We're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat

[After the fact edit: I sincerely hope y'all got the allusion in the title and understood why it was appropriate to the post. You did, right? Okay, just had to make sure.]

I have a confession to make.

Much like Mocha Momma, I am a comment whore. It’s true – I admit it. I’ll do pretty much anything to get people to comment. For months now, I’ve been eagerly watching my comments, trying to figure out which posts elicit more comments than others, and how to get people to stop lurking and comment.

After the last few posts, I was beginning to wonder if anyone was even still reading. I mean, only one comment on the football post, and then two posts in a row with no comments at all. I was *this close* to just scrapping the blog altogether, since I figured all my readers had either given up reading or gone into the Witness Protection Program.

But apparently, you were all just waiting for me to ask you about your cookie-eating habits. Nothing gets a conversation going again like a debate about Oreos. I’ll have to keep that in mind for the future.

For now, however, we’ll move away from cookies and on to something completely different: hockey.

Fiance and I went to the Sharks-Kings game Friday night. It was an ugly game if you were a Sharks fan, but since F and I were both pretty neutral, we were just enjoying being spectators. I called Seeser to gloat a bit about getting to see a Kings game, but she was good-natured about it. Seeser and I used to be big Kings fans when we were growing up – it rubbed off on us from Dad. I can’t even begin to count the number of hockey games I’ve been to, and, like football, it’s a part of my life I sort of miss sometimes. So when we were offered the tickets (Fiance’s coworker’s wife has season tickets), I was excited to be able to go.

The game itself was, as I said, a bit brutal for the San Jose fans. As pretty much a runaway game, it was only mildly interesting, and that only because it was so funny how inept SJ seemed to be. But hockey is good for providing other entertainment for fans, like the Zamboni machines, for example. Did you know they paint the Zamboni machines to look like monsters now? Neither did I, but I learned that during the torturously long 17 minutes between periods at the game. Watching the Zambonis is a time-honored tradition of many a bored hockey fan.

There is, however, an even more fun tradition, which I like to refer to as, “Watch completely random people make total asses of themselves on the ice.” Oh, wait, I should clarify – I don’t mean the actual hockey players, though at times we watch them make asses of themselves on the ice, too. I mean, once again, during the excruciatingly painful 17 minutes we have to kill before the game starts again, when they have silly contests and games. The participants are often small children who are, I believe, sold to the NHL by their parents to act as trained monkeys for the amusement of thousands of bored fans. Here we see three adolescents (they couldn’t have been more than 16, and that’s being fairly generous) in a tricycle race through a series of cones set up around the ice. Doug, on the blue trike, is about to win. George, on yellow, cheated around the first turn by skipping a cone, and was vociferously chastised by the crowd, and thus does not deserve second place, despite his actual placement. And poor Marcus, on the red trike, has fallen so far behind that he’s not even in the frame. But at least he was honest, not like that cheating a-hole George – he really should have been publicly flogged for his blatant disregard of the Humiliating-Spectacle-in-Public Rules of Behavior. After all, we still had 8 minutes and 39 seconds to go before the second period would start, and a good flogging would have killed that time really well.

But the best part of the night – the part that kept me going through every last second of those 17 minutes (34, since it happened before both second and third period) – was this.

First, to HBM, Mary P., OP (sorry I missed you the first time!), and any other stray Canadians who happen to wander by my site, I’m sorry. I’m sure this sight must be painful for you – no one wants to see his or her homeland being greedily consumed by a man-eating (and apparently nation-eating) predator. But seriously, how hilarious is that? There’s a shark – a SHARK! And it’s eating Canada – EATING CANADA. I could not stop laughing for probably the first ten minutes of the game, just staring at the shark, going after Canada like it was deep fried and smothered in baby seal.

...

I just lost my entire Canadian readership, didn't I?