A Decidedly Mixed Bag

Just one more thing on the Winter Classic before we get back to Business As Usual (immediately below)… the teevee ratings:

Jan. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The Detroit Red Wings’ 6-4 win over the Chicago Blackhawks yesterday at Wrigley Field topped last year’s National Hockey League outdoor game by 12 percent in preliminary television ratings.

The game at the home of baseball’s Chicago Cubs was the third annual outdoor contest and had an overnight rating of 2.9, according to Nielsen Media Research. That tops the 2.6 rating for last year’s match in snowy Buffalo, New York, between the Sabres and the Pittsburgh Penguins, which had the biggest television audience for an NHL game since 1996.

[…]

Ratings points are the percentage of the estimated 111.3 million U.S. households with televisions that watched the broadcast. Preliminary local ratings were 11.8 in Chicago and 10.5 in Detroit, according to Nielsen data.

OK… it ain’t the Sooper-Dooper Bowl. But the ratings are pretty good, considering hockey still isn’t viewed as a “mainstream” sport in these United States. Hopefully… some day… in my lifetime… {insert Big Ol’ Smiley-face thingie here}

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More Fun with Site Meter… an occasional feature we do here at EIP when all else fails.

In the “Taken With a Grain O’ Salt” Dept:

Location
Continent: North America
Country: United States
State: West Virginia
City: Wheeling

Referring URL: http://answers.yahoo...ard of portales%2CNM
Search Engine: answers.yahoo.com
Search Words: has anyone ever heard of portales,nm

Well, only about 50,000 folks in the local area, give or take a couple. But, Hey! We’re hayseeds, so I suppose that doesn’t qualify us in the “anyone” category. We could have just as easily described this hit as “consider the source.” But we didn’t.

OTOH… this is a legit question:

Location
Continent : North America
Country: United States
Lat/Long: 38, -97 (Map)
Distance: 438 miles

Referring URL: http://search.comcas...3F&cat=Web&con=betaa
Search Engine: search.comcast.net
Search Words: is alexandra steele of the weather channel back from maternity leave yet?

I didn’t know Ms. Steele was with child. Turns out she most definitely was… Now the question is… if Alexandra was due in October, why isn’t she back at work? Did she fall victim to NBC’s cost-cutting ax? If the answer to my last is “yes,” then it’s yet another reason to avoid NBC. Except for hockey.

As noted elsewhere, we got a LOT of these the past week:

Location
Continent : North America
Country: United States
State: Hawaii
City: Honolulu

Referring URL: http://images.google...nUS302US302%26sa%3DN
Search Engine: images.google.com
Search Words: obama, beach

My only question: OK, you’re in Hawaii… why didn’t you hit the beach and go see for yourownself?

I had another one recently that I cannot find, for the life of me. And it ain’t coz I didn’t look… because I did. This one asked a simple question: “should I wear a pea coat even though I have a beer belly?” I’ll spare you my witty retorts, Gentle Reader. Besides that… I don’t have tangible proof this visit actually happened, ya know. And we’re fairly conscientious about this proof thing here at EIP. Be that as it may… I really should have cut ‘n’ pasted that one into an ongoing Site Meter Oddities file. Alas, I have no such document… but I will start one today. Some of this stuff is just too good to let slide.

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In which I find myself in complete agreement with one of the Left’s Leading Lights… and that would be while reading Jonathan Chait’s piece in The New Republic titled “In Which Bowl Games Deliver Me Into the Hands of the Far Left.” Excerpts:

Several days of watching college football bowl games have left me with a fresh resentment for corporate America. It's the bowl sponsorship arrangement. I could accept it when the Sugar Bowl became the Nokia Sugar Bowl and the Orange Bowl became the FedEx Orange Bowl. I was even able to swallow hard and live with it when the smaller bowls lost their non-corporate identity altogether, as when the Outback Hall of Fame Bowl has simply become the Outback Bowl.

But what really gets me is the obligatory CEO interview. At every one of these games, the announcers must take five minutes to speak with the CEO of the sponsoring company. He is treated as a visiting patron, prodded to share his interest in the community that sparked his sponsorship decision. Often he will share his Business Philosophy as his interlocuters (sic) gaze on in wonder. Of course it takes place during the action so nobody can flip away without missing some plays. And then -- this is what really burns me -- they thank him for sponsoring the game, as if the game wouldn;t (sic) be happening without his beneficience (sic).

(cranky-old-man-rant mode) Hell Yes!! I’ll go even further in that I hated it when all the bowl games became The Corporate America Bowl, V 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc., etc., ad nauseum. I’m as big a corporate booster as the next guy and probably more than most. But there ARE limits and our cultural institutions should have been out of bounds for this sort of thing. You can go ahead and rename every damned stadium or arena in America for all I care… but the names of the bowl games themselves should have been left alone! (/cranky-old-man-rant mode)

Mr. Chait has a dandy of a closing line and one that can’t be quoted out of context while still having the line work. I’d have to post Mr. Chait’s entire article and I wouldn’t do that, ya know. The whole piece is only four paragraphs and I’ve quoted one a half already… so take 15 seconds and go read. You’ll get a good laugh, I promise you. Unless you happen to be a Marxist.

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Today’s Pic… We haven’t posted any gratuitous baby photos in quite a while. But don’t think we’ve run out, Gentle Reader. Oh no. Hell, no! There be tons of that stuff here at El Casa Móvil De Pennington. And in the unlikely event we run out of pics of our own, there are always the grandbabies*. And the GREAT-grandbabies, too*. We digress.

Back to the pic: SN3 in Former Happy Days. Perinton, NY, April 1998.

*(About which: if an astute person reads between the lines correctly, is no more than a thinly-veiled comment on the absolute dearth of said pics in my in-box.)