Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

The list of podcast episodes as yet not listened to has swollen to 70 thanks in due to spending most of last week in Windows as well as having lost my iPod earphones on the plane. (WestJet didn't have them in the lost & found, which surprised me a little, their having raised my hopes by being otherwise generally awesome.) Not to mention I didn't write an update last month. No earphones meant no listening to podcasts while in transit, which is no excuse, since I still have ironing and bill-paying.

I added no podcasts since last time, and even unsubscribed from one, ChinesePod. It was time to admit that despite intentions to do so, I was never going to get around to listening to them. Too much going on in my life to pretend to even have the time to continue learning Mandarin.

It pains me to say this, not having anywhere else to listen to great Canadian music, and knowing people who work in production for the show, but it must be said: I skip the talking bits of the still excellent CBC Radio 3. At least they put those in chapters within podcasts to make it possible: KEXP, can you please do the same? The latter has no talking for their awesome song-of-the-day podcast, so I've moved a few to my regular iTunes Library. "Convert Selection to MP3", despite the podcast already being in MP3 format, is your friend.

More than a day's worth of CITR's The Jazz Show, an afternoon's worth of KEXP's Sonarchy Radio, 6 hours (!) of The Crazy Canucks and a half hour of Planetizen Podcast wait for me to work through. But to Dave, who knows my usual response to his notification of a new podcast is to tell him how behind on podcasts, as with everything, I am completely up-to-date on The Canucks Outsider.

After buying my second iPod, a svelte nano, I subscribed to some podcasts, unsubscribed from others, which I listen to while commuting from place to place. (And while ironing.) Here are the podcasts I'm listening to these days:

• Dave Thorvald's Canucks Outsider podcast [podcast feed]. Recaps of recent games and analysis of the local hockey squadron.
• ChinesePod Intermediate [podcast feed]
• My Daily Phrase German: I'm finally trying to learn, after working with at least 3 German-speakers. The only phrase I remember, though, is Schluß fur heute, which means "that's all for today". That's the only phrase that's consistently repeated throughout the episodes. Found this one through the iTunes podcast directory, which you can subscribe to directly.
• KEXP's Music That Matters and Sonarchy Radio [podcast feed] podcasts. The SXSW MTM episode, which introduced new bands that played at the music festival, was a particularly good one. I find Radio Sonarchy challenging, but after listening to field recordings of electroaccoustic soundscapes and sound sculptures, I feel better attuned to the aural beauty and ugliness that surrounds us on a daily basis.
• Serious DJs, if only it worked properly in iTunes. I subscribe to it normally in ye olde aggregator.
• vanmega.com's faux-podcast [podcast feed]
• Deftone Fake DJ [podcast feed]
• The MetaFilter Best of the Web Podcast [podcast feed]. I don't even participate in MeFi, Ask MetaFilter or MetaTalk anymore, but this is a good weekly recap of the stuff on the web that I would normally be interested in.
• Fresh Lime Soda [podcast feed], by Suw Charman and Stephanie Booth. I know both through the #joiito channel, and like the MetaFilter podcast, they recap another part of the Web I'm interested, specifically social software.

These days I'm wearing headphones more often, trying to listen to Fake DJ sets, weekly recaps of the Internet, and language learning, so I apologize if I'm not paying attention to you. If people don't support this podcasting thing, it might not make it.

The website for the CBC, Canada's government-funded TV network that takes ad revenue and has as one of its most popular shows an American cartoon, has a list of all the games that they will show as part of Hockey Night in Canada. HNIC is, historically, all of Saturday night during the fall and winter as well as spring during the playoffs, though sometimes—especially the playoffs—those days are weekdays and/or Sundays. The listing they show isn't very useful, I found, since they show the times in Eastern and there's no obvious way to quickly switch to Pacific, the time zone I currently reside in. Also, it's not clear to me which team is the home team. (I guessed, correctly, that it was the team on the right.) Also, it's not in calendar format.

So, mostly to experiment with Drupal's features (Event + Location + Views), I created a calendar of all the Vancouver Canucks games shown on the CBC. I even created an iCal feed (which doesn't really work...). Why only Canucks games? Because that's the team I cheer for. Why games only on the CBC? Because that's the only channel showing hockey games that's not on TV that requires me to pay money. I could, though, add the games that are pay-per-view and on other networks, since I do occasionally go to a buddy's house and watch those games.

(If there are any errors in the calendar, let me know and I can make the change.)

Yes, yet another Drupal-powered site, which you can sign up for and write a weblog for if you like. I plan on writing there not very often, not really knowing what I'm talking about, but I'd like it to be an aggregation point for everything that people—bloggers and others—are writing with regards to my longtime-favourite hockey team.

Randy Charles Morin, J.J. Guerrero, Jackson Murphy, and Joe Frazier all summarized the Vancouver Canucks' 4-3 over the Toronto Maple Leafs I was able to attend (thanks Jeffery)! My coupled friends M and S attended, she wearing a Maple Leafs' jersey, he wearing a Canucks jersey, though in seats far away from mine. They weren't the only people who came to the game together but as opposing fans: a guy from Newfoundland cheering for the leafs came with his son, who was cheering for the Canucks.

Some observations and interpretations follow. It looked as if the star players, at least from the Canucks side, were doggin' it. Specifically, Todd Bertuzzi and Marcus Naslund looked as if they were going through the motions, the latter taking a shot on goal from the latter with zero chance of going or even rebounding, but with no apparent decision to consider alternatives, like passing it off. Every time the players (not just the stars) made a change, they coasted to the bench, making me wonder whether the rules for too many men on the ice should be enforced more stingently.

Tom Benjamin compares the speed of the players at the World Junior Championships to NHL players: “We were flipping back and forth to the Canuck game. The difference in the pace was very stark and not flattering to the NHL at all. How could Juniors be so much faster than NHL players?” In the comments, Darren blames the 82-game schedule, but I'm not so sure. Every now and then I would catch a 'classic' NHL game—you know, the ones where there are no logos on the ice surface?—and I think it has more to do with the size of the players with respect to the size of the rink; rule and enforcement differences between leagues; and more controversially perhaps, that the current batch of NHLers are coddled. They have million-dollar contracts, flawless ice surfaces, long "media breaks" during games, access to world-class equipment and coaching/training personnel and maybe even the celebrity status of sports players that require them to not only perform on the ice but also fulfil contracts to their sponsors. Those things might actually work towards the favour of a higher-speed game, but the only people that are really exciting anymore are the rookies and the odd player like Trevor Linden who seemed to give 100% on each shift. A lot of the truly talented players have the ability to get away with not giving it all when they score every night, but if we're paying full price for something, shouldn't we get full effort?

Watching a hockey game live is so much better than watching it on TV. The thrill of cheering a goal with thousands of others alone is usually worth the price of admission, but also booing the ref and chanting "Leafs Suck" in unison when thousands of fans of the opposing team in question are in the audience adds to the effect. I don't care much for the fact that everything has an advertisement on it—including the Zamboni's, which look almost as if they are NASCAR cars. Also the long breaks between play to cut to commercial for radio and TV are too long, but at least watching the kids clear the ice of snow—and the players looking at the girls' asses—eases the boredom. They're almost like the crew during a play that set the props correctly in between scenes. The metaphor breaks down because plays, unless they are improv, have a pre-determined outcome.

It turns out that the Leafs do indeed suck. They would have sucked less with Lindros in the lineup, but so too would the Canucks if they had Jovanovski in the lineup. The part that truly sucks is that the Leafs play in Vancouver the next time won't be for 3 years, or so goes the rumour. Do the geniuses at the NHL know how many Leafs fans there are in every Canadian city? There were, as I mentioned, thousands of Leafs fans at GM Place on January 10th. This is true, I hear, of Calgary and other Canadian cities with an NHL franchise. I know revenues from TV are often more important than what the league gets from fans in the stadium, but all you have to do to guarantee a sold out game in Canada is schedule the Maple Leafs to play. Becuase you'll get a least as many fans of the Leafs to come jeer the home team.