So the Oilers play the LA Kings tonight in another meaningless game do they? And Gregor is doing married guy stuff before his show and asked us to write the GDB on his behalf? How will we live with the pressure of trying to describe a game that will be forgotten by 99% of us within days?

Fingers and brain don’t fail us now!*

A great many folks have done a great many things in the name of "better than nothing." Say you are the unfortunate fellow in the picture above. You say to your wife "Honey, now that the kids are grown up and have left the house we should get a pet! How about a Golden Retriever?"

When the wife strolls in with two spider monkeys and digs up boxes of old childeren’s clothing from the basement you quickly come to the sobering realization that the dog you wanted probably isn’t on its way. But do you shun the creepy little buggers? No. You dress them up in the family’s finest and grimace your way through a series of photos at the local Walmart.

You know why?

Because it’s better than nothing.

Now what if you are this little girl? Your parents have set up the video camera and on the eve of Santa’s arrival you get to open an early Christmas present. Little would you know that they watch the Jimmy Kimmel show and he has put out a challenge to viewers to give their kids crappy Christmas presents and video their reactions.

How are you to know that Christmas has turned from a joyous day for Children into a joyous day for Jimmy Kimmel and his burning desire to ruin everything?  As this big Chicago Bears fan opens up a Packers jersey and promptly flips her Dad the Christmas Bird, we can see that in some cases something is definitely not better than nothing.

So Oilers what’s it gonna be tonight? We will be tuning into the game from beginning to end despite the fact it is Friday night, there are a myriad of other things to do and we know this game doesn’t exactly mean the world to you.

Jason Strudwick described this in gory detail in his earlier article and we can’t help but ask ourselves how we are supposed to find inspiration to watch the game when the millionaires collecting bags of cash can’t be bothered to get amped up themselves.

But tune in we will. Why? Because it is better than nothing. Even the worst Oilers game in history is better than nothing. Even a 1-0 shutout loss to some awful team on a Sunday afternoon is better than nothing. Even a pre-season game between split squads of the Oilers and the Columbus Blue Jackets is better than nothing.

And in a few short weeks that is exactly what we will be left with. Nothing.

So go Oilers. Snipe a few would ya?

According to the Oilers twitter feed the scratches tonight are Belanger, Omark, Barker, Petrell and Fedun. More information to follow as it becomes available. Linus Omark also tweeted the message above which suggests he is either confused by something or the question mark key on his Blackberry is stuck. More information on that too should we find out more.

Apparently Linus Omark didn’t tweet about a hundred frustrated question marks because he found out he is a healthy scratch tonight. Even though he tweeted it right around the time he would have been finding out the bad news. We can safely make this conclusion because he tweeted in his charming way that we are all wrong if that’s what we all thought.

Ha ha! Jokes on us right Linus? And you thought he was on a different page than Oilers management. Scratch that kind of thinking you negative nelly.