Last Updated on: 1st October 2013, 04:20 pm
I hope that everyone who celebrates it had a good Canadian Thanksgiving. Mine was great, thanks for asking. It was a good excuse for me to see my family, who I don’t see nearly as much as I’d like. It was also a good excuse for me to eat ridiculous amounts of food. The last time I can recall stuffing down so much dessert in a 24 hour period was last Christmas, but last Christmas there were 3 dinner gatherings, not 2. And through all of the eating and catching up, I still managed to learn something. That broken telephone campfire game that I’m sure most of us played as kids is a lot more fun when you’re playing with a buzz and when a couple of the people in the circle don’t have the greatest hearing.
It was nice to see the Leafs finally win a game on Tuesday night after a couple of shootout losses to Ottawa and a loss to Montreal on Saturday that I didn’t watch. I was one of the people who was upset before the season started about them not making a whole lot of big name signings, but I’ll say now that I’m pleasantly surprised at how well they’ve been playing. Even in losses, they’ve got quite a few guys who are all over the puck and creating good scoring chances. Now if they could only get a lead and hold on to it for more than a couple of minutes at a time, they might just have it made. But having said all that, there’s still a part of me that wonders if we could be in for another year like we’ve had in the past, where goaltending keeps them in a lot more games that they have no right winning, or even coming close in. I guess time will tell, but I’m going to make a really bold prediction here and say that we’re not looking at a cup contending team this year.
Man, has WWE been sucking more than usual lately or what? I can find good in wrestling where a lot of people can’t, but even I’m finding myself having trouble coming up with good things to say about the last few weeks of programming. I honestly think it’s some of the most boring and uninspired crap I’ve ever sat through, and I’ve watched a lot of wrestling in my life, a fair bit of it bad. The sad thing is that WWE, with the talent pool they have access to, should find it impossible or at the very least exceedingly difficult to put on horrible and unimportant shows week in and week out. Yet somehow they make doing so look absolutely effortless, it’s amazing.
Take Raw Homecoming for example. That show had an Ironman match between 2 of the best workers the business has ever seen, a Ladder match featuring 2 guys who’s names just about noone can argue come almost immediately to mind when the words Ladder match are spoken, and appearances from a huge list of legends that are rarely if ever seen outside of local independent shows or a WWE TV cameo now and then. But still, somehow, some way, the folks at WWE managed to turn what could have easily been an event that should have been talked about for months if not years to come into just another show, and not even a good one at that. A non-finish in an Ironman match? Ironman matches decide champions and end feuds, they don’t…whatever the point of that was, they don’t do that. The match was great, but in the end I felt let down, and after 30 minutes of Michaels vs. Angle, that’s not the way anybody should be feeling. The Edge vs. Matt Hardy ladder match was good, but it was over before it really had a chance to get started. You had 3 hours and an overrun, why not shorten something else, like one of the million pointless interview segments that accomplished nothing more than poorly advancing bad angles, or worse, wasting TV time on things that weren’t going anywhere beyond this 1 night? This show could have and should have been so much better than it was, and the fact that it didn’t even come close speaks to some huge problems behind the scenes in WWE in my opinion, for whatever that’s worth.
I got a call last night from one of those survey companies. No, I’m not upset about it, I don’t mind those. They’re sort of fun, they’re not trying to sell you anything, and those polls are one of the only ways you can get your government to consider listening to you, even if all you are is anonymous guy number 5423 in poll number X19. Who you are doesn’t matter, because you’re a voter, and everything related to voters and their feelings is measured in numbers, so politicians tend to live and die by them, changing their positions on just about everything under the sun based on each new set that lands in front of them. Ok, where was I? Right, the phone call I got yesterday.
It started out normal enough. The guy introduces himself, asks me if I’m over 18 and whether or not I’ve got time to answer a few quick questions, completely standard stuff. Then he launches into some questions about the province’s electrical system and my feelings on various aspects of it. How we should be generating our power, how important environmental concerns are when making such decisions, that kind of stuff. Then he hits me with one I’m not expecting.
“In the last 4 weeks, how many times have you shopped in an LCBO store, and how would you rate the service on a scale of 1 to 10?”
For those of you who don’t know what the LCBO is, those letters stand for Liquor Control Board of Ontario, which as should be quite obvious to hopefully everyone reading this, has nothing to do with hydro. I’d love to know how those 2 subjects found their way into the same survey, especially since they were the only 2 topics covered. It wasn’t a long, drawn out questionnaire on my feelings on all sorts of government-run services, it was hydro and booze, that’s all. That’s totally random and I’m overly curious about it. Why wouldn’t they have put the booze questions in a survey about health care, that would have at least made some sense. As things stand now, the only theory I can come up with as to how those 2 things became related is that lots of people drank beer during the big blackout a couple of years ago, and they would have had to get it from an LCBO location. I really should have asked, but I was kind of in a hurry and now it’s driving me nuts. Oh well, it’s my own fault for not taking the extra time to find out.
Wow, I didn’t realize this while I was writing, but I suppose this story kind of has a bit of a moral to it. Slow down, take your time, and ask questions. It’s the only way you’re ever going to learn anything.
And on that happy note, I’m going to take a few minutes and learn a little about what my lunch options are. I’ll talk to you all a bit later on.