s spent their free-agent money.

But where to sign? If you were all about winning, you’d have surely signed in some place like Detroit or Montreal. And if you were all about the money, you’d have gone to Vancouver. Hell, if you were all about the money, you could defect to the new KHL and rake in a stupidly high payday from Russian oil billionaires and mobsters, like Jaromir Jagr just did by accepting two years of exile to Siberia for $35 million. You’re clearly not about getting richer, though. At least, you shouldn’t be at this point. According to The Hockey News, you’re the third highest career salary earner of all time among active players. (Number one? That greedy Jagr.) Plus, taciturn Scandinavian that you are, you’ve got prudential money management written all over you. You’re not stuffing all your earnings up your nose and into slot machines like, say, Darren McCarty. So what are you all about anyway? Do you even know? Some people think you like taking early summer vacations and playing golf most of all. Say it ain’t so, Mats. If you pop up in EA’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 instead of NHL 09, I guess I’ll know for sure.

You’ve given us many years of faithful service, and we thank you for that. (We’ve thanked you by making you the third highest career salary earner of all time among active players, in fact.) But after all this dithering and dicking around, we Toronto fans are starting to lose our patience with you. And if you leave now and we get nothing for it, we sure are going to be pissed. You’ll get booed you off the ice. Well, not literally — that would take a lot of booing to generate that amount of sheer sonic energy, and the Air Canada Centre is actually notoriously quiet. but you know what I mean.

So, here’s the plan. Yeah, I know I don’t work for Maple Leafs Sports Entertainment, even though I toss around the words “we” and “us” a lot. On the other hand, my girlfriend is going to teachers’ college, and since the majority owner of MLSE is the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, when she gets out, she’ll kind of be your boss in a way. And that makes me your boss too, since I’m the boss of her.

So here’s the plan: You sign with us now for a one-year, league-minimum deal. (Hear me out on this.) The players’ union won’t like this, but screw ‘em. We’re only three years out of a labour lockout, and salaries are already ballooning out of control again. (Even newly signed Leaf Jeff Finger is amazed he got $3.5 million a year. I’ve been making the joke that he’s only worth a fifth as much as Tony Hand, but the only people who really appreciate that one are fans of the British Elite League, and there aren’t that many of them.)

You’ll sign with us, but you won’t play for us. We’re actually trying to stink up the joint this season, and your consistently excellent play will hurt us more than it helps. Instead, we’ll trade you to the team of your choice for a high return, something on the order of a couple of good prospects and a first-round draft pick; at your salary, they’ll be getting a bargain. I suggest you pick Detroit. Not only are they poised to repeat as champions, but Detroit isn’t even that far away from your house here in Toronto, yet they play in the Western Conference where you won’t have to bump into us that often, which you might find awkward. You play the season with them and win your Cup, and we’ll try to come in last and draft John Tavares to replace you as our future franchise player. Then, next season, you can sign with us again. Play the whole season or play just one shift, and then retire as one of the most beloved Maple Leafs of all time. Then, and here’s where you get your payoff, we’ll sign you to a management deal, which won’t count against the salary cap. I know you’ll want to move home to Sweden when your playing days are done, so let’s nominally sign you up as a Swedish scout, say, for two years at $10 million? MLSE has money to burn, after all. You won’t even need to do any scouting if you don’t feel like it. You can just sit in your pile of money and admire your Stanley Cup ring.

Sound like a deal? What do you say?

Oh, speaking of my old GW buddies, your favorite defunct internet humourist Jay Pinkerton sent this to me today. “I don’t know whether you should feel honored or insulted that I thought of you when I saw this,” he said. “Probably insulted, just to be safe.”

I can’t be that insulted. I wondered today if Luna broke up because they realized that Yo La Tengo made them redundant. Then I wondered if anyone else would even get that joke or if it was even a joke at all.

Somewhere in my move to WordPress, my blogroll went missing in action. Someday, some way, I’ll get it back up and running, and yes, you’ll be on it. Every one of you. But I’ll especially make a point of including two former editors of my old university humour rag, Neil Pasricha and Matt Blair, who are both currently engaged in oddly similar projects.

Being a positive fellow with a disposition for stopping to smell the roses, Neil is celebrating life’s many small pleasures with a blog called 1000 Awesome Things. Where will stopping to smell the roses rank? Stay tuned and find out.

Matt, on the other hand, plays the raging yin to Neil’s sober yang by railing against life’s many cruel blows with his series A Thousand Things That Piss Me Off, which is hosted at Shplog. I have a sneaking suspicion that a recent post of mine may have inspired numbers 255 and 256. How so? Tune in and find out!

Yeah, I know you can’t “tune in” to a blog. But clicking is just so much less dramatic. Still, click away. Oh, and while you’re doing that and I’m doing a GW Has-Been roundup, Elan Mastai and Conrad Schickedanz popped up over at Cracked today with 11 Celebrity-Inspired Fads We’d Like to Forget, so click on that too.

Found, via James Mirtle, an ESPN story about Tampa Bay Lightning defenceman Dan Boyle by … Dan Boyle. (At least, that’s what the byline says. At the bottom, it indicates that Scott Burnside wrote it.) To crib from my comment at Mirtle’s site, I like the potential for self-promotion this offers. From the article:

Boyle, a top puck-moving defenseman who helped the Lightning to a Stanley Cup championship in 2004, signed a six-year, $40 million deal that includes a no-trade clause before last February’s trade deadline.

Good. But it could have been better:

Boyle, widely considered the best player in the NHL, is perhaps the handsomest man ever to lace up a pair of skates, not to mention a perennial contender for both the Norris trophy and the Pulitzer prize. Most outside observers agree that the popular defenceman’s point production, journalistic excellence, and telegenic good looks merit a hefty contract extension from the Lightning, a weekly ESPN TV program with Bill Simmons, and a personal introduction to Tampa resident Brooke Hogan.

And then Boyle leans back in his chair and says, “Now we wait.”

I swiped the last sentence there from Susan, who really needs to get back to writing her own blog.