Whew. What does not kill you will only make you stronger. In fact, my liver will now be competing in the Beijing Olympics in the weightlifting competition because it did quite a bit of heavy lifting this weekend. Still no word from Mats and, I wish this wasn't true, but Friday night once I got up north I dreamt that Mats had signed with Montreal for $5.5M. I woke up in a cold sweat angry that Mats had signed after I got out of range of any computers. I definitely have a blogging problem. Or I would have had one if anything had happened over the weekend.

Anyway, first off, the good news from the weekend: All of you visitors combined to set a new monthly record for Pension Plan Puppets with 8301 visits and 20265 page views. It's a great thing that sitemeter went bust on the weekend thereby making it extra hard to top July in August. But I have a feeling it'll happen.

The Origins of Fandom series certainly helped move July's numbers and were definitely an interesting addition to the site. If you still haven't put one together then there is no time like the present before the season starts and it hurts too much to reflect on how you ended up supporting a team that is doing nothing but cause you pain.

Luckily for anyone that needed something to read over the weekend some people didn't go into isolation and abandon you:

• Did Mats sell his house? He's done it before and returned to the Leafs so no worries...yet.
• Cliff Fletcher finally makes a signing. No word on whether the contract was signed with an X or with a painted handpring.
• Man, I used to love DJ Tanner. Now she is pious and peddles booze. Wait...what?
• General Borschevsky is reminded of Hamlet by Mats Sundin. Hopefully Mats doesn't kill his mother and his uncle while his girlfriend goes crazy. Also, GB has a kid? I thought the only thing soft, blue and white was Kyle Wellwood.
• Down Goes Brown completes his Nightmare Leafs Series with the front office. No surprise but Harold 'Satan Incarnate' Ballard picks up the ownership clause. If only Conn Smythe's son had not been such a useless drunken piece of pedophile aiding and abetting bastard he never would have hooked up with someone a billion times worse than him. Enjoy Hell bastards.
• Jared and his buddy Jack share some deep thoughts.
• Is the "Detroit Model" easy to replicate? Yes, if you keep a team of people together for decades and manage to pick up one of the top three defencemen of all-time for far below market value. Oh, and shock of shocks, Howard Berger continues to be terrible.
• Norte's right. If it happens, it'll hurt more when the games start.