TV Off
April 20, 2004
I noodled with the galleries a bit last night. There are some more photo's in the "Found on Road" gallery and a new movie in the "Movies" gallery. Thanks to David Leonard Reimer & Robert Kemmis for their fine contributions.
How quickly do you switch off the TV when your team loses? I instantly leap from the couch or the floor and deftly smote the television’s off switch. It takes too long to scramble for the remote. I need not watch a millisecond of the other team’s victory celebration. I do not need to see the goal again and again. I do not need to get in there and analyze what went wrong with Kelly Hrudey’s electric crayon scratches across my TV screen. No offense directed at Kelly. I like Kelly a lot. He does a better and better job each year (goalies make the best analysts because they have intently watched the game develop in front of them all their lives). At that instant it is time to move on. I will disassemble the shrine tomorrow. Like a Christmas tree it gets to stay up a few extra days after the celebration has ended. There was so much work put into the Christmas effort that it seems too soon to have it grind to a halt. Later the Christmas tree will weigh heavy on you and it must be instantly taken out of sight. The bills roll in. The NHL playoff equivalent of the bills are the constant reminders that you have spent grand three hour chunks of work time in front of the TV or at the rink. The falling behind feeling fills the space that the roller coaster emotions of losing and winning once occupied.
If you ask an NHL player about what he honestly thinks any team’s chances are in the playoffs they, to a man, shrug and say, “Who knows. Its the playoffs”. The educated guessing by sports media figures can bear heavily on the colour commentary. Here’s a trend I have spotted in “educated guessing”. If you correlate the predictions of the sportscasters and hockey writers they are, for the most part, identical. In this way all parties can save face when they are wrong. When they are wrong it is a “surprise result”. When they are universally right they all get to slap each other on the back and marvel at their collective base of knowledge. How can you REALLY say “________ in 7 games”? Why don’t you just say, “I’m flipping a coin”?