Fish Sticks, Hockey Sticks, Canadian Chicks

Mack Hall


Last week a pet whale killed its third human at about the same time the Canadian women’s hockey team won a hockey match, which hockey teams have been known to do. This hockey match, though, was for the Olympic championship.

Curiously, the girl-eating whale enjoys a better chance at praise, honor, and a picture on a cereal box. The Canadian girls (I can call them girls; I’m old) are in BIG trouble for excessive merriment, which must not be tolerated.

No, not everyone was happy to see those young Canadian women sing their national anthem with joyful tears in their eyes. American hockey fans, for instance. And a number of Canadians in the audience didn’t even bother to take off their obligatory baseball caps during “O Canada,” while Prime Minister Harper looked as if he had lost a particularly beloved looney in a wager with his driver.

Things got worse for the plucky pucksters when, later in the evening, after the fans and almost everyone else had gone home, they returned to the ice to celebrate with champagne and cigars. The photographs of this innocent jollification outraged the oh-so-easily outraged. The public relations would have been worse only if Canada’s gold medalists had killed and eaten a baby harp seal in front of a kindergarten class.

According to the BBC, the International Olympic Committee, that unimpeachable role model to the world in matters of probity, is “looking into the incident.”

Incident? The Canadian equivalent of an end-zone dance is an “incident?” Horrors.

An organization styling itself Hockey Canada apologized for the offense given by Team Canada to a frail and delicate world heretofore innocent of the lurid knowledge of champagne and cigars. Perhaps Team Canada will be required to dress in white pinafores and stand meekly before some rubbishy EuroCourt and sing “I Am Sixteen, Going on Seventeen” as penance.

In contrast to the shabby treatment given Canada’s merry hockey players, the orca (“orca” sounds so much more, like, y’know, environmental and, like, stuff than “large stupid fish”) who kills folks will enjoy a continued career in show business with Sea World, whose corporate heart is colder than Viking DNA mouldering beneath the frost at L’Anse au Meadows. Hey, so what if a loyal employee is drowned and partially eaten by a cetaceous carnivore? Such must not interfere with profits, though the Dinner with Shamu concept may need a little re-working.

Some have asked what made the critter snap? Snap? What are they going to do, give the varmint therapy? A gold medal for killing the most humans?

Others blame the victim, suggesting that her ponytail provoked the animal. Ah, yes, the ponytail defense. And will they say that the victim’s clothes were too tight?

Perhaps even now Sea World lawyers are investigating the victim’s past to determine if she once smoked a cigar or drank a glass of champagne, or was taking secret orders from Ottawa.

How curious it is that women’s honor and even their lives are less important than profits from a freaky fish show for tourists in knee-pants and Avatar tee-shirts.

God bless Canada’s women’s hockey team. They know who they are and how good they are, and so do we, and so do their truest fans: this week in Windsor, Nova Scotia, and all over Canada little girls are slipping Bambi-like on the ice with their half-litre-size hockey sticks, dreaming of Olympic gold, not of being eaten for profit and amusement. To paraphrase Mr. T, I pity the poor fish that gets in their way.

As for the stupid whale, let it be rendered into fish sticks, and soon.

-30-