A Lover's Guide To The NHL Playoffs

The Stanley Cup Playoffs: they apparently started some time ago. I was not apprised of this, but then no one would have thought to do that because I have been very clear with the people in my life that I do not need to be told about the latest developments in the National Hockey League. It’s often among the first things I say to people I meet, e.g. “I’m Dave and you should absolutely not feel compelled to keep me up to speed on the goings-on in hockey, it’s fine.” And yet, as is the custom at the Deadcast, we do like to dedicate at least one installment to the NHL playoffs—not along the traditional Hater’s Guide lines, but something like its opposite, so that Drew and I could figure out which teams are worth knowing/caring about in the weeks(?) of playoffs still ahead. Our own Lauren Theisen shook off a hangover and gutted out her own personal flu game in this go-round, getting us up on which of the teams that are left are worth our time and affection. Apparently the Carolina Hurricanes are very charming!

Non-hockey topics were discussed during the podcast, which was good because all I contributed to the first part of it was some dismissive criticism of the truck stop T-shirt aesthetics of the Columbus Blue Jackets’ logo. There was a brief going-over of the NFL Draft—I declined to take a victory lap over correctly predicting that the Giants would draft Daniel Fucking Jones because I am still upset about having been right about it—and a predictably queasy assessment of Tyreek Hill’s latest acts of extreme ugliness and the strange and hysterical discourse that has kicked up around them.

The Funbag, for once, came as a relief. There we discussed the proper usage of scallions in a conversation that rapidly veered towards the existential, some possible officiating changes in the NFL that quickly became about scoring changes, and the question of whether Donald Trump can swim. At the risk of spoiling anything, I think it’s his own demented bespoke concept of decorum that keeps him from doing it more than any lack of capacity, but Drew turned up some disturbing images that suggest Trump may be even more profoundly out of his element on the beach than we’d suspected. What exactly are we looking at here?

And so what began with hockey ended with a honking bigot wearing socks but not shoes on a beach. In retrospect, this was always where it was going.

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