Category: Sports

This is our house.

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Today we went to our first Toronto FC game down at BMO Field. The weather called for showers and possibly even thunder & lightning, so we fully expected to get wet. I also expected to see a win, since FC were playing the expansion San Jose Earthquakes.

We took a streetcar packed with red-clad fans down to the exhibition grounds and found our seats; good view of the field, right in the middle, good sightlines. Last time I was there (for a non-FC game) I was on the other side, so it was good to get the other angle. We were in one of the calmer sections, far from the likes of the Red Patch Boys, U-Sector and North End Elite.

The game itself ended in a 0-0 draw, a disappointing result for Toronto. San Jose (more often than not described as “lowly”) mustered only a few moments of offense, so the game was Toronto’s for the taking…they just couldn’t find any scoring touch. Several failed runs, lots of crosses sailing right through the box with no one to put a head to it, even a missed penalty…nothing went right. The crowd was pretty vocal about their disappointment. It’s hard to watch your team struggle like that. They were also pretty vocal about the officiating, which was…questionable.

We lucked out with the weather. It never did rain, beyond a few sprinkles here and there…not enough to really get wet. And it didn’t get too hot either; when the sun finally broke through, the breeze from the lake kept it tolerable. A few minutes after we got home it really started to pour…glad it held off.

Pretty fun time, all in all. We have tickets for one more game in September, after the MBA is done and the film festival is over. I look forward to not having any pressing deadline on a Saturday afternoon other than getting to the soccer pitch on before the first goal.

[tags]toronto fc, san jose earthquakes[/tags]

BSS & HEPA

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Just got home from the Yaletown Brewing Co. where we watched Spain beat Germany 1-0 in the Euro final. Two things I love about the YBC, even more than their sister Brewhouse in Whistler:

1. The music. Last night, when the DJ started after 9:00, they played some really good songs, including “7/4 Shoreline” by Broken Social Scene, “First Day of Spring” by The Gandharvas, “Common People” by Pulp and “Connection” by Elastica. Surprising stuff for a pub that hosted by no less than 3 stagettes in the time it took us to eat dinner.

2. The men’s washrooms have Dyson Airblades. It seems funny to refer to a washroom hand dryer as cool…but it’s cool.

And now we wait to see what else our last full day in Vancouver — and on vacation — brings. Still waiting to see if we’ll meet up with Stanzi this afternoon, but other than that I think we may just rest, pack, do our web check-in and find a quiet place to eat dinner.

[tags]yaletown brewing company, euro 2008, dyson airblade[/tags]

Enough already with the Seattle Thunderbirds!

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In advance of Saturday’s NHL draft, Mike Boone has an article on Habs InsideOut about the 25 years of horrible drafting (in the first round, at least) of the Montreal Canadiens.

Without doing a scientific comparison, I suggest that from 1975 through 2000, no team in North American professional sports squandered more first-round draft choices than your Montreal Canadiens.

I remember seeing a lot of these picks fizzle into nothing year after year, but to see a list of so much squandered opportunity…well, it’s a wonder the Canadiens won cups in ’86 and ’93. Thanks goodness for the ’84 draft.

[tags]montreal canadiens, nhl draft[/tags]

In which my vocabulary returns to the 80s. Rad.

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Awesome: Stephen Colbert’s plundering of the Hockey Night In Canada theme song.

Awesome: Bigger sidewalks on Bloor. (Less awesome: lack of bike lanes)

Awesome: watching Portugal play football. Since I cheer for no particular team I just like watching skill, so the game today was like watching a group of painters at work.

Awesome: the weather. Perfect. An ideal June day.

Awesome: being 95% done.

[tags]stephen colbert, bloor street, portugal, euro 2008, toronto weather[/tags]

Unexpected Peaches

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Sometimes my Zen, which is usually on random, starts playing a song I don’t recognize. I often figure out what the song is, or at least which artist is performing it, within a few seconds. I was stumped on this one for a while though, even though it was a really good song. Usually the ones I don’t know are throwaways from the depths of an otherwise good CD. Finally, once the chorus hit, I realized it was “Boys Wanna Be Her” by Peaches. I don’t remember downloading that or putting it on the Zen, but hey…I’m glad I did. It’s almost as good as “Lovertits”.

Speaking of music, I finally listened to the entire new Death Cab album. It’s good, but it didn’t blow me away. Not that I was expecting fireworks, but because the first song I heard was the 8-minute version of “I Will Possess Your Heart” I think my hopes got up a little too high. Meanwhile, 59.59 by The Sian Alice Group wasn’t great. I like droning melody as much as the next shoegazer, but I think there were only three songs worth listening to again.

Finally, finishing off the topic of music for the day (probably) is word that the CBC will retire the Hockey Night In Canada theme song. Naturally, this rumour has prompted great wailing and gnashing of teeth from coast to coast to coast. Personally, I think the song sounds dated and I have no more love for it than, say, the theme to Mr. Dressup or the nasal magnificence of Rex Murphy’s voice. However, given the recent proclivity of CBC Sports producers to pepper HNIC with gawd-awful versions of Elton John‘s “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)” (Nickelback? For the love of all that’s holy…), I fear what they’d end up with. I suspect the devil I know, in this case, is better than the devil that CBC would almost surely choose.

But for fuck’s sake, retire Don Cherry.

[tags]peaches, death cab for cutie, hockey night in canada, don cherry[/tags]

Currently…

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reading: The Angel Riots by Ibi Kaslik and Strategic Management: An Integrated Approach by Charles Hill and Gareth Jones. Eye Weekly and Now Magazine every Thursday. Toronto Life once a month.

listening to: Saul Williams by Saul Williams, though any minute now I’ll move on to Death Cab For Cutie‘s Narrow Stairs or Visiter by The Dodos.

watching: almost nothing. I’m paying only marginal attention to sports (go Pens! go Celts!), The Office and 30 Rock are done for the season and The Shield hasn’t started yet. All that’s on right now is Battlestar Galactica, and even that’s on 2-week hiatus.

scanning: 190 news feeds, averaging about 509 articles per day. Of course, these are only my personal-interest feeds; I have just as many work feeds. I mainly skim the headlines here, and pay attention to maybe 50, flagging 5-10 to read later.

browsing: 6-7 websites per day. I rarely have a need to visit particular websites now (see ‘scanning’, above) but a few are applications (e.g., Google Analytics) or snapshots (e.g., the weather) that don’t work in an RSS channel. There’s also Bruce MacKinnon’s editorial cartoon every day which, despite my best efforts, I cannot wrangle into a Yahoo Pipe. Again, this is personal-interest only; there’re other work sites.

running: 3-4 times per week, 3 miles at a time. On a treadmill. Half flat, half slight incline.

eating: penne with sundried tomato pesto. Well…an hour ago, anyway.

looking forward to: our rockies/BC trip in June; Euro 2008; visiting Nova Scotia twice in August, once to visit with family and once to wrap up the MBA.

wondering: why the hell I started writing this blog post in the first place.

[tags]angel riots, ibi kaslik, toronto life, saul williams, death cab for cutie, narrow stairs, dodos, visiter,  google reader, bruce mackinnon, yahoo pipes, euro 2008[/tags]

Apparently I angered the fickle weather gods

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Today: not so nice. Downright rotten, in fact. Nellie and I just got soaked (despite having umbrellas and waterproof jackets) walking from Queen Street down to King, and then sloshed home after buying some shelves and lamps at InDesign.

The reason we were out in the first place was to have brunch with CBGB and parents-of-CB at Barrio, which was very tasty, and now we’re back just in time to watch Canada/Russia play for the gold medal. After that we’ll continue to clean & rearrange the condo as we started doing last night, which I like to do…change is as good as a rest and all that. If I can just make it the rest of the day without going back out into the rain I’ll be a happy man.

[tags]indesign, barrio, iihf world hockey championships[/tags]

Crushed

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The Habs folded tonight, losing 4 games to 1 to Philadelphia, the 6th-ranked team. Philadelphia’s 18 skaters were no really better than Montreal’s 18 skaters (except for R.J. Umberger…that guy went all John Druce in this series) but Martin Biron was excellent and Carey Price was awful. Hard to lay too much blame at his feet; he’s 20 years old and was in his first playoffs, and he’s played an enormous amount of hockey in the last year, but in the end he let in three soft goals tonight and that was the difference.

It’s a weird feeling I have right now, something I haven’t felt since the early-90s…missed opportunity. For the last 15 years the Canadiens have only made the playoffs half the time, and when they do they usually  just sneak in to the 7th or 8th spopt, so it’s a pleasant surprise if/when they win a round. This year, though, they finished first in the conference and drew just about the best possible opponents in both rounds…unfortunately, their goaltending disappeared in the second round, and the offense that ranked first in the regular season couldn’t find any consistency.

Big picture…the Canadiens were the youngest team to the make the playoffs, and they should only get better. I think a lot of young teams with big potential go through a rough ride in their first real playoff run; the question will be whether they can take the next big step and learn how to perform in the crunch. I guess I’ll have to wait eleven months to find out.

[tags]montreal canadiens, nhl playoffs[/tags]

Desperate times

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Well, I fear my Canadiens have had it. They were down almost the entire game, came storming back in the third to tie it up, and then a horrendous call by a referee late in the game (against one of the Canadiens’ best penalty killers, naturally) gave the Flyers a power play, et voila…3 games to 1, Philadelphia. To be honest, I’d be surprised if Montreal can win Saturday night, even on their home ice…something like that must just be so deflating.

If you’re going to call chintzy penalties, call the dozen interference and holding calls you should’ve called on Philadelphia this series. If you’re going to put the whistle away, then keep it away in the FINAL MINUTES OF A TIE PLAYOFF GAME, crapweasels.

.:.

92.11% of the way through the MBA just doesn’t feel like enough right now. I’m past the point of being ambivalent about it; I’m outright annoyed at still having 112 days to go.  I’m away on the second-to-last course next week, and then it’s the home stretch; let’s see if I can stay awake.

[tags]mba, canadiens[/tags]

Things I feel it's important for you to know

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  • My favourite word for today: solipsism. No idea why. I’m sure it’s related to some kind of deep and brilliant observation that I made earlier today and shall force you all to hear about. Gosh almighty I notice that the definition of solipsism sounds an awful lot like blogging geez whod’ve thunkit.
  • A new poll suggests that the Montreal Canadiens are considered “Canada’s team.” The results were met in disbelief both in Montreal (where they’ll believe it when the CBC assigns announcers to Canadiens games who can actually identify their players and correctly pronounce their names) as well as in Toronto (where they were, quite frankly, shocked to find out that other Canadian cities even have hockey teams).
  • Any smoker who justifies throwing butts on the ground by asking sarcastically, “Where are we supposed to put them?” is a premium unfiltered asshole. Why not apply the same logic to empty beer bottles? Used syringes? Diarrhea? Just because there isn’t a conveniently located receptacle into which I can dispose of the byproduct of whatever unhealthy habit I may have, I haven’t the right to discard butt, bottle, needle nor shit wherever I please. It’s bad enough that you smell bad; try not to be so lazy too.

OK, back to your regularly scheduled solipsism.

[tags]solipsism, montreal canadiens, canada’s team, cbc, cigarette butts[/tags]