For Some Reason, I Appear to Have Written about Hockey Before. Twice.

We hear all about how hockey-crazed Canada is, yet here we are with 24 out of the 30 NHL teams in America. How the fuck did this happen? What the hell is going on up there; how long can these people mourn John Candy? Get over it and take these fucking hockey teams back, please! But the Canucks seem to be very quiet about this, don’t they? We strip them of their national identity, and they don’t say a word. Matter of fact they seem quiet about everything….it’s as if they’re watching us spend all our time on the Middle East and illegal Mexicans…all while up there quietly scheming our gruesome, violent end. Canada is like that quiet neighbor that nobody really knows that eventually snaps, no? "Canada was real quiet, kept to itself, then one day I looked out my window and they were spraying the place with uzis." - XMASTIME

Matt Yglesias taps into why there's so many teams in the USA, particularly the South:

The issue is the bifurcated cable television markets in North America. Right now, hockey has a national broadcast deal in Canada and it has another one in the United States. Losing the national deal in the USA would be very costly to the entire enterprise. But to maintain that national deal, the NHL has to present itself as offering a true nationwide sports league which means you need teams in the sunbelt. Atlanta's departure didn't leave too much of a hole in the map since there are teams in North Carolina and Tennessee. Probably any one of the remaining non-Dallas sunbelt teams is expendable, but if you lost more than one to colder climes you might start imperiling the League's claim to be a real major sports across the length and breadth of the United States.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND here's some more of...me!

Every Groundhog Day I'm reminded of my grandfather, as this was his birthday. I have no idea what year he was born, but my grandma was born in 1902 (or, as my father would say, "The year after Queen Victoria died"...the words would barely be out of his mouth before Brothatime!! would blurt out "She was born in 1902? Wow!" And those words were barely out of HIS mouth before I'd say "We have a queen??!?!!!"), so I would guess around then. He owned a hardware store up in Lowell Massachusetts, which was cool cause every coupla years we'd go up to visit and he'd give us hockey sticks from his store. Which were great...until we'd get back to VA, where it would be 100 degrees and we'd be reminded that we have no idea what the fuck hockey was.