2006-09-27

I take umbrage I tell you! Umbrage! (Hold on, I need to check the dictionary). Yeah! Umbrage!

4 : a feeling of pique or resentment at some often fancied slight or insult

Well okay, when reading a post on the Battle of Alberta criticizing the Oilers 2006 defensive pairings (I'm the 27th anonymous comment about a possible mis-type that everybody missed), I came across this post:

I would have loved the Oil to get some D. Unfortunately, it cost too much. 6.5 bucks for Jovanovski? Wot a deal!

If Sutter were a competent GM, he would have shipped some of his gorgeous underpaid (according to the current market) defensemen to teams that "needed" them, and robbed them blind for scoring talent.

Instead, he gets Tanguay at fair market value. A good signing, but at market value.

I don't like the Roloson resigning--too much money for a 37 year old--but I honestly believe that Markenen will perform admirably as a decent number two. He did fine in the final round last spring.

In the new NHL, the team that wins is the one that can most consistently grab players at below their fair market value. D-men overvalued? Get forwards! GMs need to be arbitrageurs (it's a word, look it up) and I think that Lowe is passing this test better than Sutter.
Well, okay, fine, you stumped me. There are 988,968 words in the English language, and I don't know all of them. So what have we got?

arbitrageur
Pronunciation: "är-b&-(")trä-'zh&r
Variant(s): or ar·bi·trag·er /'är-b&-"trä-zh&r/
Function: noun
Etymology: French arbitrageur, from arbitrage
1 : one that practices arbitrage

Aww gee, thanks! Good thing I looked it up!

arbitrage
Pronunciation: 'är-b&-"träzh
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from Middle French, arbitration, from Old French, from arbitrer to render judgment, from Latin arbitrari, from arbitr-, arbiter
1 : the nearly simultaneous purchase and sale of securities or foreign exchange in different markets in order to profit from price discrepancies
2 : the purchase of the stock of a takeover target especially with a view to selling it profitably to the raider

There, that's more helpful.



Also on the list of things that I take umbrage to: The Washington Times review of the completely serviceable date-movie My Super Ex-Girlfriend. Of all things, its written by former Alberta Report reporter Kelly Jane Torrance:
The insecure superhero doesn't take the breakup very well. Especially when it becomes clear Matt dumped her so he could take up with co-worker Hannah (Anna Faris). (Miss Faris of the "Scary Movie" franchise is also an attractive blonde; but Matt choosing her over supergirl Miss Thurman is yet another plot hole.)
Yeah, sorry Kelly, but I've got to weigh in on this one: Uma Thurman is one of those women that just doesn't do anything for most guys. She's actually a more glaring example of this than the most common example, Angelina Jolie.

Hmm, anything else to take umbrage with? No? Well, I'll use a work incident today and the discovery that there are less than 100,000 words in the French language to do some pointless frog bashing. Hint:all of these lines are lines I either have used against the French assholes at work, or lines I will hopefully one day use;
  • "Wow, I haven't seen a Frenchman take a beating like that since the Plains of Abraham
  • Now the problem is that you are trying to take the same side as the French...and we know how well that worked in World War 2. And World War 1. Indochina. The Algiers. Franco-Prussian War. War of 1812. 100 Years War.
  • It's odd, you think that a Frenchman would do a better job retreating than that.
  • When most people think of France they think of their excellent cheeses, but I prefer to think about about their whine.
  • Stick to speaking French. Leave English to the race of people who knew how to run an Empire.
  • Frenchman: We have a word for people like you
    FACLC: Is it surrender? That seems to be French for a lot of words
  • Okay, okay, that's enough, I'm raising the white flag. Now I feel like a French patriot.