Sometimes the Oilers gas one in the Battle of Alberta and you don’t even get to see the game. Sometimes you buy bunk celebrity nudie magazines. Sometimes the haters start to get you down. What can you do right?

You write about it. That’s what you do.

We were so excited to go to war in the Battle of Alberta on the Nation. Like seriously we were excited-like-this-kid-is-excited excited:

As the big day of the game drew near it became more and more clear that we were going to have to go out of town for the day job for the weekend. This is one of the few suck things about the day job. We are often cut off from real life and sent out of town. We figured on game night we would duck out early, head to the hotel and plug into $20 internet access just in time for puck drop. To keep from boring you to tears of blood about our night, not only did we not get to participate in the GDB – which reads hilariously by the way – but we didn’t even get to see the game. Sometimes we feel like life is passing us by. No joke.

Silver lining #1: Loved reading the GDB

When we read the opinions of Flames fans addressing the OilersNation and the thundering replies we nearly died laughing. It’s exactly as we hoped it would be. We have absolutely no idea what people around the league think of the Oil. Finding out what Flames fans think obviously couldn’t possibly matter less, but it is non-stop awesome watching the Citizens of the Nation banding together and defending the fortress.

There is no doubt that while the Oilers may limp along during the season, the OilersNation would go 82-0 defeating all the fans of all the other teams. It’s not even close. We have to figure out how to find more reinforcements for the seven Flames fans that dared enter the Nation and engaged us all in battle. Perhaps the Oil could do us the slightest favor and win a game or two. That couldn’t hurt our swagger.

Promise #1: We are working on a way to bring JL meetings with you using some variety of mobile application.

Maybe it’s an iPhone application or something you can download onto your BlackBerry. All we know is that we want to be connected to our precious Nation 24/7 so that when we are sitting in a banquet missing the entire game we can ask the JL “what is happening? What is the score?” 147 times per period. Yeah, that will be so sweet.

Anyway you slice it we are committed to working at a day job to pay for the upgrades to the Nation so we can miss Battle of Alberta games because of the day job required to pay for the Nation. Makes a lot of sense doesn’t it?

Yeah we buy celebrity nudie magazines. So what? Wanna fight about it?

If anyone out there doesn’t know who Aubrey O’Day because they are living in some variety of underground bunker – she is one of these quasi-singers recruited via reality TV to a band that will soon be forgotten. In Aubrey’s case the show was Making the Band and the band is Danity Kane. Miss O’Day is hands down one of the wildest dames in all of music today. So when we read that she has upped her game from flashing passing motorists on a freeway to posing in Playboy we knew we had to get ourselves some of that. And quick.

Quick question: Did anyone else know that Playboy is basically as interesting as an issue of Canadian Home and Garden? We had no idea that we would be buying a crappy version of Maxim with 2% more nudity and 98% less interesting articles. We sat down to look at some cans and ended up reading a seven page article written by the brother of the Unabomber (true story.) Even worse, the photos of O’Day were so photoshopped and looked so little like her that it could have been Sandra Day O’Connor for all we could tell. This could not be more disappointing to us.

Silver lining #2: There is no silver lining when you spend your hard earned dough on bunk celebrity nudie magazines. There just isn’t. *looks at Aubrey O’Day playboy sitting on desk at Nation HQ, shakes fist at cover*

Crappy nudie magazines aside, one of the biggest disappointments of the past 12 months has been the number of haters that have come out of the woodwork and are trying to mess with our junk here on the interwebs. Now we have to admit we don’t necessarily know who all the blogs are out there and who everyone one is. We follow a couple dozen sweet blogs and when we find Nation haters out there we generally just go somewhere else. It’s really easy to do but apparently our haters feel the need to visit here on a regular basis and rant and rave. At the present time we are spending a ton of time defending the Nation from hater commenters, hater bloggers, hater reporters and even worse types of uber-haters out there.

We are all for freedom of speech but it is getting to be a bit much. We want to spend our time debating Liam Reddox’s contributions on the fourth line and drawing pretty pictures, not dealing with Buzz Killeringtons and their complete and utter bullshit. We don’t mind deleting commentary here and there. There is a special thrill that comes with writing swear words and poo poo talk on a website. We get that. It’s when it goes a step further and leaves the zone of “slightly annoying shit” and enters into the realm of “shit-where-people-are-just-being-dicks-for-the-sake-of-being-dicks-type-shit” that it starts to really break us down.

Recent example? Jason Gregor’s “plagarism.”

Holy fuck people. You’re serious right? We come up with a contest idea of suggesting a promotion for a soon-to-be-craptacular Oil Cats game. Gregor tells us he will dig up some stuff and sends us an article complete with list of promotions for minor league baseball teams to get the brains of the Nation started. He doesn’t even charge us for the article and donates the tickets from his own personal stash for a Nation reader to win. We paste the article into our little blogging software which takes out the formatting and fonts and we don’t realize that there are quotes in it cause as per usual we are doing 1000 things at once. Could you have a geekier mistake that couldn’t be of less consequence once it is fixed?

So then someone reading the article is genuinely clever enough to figure out that these promotion descriptions are from other articles and points it out. Fair enough – that is certainly worth bringing to the attention of the class. We get that and would never delete that kind of commentary. Instead we read the comment and almost have a heart attack when we realize what we did and quickly text Gregor an apology. He classily says “honest mistake dude don’t worry about it.” Then a boatload of folk barrage him with comments and personal emails as though they are detectives on the trail of the crime of the century.

You’re serious right? Jason Gregor – actual big time journalist that makes appearances daily on radio, internet and even national TV – is going run the risk of being busted plagiarizing on an article about minor league baseball promotions as a pretext to give away his own Oilers tickets? Do you know how many times we beg Gregor to give away tickets on here? We literally ask him once a week. Think he is going to be in a rush to give us tickets again? For heavens sakes haters. Get a dose of reality. We personally could give two squirts of piss about people who hate this website.

But what if these haters somehow piss off the real writers on here enough that they:

Wouldn’t that be a treat?

So yeah. From now the authors have the ability to delete comments on their own articles. If that keeps them happy and frees us up to do other Nation stuff then so be it. We love the Nation and we will be damned if a handful of haters are going to come on here and ruin our fun.

The other 99.87% of the Nation – we love you long time. Who wants a slightly used Aubrey O’Day playboy? Huh? HUH?