You people don't deserve the Cup. Give it back.
I've had fun going to games, but watching it on tv? No thanks.
I agree with 3. Much more interesting to see live than watch on TV, especially in a small arena.
Hockey is one of the finest spectator sports. Better than basketball and better than soccer. Orthogonal to baseball, in that hockey is exciting and action-packed while baseball is paced and philosophical. Neither substitutes for the other.
I've only ever been to one hockey game, and I didn't hate it. I've never seen it on TV.
I do recall it being pretty damn awesome on Nintendo, though.
Why would you have to pretend to be interested in hockey to land a Canadian girl? IMX, it's not that big a deal even to Canadian guys, unless you're shivbunny's cousin, who drove down from the freaking Northwest Territories when the Oilers were the playoffs.
If even Canadian guys aren't that into hockey, who the hell is watching it?
I'll meet you behind the schoolhouse after school.
Obviously ogged's talking about the board-game-style hockey, where each little joystick corresponds to a little slot person with a limited range of motion. And he's wrong, because that shit is fun.
There's a good hockey-related joke in SiCKO, but ogged wouldn't want to be associated with it.
You can have the cup back when you can takes it back, moosefuckers!
8: it's not that big a deal even to Canadian guys...
Yes, it is.
Hockey, basically, is the One True Faith. Canadians go to church less when our home team is losing -- or during periods of Exile when the Cup is in Babylon -- but in our hearts, most of us never really leave the faith.
Curling. Many cannot take the excitement, however.
Canadia was lucky to beat Minnesota last year.
Curling, now there's a sport. Emerson is correct. Thanks for timing this one for July 1, Ogged.
shivbunny used to play curling in sixth-grade gym class.
11: My 10-year-old, every opportunity he gets.
sports on teevee is one of those subjects that usually elicits some "straight people like this, gay people like that" bullshit jokes from me, but honestly I don't know why anybody likes almost any sport on teevee. Hockey is fun enough, occasionally, live, but fuck if I want to watch it on teevee. Maybe basketball, once in a while. If I'm super bored, and it's a great game. Maybe.
I hear gay guys really like to watch swimming.
I hear gay guys really like to watch swimming.
That reminds me -- when I saw the photo accompanying the Allison Wagner piece in the Times yesterday, I found myself thinking that she looked kind of mannish, then wondering exactly what about her looked mannish, then wondering if I would've even had that thought if it weren't for comment threads here. Unfogged, an eclectic web brain virus.
Also, I'm apprehensive about getting sucked into watching basketball again because, you know, Oden, bitches. All the remaining Blazer fans in Portland are in a tizzy. A pasty white tizzy.
I'd totally missed that article. Thanks, Jesus.
I don't know why anybody likes almost any sport on teevee.
While going to a live game is often fun, I actually enjoy watching football on TV more than live games, because you can actually consistently see what's happening. Not to mention that brilliant computer-projected first down line (and even the line of scrimmage on some stations), instant replays, John Madden's chalkboard, etc.
Your come-ons to me are unseemly, ogged.
I've got a chalkboard you might be interested in, you perv.
This chalkboard of yours, is it notched?
We have to factor that into the price negotiations. Duh.
You think my chalkboard is for sale? You're kind of sick, you know that?
Your chalkboard brings all the boys to the game.
He was offering it to you for free, dumbass.
He was destroying my fantasy is what he was doing!
"Chalkboard Fantasy" is my favorite Traci Lords movie.
M/lls was all lathered up about getting a bargain.
First we'd haggle over price using the chalkboard for computations, and then we'd get all lathered up, to wash off all that chalk dust. I thought my instructions about your role were quite explicit, ogged.
Anyone who'd expect you to give them a bargain is a dumbass.
Now that he's got that cancer scar Ogged can't command the high prices he used to.
And, as the post points out, he's no longer involved. Some people will hang onto their down-market goods rather than accept what they're really worth.
The scar makes me a rare collectors item. There's no telling what I'm worth.
I'm going to go to bed and think on it.
All the remaining Blazer fans in Portland are in a tizzy. A pasty white tizzy.
Oden is about as white as they come, even if he is technically black, so you shouldn't feel at all self-conscious about rooting for him.
Oden is about as white as they come
He'll feel at home here, then.
re: #7
I can totally make Gretsky's head bleed.
Neither Americans nor Canadians play on rinks the right size. No wonder they find the game crude and boring. But an ice hockey game with a political charge -- Czechs vs Russians, or Finns vs Swedes -- is one of the most exciting sports you could ever watch.
If we could just get the Israelis and Palestinians to play hockey, the other violence would cease.
For me as a boy, hockey was exiting, something I wanted to excel at, and all of its associated sensations and experiences shared some of that quality. One year I got new skates, a new uniform—stockings, shorts, jersey—pads and helmet for Christmas. Still in my memory the best ever.
And I have memories of organized, league play outdoors, in gently falling snow. I don't know if that happens anymore. More significant were entire days, Saturdays they'd have to have been, spent with my skates on, periodically warming up at the stove.
But. This is a memory of childhood, and I'm no longer a child. I've been to a few games in Chicago, all at the old Chicago Stadium; I've never been to the United Center. Those games were fun to watch, and satisfied the curiosity I'd had since boyhood of what a live game was like, even though by then I hadn't followed it for years.
During visits to Canada in the seventies, I became aware that, along with prosperity and expansion apparently, had come an explosion of hockey-as-a-way-of-life. I encountered little league games scheduled for the middle of the night in the summertime. And I've encountered it ever since in fan behavior, in guys who appear to have organized their lives in fandom.
This is alien to me, vastly out-of-scale and monstrous. And also pathetic; you could be much more of a fan than I am without going anywhere near this.
But this sort of thing appears to be a world-wide phenomenon, mostly centered on soccer, but with local variations, such as hockey in Canada. And Broadcasting, TV, is at the heart of it, enabling and stimulating all this even though it presents a very diminished version of the immediate experience. These changes due to TV must have been afoot, well underway, when I was a kid, although they hadn't yet overwhelmed the immediate experience.
I'd be interested to know whether hockey is still experienced in Canada the way I've described it, or whether the possibility has completely vanished
In all sports, there's a big difference between saying it sucks to play and it sucks as a spectator sport.
Shorter 55: What about ping-pong?
IDP, 54 is a really good comment and poses an interesting question. I don't have an answer, but I hope that someone else responds.
w-lfs-n gets it exactly right. Air hockey rules.
BG, did you get the Krugman I sent in answer to your question Friday?
-gg-d's and M/tch's discussion of getting lathered up together just brings to mind once again, the official song of Unfogged.
56: Ping pong is great fun to play and pretty fun to watch too, at least when you're watching people who really know what they're doing.
pretty fun to watch too, at least when you're watching people who really know what they're doing
[leer]
23: You would think so, wouldn't you? But actually not so much. Men's gymnastics, on the other hand...
62: Shouldn't that be "ATM"?
Anyway, an average Chinese player would wipe that leer off your face but quick.
Oh, and also air hockey, if the players are wearing half-shirts.
The last time I watched a sport on television I had money riding on the game; otherwise, they are utterly uninteresting.
I've only been to see one hockey game live, back in the day when there were no Carolina Hurricanes. I don't remember if the Raleigh Icecaps were any good or whom they played or whether they won the game. It was an event made memorable only by the spectacle of watching a toddler mutilate the mascot's uniform.
Best-ever minor league hockey team name.
The name in 67 works better if it is spoken aloud, rather than merely read.
IceGators is very good. For traditionalists, there's the Brandon Wheat Kings, aka the "Weaklings." Minor league hockey teams have the variety, legend, and ritual of the great monastic orders of the Middle Ages.