National Boston Company

Dear NBC,

This is not the first time I've written about your ineptitude as a broadcasting company. You may remember my letter about the Olympics.

My beef this time is with the dimwits you have hired as hockey commentators. And yes, this post was written after my beloved Canucks lost game seven to the bunch of hooligans (or angels, in your commentators eyes) from Boston, so you'll have to excuse the heavy dose of sarcasm.

So much was made of the Rome hit on Horton by your "people", that one would have thought Horton was a puppy. And Rome had tried to drown him. But it wasn't until well after game 7 had started that one of your commentators thought to mention the Canucks player, Raymond, who had his vertebrae broken by a Boston player. Actually, the hit wasn't even mentioned. Just the fact that Raymond was injured.

One hit resulted in a concussion. The other an almost career-ending injury. You showed the hit on Horton over and over again... ad nauseam. The Raymond injury was given very little coverage.

This just illustrates the extreme bias shown by your team of commentators (never mind that Mike Milbury used to COACH the freaking Bruins). The whole series could be summed up like this:

The Canucks sucked and the Bruins were the team of goodness and light. Good hell, one of your commentators even compared their goalie to Jesus.

I was unaware that the "B" in your name now stands for "Boston", because that is what anyone would have thought, had they tuned into your coverage of the finals.

When you show the Super Bowl, do your commentators favour one team over another? When you show Federer playing Nadal, are your guys all, "Federer, good. Nadal, bad."?

No? Then why the bias towards the American team? Look, I get that a Canadian team winning the cup is a bad thing for you and your ratings. But really, you're just trying to shove a game down a nation's throat that doesn't want it. Some of us watching down here actually understand the game, and it is annoying to no end to listen to what is supposed to be an unbiased call of the game.

At the end of the first period, your guys had already awarded the cup and named the MVP. That is just shoddy broadcasting. As is cutting the Canucks down every chance they got. I seriously think my 9 month old and my dog would have done a better job.

In closing, my advice is to fire the whole lot of them (except Pierre McGuire, who does a pretty good job - if they would only let him talk more), and hire a braying donkey and a foghorn to call all future games. At least that way it would be less painful to listen to.

Yours very truly,
Joanne

Toodles, Time Warner

Once a year, Fred and I go absolutely coo-coo bananas and get cable for about a month. This is because I love hockey, and when the Canucks are playing in the playoffs, I MUST watch. And this year, we had the nice little Stanley Cup followed by World Cup thing, so the cable hung out for almost TWO months! This actually was just the second year doing it, and it was pretty weird to have all those choices after 9 years of just watching local channels.

We decided back in 2001 that we needed to get serious about paying off our debt, so cable was the first luxury to go. Even once we became debt-free, we never turned it back on. And honestly? I can't say that I've missed it all that much.

When I turned on the "guide" option, I was amazed that we had over 900 channels. Except when you saw that a lot of them were either duplicate channels, HD versions of the SD channel, something called "On Demand" (still don't get, or care, what that is), and channels which played nothing but music (NOT MTV or VH1, on which you'd be hard-pressed to find music of any kind... weird).

And let's not forget the "dirty" channels. Screens of them, displaying names of shows that would make you blush just by reading them (special note: these were NOT included in our package, just in case you were wondering).

All told, we probably got around 200 channels. But after 2 months of flipping through the guide, it's true what The Boss says... "57 channels and nothing on".

Seriously, I don't care about Kathy Griffin's D-list life, or that what I wear is "What Not to Wear". I don't want to "Flip my House", or bust any myths, either. And I believe that The Real Housewives of (fill in the blank) are about as real as Heidi Montag's face (I am so amazed that I typed that sentence and know what it means).

So, with the end of the World Cup, came the end of the cable for another year. Although if I'm being honest, I am totally going through Law & Order marathon withdrawal.

Dun Dun!

How cute are we?

Last night we took Elise to her either her 5th or 6th hockey game. Unfortunately the best team (a.k.a the Canucks) lost, but we still had a blast. Elise had been so excited all week about going (she would ask every day, "we go to hockey game today?"), even more so when she found out dinner was going to be at Chick-fil-a, and we were going to take the train to get to the arena... pretty much the BEST DAY EVER in her book.

She did so well considering she didn't nap very well earlier in the day, and we kept her up until 11:00 pm. She kept cheering, "Go Canucks, boo Stars!" during the game.

I am so proud of my girl!

Hey Time Warner Cable? You suck!

Everyone says that there are two givens in life; death and taxes. I know of a third. Cable/satellite companies and their employees/contractors being mindless idiots.

When Fred and I committed to getting out of debt in 2001, the first thing to go was cable. It was a bit hard at first, but after I realized that real-life can be far more interesting than watching pretty people act it out on TV, I was okay. Plus I don't need to pay some idiot company money to rot my brain; I can do that all by myself for free.

But the only time I do miss it is during the Stanley Cup playoffs. Especially when my 'nucks are playing. Fred did some research and found that it wasn't too expensive to get cable for a month, so we went ahead and took the plunge. I felt dirty just thinking about it.

So yesterday was to be installation day. Time Warner gave us a relatively small window of 2 - 5 pm for the appointment time, so we sat home and waited. And waited. And well... you get the picture.

So at 5:00, with our afternoon wasted, Fred called Time Warner and they told us somebody had been by, but we didn't answer the door. This is quite impossible. If you've ever met Seven, our dog, you know that she starts barking the minute someone walks by our house and even looks at it. There was no way the guy got within 20 feet of our front door. To prove their point, the person gave a description of our house; "Yeah, it had a door, and like, some windows, a roof, and there might have been a chimney too." Okay, they didn't say that, but what does a description of our house prove, that you have Google Street View?

Methinks that Mr. Cable Guy drove by our house, saw that there were no cars in the driveway (because we keep them in the garage), didn't like the inclement weather, and kept driving.

So Fred gets on the phone with the idiot-contracted company, who gives him mega-attitude and argues that their guy WAS there, and WE were the ones who weren't home. Because apparently, we've been watching too much TV, and are too stupid to know whether or not we are in our house.

They finally arrange a guy to come back and do the job he was supposed to do in the first place. Of course he said that it wasn't him that was the one who "knocked on our door", it must have been someone else. Yeah. Right.

When the guy goes to set-up the box, Fred asks him where the HD cable is. They guys answers that Time Warner doesn't supply him with those, and we'd have to make do with an SD cable. Apparently, Time Warner is the "Home of free HD", without the HD cables. So we had to pay $25 of our own money to get "free" HD.

When Fred called Time Warner today to figure out the cable issue, the guy snotted at him, "we don't supply the cables or the TV." Niiiice... a wiseguy and an idiot! Fred also mentioned that the box didn't support HDMI, and the guy said that not all their boxes do and if we wanted one that did, they could send another cable guy with a new box, but they would charge us $40 for it, and there was no guarantee the new box would support HDMI either (so we'd be paying $40 to sit around and wait for another idiot cable guy to show up, and possibly the right box?). Or we could spend our valuable time driving to the nearest payment center and exchange boxes. We don't have time for that; we have cable now!

(by the way, I really don't understand a single thing I wrote in that last paragraph, but Fred assures me it's important)

So now we have cable. And it's just as crap-tastic as I remember it. 200+ channels, and nothing on.

Except when there's a hockey game, of course.

Go Canucks Go!

Thanks to our friends Gerald and Amber, we were able to see our second Canucks vs. Stars game this season. Although they had four tickets, they weren't all together, but both sets of seats were AMAZING! One set, which we sat in for periods one and three, were in the lower section, right behind the Stars net... perfect location to boo Turco from!

The second set were again in the lower section, right behind the Canucks bench. We sat in these seats during period two and were so close to the players you could smell the sweat. No, you really couldn't. Because hockey sweat is gross and I would never voluntarily sit that close to it.

It was fun to switch seats with Amber and Gerald each period because it confused the crap out of people. One guy thought he was in the wrong section because as he put it, "the people who were here before looked totally different than you and had two boy babies with them instead of one girl." As ridiculous as that statement was, I have to give him credit for noticing at all.

Anyway, it was a great game, with the good guys (Canucks) winning 5 - 2. Lots of hitting, great plays and even some rough stuff. I even remembered to take a few pictures.

Enough posing, I want to watch the game!

Our vantage point during the second period

Happy fans!

This one was taken by Elise... kinda artistic, don't you think? I call it "Hockey Reflections"

The Good Old Hockey Game

Come on, everybody sing it with me... "The good old hockey game, is the best game you can name. And the best game you can name, is the good old hockey game." Ahh, you've got to love Stompin' Tom Conners. Anyway, onto the rest of my post.

Last night we took Elise to see the Vancouver Canucks (woo!) play the Stars (boo!). This was actually her third hockey game that she's been to (the other two were when she was 5 and 6 months old), but her first one where she was aware of her surroundings.

The game itself was not well played. Pretty sloppy, with a lot of miscues and errors by both teams, but it was so fun to watch Elise's face as she took it all in. I think her favourite part might have been the Zamboni. But she was well-behaved the entire time we were there, and had people gushing over how cute she was.

For me it was sad to see the Canucks without Trevor Linden. I guess most Canuck fans back home are used to not seeing #16 out there, but it was like there was a giant hole on the ice. For those who are unfamiliar with Trevor Linden, he was the heart and soul of the Canucks since he was drafted in '88 (not counting the three years that that jerk-off Mike Keenan traded him away). I can still remember how excited I was when I found out he was being traded back to the Canucks in 2001. He retired at the end of last season and was not only gifted player, but an amazing person who devoted a lot of time to charity work. Okay, hockey lesson over.

Unfortunately, the Canucks didn't win, mostly because the Stars goalie played decently for a change (usually he is pretty good, but he's had a rough season this year). Actually, since both teams kind of stunk it up, I think the refs deserved to win this one. Oh well, we'll get them next time when Luongo is in goal!