TRH PLAYOFF PREVIEW PARTY: MIDWESTERN HOSPITALITY
We here at The Royal Half are an equal-opportunity blog. So when several Chicago Blackhawks fans took umbrage with One Girl, One Puck's and Battle of California's recent previews of the Los Angeles Kings Western Conference Final opponent… we listened. Presenting, without commentary, a completely sane and non-reactionary counterpoint to recent LA Kings Bloggers positions on the Chicago Blackhawks. Take it away, Second City!
Los Angeles: Where Everything Is Terrible
by Andrew Cieslak, Andrew Burner & Kelly Reardon
Photoshops by Monocle Man
Los Angeles, we’ve heard your cries. One of your blogs felt compelled to come up with some funny reasons why Chicago is a bad place and we’re looking forward to seeing the day you actually succeed. In the meantime we thought we’d introduce ourselves. Here’s mud in your eye! Oh wait, mud is a sensitive subject in LA since it flows from the hills onto your homes which are usually also on fire since…you know what I’m sorry but your whole state is nature’s experiment to see how much torture it can inflict on people who insist on staying. It’s muddy and burning and doesn’t have any fresh water. Which brings me to…
…lakes! Oceans vs. Lakes. Yeah we’re a city by a Lake. It’s a good lake. It’s big. We can actually drink from it. It’s not nearly as big as the Pacific Ocean. In fact it’s probably around the same size as the giant toxic garbage island floating in the middle of the it. Gee, how did that get there? I wonder what highly populated state covers the majority of the coastline out west? Oh that’s right: it’s California! Yes, Calfornia’s biggest export is an island of garbage that extinguishes approximately 8,000 species of marine life per minute.
I also heard mention of the Donner Party being from Illinois. They came from Springfield. Check out a map. People from Springfield support St. Louis teams like the Cardinals and the Blues. So yes, a bunch of idiotic St. Louisians (St. Lice?) rode their wagons all the way to California only to discover that it was so god awful they’d be better off having a Battle Royale where the winners eat the losers.
When Los Angeles isn’t forcing most of the ocean to boil over and die or teetering on the brink of just falling right on into it (just think, you can soon all be part of the gross body of garbage-water you hold so dear) it acts as Chicago’s farm system. We’ve sent our most despicable human beings out to LA just to get their stink off our wonderful city. John Cusack, Jim Belushi, and Jeremy Piven are a few people who ended up in LA because they didn’t like a little bit of cold or wanted to be in fancy moving pictures. Another cool guy who thought it’d be wise to take his talent from Chicago to LA is Jay Mariotti. No, really you can keep him.
Los Angeles family life mirrors that from the wonderful non-fiction documentary, American Horror Story. From it, I learned every house in LA is haunted by the ghosts of all the failed actors, writers, artists, and baristas who tried to make it but instead ended up violently concluding the lives of the people stupid enough to live with them. Based on very thorough Internet research, the average LA home contains 8.6 failed never-famous ghosts who murder the occupants of said home once every 2.3 years. It’s a really nice turnover rate. Another thing I learned is don’t ever have a baby in Los Angeles because the ghosts will take it and who wants to see bad things happen to babies? Babies are wonderful. In LA I can guarantee you that ghosts will steal and disfigure your babies.
What about the hockey team asks readers of this article and 95% of the Los Angeles population who doesn’t care a jot about hockey and never will? A huge part of the LA Kings’ chances of beating Chicago rest on the shoulders of Jeff Carter and Mike Richards. At one point, this is hard to believe, people thought Mike Richards was a superstar. It turns out he’s an ok player who loves to drink and share his keen financial wisdom and child-like wonderment with the world. Taking that adage to the extreme is his Dry Island Castaway brother-in-arms Jeff Carter who likes his alcoholic beverages like he likes his hair: frosty.
You might recall when the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup a couple of short seasons ago that Richards and Carter were the big guns on the losing Philadelphia Flyers. So naturally Los Angeles is going to try to beat them with…Carter and Richards. Yeah. Jon Quick is a bit better than the two homeless guys the Flyers had in goal but you can’t win if you can’t score and Jeff Carter has used up all his playoff scoring on his teammates’ wives, probably.
While the LA Quicks have a great supporting cast I’m just not sure it’s going to be enough. Robyn Regehr just got re-signed which is awesome because he’s 46 years old and you know, getting defensemen who spent a lot of time in Calgary never backfires. Anze Kopitar is practically a Scooby-Doo villain. Captain Dustin Brown is just a SoCal David Backes but instead of making coats out of dogs he just openly likes Vancouver. That’s a lot worse.
I get it. Inferior cities that accept nothing but midwest runoff feel the need to lash out and say hurtful things to compensate for their lack of an identity. It’s understandable. This should be a great, hard-fought series. Just remember who you’re dealing with.
You can read Andrew Cieslak and Monocle Man at Hockeenight. You can read Andrew Burner and Kelly Reardon at Dry Island Castaways. This is going to be the greatest Western Conference Final ever.
