Here are my tax dollars at work:
The CBC folks in the building downtown show Vancouver games in a basement studio during the playoffs, and there they get people to sing songs by Americans. There was also a version of this which I should not have linked to. Sorry. The Indonesian and Pakistani acquaintances seemed to do okay with both the game and the hideous music.
I give nearly zero shits about hockey, but I went along to placate others and wound up watching an entire hockey game for the first time since...I dunno. Ever? Maybe there was a Canada Cup series in which I paid attention. It's actually not a bad game as far as suspense goes, so good for you if you like it. Myself, I watched for Peter Puck (shown dancing in the above video) when I was little:
Then the game would come on and I'd go do something else. When pressed by my peers I would claim to like the Flyers because they beat people up.
There was, until recently, one rooting interest: the destruction of the downtown Sears. So fuck you Canucks, I sat through an entire game PLUS OVERTIME for nothing. No riots this year.
To round out the CanCon here are some early beneficiaries of radio stations being forced to play the substandard from the general era in which I paid attention to hockey because other people cared. Gee whiz, I thought this one was really dirty.
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12 comments:
that last one is an awesome black velvet painting.
Coulda sworn that was a Lighthouse album cover, but no.
The Caps and Bruins are having a pretty awesome series.
Six games with a one goal margin of victory so far.
~
What thudner said. Hockey is the most exciting sport in person, but it doesn't translate that well to the TV (HDTV helps a little). Football is the opposite.
You May Now Stop Believing
I thought this would be about a Journey breakup.
Peter Puck was pretty damn awesome.
I don't get hockey at all. It looks random, like some alcoholic professor's model of brownian motion. High velocity chaos with occasional fighting. On skates. Just. Weird.
But I have lived in Silicon Valley since 1990. San Jose has a serious inferiority complex about San Francisco and Oakland. So they got the biggest-deal pro sports franchise they could, a hockey team (because not even the NBA would consider SJ), and all of a sudden a bunch of people who really should know better became hockey fans. Some of the most obnoxious, unpleasant, loud, profane, drunken, flatulent, vomiting, drooling hockey fans this side of Pennsylvania. To the point where I actively avoid elevators, because to be trapped with these sorts of converts-to-the-cause is worse than having to listen to the soccer conversation at one of the local Irish Pubs...
Vancouver was the best team in the league through the regular season, and if I can generalize through one game in which they had a pretty good chance to win, their style is the chaotic style: get the puck, put it across the other guy's line, chase after it, try to get it in the net. In contrast Los Angeles seemed to have an organized style: they'd cross the Vancouver line with guys passing to each other. If I have to sit through one style over the other I like the latter.
Vancouver hockey fans are saintly.
It looks random, like some alcoholic professor's model of brownian motion. High velocity chaos with occasional fighting. On skates.
Still looking for the negatives.
the old joke about going to a fight and a hockey game broke out.
Milwaukee has an NHL farm team called the Admirals that are usually fun to go to, and not hideously expensive.
My impression is that the brutality is down. Vancouver doesn't seem to have a designated enforcer any more and a bunch of other teams apparently do without. It used to be expected that your team's tough guy would take on the other team's tough guy. There remain vicious hits, but most of those are legal.
Tee hee. That video is endearing...and that guy actually has a pretty good voice. That's not a terrifically easy song to sing. I kinda think the crowd should have clapped harder.
There remain vicious hits, but most of those are legal.
Agreed, We definitely need a Hanson Brothers for the 21st Century.
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