Saturday night is right for blogging

I'm spending some quality alone time with myself, a sink full of dishes, my list of international chatters, and the combined sports forces of the Edmonton Oilers game against Vancouver from Rexall tonight and MLB.tv's archive feature: in this case, the June 28th 2005 game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres. Mostly I watched the baseball game, with only a few Oilers minutes here and there.

One thing that bugged the (censored) out of me in the last 5 minutes of the Oilers game: Anson Carter took a hooking penalty against Chris Pronger (best defensemen in the league, we told him once when we saw him at Billiard's Club on Whyte Ave), and during the ensuing power play an Oiler (Spacek, I believe) took his own hooking call against Vancouver. For just over a minute, the Oil and the 'Nuks were playing 4-on-4 hockey. How long? No idea. Why? Because for some unfathomable reason, the CBC (and TSN, and Rogers Sportsnet, and FSN, and OLN, and ESPN back in the day) refuse to put an on-screen graphic under the score chart showing that there even is 4-on-4, let alone how much time until the 4-on-4 ends. I really don't see why they don't do this: it truely makes no sense. On the bright side, the Oiler fans broke into a "Vancouver Sucks" chant, and the announcers refused to acknowledge what they said (though they did acknowledge the chant, quipping "it sounds like Madison Square Garden" -- and then having to cover their ass and reaffirm that it wasn't an insult). Bonus link: HNIC has its own jumped the shark page.

The real thrill for me was the Dodgers-Padres game on MLB.tv where I can again watch the games after a few technical problems. One was mine: Linux's Windows Media File viewing options are extremely limited. The other, later, one was MLB's problem: MLB.tv was only playing 5 minutes before shutting off, somehow unaware that it wasn't before 6am on the day after the game, seeing how the season has been over for 4 months.

Tonight it all came together: I got myself 4 cans of Tuborg beer, some Jalapeno Cheddar nachos with my homemade sour cream/salsa combo dipping bowl, and an evening where none of my friends answered the phone. Legendary announcer Vincent Scully and his beyond-baritone voice really take the game to a new level. I mainly tuned into the game because I had a couple times last season caught Tegan and Sara's incredibly catchy "Walking With a Ghost" actually being played at Dodger Stadium, which for the girls has to be a huge coup. It also reminded me why Padres shortstop Khalil Greene is such an underrated player: his reach and throwing arm make him a deadly part of the Padres [the only deadly part of the Padres... -ed]. Yet his fantasy value isn't quite as good... his offensive numbers make him best used as a backup SS in away games (his batting average last year fell off quite a bit to 0.250 last year, but his away-from-home OPS was 0.772 versus 0.684 at home). I tried to think of a good analogy for picking up fantasy players with good defensive numbers akin to "sleeping with your sister" or something along those lines, but I couldn't come up with anything. Suggestions are encouraged.

Blogger.com is having a whole lot of trouble this weekend: my site got 403 HTTP errors most of yesterday, and the Battle of Alberta blog was getting timeout and gateway errors this evening, keeping me from reading updates. As a result, the 0 people who tried to view this page over the past 36 hours were probably prevented from doing so. I was still able to post though (I decided not to: no point).

So now that I do have posting capability, whatever shall I take a look at. One thing I did find was a rundown of how MLB.com knows which games to black out. Interesting, I suppose.

Some reasearchers have postulated that time is not a single dimension but is in fact comprised of numerous dimensions (like space is). What this means, of course, is that there is more than one dimension in the spacetime metric which describes "time". Assumably this means altering the affine connection, but I haven't started reading the paper yet (due to the Tuborg). Should be interesting.

The Superbowl is tomorrow. I'll be at work. At least, that's the cover story while I'm disrupting the big game... And while Global's SuperBowl numbers exceed the Grey Cup (by almost 3.5 TIMES in Ontario!), it doesn't matter anyways since we miss the best part.

Tomorrow night interested Edmontonians should be willing to run over to Comic Strip at West Ed (as I shall be) to catch former fellow blogger Lars C. as he debuts as a headlining act.

That's all for now, folks!