Kirk Van Ludwig

@WHO @cfax1070 Oh fuck off

Hantaviruses are zoonotic viruses that naturally infect rodents and can occasionally spread to people. Here’s what you need to know about #hantavirus: What they are, how they spread, the symptoms, and how to prevent infection

@AndrewScheer It’s most interesting to read the comments, I think that gives the best understanding of where Canada will be, or better said, continue to be, in years to come. Having the ability to see the mountains through the clouds is clearly not a Canadian attribute. Feel bad for my kids

Mark Carney claims he’s an expert on numbers. And yet he stated this at the WEF: Nordic + Canada = 20% Global GDP Reality? 👇

I’m in to win for BC. 👉We need you. Join our team: winforbc.ca

@dstaples @TheCultofHockey @edmontonjournal Same here from the coast David. Can’t see the game grades. Side note: love to see a series of podcasts from you and Kurt,he oilers in 10 year segments, same format as usual, with overall grades for management. I think that would be a fun recap. Miss Bruce dearly.

21 Grade A shots for Oilers. 12 for New York Islanders. Sorokin goes full Bernie Parent. Player grades: Isles goalie singlehandedly thwarts Oilers onslaught, 1-0 NYI win edmontonjournal.com/sports/hockey/… via @edmontonjournal

Love this throw back nhl.com/news/carolina-…

@KNugent4118 NYC, Nashville and possibly FLA. I might hit Edmonton but that’s in the great republic of Alberta.

This summer, we are vacationing in Canada, starting this week in Ottawa and Quebec. No U.S. trips for this family! Next month will either be Newfoundland or the Yukon. What are your plans? #CanadaDay2025

@evanderkane Kane is one of my all time favourite Oilers. And I had season tickets as a kid all through the dynasty. Oil are a different team with him in lineup. Key component to winning a championship IMO

@CHEK_News What a bunch of losers.

A shipyard in China has been chosen to build the recently approved four new vessels to replace existing aging ships in BC Ferries’ fleet. cheknews.ca/chinese-shipya…

@DhillonSteve I’d add Bruce Mcurdy from the Edmonton Journal and cult of hockey to that list IMO

Gonna repost this from a thread I put up last year... Keep going fellas.. Keep going.. They're watching.. #believe #LetsGoOilers    #playlabambababy

@dstaples Thank you for this David.

The Bruce McCurdy I knew... Cult of Hockey writer and podcaster Bruce McCurdy always loved to explore how luck played out in Edmonton Oilers games, his half-joking suggestion being that the fate of each contest was in the hands of "the Hockey Gords," a reference to the late great Gordie Howe in hockey heaven. Puck luck and bounces do indeed weigh heavily on the outcome of every NHL game. I'm not one to question or risk offending the Hockey Gords. And now that Bruce himself is among them, I expect the Oilers to get some excellent bounces in the coming 2025 Stanley Cup playoffs. No one was a bigger fan of the Oilers than Bruce, who started writing at the Edmonton Journal's Cult of Hockey in 2010, but was a diehard for the team since the Oilers inception in 1972. No one had a more encyclopedic memory of Oilers' history. Bruce's family, wife Anna and son Kevin, will prepare a formal obituary for him, detailing the life of the man born on Oct 13, 1955, in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, his family's migration to Alberta in the 1960s, his work as a CIBC banker for two decades, and his time as president of the Edmonton branch of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. Today I'll write of the Bruce McCurdy I knew, a man beloved in the hockey world if we're to go by the tsunami of tributes flooding social media in the aftermath of his painfully sudden medical emergency and death following Edmonton's win over Vegas on Tuesday. The one that hit me hardest came by way of Journal colleague Jim Matheson: "What I always realized about Bruce when we would talk (often at Oiler rookie camps) was what a kind, gentle guy he was. He looked at the stars as an astronomer, then would be trying to pick out a few when he watched the games." When it came to the Oilers, Bruce was what is known as a completionist, defined by Google AI as "someone who strives to complete everything related to a particular subject or interest, whether it's a game, a collection, or an experience, ensuring nothing is left undone." Together, he, Kurt Leavins and I, plus a number of other obsessives, have graded every player in every Oilers hockey game for 17 years. Together, Bruce and I have done video reviews and grading of every single player on every single Grade A shot for 15 years. This addiction to thorough analysis marked McCurdy and was recognized by the Oilers, who asked McCurdy to join their initial advisory panel on hockey analytics in 2011. Bruce was the master of game grades, putting in more time and effort than anyone to get it right, labouring deep into restless nights. But at the same time, his writing and interactions were defined by humility, by the knowledge that no one thing is undeniably true. This kept him — with a few notable exceptions — from being overly hard or negative about any single Oilers player, coach or manager. He once told sports writer Alan Draper, "If you find your heart and your head on the same page, write on that page. When they are not in full agreement, take the time to explore both sides of the issue and try to present a balanced view, lay out the facts but still leave room for a personal opinion at the end. When that opinion gets challenged, be willing to have a frank exchange of views; as long as the conversation — from both sides — is civil and speaks to the issue at hand, that’s great. As my dad used to say, 'Credit others with having equal intelligence, at least until they prove otherwise!'" At the same time, Bruce also held a number of fierce grudges against GMs, coaches, players and/or referees whom he believed had grievously erred. For example, he repeatedly ripped NHL commissioner Gary Bettman for what McCurdy derisively called "the Bettman point," the awarding of a point in league standings to the losing team in an overtime or shootout loss. What else? In grading players, I always felt Bruce, a minor hockey goalie, was too easy on goalies and too hard on defencemen, me being a beer league d-man. He felt I went easy on Evan Bouchard. I felt he went easy on Stuart Skinner. As the Oilers battled on the ice, he and I debated back and forth on-line in our scoring chance documents about which player was to blame on Grade A shots against and which should be credited on Grade A shots for. I did the initial grading of each play and each player. Bruce reviewed my work. Here is an example, the last game we worked together, Edmonton's win over Vegas, with Bruce's comments and some discussion in the "official review" column. In time, I came to accept most of the corrections that Bruce suggested, mainly because the work brought us together and gave us a more acute understanding of each position and its roles. We came to see the game in the same way. We were, essentially, of one mind. As I continue this project, I'll hear Bruce's voice in me, urging me to get it right and challenging me if I've fully considered this or that context. I wish it were his real voice. It's already acutely lonely for me without that voice. But I know what he would say. Bruce had a massive vocabulary. Just a few weeks ago he referred to a player as "pestiferous." I challenged him, saying that could not be a word. He said his mom always said it, and indeed pestiferous is in the Oxford Dictionary: "constituting a pest or nuisance; annoying." Bruce wanted our Cult numbers to be meaningful and precise. On the our 10 point grading system, he never liked that a grade of 10 out of 10 meant a "perfect game." That was an impossible and imprecise standard, so after much lobbying from him, we changed it to 10 being a "transcendent." He had a fascination and obsession with numbers. In reporting game grades, both Kurt and I group the players according to their position and line status. Bruce always put them in order based on their sweater numbers. That always puzzled me but that was Bruce with his intriguing commitment to the primacy of numbers. I should be clear: I loved working with Bruce and am lost right now without him. He was an outstanding collaborator, trusted to never go to far in criticism, our blog's starting goalie when it came to catching spelling or math errors in copy, known for his considered and balanced opinion, and dedicated beyond measure to excellent in statistical analysis. It was his sense of justice and his prudence I most admired. My main job for years has been to write opinion columns on politics, first on civic affairs, now on provincial and national affairs. This work often puts me at odds with other people, which is only fair given my fierce stands on many controversial issues and the high stakes of political decisions. One of the hottest issues in this time was the funding agreement for Edmonton's new downtown area, a matter related to the Oilers. But on that issue, as well as on every political issue, I never heard one word from Bruce, even as I said a billion words in public. Even if he disagreed with me -- and he most certainly did on many issues -- he respected that it was my job to engage in such debate and that it was essentially unrelated to my hockey writing. That kind of restraint is rare today. It's unusual in our charged and partisan world. He and I were both old school in this way. We are from a time when you could have stark political disagreements but still be great friends, and not even talk about that kind of thing if there was no benefit to the friendship. I appreciated this in Bruce. To this day, I don't know where he stood on the controversial arena deal. I don't want to know either. We shared another kind of restraint. I'm not saying we were never critical of the team or players. We could be. But fundamentally we always hoped for the best for each player, coach and manager. Many fans and pundits come at the team in harsh, angry and even profane fashion, as if they truly believe they could do a better job of running the operation, or as if the poor performance of a player was somehow a personal affront, rather than a matter of simple and expected failure in a hard, fast, violent and difficult game. Bruce always kept this context in mind. We always remembered that hockey happens fast. The puck is round, the ice slippery. The Hockey Gords are fickle. It's a game of mistakes. Bruce was never that angry or arrogant fan. I admired that in him. It's what brought us together on the Oilogosphere, the boiling, blistering and frothing pot of online commentary about the Oilers. We both loved the Oilers and both loved Edmonton. We were unrestrained homers and restrained critics. We were bound together as Oiler faithful -- and judging from the overwhelming response of grief to Bruce's death, we are not alone. The faithful are numerous. Bruce loved nothing more than writing about Oilers history. In the online world where we know exactly how many readers look at every post, he quickly found out that readers have little interest in the past, but intense interest in the latest transaction and what it means for the future. This fixation on the present over the past bothered Bruce. His thinking always took into account the the entire field, past, present and future, which meant his writing was full of context. This was one of the reasons people so appreciated him and his manner of analysis, even if they didn't want to dig deeply into the past themselves. On the X-Twitter platform, just after the Oilers beat Vegas in a defensive struggle, Bruce tweeted out his final post, repeating what had become his go-to phrase after another close Oilers contest, "Never in doubt." It was a wry statement of relief. That phrase was pure Bruce McCurdy, both celebrating the win but also gently mocking how the seemingly talented Oilers, a team in 36 games decided by one goal this year, had once again nearly found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The slogan of our Cult of Hockey blog is, "By the faithful and for the faithful." Just now it's hard to imagine Oilers games going on without Bruce, the team's most faithful fan and conscientious commentator. But the Oilers will, of course, keep playing. The Oilers might even win the Stanley Cup this year without Bruce here to relish it. I'm sure most of us have friends and family who are gone now, ones who were passionate fans but will miss out on what is to come. But, for me and all who loved and admired Bruce, and all who miss those now departed, he will be here and they will be here. Bruce is part of us now, a herald of the Hockey Gords, whispering on a cold night that the stars are bright, the Oilers are skating, and all will be well. Never in doubt.

@TorontoStar And yet the people who pushed the poison walk free

#Breaking: ‘Freedom Convoy’ organizers Lich, Barber found guilty of mischief trib.al/2TIS3td

@dstaples Bruce brought a calming stream of oiler poetry win or loose. In Victoria you guys are my little piece of Edmonton. Bruce weaving colourful non hockey vernacular like no other. I’ll miss his subtle nature in both COH podcasts and my morning coffee +player grades. #neverindoubt

We lost our great friend Bruce McCurdy last night. He passed on shortly after the Oilers beat Vegas. My heart is broken with grief and sorrow. I never had such a collaborator and friend in hockey as Bruce. My thoughts are with his son Kevin and Bruce’s family.

@BruceMcCurdy @edmontonjournal Yes to everything you said about Skinner + Arvy in the podcast. My sentiments exactly, and were heard by everyone in the house yesterday. 97 requires someone with a great set of mitts to benefit appropriately.

CULT OF HOCKEY Player grades: Edmonton #Oilers hang tough in MSG, pull out 3-1 win over Rangers edmontonjournal.com/sports/hockey/… via @edmontonjournal by @BruceMcCurdy

@MikeBloomberg @MarkJCarney He wasn’t elected for the record. He’s never been an elected official. He was appointed. Just like this time. The liberals got us in this mess, he was guiding Trudeau. FYI they are planning more money printing to help out the tariff war.

Congratulations to @MarkJCarney on being elected Canada’s next Prime Minister. The U.S.-Canada relationship is vital to both nations, and there’s no one more prepared to strengthen it. Mark is one of the smartest, most capable, and steady-handed leaders I know. Wishing him success in the days, months, and years ahead. bloombg.org/4bDQT1k

@robertbenzie @TorontoStar Love they are supporting the truckers

Full page ad in the ⁦@TorontoStar⁩, Canada’s largest circulation newspaper. 🇨🇦

@CarlaBeckSK Look at those patriot truckers

Canada is 1st. Never 51st.

@FredEisenberger You’re out of your mind. ….imbeciles

This is the kind of calm, focused, determined leadership I have witnessed from this Prime Minister time and time again. One of the finest speeches of any Prime Minister in this most difficult time! Canada, United strong and free.🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦🍁🍁🍁🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦 #HamOnt #CanPoli Buy Canadian.

@Dave_Eby You have no talent as a leader. When you rely on a single customer, you have no leverage. Had you developed oil and gas distribution we wouldn’t be in this mess. Go away already.

If America thinks tariffs will crush the resolve of Canadians – they’re wrong. We will not roll over. BC is stepping up to do our part by: ❌ Pulling US liquor off shelves ❌ Excluding US products from government purchases

@BernieSanders No Bernie, it’s just out in the open now

When I started talking about Oligarchy, many people didn't understand what I meant. Well, that's changed. When the 3 wealthiest men in America sit behind Trump at his inauguration, everyone understands that the billionaire class now controls our government. We must fight back.

@TorontoStar Maybe Canada should hedge its bet and take advantage of global demand for oil and natural gas, gain a bit of leverage instead of relying on a single customer. But that would take some foresight, which these children liberals have non of.

Ignoring wildfires, Danielle Smith cozies up to Trump to sell more oil and avoid tariffs. Maybe Alberta should contemplate becoming the 51st state. That way there would be no problem with the U.S. getting all the oil it wants. #Opinion trib.al/xXFFIy5