Spitballin’ (or Super Pass It To Bulis: All In, if you love adventurous acronymizing) is a feature that allows us to touch on a multitude of things really fast, because in the world of hockey, there are always lots of things to find and colour. Here are a few quick topics.

Originally, I considered filing this picture of Roberto Luongo at the Vancouver Canucks’ bench under the “I find this photo odd” feature, but truthfully, I only find the caption odd. According to Getty Images, in this photo, “Roberto Luongo of the Vancouver Canucks checks the replay on his iPad during their NHL game against the Columbus Blue Jackets at Rogers Arena March 26, 2013.”

But that can’t be right. Why would any non-masochistic person replay any portion of Tuesday night’s game? It made Season 1 of Treme look like Season 4 of The Wire, that’s how dry that game was.

The Canucks are on a roll, winning four straight. As a result, the team is feeling pretty loose and relaxed. Want proof? After their victory over the Colorado Avalanche on Sunday night, three Canucks engaged in an absurd and ridiculously hilarious conversation on Twitter.

We’re used to Roberto Luongo entertaining Canucks fans and the rest of the hockey world with his self-deprecating humour on his no-longer-alleged Twitter account, @strombone1, but on Sunday night Ryan Kesler (@Ryan_Kesler) and Kevin Bieksa (@kbieksa3) joined in on the fun. The three Canucks riffed on Luongo’s hair, for the most part, but couldn’t resist a couple quips on Burrows’ indecipherability and a couple body blows on Kesler’s nude photo.

Spitballin’ (or Super Pass It To Bulis: All In, if you love adventurous acronymizing) is a feature that allows us to touch on a multitude of things really fast, because in the world of hockey, there are always lots of things to find and colour. Here are a few topics that deserve mention.

Spitballin’ (or Super Pass It To Bulis: All In, if you love adventurous acronymizing) is a feature that allows us to touch on a multitude of things really fast, because in the world of hockey, there are always lots of things to find and colour. Here are a few topics that deserve mention.

Last last month, Alex Burrows wowed everyone with an audacious shootout move versus the LA Kings, attempting a forehand spin-o-rama on Jonathan Quick, followed by a couple of late jukes and a seeing-eye snapshot just inside the post. Of course, it wasn’t “Wow, that was nifty,” so much as “Wow, that was embarrassing.” The move failed completely when Quick refused to bite — ironically — and Burrows wound up looking pretty darn foolish.

It was an eminently mockable move, and the hockey world took full advantage. Even Roberto Luongo joined in on Twitter. On Sunday, however, it was Luongo’s turn to look foolish and get mocked.

Roberto Luongo was the guest on Hockey Night in Canada After Hours Saturday night, and as you might have guessed, it was must-watch television.

This interview had three things going for it from the start. First, the Canucks won, so Luongo was guaranteed to be in a good mood. Second, Luongo spent the entire night sitting on the bench, so you know he was ready for a little banter. And third, Scott Oake is notorious for awkwardly asking the questions you’re not supposed to ask. Typically, if he’s been told he’s not supposed to ask something, he just asks it like this: “I know I’m not supposed to ask this, but I have to ask.” It’s super subtle.

Sure enough, it all came together, resulted in what one might argue was the best of many great Canuck performance on After Hours. Watch and enjoy.

Spitballin’ (or Super Pass It To Bulis: All In, if you love adventurous acronymizing) is a feature that allows us to touch on a multitude of things really fast, because in the world of hockey, there are always lots of things to find and colour. Here are a few topics that deserve mention.

Back in April, Ryan Kesler and Popchips announced the Game Changers initiative, which would give fans the opportunity to suggest charitable causes for the Canuck centre to support. After a month, Kesler was presented with a shortlist of five charities. From those five, he went with the request to tape a public service announcement for the BC Society of Transition Houses, “a non-profit association of Transition, Second and Third Stage Houses, Safe Homes, Children Who Witness Abuse Programs and other groups which serve the needs of women and their children fleeing violence”, according to their website.

“I’ve never known anyone personally who was affected, but I picked this charity because I feel strongly about it,” said Kesler when asked about the selection. “Too many kids are going through this. Violence against women is not right and when you involve kids… I have kids myself and I couldn’t imagine my kids going through something like that.”

Kesler filmed the public service announcement in support of the “Love Doesn’t Hurt” campaign back on June 22nd. It was released Tuesday. Here it is:

Friday on the blog, we featured a particularly amusing tweet from @strombone1, suspected (rightly) by many to be the Twitter account of one Roberto Luongo. The tweet, made shortly after the U.S. Presidential election, celebrated four more years of Barack Obama because it also meant four more years of politically charged Facebook rants from a certain goaltender whose initials happened to be TT.

With Tim Thomas’s star having fallen somewhat over the past year, the kneejerk response from many Bostonians — who, in a rare moment of lucidity, got the joke — was little more than a hearty chuckle. But there were still plenty of Bruins fans just touchy enough to flip out over the tweet. Luongo estimates that he was bombarded with hate-tweets in the triple digits.

Now, as someone who has gotten his fair share of hate-tweets (mainly from the good people of Great Britain), I can tell you that there’s really nothing to do but laugh when they come your way. That or, if you run a blog, make a list of your favourites, because blogs are for lists.

Well, Roberto Luongo doesn’t run a blog, but he is a friend of this one, so he was kind enough to put together just such a list for us. What follows is a countdown of @strombone1′s 10 favourite Bruins fan hate-tweets, lovingly selected by the man himself. Fair warning that a few are a little NSFW for strong language, as one might expect.

Immediately after Tuesday night’s election was called in Barack Obama’s favour (actually, four minutes before, but who’s arguing), his Twitter account sent out a victory tweet. “Four more years”, it said, along with a photo of the President hugging his wife, Michelle. In just 22 minutes, it had been shared over 200,000 times, making it the most retweeted tweet in history. Three days later, it’s been retweeted an astounding 800,000 times. People seemed pretty into it.

That said, if you’re asking me, the tweet most deserving of an RT in the wake of Obama’s re-election win was this one, from our old pal @strombone1, a.k.a. totally Roberto Luongo:

One of the major differences between this NHL lockout and the lockouts that occurred in 2004-05 and 1994-95 is the advent of Twitter, giving teams, media, and players a direct conduit to fans. The NHLPA has encouraged their constituents to communicate their frustration with Gary Bettman and the owners through Twitter, to the point that many of the player accounts seem completely homogeneous.

There is one player’s Twitter account, however, that will always be completely and utterly unique: strombone1. The all-but-verified account of a certain French-Italian-Canadian netminder for the Vancouver Canucks is an endless source of bizarre non-sequiturs , love for reality TV, and an obsession for literal toilet humour, generally at his own expense.

No other NHL player would start a hashtag full of terrible pickup lines entirely making fun of himself. The pseudonym’d Roberto Luongo distracted hockey fans nation-wide from the lockout with the #StrombonePickupLines hashtag and the results are ridiculous, hilarious, and frequently filthy. Be forewarned.

Earlier this week, Sports Illustrated released their second annual Twitter 100, a countdown of the 100 most essential Twitter accounts in sports. Shortly thereafter, Deadspin released a rebuttal, a list of the 67 worst. With Twitter lists on our mind, we thought it might be worth creating something similar for Canucks fans. This is that: the Pass it to Bulis Twitter 50.

Now, this list — juried by myself, Daniel, and an anonymous third party who is to blame for any omission or selection that offends you — provides 50 accounts worth a follow if you’re a Canucks fan on Twitter: beat guys, radio stations, fans, bloggers and players. But, of course, the Canucks community is much larger than just 50 accounts, which is why we’ve avoided naming this “The Essential 50″ or “50 must-follows” or some such other nonsense that suggests you’re doing it wrong if you’re not following these accounts, or that other accounts are somehow not as good.

It’s for that same reason that they’re presented in no particular order. These are just 50 accounts we think Canuck fans will benefit from following. Effectively, think of the PITB Twitter 50 as a starter pack.

There was a time when Tim Thomas was the everyman hero, the blue collar journeyman who didn’t make his first NHL start until the age of 28, only to become a Vezina, Conn Smythe, and Stanley Cup winner. Now he’s known more for his extremely conservative, right wing political viewpoints that he shares on Facebook and refuses to talk about with the media.

His latest Facebook post sees him supporting Chick-Fil-A, the chicken sandwich restaurant chain whose owner has recently ignited controversy with his anti-gay-marriage comments. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, really. Given the other political viewpoints Thomas has espoused on his Facebook, it’s pretty much a given that he would be against gay marriage.

This is, of course, a serious issue that deserves serious consideration and serious discussion. But not from Pass it to Bulis. Instead, I’m just going to share the many, many hilarious things that people said on Twitter in response to Thomas’s Facebook post.

After the NHL Draft came and went without a Roberto Luongo trade, the waters were temporarily calm on that front. Then came Aaron Portzline of the Columbus Dispatch to create some waves Monday morning by claiming that Luongo had invoked his No Trade Clause to avoid being traded to the Blackhawks or the Leafs and that his preferred location was a return to the Florida Panthers.

Needles to say, this caused what is known in technical terms as a kerfuffle.

We’ve been talking about Roberto Luongo’s suspected secret Twitter account since late February, but with the Canucks’ elimination from the playoffs and Luongo’s reported trade request, the antics of @strombone1 have spiked in a major way of late. The man has basically been writing this blog for us for a week now.

On Tuesday, the continuing adventures @strombone1 went national when CBC picked up the story in a piece by Karin Larson. Here’s “Luongo on Twitter?”, a CBC investigative report.

David Booth has been completely open about his affinity for hunting since he came to Vancouver. At that time, we were all a little bummed to have lost bear fighter extraordinaire Tanner Glass to the Winnipeg Jets, so the fact that Mike Gillis went out and got another bear fighter to take his place was amusing.

Booth discussed his bear hunting on Hockey Night in Canada After Hours, talking about how the black bears he hunts “eat up all the blueberries, and we don’t want that.” We chuckled. How quaint. And heck, even when Booth tweeted on Monday that he was “In Alberta trying to kill a few Bruins,” we laughed and made jokes about how we hoped he wasn’t sitting outside Alberta-born Johnny Boychuk’s house.

But then on Tuesday Booth actually tweeted a photo of a dead black bear and suddenly everything got real and everyone was horrified.

Technically, the summer started on June 21st, but it still doesn’t feel like summer is here. It could be because of the rain pouring down outside my window or the Canucks long playoff run throwing my sense of time out of alignment, but I think there’s another, better explanation. There are no Cody Hodgson Controversies.

So far this summer: nothing about Hodgson. No questions, no rumours, no controversy. It just doesn’t feel right. So we decided to be more like the mainstream media, and create our own Cody Hodgson Controversies. We enlisted the help of our followers on Twitter to find out what crazy things Cody Hodgson has been up to using the hashtag #CodyHodgsonControversies. Here are 24 shocking controversies that we have dug up: