One of my Christmas gifts was a pair of tickets to one of the round robin games in the hockey World Junior Championships that Vancouver, Kelowna and Kamloops are hosting.

While I enjoy watching hockey games live, having spent years as a fan of the WHL’s Kelowna Rockets and now having tickets to the Canucks, this isn’t really the level of hockey I’m used to.

Granted the best from Canada’s junior leagues will be playing in this championship and I’m sure that Canada versus Sweden, Russia or the United States would be great games there’s just something about the titantic match-up between Switzerland and Norway that I’m currently watching that’s hypnotizing me to sleep.

So far the game is scoreless and blogging this is what’s keeping me up.

This post is a cross post with my own website.  It’s a follow up to a post/letter/newspaper article that I wrote at the start of the hockey season to my friend Delme who is a die-hard Canucks fan.  Watch the original British version of the film Fever Pitch and simply substitute the Canucks for Arsenal, Trevor Linden for Tony Adams and winning the Premiership foor loosing to the Rangers in the Stanley Cup finals and you’ve got Delme.

Delme:

When I decided to make the transition to being a Canucks fan I mustadmit I was expecting to be jumping onto a fairly succesful team’sbandwagon. Granted I know they’re never going to win a Cup but reallythe only Canadian team that has any chance of that is the Leafs if theystop trading for the NHL’s oldest players.

Still what I expected was a certain amount of comedy goaltendingmixed with exciting offence, two rounds in the playoffs and the oddstomping of Calgary. I wasn’t expecting Nausland to win scoring titlesor even a serious playoff run, I mean fuck I’m suppoprting a team wherethe loss of Dan Cloutier is considered a “bad thing”, so don’t say I’mbeing unrealistic or only wanting to root for a winner but come on.

It’s interesting that at this point after Marcus the Canucks’highest scorer is Carter a former Oiler. It’s interesting because theCanucks need to be more like the Oilers. They need to play to win everygame as though it were the seventh of the Stanley Cup.

One of the reasons Dallas never established a dynasty of note duringthe 90s’ was because every year in the first round like clockworkthey’d meet Edmonton and while they’d win in six or seven they’d betotally destroyed physically after what amounted to a war on ice.

Anson Carter just scored at the game I’m at to bring the Canuckslevel with the Flames. The team needs Ryan Smyth, someone who would eatyour soul and destroy your family to win. Other than Linden the teamseems too… I don’t know but their attention span isn’t the greatestis it?

They can’t hold a lead like a team of their caliber should and it’snot all Auld’s fault. Now minutes after Carter’s goal it’s 2 – 1 forthe Flames thanks to a defence that on paper should be solid. This isnot the same Flames team that reached the Cup final, they can be beaten.

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Susie got up this morning to find out that we’d made an involuntary Boxing Day gift to some idiot loser.

The garage door was open, so she went out and looked. Sure enough, my bike was stolen.

Then Susie went into the living room and discovered that the roof was leaking. That’s not acceptable. That’s downright unacceptable. We called our landlord and reported the roof, but not the garage break-in yet.

Not tht I’ve been doing a lot of bike riding, but it was a wonderful mountain bike, and I really did enjoy it from time to time. The really crappy thing is, Susie’s bike is still there, and you just know the asshole is going to come back and try to grab it, too. So we’ve moved it into our dining room until we can get a better lock for the door.

The only plus side: this would have been a lot harder to take on Christmas Day.

I tried to report this to the Vancouver PD online, only to discover that they require you to use WIndows IE to file a report online. THERE’S your crime right there, officer.

So now I’m on hold with the Police Department. It’s been about ten minutes. I know this isn’t the 9-1-1 line, but still, hello, police, where are you? Probably out setting up a dragnet to catch my bike thief — oh, wait, they don’t know about it yet. Well, maybe they’ve got other crimes to deal with.

I’m debating whether or not to leave the house today. 25% of Canadians are supposed to be focused on today as the big shopping day of the year, rushing to the stores for big bargins and big savings. Me I’m not so convinced that there are actually great deals on Boxing Day.

Typically the stuff that’s the big deals, or the door crashers, at places like Future Shop or Best Buy is just cheap stuff that they want to clear out. $50 might seem like a great deal for a DVD player, but when it’s a Srony that cost the store $29 to buy it’s not worth trampelling someone’s grandmother for. And I’m sorry selling a $4 CD for $9.99 isn’t a deal, it’s just an inditment on how much the price of discs are jacked up regularly. Just buy the music from iTunes and save yourself the cash and the wait in line.

Boxing Day used to be about relaxing, and enjoying the holidays with family and friends, sort of part of the relaxing lull between Christmas and New Year’s. Now days it’s an excuse to continue the consumer orgy another day, or a week for Boxing Week Sales, and all it means is that more people have to work and less actually get days off during the holiday season.

Also when did Boxing Day stop being a stat holiday in B.C., or was it always that way?

For those of you who have awoken to find that there are no more sleeps between you and Christmas I’d like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a happy holidays. For those of you reading this shortly after it’s published, what are you doing up? Are you some kind of freak being awake past midnight on Christmas Eve? How is Santa going to deliver the gifts if you’re rattling around on the internet? Now if you’ve got a good excuse like me and are blogging late at night while watching episodes of The West Wing on DVD wacked out on Contact C, then I retract my judgement of your private life.

All of which is to say that I hope you all have a happy holidays. Whether you’re Christain, Jewish, athiest, Muslim or any other creed hopefully you’re getting a few days to relax and spend with family and read sappy For Better or Worse comics in your daily newspaper. Watch some bad Christmas television, listen to Bing Crosby and David Bowie and eat some fatty sugary foods.

Most of all please have a happy holidays.

In the U.S. Christmas Day is one of the biggest days for movie going all year. The trend hasn’t quite hit Canada yet, and back when I worked at theatres in the Okanagan we were never open at Christmas. Vancouver however is not quite the Bible belt that the interior is so the thought of working on Baby Jesus’ birthday isn’t as hard to sell. Most of the local theatres are doing late afternoon and evening shows, except for the Famous Players’ theatres who still feeling the union breaking hubris from their fight with the projectionists are making their employees work the early early shifts including some shows that start as early as noon.

Films that I’d either recomend or want to check out myself are Syriana, Munich, The New World and if you haven’t seen it yet the very good Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Munich especially looks good, and it’ll be interesting to see a Spielberg movie tackling difficult and controversial subjects something he’s not really done since Schindler’s List. I mean any film that can make Steven an “enemy of Isreal” is sure not E.T.

movies FamousPlayers Munich HarryPotter

For the second year in a row our Christmas dinner is being cooked by the kind folks at the Bayshore Hotel. We’re buying a big turkey, they cook the entire meal for us and we just pick it up after we’ve spoiled ourselves on gifts and candies and are just about ready for gravy. Plus it saves Mom from having to worry about cooking, and it’s a short ride down the block and back.

I suspect that we’re slightly less than traditional here, and that most of the other people in the world simply cook their own meal. What about you? What are your Christmas Day dinner plans?

The Metroblogging Vancouver’s Best of 2005 Poll is still open. You can fill it out using this totally easy to use form that our good and kind friends at Urban Vancouver made for us. If you haven’t already done so fill it in now if you want your favorite things about Vancouver given the props they deserve.

Because you know what, all the things you love are totally loosing. I know it’s hard to believe, but without your vote those things that you love so much that make you smile at the very thought of them are totally being beaten, probably by things that you hate and that piss you off. That place you like to grab a bite at on rainy days? Totally being slaughtered by that place where they forgot your order and kept bring you out something that looked like the food Klingons eat on Star Trek.

That special park you love to walk with your dog, cat, boyfriend, children and or elderly parents is loosing to a McDonald’s Playland. While Playlands do have big cages for kids to play with brightly coloured balls, and slides for them to vomit up their McNuggets, woudn’t you rather your favorite park to win?

So come on and vote, vote, vote.

A recent post by Matthew Good mentioning the browser Flock got me thinking, which browser are people actually using? So I did a quick search around some local blogs to find out the answer, or at least as definitive of an answer as I could discover while sluething on the job at Metrotown during the day before Christmas rush.

Darren Barefoot keeps his cards fairly close to his chest but did have a interesting post on Flock, which mirrors a few of my own thoughts on it when I checked it out a few months ago. Flock’s gotten a lot of good press, and certainly has gotten a lot of buzz from the TWIT folks including a dedicated episode of Inside the Net. Still it seems not quite ready for prime time.

Having said that I’m going to give it another shot, and use it for blogging more than I had. My standard browser is Apple’s Safari and I’d not leave that at all except it doesn’t give me the WYSIWYG options for blogging on TypePad, when I do my own personal blog. Firefox does, so I use that for blogging, but Flock should let me blog right from the browser without actually needing to go to the website interface for either TypePad or Moveable Type for this site. Plus since I use del.icio.us and Flickr more I’ll get additional benifits from it.

Our own Rod Templeton has a post about starting to use Flock, but nothing in way of a follow up. At least not that my five minutes and Google search of his site could turn up. Maybe it killed him? I doubt it, he’s posted on this site since then, unless it killed him and replaced him with an evil Web 2.0 clone acting as Rod Templeton?
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As I mentioned I was listening to the Canucks game on the radio while at work. It was a tough game to follow because there was a total of 11 goals, six of which game in the third period. That’s not counting the shootout, in which the Flames were able to score an additional two goals and the Canucks an additional zero.

The Canucks just aren’t doing very well at home, and have now dropped behind the Oilers in the standings. They’ve had the most trouble with teams in their own division like L.A., the Oilers and now the Flames. They play Calgary again on Boxing Day, a game which I have a ticket for, so hopefully they’ll be able to put an end to this disturbing streak of suckage. I mean really I don’t mind them loosing to the Oilers, but they’d better be able to beat the damn Calgary Flames.

NHL hockey VancouverCanucks CalgaryFlames EdmontonOilers